Eighteen months after the invasion of Iraq, France is increasingly proud of its decision not to join the US-led coalition. Until recently, it was assumed that this opposition would render French citizens immune from danger, with many American and British journalists “pretending they are French when they go into hot spots,” according to Georges Malbrunot, a French journalist working for Le Figaro. A few days after writing these lines, he himself was kidnapped in Iraq, along with his colleague Christian Chesnot. Nevertheless, believing them immune, the French embassy in Baghdad was not initially worried. Four days later, however, French secret service agents were alarmed to discover that the journalists were being held by a group of Wahabbi fundamentalists. On the sixth day, Al-Jazeera broadcast a video of the hostages saying that unless the French government repealed its new law banning headscarves in state schools, they would be executed. The French government responded strongly. Michel Barnier, the foreign minister, was sent to mobilise support in all middle eastern countries having some influence on the kidnappers – Egypt, Jordan, Qatar. Meanwhile in France, interior minister Dominique de Villepin set out to win the backing of the two organisations representing French Muslims: the official CFCM and the more powerful UOIF. The government-created CFCM was no problem, but the more militant UOIF, with its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, was trickier. Only a month earlier, it had been exhorting French Muslim schoolgirls to defy the headscarf ban. In secret talks throughout August, de Villepin had been trying to persuade the group to modify its objections, and by their final meeting it looked as though a compromise might be reached. That was on the 27th August; the next day came Al-Jazeera’s broadcast that unless the law was repealed, the hostages would be killed. President Chirac made it plain he would not repeal the law. De Villepin, having edged the UOIF to the brink of compromise, had no idea how it would react to this new situation. It was no longer a question of tacit back-tracking by the UOIF: it was going to have to renounce all its earlier criticisms of the law and proclaim publicly that France is a secular democracy where all religions are treated fairly. If it refused, the country would be dangerously divided. But the meeting hastily convened for the 29th August hung on a thread.

The press conference which followed has been hailed as a triumph of republican values. “We live our religion in France fully and freely,” Fouad Allaoui, general secretary of UOIF announced, to general stupefaction. But it was the young, veiled Fatiha Ajbli who stole the show. “My headscarf will not be stained by blood,” she read. “I offer myself as a substitute hostage.” Journalists became lyrical, and to the delight of the government, television news editors the world over played the clip again and again.

The next day the interior ministry organised a rally so the prime minister’s wife could be filmed greeting headscarfed women before the world’s lenses. Dewy-eyed Muslims sang the “Marseillaise” (non-violent verses only) and even Al-Manar, the about-to-be-proscribed Hizbullah television channel, was allowed to interview a minister. And a day later de Villepin was at the Paris mosque to show that laïcité does not exclude religion, that life in France is truly tolerant.

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