if i were the french parliament, i'd take the obvious next step of requiring all women only to wear bikinis. honestly if you think you can get to a good argument that it is legitimate for the government to tell you how to dress, i'd like to hear you formulate it. one question: if that is within the purview of legitimate state power, what is not? go ahead and ban islam, or being of pashtun origin. go in and start redecorating people's houses. start requiring plastic surgery of various kinds; once we all look pretty much the same, integration will be far easier to achieve. obviously in a secular state, religion ought to be against the law. we might be able to reinforce this with compulsory psycho-surgery. obviously, we should ban texts of the sort that suggest that women ought to be veiled; or maybe we ought to ban text altogether. 

at any rate, the fact is that this is some people telling other people what to wear: this government is not an abstract object. it's not a deity. and it is obviously not us imposing rules on ourselves, since if these women were imposing rules on themselves, this wouldn't be one of them. and in virtue of what does someone have the right to tell you what to wear (etc)? not only is this an exercise of arbitrary tyrannical power, it is obviously an exercise of arbitrary tyrannical power. the restriction may seem relatively trivial to people who are not affected by it, but any government that claims and exercises such power should be destroyed.