France's BOLDEST Move Against Islam Yet..

[00:00:01]For decades, France warned of a country forming inside its own borders. Then it finally decided to act.

[00:00:13]The reports began arriving in the late 1990s, >> [music] >> typed on prefecture letterhead and stamped confidential.

[00:00:20]A school teacher in Seine-Saint-Denis noted that pupils refused to draw the human figure.

[00:00:26]An intelligence officer in Roubaix flagged a bookshop selling texts that called French law illegitimate.

[00:00:33]A mayor near Lyon >> [music] >> reported swimming pools with hours reserved by gender, butchers who sold only halal, a football club that had quietly stopped registering girls.

[00:00:44]Individually, each memo was a footnote.

[00:00:47]Filed together, they described something the Republic had no vocabulary for.

[00:00:52]France was home to Europe's largest Muslim population, somewhere between 5 and 6 million people, most of them citizens, most of them ordinary.

[00:01:02]But in a handful of neighborhoods, officials [music] watched a second set of rules take hold, enforced not by the state, but by pressure, custom, and occasionally by fear.

[00:01:13]The Republic called itself indivisible.

[00:01:16]On certain streets, it was being quietly divided.

[00:01:20]The state had built its identity on laïcité, the 1905 law that walled religion off from public power.

[00:01:26]>> [music] >> For most of the 20th century, that wall held. Then the reports stacked higher.

[00:01:31]In 2004, Parliament banned conspicuous religious symbols from public schools, and the headscarf became a national argument.

[00:01:40]Sociologists coined a word, communitarism, for communities turning inward. Intelligence services mapped districts [music] where their own agents felt watched.

[00:01:51]For years, the files were read, annotated, and shelved.

[00:01:55]Admitting the pattern meant naming a religion, and naming a religion meant risking the charge of bigotry against millions of loyal citizens.

[00:02:04]So, governments of left and right did the safest [music] thing available to them. They looked away, funded association after association, >> [music] >> and hoped integration would outrun estrangement.

[00:02:16]It did not. By the late 2010s, the memos were no longer whispers. They spoke of clerics preaching contempt for the courts, of teenagers radicalized online, of teachers who soften lessons to avoid confrontation.

[00:02:29]>> [music] >> The intelligence directorate counted its watchlist in the thousands. The warnings had grown too loud to file.

[00:02:37]What no president had dared to do was stand up and give the thing a name. In autumn of 2020, one finally would.

[00:02:47]>> [music] >> On October 2nd, 2020, Emmanuel Macron drove 30 km west of Paris to Les Mureaux, [music] a town in the Yvelines where towers of social housing rise over the Seine.

[00:03:00]He chose it deliberately.

[00:03:01]This was banlieue France, the periphery politicians visited for photographs and left unchanged.

[00:03:08]Standing before a modest audience, the president delivered the speech his predecessors had avoided for a generation.

[00:03:16]He named the enemy.

[00:03:17]Not terrorism, not crime, but séparatisme islamiste, Islamist separatism. [music] He defined it as a conscious project to build a parallel order inside the republic, governed by religious law rather than French law, where the mosque outranked the mayor and the community swallowed the citizen.

[00:03:38]"Islam," he said, "is a religion that is in crisis today, all over the world."

[00:03:43]The sentence detonated across the Muslim world within hours.

[00:03:48]But Macron did something his critics rarely credit. He turned the accusation partly inward. The Republic, he admitted, had built its own separatism.

[00:03:58]It had stacked immigrants in concrete estates, abandoned their schools, tolerated their unemployment, and then acted surprised when identity filled the vacuum the state had left.

[00:04:09]Ghettos were not an accident of faith.

[00:04:12]They were a policy of neglect.

[00:04:14]Then he laid out the counterattack.

[00:04:17]France would end the system of imams détachés, roughly 300 clerics seconded and paid by Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey, >> [music] >> and train its own on French soil.

[00:04:27]It would demand a charter of Republican principles from Muslim organizations.

