Ithere are no more seasons. This year, the controversy over the burkini, usually reserved for the summer season, arose in the public debate from the beginning of May. It is in Grenoble, this time, that « the burkini (…) Split “. The municipal council did not provoke the debate by prohibiting the garment but by voting its authorization to the swimming pool. A regulation immediately suspended by the administrative court.
This battle around the burkini is recent. The word appeared in the daily newspaper on September 5, 2009. An entry that we owe to a reader, Hugues Hotier, a resident of Prades-sur-Vernazobre (Hérault). In a letter, he was moved to have “saw burkinis in the swimming pool at the Center Parcs de Chamouille”near Laon (Aisne). “It can’t be invented”, he notes, before narrating the scene and drawing the lesson from it: “Everyone is free to conform in his private life to the precepts of his religion. But for the management of its public space, society must keep reason and not agree to submit to the demands of the irrational. »
This missive, like many others, caught the attention of the daily’s mediator, Véronique Maurus, who devoted her column to these letters that day. “annoyed and ‘politically incorrect'” received in the midst of a debate on the burqa. Mails “often accompanied by testimonials and justifications, as if they were vaguely embarrassed by the opinions they express”. Readers who do not show “neither violence nor rejection” but “irritation against the “political correctness”, of which The world has always been the symbol – rightly or wrongly”.
The Australian origins of the burkini
In the years that followed, the term reappeared very occasionally in articles concerning foreign countries, such as on July 15, 2010 when The world examines the responses of our European neighbors to the thorny issue of the full veil. It is then a question of swimming pools which welcome women in ““burkini”, a bathing suit covering the body and the hair” in Austria.
The burkini is really taking hold in the debates and in our pages six years later: between August and December 2016, 146 articles published in the newspaper contain the term burkini at least once. In Marseilles, a “burkini day” organized in the private water park Speedwater Park is threatened with cancellation. The organizers whom Gilles Rof meets are shaken by the surge of “hate messages received” (August 5, 2016).
You have 60.68% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.