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Given this history of violent religious division, revolutionaries saw no suitable purpose for the church. They temporarily transformed the Cathedral of Notre Dame into the Temple of Reason to signify their new allegiances. They renamed 1,400 Paris streets to expunge the memory of monarchs and saints. And they stripped priests and bishops of their formerly state-funded positions. This program of dechristianization shocked even moderate French revolutionaries, but radical elements prevailed, along with the belief that the Roman Catholic Church would forever be an enemy of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Secularism Then and Now
Once the revolutionary coalition fell apart, however, the Roman Catholic Church managed to regain some of its earlier authority. In 1801, Napoleon brokered a deal with the papacy to grant the church favored-religion status, which allowed them to take responsibility for educating French youth. But for the radical remnant, this compromise undermined the revolution's legacy. Led by Prime Minister Jules Ferry, an ardent atheist and ancestor of current Education Minister Luc Ferry, this faction established the public school system in 1880 and barred priests from teaching. Ferry viewed the public schools as a primary vehicle for diffusing the revolution's values and giving the nation a unified sense of secular citizenship.

Finally in 1905 church and state broke for good in France. The last vestiges of Napoleon's post-revolutionary compromise with the Vatican were abolished. The government ordered schools to desist from all religious instruction, assumed much church property, and even banned many public displays of religiosity, such as gravestones. This brand of state-sponsored secularism has characterized France to this day.

New Crisis
France's latest tussle about the relationship between church and state has been sparked by a new threat to state secularism—the immigration of North African Muslims to France and other European nations. Lured by the employment void created by rapidly aging European populations, Muslims have sought economic refuge in Europe. Muslims now constitute about eight percent of France's population and promise to increase that proportion in the future.

For the French, this development poses nothing less that a threat to the essence of their proud nation. The French government is responding in alarm to reports that Muslim students have questioned the historic veracity of the Holocaust and demanded sex-segregated gym classes. French writer Guy Coq expressed the danger this way: "But the laïcité (secularism) has been eroded by the intrusion of religious symbols, prompted by an excess of individualism, that philosophy so revered by Americans. … More than ever, in this time of political-religious tensions, school secularism is for us the foundation of both civil peace and the integration of all people of all beliefs into the Republic."

Ever mindful of the devastating religious conflicts that mar their history, the French fear public religion will slow this integration process and jeopardize the civil peace.

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February (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48