[00:04:32]>> [music] >> It would tighten oversight of associations, foreign funding, and [music] money flowing into places of worship.

[00:04:39]And it would restrict homeschooling, which Macron cast as a channel for pulling children out of the Republic's reach entirely.

[00:04:47]A law, he promised, would follow before winter. Every clause would target the same scene, the place where private belief pressed against public authority.

[00:04:57]The speech drew applause on the right, alarm on the left, and fury abroad.

[00:05:01]Critics warned it stigmatized [music] 5 million Muslims for the crimes of a few.

[00:05:06]Supporters called it overdue.

[00:05:09]For 2 weeks, France argued about a speech.

[00:05:12]Then a teacher was murdered, and the argument became a wound.

[00:05:21]Samuel Paty taught history and geography at the Collège du Bois d'Aulne [music] in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a quiet town on the Seine, northwest of Paris.

[00:05:30]In early October 2020, he ran a lesson he had taught before, part of the civics curriculum on freedom of expression.

[00:05:38]To discuss the limits of that freedom, he showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad >> [music] >> published by Charlie Hebdo, the magazine whose staff had been massacred in 2015.

[00:05:48]He told Muslim pupils >> [music] >> they could look away if they wished.

[00:05:52]That small courtesy did not save him.

[00:05:55]A parent who had not been in the room launched an online campaign posting videos that named Paty, named the school, and demanded his dismissal.

[00:06:04]The message spread [music] through a network of accounts within days. It reached Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old of Chechen origin who had been granted refugee status in France as a child and lived hundreds of kilometers away.

[00:06:19]On the afternoon of October 16th, 2020, Anzorov waited outside the school. He paid pupils to point out which man was Paty.

[00:06:29]He followed the teacher into the street and beheaded him with a knife.

[00:06:33]He posted a photograph of the killing online, then was shot dead by police minutes later.

[00:06:40]Samuel Paty was 47.

[00:06:42]France had absorbed terrorist [music] attacks before, or the Bataclan, Nice, the Charlie Hebdo newsroom. This was different. A teacher had been murdered for teaching, executed for a civics lesson at the heart of the Republic's most sacred institution, the public school. The killing collapsed the distance between Macron's abstract warning at Les Mureaux and a body on a suburban pavement.

[00:07:06]The state held a national homage in the courtyard of the Sorbonne.

[00:07:10]Macron declared that Paty was killed precisely because he embodied the Republic and posthumously awarded him the Légion d'honneur.

[00:07:19]Across the country, teachers stood in classrooms unsure how to speak.

[00:07:24]Overnight, the separatism bill stopped being a political proposal and became a national emergency.

[00:07:30]What had been a debate about principle was now a matter of protection.

[00:07:34]The government reached for the pen >> [music] >> and began to write.

[00:07:42]The government moved fast.

[00:07:44]On December 9th, 2020, a date chosen for the anniversary of the 1905 law on laicite, >> [music] >> the cabinet presented its text to the Council of Ministers.

[00:07:54]Its title was deliberately unthreatening.

[00:07:57]A bill reinforcing respect for the principles of the Republic.

[00:08:01]Everyone called [music] it the separatism law.

[00:08:04]It was not one big prohibition, but dozens of small ones, >> [music] >> each aimed at a specific pressure point where private belief had learned to bend public rules.

[00:08:13]Consider homeschooling.

[00:08:15]Roughly 50,000 French children were educated at home, and officials suspected a share of them were being withdrawn from school >> [music] >> to be raised outside Republican values entirely.

[00:08:26]The bill ended free choice. From 2022, families would need prior authorization from the state, granted case by case.

[00:08:34]It reached into medicine. Doctors would be forbidden to issue >> [music] >> virginity certificates, the documents some families demanded before a marriage, a practice the [music] Republic now branded as control dressed as custom.

[00:08:46]It reached into money. Associations seeking public subsidies would have to sign a contract of Republican engagement, and any group that broke it could be forced to repay every euro.

