In contemporary multicultural societies, a main source of social and political tension lies in the ongoing process of the symbolic definition of the difference between what it means to be a (good) citizen and what it means to be culturally suited to fit within the values embedded into citizenship. The definition of the formal and symbolic content of citizenship entails important normative questions regarding whether a model of citizenship offers satisfactory normative and political resources to promote a fair and actual democratic accommodation of cultural minorities. In this perspective, this article attempts to assess the potential of democratic integration inherent to a particular model of citizenship, namely the French Republican one. On the basis of the controversy leading to the law banning the headscarf from public schools in 2004, it shows that this ban is the results of some logical and political inconsistencies that are endogenous to the political grammar inherent to the French Republican model of citizenship and that such inconsistencies call into question part of its potential to democratically manage an increasingly multicultural society.