French PM: Naked breasts more representative of France than headscarf

The French prime minister has stoked the fierce debate over the burkini by saying that naked breasts are more representative of the country than a headscarf.

Manuel Valls, who has supported mayors who have banned the burkini on French beaches, gave last night a speech in which he celebrated the bare breasts of Marianne, a national symbol of the Republic.

A historian has suggested Valls may have confused Marianne with the subject of this painting (Picture: Alamy)

To rapturous applause from those in attendance at the government rally, Valls said: ‘Marianne has a naked breast because she is feeding the people!

‘She is not veiled, because she is free! That is the republic!’

Valls’s suggestion that bare breasts represented France more closely than the Muslim headscarf was seized upon by critics, who accused him of historical illiteracy.

Mathilde Larrere, a historian of the French revolution, called Valls a ‘cretin’ in a string of tweets in which she also wrote that the sole reason Marianne was female was because the decadent French king was male, and that the use of an exposed breast was ‘just an artistic code’.

‘Marianne has a naked breast because it’s an allegory,’ she tweeted.

The historian Nicolas Lebourg called Valls’s interpretation of Marianne ‘inexact and stunning’, and suggested in an interview with Libération he had confused her with the subject of Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting, Liberty Leading the People.

He also described how there have long been two competing representations of Marianne.

One is wise, fully clothed and unarmed and one carries a sword, has an exposed breast and wears a Phrygian bonnet.