[00:08:57]And it reached into speech.

[00:09:00]In direct answer to Samuel Paty, [music] lawmakers created a new offense, endangering a person's life by exposing their private information online.

[00:09:09]Publish a teacher's name, school, and schedule to a hostile crowd, and prosecutors could now charge you before the knife ever appeared. The press named it the Paty clause.

[00:09:19]There was more. Tighter registers of children so none vanished from the state sight. Bans on polygamy and residence permits. Penalties for pressuring public servants on religious grounds.

[00:09:30]Critics on the left saw a single population in the crosshairs [music] and warned of collective of Ministers insisted the text never wrote the word Islam, that it defended every French citizen from coercion, believer and atheist alike.

[00:09:45]51 articles, each one drawn along the same fault line, the frontier [music] where faith stopped being a private matter and started making public claims.

[00:09:55]>> [music] >> But laws govern people and money moves them.

[00:09:59]The state turned next to the mosque and to who was paying for it.

[00:10:08]If separatism grew in the space between faith and state, >> [music] >> France decided to reclaim that space at its source, the mosque and its financing.

[00:10:17]>> [music] >> For decades, the country had outsourced its own religion.

[00:10:21]Some 300 imams preached in France while drawing salaries from Algeria, Morocco and Turkey. Clerics trained abroad, loyal abroad and in some cases barely fluent in French.

[00:10:34]Macron announced the arrangement would end by 2024.

[00:10:38]Imams in France would be formed in France and the era of the detached imam would close.

[00:10:45]But a preacher is only as independent as his paymaster.

[00:10:48]Much of French Islam ran on foreign money. Gulf states and Turkey funding mosques, [music] cultural centers and the associations around them often without public trace.

[00:10:59]The new law forced daylight onto the flows.

[00:11:02]Religious associations receiving foreign donations above 10,000 euros have to declare them and open their accounts to the state.

[00:11:10]Cash that once arrived quietly would now arrive on the record or not at all.

[00:11:16]Then came the demand that cut deepest.

[00:11:18]In January 2021, the government pressed the French Council of the Muslim Faith to sign a charter of principles, >> [music] >> a document affirming that Islam in France was a religion, not a political movement, that its adherents rejected foreign interference, political Islam, and the claim that religious law stood above the laws of the Republic.

[00:11:39]Several federations signed.

[00:11:41]Others, Turkish-linked and hardline currents among them, refused, calling passages an insult to conscience.

[00:11:48]The refusal split the very body France had built to speak for Muslims.

[00:11:53]The message was singular and unmistakable.

[00:11:56]Islam could be practiced freely in France, but it would answer to France alone, not to Ankara, not to Algiers, not to Doha.

[00:12:05]A faith of 5 million would be rooted in Republican soil, or not tolerated at all.

[00:12:11]Yet, reshaping mosques and money was persuasion by pressure.

[00:12:15]The state [music] held a harder instrument still, the power not to reform an organization, but to erase it.

[00:12:23]Behind the charters and the transparency rules, prefects were already assembling files on the associations they meant to dissolve.

[00:12:33]>> [music] >> The state did not wait for the law.

[00:12:37]On October 19th, 2020, [music] 3 days after Samuel Paty's murder, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin ordered raids on dozens of associations and individuals to send a message, he said.

[00:12:49]Within weeks, the message had names.

[00:12:52]Baraka City went first. On October 28th, >> [music] >> the Council of Ministers dissolved the Muslim humanitarian NGO by decree, accusing its founder, Idrissa Amali, of legitimizing acts of terrorism.

[00:13:06]The group had built wells in Africa and shipped aid to Syria. The government read its online rhetoric as incitement.

[00:13:12][music] Its accounts were frozen, its offices shuttered.

[00:13:16]The Collective Against Islamophobia in France fell next.

[00:13:20]On December 2nd, the same decree power dissolved the CCIF, an organization that for 15 years had documented discrimination and filed [music] lawsuits.

