In a 2015 interview on French public television (France 2), member of the conservative party Les Républicains and elected member at the European Parliament Nadine Morano stated: “[I] n order to have a national cohesion, we must keep an equilibrium in the country, meaning one’s own cultural majority. We are a Judeo-Christian country, as General de Gaulle said it, of white race. I want France to remain France. I don’t want France to become Muslim.”

In a 2016 speech, Sarkozy, then conservative candidate for the 2017 French presidential elections, declared that “wearing a burkini is a political act, militant, a provocation. Women who wear them are testing the resistance of the Republic. Doing nothing is to let everyone think that France appears weak, and it would be like showing a new setback for the Republic” (Le Monde, August 24, 2016). During that period, the presence of the burkini – a portmanteau word made of burqa and bikini, a type of swimsuit for women, which in some cases is worn to respect Islamic traditions of modest dress – had provoked heated public debates for weeks, and more than 30 French cities, including Cannes and Nice, had passed city decrees forbidding them from being worn in public spaces, such as beaches.

Both comments, like many other public declarations made by French politicians about Muslims or Islam in France, convey the fact that Muslim or Islam is used as a racialized category, a euphemism for race, and that such a category is located in opposition and as a threat to what is presented as the true roots of France and French identity, as well as social stability. Additionally, it is an indirect way to refer to another culturally and ideologically significant element of French national identity, namely laïcité (roughly translated as secularism), a law primarily about the separation of church and state but that has come to be at the center of ferocious debates and declarations about Islam in France. Thus, when examining the performativity of colorblindness in France, we must turn to the framing of laïcité as legally enshrined secularism, which makes religion both a gatekeeper to the assertion of French identity and a marker for ethno-racial outsiders like Muslims in France.