How many burqas - a traditional Afghan costume, hiding the complete body and face – are there in France?
Nobody knows exactly. An official account tells about 200. A month later, a next official report told about 5 000, but the statistics were obviously exaggerated. (The police based their account on the number of mosques, then made additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions... You got me). According to statistics, the majority of the women wearing them don't come from Afghanistan.
They are French, born in France, speaking French.
Anyway, 200 or 5 000... Compared to the 5 Millions Muslims living in France, that's peanuts.

But since the government made propositions to forbid them in the French public areas, it's like there's an army of burqas surrounding me. In my TV, my magazines, on the Web, they look at me, like dark spectres invading my livingroom. I'm afraid.

I'm even more afraid that my other nightmare, that I make regularly since I'm in the job life. Here it is : I never find a job, the social elevator brings me down to ground zero, and I slowly but surely become an alcoholic homeless.
Thanks to the burqa polemic launched by the French government, I don't make this nightmare anymore! My fears of unemployment disappeared.

You know the funniest? As a majority of French never seen burqas for real, reporters of the site Rue 89 have tried to buy a Burqa in Paris. During a whole afternoon, in Barbès, in Belleville... They didn't manage to find a single burqa.
'It's from Afghanistan, it's not Arab, neither from Maghreb. It's not in our tradition. The girls who wear it go completely wrong. It's not a precept of the Koran to wear a burqa', sellers told them. 'The girls in Burqa wear it as an act of provocation, in reaction against female exhibitionism. The more we talk about it, the more they will wear it.'

For the moment, there is still no laws forbidding burgas in the public sphere. There has only been a 'parlementary report' (26 of January 2010) that concluded that it should be relevant to forbid it. But The Assemblée Nationale did not take position for the moment.
Having a look in the other European countries, the French information website Le Point noticed that the burqa issue is not a priority, excpept in a Italian town, Varallo Sesia, where wearing a burqa could cost you a 2000 € fine. The Mayor's Party is the Separatist party Lega Nord, an extreme-right party known for his nostalgia for the Mussolinian era.