Factsheet: Marlène Schiappa

IMPACT: Marlène Schiappa is a French author and former politician who has served in multiple ministries of the French government (2017-2023). She has supported laws and programs that use the idea of “separatism” to target Muslims and immigrants and repress people who speak out against Islamophobia.

Originally, Schiappa worked in freelance advertising. In 2008, she started a blog called Maman Travaille, about life as a working mother. In 2014, she was elected to the municipal council of Le Mans, having been on the winning list of candidates. This list was led by Jean-Claude Boulard of the Socialist Party (Le Parti Socialiste, PS), but it included members of other parties, as well as those with no previous party affiliation, like Schiappa.

For the next few years, Schiappa continued to engage in local politics, forming the Movement of French Elected Representatives for Equality (Mouvement des élus français pour l’égalité, MEFE) in 2014 and running in the 2015 departmental elections with the Socialist Party. She supported Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in 2017, and served in multiple national ministries throughout his presidency. She was State Secretary for Gender Equality from 2017 to 2020, Deputy Minister in charge of Citizenship from 2020-2022, and State Secretary for the Social and Solidarity Economy and Community Life in 2023.

In response to Samuel Paty’s murder in 2020, Schiappa created the Marianne Funds in April 2021, a government fund with the professed goal of financing “people and associations who will speak out to promote the values of the republic and to fight against separatist narratives, especially on social media and online platforms.” According to an investigation by the French Mediapart in January 2023, funds were partly used to “harass government critics” like Rokhaya Diallo, a French civil rights advocate, online. Some organizations that benefited from the funds were discovered to have personal relationships with Schiappa. In November 2023, Diallo commented on this in a Washington Post article, saying that these organizations hadn’t been required to “demonstrate their previous work on radicalization, or, for some of them, to demonstrate any work at all.” Schiappa was sacked in 2023 due to her involvement in this scandal.

When, in 2021, the European Commissioner for Equality met with a representative of FEMYSO  (the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations), Schiappa said she was “shocked,” claiming  Femyso had made  “aggressive remarks about France and French culture.” She leveraged anti-Muslim tropes when calling FEMYSO an “Islamist association” that was “infiltrating” EU institutions.” FEMYSO’s website contradicts Schiappa’s accusation, stating their mission involves “developing and empowering [European Muslim youth], and working to build a diverse, cohesive and vibrant Europe.” Additionally, a January 2022 piece by Shada Islam for The Guardian supported the Commissioner, saying that she “rightly defended” the meeting in which they discussed “challenges facing young European Muslims as ‘a result of stereotyping, discrimination and outright hatred.’” This stereotyping has been perpetrated by Schiappa herself: in 2018, a student wearing a headscarf spoke on TV on behalf of protests about university options after highschool. Schiappa criticized the headscarf, calling it  “a form of promoting political Islam.”

In October 2021, she was invited to the Vienna Forum on Countering Segregation and Extremism in the Context of Integration, created by Susanne Raab, Austrian Minister of Women and Integration. According to the forum, their main goal is to share best practices in combating political Islam. According to the European Network Against Racism, an anti-racist NGO, the forum was “built on essentialization of active Muslim communities and aimed at increasing the surveillance and repression of Muslims in Europe.” Schiappa later tweeted her agreement with some things said at the forum, such as that “the common threat, atmospheric Jihadism” unites both Austria and France.

In a 2022 CAGE report, Schiappa was mentioned (on page 36) in regards to the Republican Counter Discourse Unit of the Inter-Ministerial Committee for the Prevention of Crime and Radicalization (CIPDR), saying that the goal of this unit is to counter “cyber-Islamism.” The report explained further that the unit is supposed to “monitor ‘Islamist’ discourses on social networks, identify ‘Islamist preachers’ on social networks, [and] promote content praising Republican values and/or deconstructing ‘Islamist discourses.’”

In February 2021, Schiappa supported a proposed investigation of chlorine allergy certificates that exempted students from swimming classes. Though official statements only refer to suspicions of “religious” parents trying to keep their kids out of swimming lessons, a 2021 Al Jazeera piece by Peter Yeung noted that rights groups described the investigation as an “Islamophobic” gesture. A statement released by the Ministry of the Interior tied the investigation to the fight against separatism, saying, “School should not be a breeding ground for ‘religious separatism.’” Schiappa agreed, tweeting that schools “must fight against separatist ideologies which primarily target little girls”.

In a 2020 interview with Leaders League (an international rating agency), Schiappa was asked to define separatism. She claimed that separatism exists “any time a group considers its rules superior to the laws of the state.” Though the examples she gave all had to do with women and men not mixing for religious reasons, she assures the interviewer that her anti-separatism bill would strengthen not only “our ability to fight radical Islamism but also sectarian aberrations, such [as] La Famille [a group of 8 Christian families that marry only among each other.]”

An October 2020 article for openDemocracy observed that Schiappa’s fight against separatism tends to end when the separatists are not Muslim. Writer Fabrice Roger notes that in recent history there has been “armed resistance against mainland France, including the killings of politicians and claims of independence” in Corsica. Yet, when asked by a reporter in 2020 whether her definition of separatism referred to Corsicans or Islamists, Schiappa responded that the reporter should leave the good people of Corsica alone.

In a 2020 interview with 20 Minutes, Schiappa also asserted that things associated with “political Islam, Islamism, and separatism” cannot be compared with “the deacon who considers that the bishopric must be reserved to men. I do not agree with him, but he does not endanger the Republic.”

Schiappa often links French republican values to the fight against separatism.  In a 2021 interview with Arab News, she said that integration is “what a republic should be.” In her examination alongside the Ministry of Interior in July 2020, she highlighted the necessity of “defend[ing] our freedoms, particularly against separatism, which aims to establish its own rules in opposition to the Republic.” She vowed to promote “the values of the Republic,” specifying some values like national cohesion, integration of foreigners, defense of secularism, and prevention of delinquency and radicalization.

France chaired the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe from May to November 2019. Leading up to this, Schiappa said that they were going to encourage other countries to sign the Istanbul Convention – a pledge to combat violence against women and domestic violence.

As examples, she gave laws passed in France in the interest of this.

In 2020 Schiappa spoke proudly of a law she had recently enacted allowing for the “expulsion of foreigners guilty of sexual and sexist violence.” A column in Le Journal du Dimanche called this law a “double penalty for foreigners” and condemned Schiappa for using feminism as a tool to advance nationalism and xenophobia. Indeed, in a 2020 Ballast article, Kaouter Harchi accused Schiappa of femonationalism, the “rhetorical phenomenon where feminism and racism meet, acknowledge each other, and become embodied in government policies, educational programs, prevention campaigns, and integration repertoires.”

Today, Schiappa continues her political career on a lesser scale as a regional councilor of Ile-de-France. She is employed at Tilder, a communications consulting firm, and she is president of Actives, a non-governmental organization she created in 2024 that seeks to increase the percent of CAC 40 company heads who are women. She has also continued to give credence to Islamophobic ideas: in February 2025, she reposted a tweet that calls out a comedian for (among other things) “posting salafist content,” and looking like an “illiterate 7^th-century bedouin.”