Rise of French Laïcité

French Secularism from the Reformation to the Twenty-first Century

Stephen M. Davis

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725264113
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Americans are often baffled by France's general indifference to religion and laws forbidding religious symbols in public schools, full-face veils in public places, and even the interdiction of burkinis on French beaches. An understanding of laicite provides insight in beginning to understand France and its people. Laicite has been described as the complete secularization of institutions as a necessity to prevent a return to the Ancien Regime characterized by the union of church and state. To understand the concept of laicite, one must begin in the sixteenth century with the Protestant Reformation and freedom of conscience recognized by the Edict of Nantes in 1598. This has been called the period of incipient laicite in the toleration of Protestantism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 reestablished the union of the throne and altar, which resulted in persecution of the Huguenots who fought for the principle of the freedom of conscience. French laicite presents a specificity in origin, definition, and evolution which led to the official separation of church and state in 1905. The question in the early twentieth century concerned the Roman Catholic Church's compatibility with democracy. That same question is being asked of Islam in the twenty-first century.

6

Twenty-First-Century Challenges to Laïcité

French society accommodated itself to religious changes in the twentieth century following the disestablishment of concordataire state churches. The arrival of the law of 1905 ended decades of harsh combats between political and laïque powers.677 The law was both a law of rupture and a law of conciliation. The rupture was considered justified by many since the Church was a threat to the Republic. The conciliation was a guarantee of the free exercise of religion and the liberty of conscience.678 Jean-Michel Bélorgey describes French laïcité as a response to confrontations between the Catholic Church and political powers and to several centuries of religious quarrels which profoundly marked and bloodied French society, and as an attempt to battle the imperialism of the Catholic Church of France, the eldest daughter of the Church.679

We saw previously that by 1924, the Catholic Church accepted its new status and adapted accordingly to its diminished prestige, influence, and numbers. The Catholic Church waited until the twentieth century to recognize the freedom of conscience, the autonomy of scientific inquiry, and the equality of all people, believers or not—all the things that Pope Pius IX still anathematized in his 1864 Syllabus.680 The Church continued to believe that the Law of Separation was contrary to the order willed by God, but could be accommodated from the moment the State respected the rights and the liberties of the Church.681 Radical transformation in the Catholic Church in France followed in the fifty years after Vatican II.682 Both the Catholic Church and its adversaries came to accept the idea of a State serving all citizens and no longer subject to religious belief.683 There was optimism that the Church had in itself the spiritual resiliency to remove itself from the nostalgia of an idealized past in order to put itself without reserve at the service of a laïque society, to contribute along with all others, to invent a better humanity in the present civilization.684

The law of 1905 evolved in the twentieth century, particularly between World War I and World War II, and mostly in relation to questions of education. It was understood that the public school was both the realization of a particular political organization and of specific religious and moral options.685 The public school’s primary purpose remained the formation of young citizens according to republican values. Soppelsa argues that the evolution of the concept of laïcité was modest for most of the twentieth century and that its structure, its coherence and its objectives were not fundamentally questioned.686 Matthew Kaemingk maintains that “the utter dominance of secular liberalism in Europe during the twentieth century created the impression that the question of faith and public life had all been laid to rest and that the problem of public religion had been solved.”687

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the concept of laïcité began to develop beyond its traditional sense of separation of Church and State and the concept of State neutrality. Laïcité was conceived in a new manner and generally in terms of freedom. Traditional laïcité appeared outdated and inadequate.688 The opening years of the twenty-first century in France presented contemporary challenges for laïcité and applications of the law of 1905. For that reason, in 2006 laïcité could be described as a modern idea requiring systematic promotion because it remained more than ever the prerequisite for economic, social, and political progress at the beginning of a new millennium.689 Indeed, in the last few decades the subject of laïcité returned to prominence in French society. What began as a trickle of books on laïcité in the late 1900s became a torrent in the early twenty-first century. The multitude of studies which have been consecrated to laïcité led to blurring the notion rather than clarifying it.690

Many of the concerns and questions raised in the twenty-first century are far removed from issues debated and resolved at the time of the law of 1905. It has been noted that within a year or two of the centennial of the law of 1905 there was an extraordinary upsurge in laïque debate in France concerning a question—the wearing of symbols or clothing by which students ostensibly manifested a religious commitment—which certainly was nothing new but which was hardly an issue in the debates of 1905.691 Islam presented the problem of laïcité in a different manner to French and European society. The problem was not the long presence of Muslims in France, but the radicalization of Islam in the 1990s.692 The issues now incl...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Laïcité and the Religious Question
• Reformation and Incipient Laïcité
• Nineteenth-Century Revival of Republicanism
• Foundational Documents and Political Debates on Laïcité
• Laïcité in the Twentieth Century
• Twenty-First-Century Challenges to Laïcité
• Conclusion and Implications for Gospel Ministry
• Bibliography