The First Deputy of Nice, Christian Estrosi, communicates: “A Municipal Police crew intervened yesterday by the seaside (editor’s note: the day before yesterday) to verify the application of the ordinance in effect since August 18 in Nice. To date, 24 citations have been issued in our municipality. Photos showing municipal police officers from Nice performing their duties have been circulating since this morning (editor’s note: yesterday) on social media, sparking defamatory remarks and threats against these officers.”
The burkini story has taken on a dimension that exceeds reality: its creator, Aheda Zanetti, an Australian of Lebanese origin from Sydney*, designed it 12 years ago as a fashion garment (a swimsuit), likely following, without knowing them, the theories of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, for whom “imagination is more seductive than reality.”
If the matter were not serious, it could lend itself to jokes: in fact, when one sees certain silhouettes on the beach exposing padded thighs or breasts like udders, one might find the burkini to be a help… to aesthetics. Just as the male version might be for the numerous “beaufs” who do not accept the inexorable law of time and still think themselves to be Adonises while…
Considered non-compliant with the “values of the Republic” (what would those who drafted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” think?), the burkini has become divisive: burkini yes for some, burkini no for others.
Who is right, who is wrong?
The fact remains that, step by step, the explosion of French society’s cohesion succumbing to hysteria and the escalation of exceptional laws is an established fact.
Moreover, the 4 officers who apprehended the bather on the Nice beach were applauded by the onlookers present.
We willingly leave to the experts (or so-called) the deep socio-cultural and political analyses of rights and freedoms in danger.
The fact remains that each person, writes John Stuart Mill, the father of liberalism, has as their vocation to be free: “such freedom must be expressed without any constraint, with the only limit being self-determination.”
