June 24 (Bloomberg) -- France long has celebrated the female form. Artists have painted it. Moulin Rouge dancers have exposed it. World famous French designers have dressed it.

Now lawmakers and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, married to a former model, want to see more of it.

More specifically, they don’t want women roaming about Paris hidden in burqas, that tent-like garment that covers orthodox Muslim women from the tops of their heads to the tips of their toes. Only their eyes show, often from behind a fabric screen.

It’s not that they want to see more flesh. It’s that they see the full-body covering as a sign of repression.

“We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity,” Sarkozy said this week to the French Parliament meeting at the Chateau de Versailles this week.

“That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity,” he said.

It isn’t my idea of women’s dignity, either. But then, nor is it my idea that women must submit to their husbands, as some conservative Christians preach, or that only men count for the 10-person quorum required for religious observances, as Orthodox Jews say, or that women can’t be priests, as the Catholic Church demands.

Yet I’d flee any government that outlawed those beliefs as quickly as I’d flee any government that imposed them. Well, almost as fast.

Government intervenes if a man beats his wife, even if he believes it his God-given right. It steps in if a secular employer turns down a job applicant on religious grounds.

Completely Covered

But, assuming free choice, what’s the harm to anyone else if a woman covers her body completely? If that’s what she believes she should do, let her be.

My American perspective no doubt limits my understanding of the French drive to obscure religious differences in public life. In the U.S., religious plurality cherishes free expression and detests excessive government “entanglement,” to use a U.S. Supreme Court phrase.

The French, too, honor religious freedom and demand the church and state be separate.

Following the French Revolution, Catholicism lost its status as a state religion. With a history of massacring Protestants, killing Jews and denying rights to anyone not Catholic off and on until the 20th century, France embraced religious freedom in a 1905 law.

No Religious Subsidies

“The Republic neither recognizes, nor salaries, nor subsidizes any religion,” it declares. Still, anti-Semitism continued to plague France. During World War II, the Vichy government cooperated in the extermination of Jews, a French judge ruled earlier this year. And though the French government vows to eradicate attacks on Jews and Muslims, the two most likely targets of religious hatred, such incidents continue.

Perhaps it is this history that makes France wary of outward expressions of religion. The French also worry that the growing Muslim population, now estimated at 5 million, will dilute the country’s French-ness.

But to an outsider, France appears so uncomfortable with religious expression as to be intolerant, especially of minorities. No wonder Muslim representatives suspect the anti- burqa movement to be grounded in anti-Islam prejudice.

Sarkozy says the burqa debate isn’t about religion. It’s about the persecution of women.

“This is not a religious symbol,” he told lawmakers. “It is a sign of subservience; it is a sign of lowering.”

Drawing the Line

Where do you draw the line? Should France prohibit Orthodox Jewish women from covering their hair? Should it shutter Notre Dame for forbidding women to perform mass there?

When France in 2004 forbade public school children and employees from wearing “conspicuous” religious symbols, it banned yarmulkes, head scarves and cross pendants alike. At least that law had the appearance of even-handedness.

Still, it fell most lightly on Christians, whose faith doesn’t require the wearing of crosses in the way that some forms of Judaism and Islam require head coverings for one gender or the other.

The notion is that French unity suffers when people display their differences. At least some reports attribute anti-Semitic attacks in France to the growing Muslim population. It’s clear that religion is often more of a divider than a uniter.

I don’t minimize the harm done to women and their daughters when relegated to subservience, when their bodies are considered so provocative as to require hiding. It’s true, too, that the more fundamentalist members of any religion tend to be the more militantly insistent that their faith prevail above others.

Sarkozy says he respects women who wear burqas out of a sincere devotion to their faith, but he’s wary of those who would demand.

When the French Parliament decided to study the issues of burqas rather than outlaw them, it took a politically safe path.

It was also the right one.

(Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 24, 2009 00:01 EDT