[00:13:30]The state accused it of an Islamist ideology that framed the republic itself as the [music] aggressor.

[00:13:37]The CCIF insisted it had only ever used the courts.

[00:13:42]They relocated to Belgium and reconstituted abroad beyond French [music] reach.

[00:13:47]Then the Cheikh Yacine Collective, named for the founder of Hamas, whose member Abdelhakim Safrioui had helped ignite the online campaign against Patty, dissolved.

[00:13:59]The Grande Mosquée de Pantin, north of Paris, had shared that campaign's video to its 155,000 followers. The prefecture closed it for 6 months.

[00:14:10]Each dissolution followed the same instrument, Article L212 to one of the internal security code, a decree signed in cabinet, no trial required. Supporters called it self-defense, critics called it collective punishment, a state deciding which citizens associations deserved to exist. [music] The Conseil d'État, France's highest administrative court, began receiving the appeals and upheld most of them. By the spring of 2021, >> [music] >> the government had dissolved or moved to dissolve more than a dozen structures.

[00:14:47]The tool was blunt, fast, and legal, and that was precisely what unsettled the lawyers.

[00:14:52]>> [music] >> A republic built on rights was learning to switch them off by signature.

[00:14:56]The question was no longer whether France would act. It was how far the text of a single law could stretch, and inside the two chambers of parliament, that fight was about to turn brutal.

[00:15:11]>> [music] >> The bill entered parliament in December 2020 under a careful title, Reinforcing respect for the principles of the republic, and immediately split the country's institutions along every seam.

[00:15:23]The National Assembly went first. In February 2021, deputies passed the text 347 votes to 151 with 65 abstentions.

[00:15:33]Macron's centrists held the middle, but the debate had already grown 51 articles into more than 70. Each amendment a small battle over where private belief ended and public law began.

[00:15:44]>> [music] >> Then the text crossed to the Senate, where the conservative Republicans held the majority, and they were not interested in restraint. Senators bolted on amendments the government had never wanted. A ban on the veil for girls under 18 in public. A ban on the burkini in municipal pools. A bar on head scarves for mothers chaperoning school trips. The right wanted a law about Islam. The government insisted its law was about separatism, not faith. "You are legislating against the religion," [music] the left warned. Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Insoumise and much of the socialist bench voted no, calling it a text that would humiliate millions of ordinary Muslims to punish a violent few. The two chambers could not reconcile. The Commission Mixte Paritaire, the joint committee meant to forge a compromise, collapsed [music] in failure.

[00:16:33]The bill shuttled back to the Assembly, which stripped the Senate's hardest additions [music] and restored the government's version.

[00:16:39]Overhead loomed the Conseil d'État, >> [music] >> which had vetted the draft before it ever reached Parliament, warning that several measures brushed against constitutional liberties, [music] freedom of association, freedom of worship, the right to educate one's children. Human rights groups and the UN filed objections. Amnesty International called it discriminatory. Article by article, the text was fought over. Home schooling now required state authorization.

[00:17:05]>> [music] >> Associations receiving public money had to sign a contract of Republican engagement. Issuing a virginity certificate became a crime. Nothing passed untouched. By summer, the chambers had exhausted their and the Republic was ready to sign.

[00:17:21]But France was no longer arguing alone.

[00:17:23]Across the Alps and the Rhine, other capitals had begun to copy its homework.

[00:17:33]>> [music] >> France had not acted in isolation, and the continent knew it. As Paris finalized its law, other capitals were watching, >> [music] >> and some were already moving. Austria went furthest.

[00:17:45]On May 27th, 2021, Integration Minister Susanne Raab unveiled the Islamlandkarte, >> [music] >> a map of Islam, an interactive online atlas pinning the names and addresses of more than 620 mosques and Muslim [music] associations across the country, cross-referenced against foreign funding and ideological ties.

[00:18:05]The government called it transparency.

