A brief history of the politics of the veil underscores how this item of clothing is, as Reina Lewis asserts, “dramatically overburdened with competing symbolism” [1]. Within the French context, debates about whether women could wear Islamic headscarves in public schools erupted at three separate times, in 1989, 1994, and 2003. Yet, as Joan Wallach Scott explains, French Islamophobia “antedates not only the attacks of September 11 and the war on terrorism but also the Algerian War” [2]. As an aspect of the long history of French colonialism that began at least as early as the conquest of Algeria in 1830, the veil has been the sign of the seductive/fanaticized, “irreducible difference” between Islam and France ever since [3].