The struggles for recognition by minorities in the 1990s acquired a particular sensitivity in France, where the myth of Republican, universal and difference-blind citizenship was less corroded than in many other Western countries, a phenomenon that was also experienced by, for example, sexual and gender minorities, and that has delayed the introduction of postcolonial studies and multiculturalism in France (Nordmann & Vidal 2004). Nordmann and Vidal aptly summarise the central problem:

Around 1989, public intellectuals who called themselves neo-Republicans found the public assertiveness and the struggle for recognition especially problematic when religion was involved, and Islam in particular. We already saw that this singling out of religion from the philosophies of difference and multiculturalism also quickly emerged in other European countries partly as a result of the Rushdie Affair. But they did so most strongly in the context of the French headscarf affairs.

The affairs more or less began with the question of whether three Muslim girls from Creil (a Parisian suburb) had been rightly expelled from school after they had refused to remove their headscarves in class. This question grew into a public conflict when in November 1989, five neo-Republican intellectuals placed an advert in Le Nouvel Observateur about the threat of the ‘Republic's Munich moment’ at the time of the ‘bicentenaire’ of the French Revolution, when the wearing of headscarves in public education was not forbidden by law.