Rise of French Laïcité. Stephen M. Davis

Jean-Claude Monod explains that laïcité was introduced by the Reformation, prepared intellectually by the Renaissance, initiated by the French Revolution, and was founded largely on autonomous reason devoid of religious assumptions.12 Patrick Cabanel advances what he considers a global hypothesis in his understanding of French history. He asserts that every century over the last five hundred years France has changed the solution for dealing with the religious question which was opened by the definitive implantation of the Protestant Reformation with the Edict of Nantes in 1598 as the starting point. According to him, the Reformation forever changed the religious equation in France. He estimates that by 1560 one out of ten French people was won over by the Reformation and converted to Protestantism. That number fell to one out of fifty by the end of the eighteenth century. These figures are considered by Cabanel as measures of a double failure—the failure of Protestantism to take root in France and the failure of the monarchy to effectively treat the Protestant question. He does not consider the Edict of Nantes tolerant, pluralistic, or laïque. He argues that Protestantism was temporarily authorized and protected, yet still trapped as a minority until France once again found its unity in the Catholic religion in what he calls a coexistence in intolerance.13 The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was followed by a new edict of toleration in 1787 when it became evident that Protestantism was not going to disappear. To this edict was added state recognition of three other religious confessions alongside the Catholic Church with the Concordat of 1801. A hundred years of relative peace followed until the events of the nineteenth century which would lead to the unraveling of the Concordat and the enactment of the Law of Separation in 1905.14

Cabanel looks at two major thresholds of laicization. He sees the first threshold with several characteristics established during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. The first characteristic was institutional fragmentation. Although religion was no longer coextensive with French society, religion remained an institution structured by the State under the Concordat. The second characteristic was State recognition of the religious needs of its citizens and the provision of salaries for ministers of different religious expressions. Religion was maintained as the moral foundation of society and the practice of catechism was continued in public schools. The third characteristic was an incomplete religious pluralism in State recognition of four religious confessions—Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Judaism. Established laïcité was the second threshold which covered most of the twentieth century and appears to most people today as the definitive framework in defining relations between the State (public domain) and churches (confined to private spaces). In this threshold, religion was no longer considered an integral part of societal structure and was banished to the private sphere where it experienced a loss of legitimacy and where religious needs were no longer socially recognized. The State withdrew recognition of the religious confessions included in the Concordat, the Catholic Church lost its privileged place, minority religions became juridical equals, and the State, at least in principle, observed a benevolent neutrality.15

The importance of these two thresholds will be seen later in the challenges to laïcité in the early period of the twenty-first century to determine whether a third threshold has now appeared. The arrival of this third threshold might have been signaled by the writings of Nicholas Sarkozy (b. 1955), president of France from 2007 to 2012. As Minister of the Interior from 2002 to 2004, he also had conferred on him the position of Minister of Religions. During this earlier period, he wrote a book entitled La République, les religions, l’espérance. In the form of an interview, he presented laïcité in service to liberty and religion in service to society. A major chapter was given to Islam and the Republic in which he describes two variations of Islam: one official and reassuring represented by the Grand Mosque in Paris; one unofficial and worrisome in which a militant extremism was developing.16 It is significant that he wrote this book during the time when two French citizens were held hostage by Islamic militants. In his preface he declared that the kidnappers were fanatics who claimed the Islamic faith which professes the opposite of what they became and had nothing to do with God.17 Further, he distanced himself from his predecessors and their apparent indifference toward religions and considered that in past years sociological questions had been overestimated and religious reality largely underestimated.18 He spoke with an uncommon frankness in stating that religion occupied a central place in France at the beginning of the third millennium. He further clarified that the place of religion is not “at the exterior of the Republic; it is not a place in competition with the Republic. It is a place in [dans] the Republic.”19 The landscape of France has changed several times in the past and is once again undergoing change and challenges in the present.

      Christian France

As we now turn to examining the place of Christianity in French history and the emergence of laïcité, important questions and distinctions must first be raised concerning the nature of French Christianity and Christendom. In posing questions on the re-evangelization of Europe, Wessels asked, “How Christian was Europe really? To what extent has it been de-Christianized today?” He initially responded that Europe was largely Christianized by AD 750 if one uses the marks of baptism and other religious rituals. However, he questions “how deeply this Christianization had really penetrated in the so-called Christianized areas” and agrees with Dutch historian Jan Romein that “mediaeval Christianity was only a thin veneer.”20 French philosopher Luc Ferry adds that many associated with the Christian faith were attached to the religious form as such, but the content, the message of love, was hardly evident in the reality of human relations.21

French historian Jean Delumeau goes further in declaring that one cannot even speak in terms of medieval Christianity and that the Christianization of Europe in that period was unsuccessful. He questions what was really accomplished in seven or eight centuries of evangelization and notes that both Protestant Reformers and their Catholic adversaries viewed the peasantry, which constituted the vast majority of Europeans, as ignorant of Christianity, given to pagan superstitions and to vices.22 With this assessment Newbigin concurs:

When we speak of a time when public truth as it was understood and accepted in Europe was shaped by Christianity, we do not—of course—mean that every person’s behavior was in accordance with Christ’s teaching. In that sense there has never been and there can never be a Christian society. But Europe was a Christian society in the sense that its public truth was shaped by the biblical story with its center in the incarnation of the Word in Jesus.23

Delumeau further asserts that one can speak of medieval Christianity only by an abuse of language or by holding to the myth of a golden age, and that those living during that period often lived as if they had no moral code.24 This specialist in Catholic Church history claims that Christianity, in its dealings with non-Christians, often practiced the law of the strongest. Christianity was proclaimed, theorized, and institutionalized but never really evident in the way people lived. It was a project or a dream that was wrongly taken for a reality.25 In pre-revolutionary structures, with the marriage of Church and State, it was necessary that everyone belong, willingly or not, to the cultural and moral framework established by the Church. For many it was simply “conformism, resignation, and forced hypocrisy.”26 When the Church lost its force, people regained their liberty outside the Church. McManners observes that “‘Christian Europe’ was a social-intellectual-cultural complex and not a concentration of converted believers” and supports that assertion with a quote attributed to Anatole France (1844–1964) who observed years later that “Catholicism is still the most acceptable form of religious indifference.”27

We are far from the days when the subjects of European kings were required to hold the faith of their sovereign and their ancestors. It may be extremely difficult for moderns to even imagine life under an imposed religion in light of the freedom of choice—religion or no religion—which most Westerners enjoy today. Yet we must understand that for centuries of European history, secular authority was at the service of ecclesiastical authority with the accompanying constraints and restraints on personal liberty. Christianity existed as a politico-religious system present in the daily life of subjects. The configuration of Church and State structures ensured that the form of Christianity which was held by those in power was rarely transformed into anything resembling biblical Christianity. It was coupled with the dominant physical presence of churches and monuments serving as a constant reminder that people