[00:18:07]Muslim organizations called it a target list. Within days, some of the mapped sites reported threats, >> [music] >> and stickers reading "Political Islam has no place here" appeared on mosque doors.

[00:18:18]Vienna had already, in 2015, [music] passed an Islam Act banning foreign financing of mosques, a policy France [music] was now importing wholesale. The parallels multiplied.

[00:18:29]Austria's Chancellor spoke of political Islam in the same register Macron used for separatism.

[00:18:37]Denmark had tightened its parallel societies law, redrawing neighborhoods by ethnic origin.

[00:18:43]Belgium debated foreign imam bans.

[00:18:46]Germany weighed a mosque tax to wean congregations off money from Ankara and the Gulf.

[00:18:52]Everywhere the vocabulary was converging: integration, oversight, sovereignty over the sacred.

[00:18:59]France's fight had become a test case.

[00:19:02]If the Republic, the continent's [music] most emphatic secular state, guardian of laïcité since 1905, >> [music] >> could reach into places of worship, trace their financing, and dissolve their associations by decree without shattering its own liberal order, then the model would travel. Diplomats in Brussels tracked [music] the bill's progress. Nationalist parties from Italy to the Netherlands cited it approvingly.

[00:19:26]Civil liberties groups cited it as a warning.

[00:19:29]Turkey's President >> [music] >> Recep Tayyip Erdogan went the other way, questioning Macron's mental health and calling for a boycott of French goods after the caricatures were defended.

[00:19:40]The rupture was no longer domestic. It ran along a fault line between a Europe rethinking the limits of tolerance and the Muslim world reading that rethinking as hostility.

[00:19:51]Paris had lit the way for better or worse.

[00:19:55]And on a late summer day in 2021, France would take the final step writing its answer into permanent law and setting a precedent the whole continent would have [music] to live with.

[00:20:11]On July 23rd, 2021, after 7 months and two full readings, the National Assembly cast the final vote. The law confirming respect for the principles of the Republic passed.

[00:20:22]>> [music] >> On August 24th, President Macron signed it and it entered the statute books.

[00:20:28]105 articles where the first draft had held barely 50.

[00:20:32]>> [music] >> What it changed was concrete. Every child in France now had to be schooled in a classroom by default.

[00:20:38]>> [music] >> Home schooling required prior state authorization. Any association drawing public subsidy had to sign a contract of Republican engagement and could be forced to repay the money if it broke faith. Mosques could restructure under a stricter, more transparent legal status, their foreign financing above 10,000 euros now declared and audited. Seconded imams sent by Turkey, Morocco, and Algeria would be phased out.

[00:21:05]Issuing a virginity certificate, pressuring a doctor for one, >> [music] >> doxing a public servant as Paddy had been doxxed, each became a crime with prison [music] attached.

[00:21:16]Its critics did not fall silent. They argued the law had defined a problem by pointing at a faith, that separatism was a word aimed at 6 million Muslims to catch [music] a few hundred radicals.

[00:21:27]Its architects answered that the Republic was not neutral about its own survival, that a state which would not defend laicity would eventually have none to defend.

[00:21:37]Both were describing the same act.

[00:21:40]France had decided that the space where private belief pressed against public law belonged, in the last instance, >> [music] >> to the Republic.

[00:21:48]And it had written that decision into permanent statute for the courts and the prefects and the next generation to enforce.

[00:21:55]The precedent outran the country that set it.

[00:21:58]Austria mapped its mosques.

[00:22:00]>> [music] >> Denmark redrew its neighborhoods.

[00:22:03]Germany debated its mosque tax.

[00:22:05]Each borrowing France's grammar of oversight and sovereignty. The 1905 wall between church and state had been rebuilt higher and made to lean inward.

[00:22:15]What France chose to become in that summer would echo across Europe for years. The story of a nation that, to protect its founding promise of liberty, learned to constrain [music] it. This was, in the end, the oldest and most dangerous experiment in democratic life.

[00:22:31]A republic tests its own limits.