There are no more seasons. This year, the controversy over burkini, usually reserved for the summer season, arose in public debate from the beginning of May. It is in Grenoble this time that “Burkini (…) divides”. The municipal council did not cause the debate by prohibiting the garment but by voting its authorization to the swimming pool. A settlement immediately suspended by the administrative court.
This battle around the burkini is recent. The word appears in the daily newspaper on September 5, 2009. An entry that we owe to a reader, Hugues Hotier, living in Prades-sur-Vernazobre (Hérault). In a letter, he had moved to “saw Burkinis in the Center Parcs de Chamouille” pool near Laon (Aisne). “This is not invented,” he notes, before narrating the scene and learning the lesson: “Everyone is free to comply in their private life to the precepts of their religion. But for the management of Its public space, society must keep and not to accept to submit to the requirements of the irrational. “
This missive, like many others, caught the attention of the daily mediator, Véronique Maurus, who devotes her chronicle to these “annoyed” and “politically incorrect” “chronicles that day received in full debate on debate on Burqa. Letters “often accompanied by testimonies and justifications, as if they were vaguely embarrassed by the opinions they express”. Readers who show “neither violence nor rejection” but “of irritation against” politically correct “, of which Le Monde has always been the symbol – rightly or wrongly”.
Australian Burkini
In the years that follow, the term reappears very punctually in articles concerning foreign countries, as on July 15, 2010 when Le Monde looks at the responses of our European neighbors to the thorny question of the full veil. There is then talk of swimming pools that welcome women in “” burkini “, a swimsuit covering the body and hair” in Austria.
The Burkini really settles in the debates and in our pages six years later: between August and December 2016, 146 articles published in the newspaper contain at least once the term Burkini. In Marseille, a “Burkini day” organized in the private water park Speedwater Park is threatened with cancellation. The organizers meets Gilles Rof are shaken by the surge of “Haine received messages” (August 5, 2016).
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