France's state schools reopen on Friday with no sign of the uproar over a Muslim headscarf ban that threatened to turn last year's back-to-school day into an open confrontation between the state and Islamist activists.
If there is any dispute this year, it's a small one about a new law passed in the wake of the headscarf controversy that requires primary schools to teach pupils all the words of La Marseillaise, France's sometimes blood-curdling national anthem.
The headscarf ban, which prompted angry protests across the Islamic world, is so firmly established now that it hardly rated a mention from Education Minister Gilles de Robien this week.
"Most families have conformed with the law," he said on Wednesday, saying the policy of a firm ban backed up by talks with defiant girls and their parents had worked well.
According to an Education Ministry study, 639 girls turned up for school with headscarves last year - compared to 1,400 in 2003 - and only 47 refused to remove them and were expelled.
"We can say many girls and their parents felt liberated by this law," French media quoted the internal study as saying.
The ban, which also outlawed large Christian crosses and Jewish skullcaps as contrary to the separation of church and state, was passed after a heated debate pitting individual rights against France's self-image as a secular state.
Many teachers demanded it because a growing number of girls were sporting headscarves, bringing religion into the classroom despite the schools' official neutrality, and some seemed to do it under pressure from local Islamist activists.
"The tension is mostly behind us," Philippe Guittet, a teachers union official, told the daily Le Figaro. "I don't think there will be any problems this year."
The movement to defy the law stopped in its tracks just before school opened last year when Islamist militants in Iraq kidnapped two French journalists and demanded the ban be lifted.
Even groups encouraging defiance, such as the large Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF), rejected the blackmail and showed their national solidarity by supporting the hostages.
The UOIF's setbacks last June in elections for France's Muslim Council were seen as a rebuff for its activist stand.
A survey released this week by the CEVIPOF think tank put public fears about growing Islamist militancy into perspective by showing that over 80 percent of French Muslims supported the strict separation of church and state.
The faith gap between the 5 million Muslims and the other 92 percent of the population was "far from putting them on the fringes or in conflict with French society and its main values." The law on La Marseillaise has provoked criticism from teachers who flinch at the stirring refrain saying the "impure blood" of foreign invaders should water French farmlands.
"How can you talk about 'impure blood' and teach pupils tolerance at the same time? It's totally unrealistic," said Jean-Luc Villeneuve, another teachers' union leader.
"You're trying to guillotine La Marseillaise," Guy Geoffroy, a conservative deputy, retorted in a televised debate.