The ban was initially introduced to preserve secularism in state schools, which are not allowed to hold religious services or instruction, per The Times.
On Thursday, students, parents, and teachers at the Jean-Perrin Lycee in Reze received videos showing beheadings via online links. The school was subsequently evacuated.
In recent weeks, two school heads received death threats after trying to enforce the rule.
A student at the Maurice-Ravel Lycée in eastern Paris falsely accused a school head of hitting her when she refused to remove her Islamic headscarf. He was forced to resign after receiving threats. He then met with Prime Minister Gabriel Attal who said the government would raise a complaint against the student and 2 others for slander.
He said in a letter to staff that he was quitting immediately "for my safety and that of the school."
The education ministry said the resignation was "understandable given the seriousness of the attacks against him."
Boris Vallaud of the Socialist Party agreed: "It is a collective failure when a teacher leaves a school because of death threats."
Bruno Retailleau of the Republicans party stated: "This headmaster’s resignation is the result of an abdication of responsibility by the education ministry and the entire state apparatus."
Three other teenagers were charged with making online threats against the 2nd head teacher at the Romain Rolland school in Paris after they accused him of trying to forcibly remove a Muslim robe worn by a female student. The student and 2 boys will stand trial in May according to prosecutors.
Aggressions from Islamic extremists have been on the rise in the past few years in particular, amplified by Hamas' October 7 massacre in Israel and subsequent war in Gaza.
In 2020, teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by an Islamic extremist after displaying images of the Prophet Muhammed in an educative manner and upsetting one of his Muslim students who told her father.
“Most of my pupils are Muslim and I’m walking on eggshells every day,” an anonymous teacher at a secondary school in Seine-Saint-Denis said.
“Am I scared? I’d be a fool not to be. Some of my pupils openly admit to working sometimes as lookouts for drug gangs, which have guns. When I try to tell them about citizenship or the values of the French Republic, they laugh.
“They say France rejects them, although they were all born here. They complain of police harassment and say laws like the headscarf ban are a way of persecuting Muslims.”
He had not gotten one of the police panic buttons given to classrooms in France after a 57-year-old teacher, Dominique Bernard, was stabbed to death by a former student screaming "Allahu akhbar.""But even if I had," he said, "if I pressed it, how long would it be before the police arrive? And how long would it take for someone to stab me?"
