France targeted the veil deliberately in the 1930s after ethnological studies

Evidence

The decisive battle was launched before 1954, more precisely during the early 1930’s. The officials of the French administration in Algeria, committed to destroying the people’s originality, and under instructions to bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the veil, which was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status of the Algerian woman. Such a position is not the consequence of a chance intuition. It is on the basis of the analyses of sociologists and ethnologists that the specialists in so-called native affairs and the heads of the Arab Bureaus coordinated their work. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 131

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how colonial administrations weaponized academic social science to target cultural symbols, with the veil as the case study.
• XREF: connects to: French state policy in the 1920s actively sought racial regeneration of France; French ethnology was founded explicitly to serve colonial control objectives; The veil shifted from passive tradition into an active revolutionary instrument — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 216

Related

• French ethnology was founded explicitly to serve colonial control objectives (similarity 0.91)
• The veil shifted from passive tradition into an active revolutionary instrument (similarity 0.86)
• French unveiling campaigns aimed to demoralize Algerian men, not liberate women (similarity 0.80)
• The revolutionary struggle itself loosened the veil’s taboo, then reversed it (similarity 0.79)
• Algerian women’s veiling practices changed without being part of the revolution’s program (similarity 0.79)