France honours law enshrining secularism

Paris letter: The 1905 law on the separation of church and state is considered a pillar of the French Republic, an integral part of national identity. This week, France began celebrating its centenary at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, attended the opening session, under the dome at the Institut de France.

Writing in Monday's La Croix newspaper, Raffarin praised "the subtle balance established by the law of 1905, which must be preserved". The French people demand the religious neutrality of the public sphere, Raffarin continued. He objected to moves by the head of the centre-right UMP, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Protestant Federation of France, to revise the text.

France's 1789 Revolution nationalised all religious buildings, including, ironically, the chapel which Napoleon turned into the Institut. Under Napoleon's 1801 concordat, the state lent Christians and Jews the use of churches and synagogues.

Since Islam came late to France, Sarkozy argues, the state has no mosques to lend Muslims. Jean-Arnold de Clermont, the president of the Protestant Federation, argues that local governments abuse the law by withholding building permits to prevent the spread of Protestant sects and Islam.

Though it is considered sacrosanct, the 1905 law has often provoked disagreement. In When Catholics Were Outlawed, to be published by Éditions Perrin on February 24th, the writer Jean Sévillia destroys the myth that it was drafted in a spirit of neutrality and civil harmony.

"The anti-clerical, republican left took power in the National Assembly in 1879," Sévillia said. "Their anti-Catholicism was a vestige of the Revolution, and they stayed in power until 1914. For 35 years there was not a single Catholic head of state or minister, whereas 95 per cent of the population were Catholic. Catholics were politically excluded from their own country."

The 1905 law was the culmination of 25 years of anti-Catholic legislation, Sévillia said. "Little by little, the government took away the right of priests and nuns to teach. Some 14,000 Catholic schools were closed on government orders. They kept records on officers who went to Mass. Almost all religious orders were banned between 1901 and 1904. Between 30,000 and 60,000 priests and nuns were exiled, with great psychological violence. Some went to Ireland; others to England, Belgium, Spain, Italy and Canada. Catholics experienced this period as one of intense persecution."

The rest of Europe was appalled by what it saw as French extremism. Popes Leo XIII and Pius X made appeals on behalf of French Catholics, and Pius X wrote an encyclical against the 1905 law entitled Vehementer nos. Two people were killed and many others wounded in the "inventory crisis", when Catholics staged sit-ins to prevent the state from assessing church property.

France's anti-clerical fever died in the trenches of the first World War, in the fraternity of combat. When the war ended in 1918, the right returned to power and little by little began reversing the more extreme measures, allowing priests and nuns to return in the 1920s and 1930s.

"Everyone has forgotten how conflictual it was," Sévillia said. "The church came to an arrangement with the government, and now it doesn't want to open old wounds." In his speech on The Profane and Sacred in the Memory of the Republican Nation, at the opening ceremony at the Institut de France, the academician Pierre Nora argued that "the brutal radicality of the French Revolution . . . rapidly transferred the sacred nature of the monarchy upon the nation, of the religious to the political, and the divine to the historic". This transfer created a collective republican memory, Nora said, in which the tricolour, the Marseillaise and the 14th of July became the emblems of a "republican spirituality" linked to the concept of secularism. Schools replaced churches as the place where "free and equal" French citizens were turned out.

"No country has so deeply anchored schooling at the heart of its national identity, nor so exalted the link between schools and republican ideology," he said. This was epitomised by the slogan embossed on the cover of Lavisse's History of France: "Child, you shall love France because nature made her beautiful and history made her great."

Today, right-wing politicians are as fervent in defending the separation of church and state as the left. This led last year to a law banning Islamic headscarves in public schools. At least 48 students have been expelled as a result of the law.

No other European country is as fiercely secular as France; a form of State religion continues in Britain, Denmark, Finland and Greece. It was on the insistence of French authorities that an allusion to Europe's "religious heritage" was replaced by the words "spiritual patrimony" in the preamble of the Union's charter of basic rights.

In France, said Jean Sévillia, "the concept of secularism has become a sort of sacred cow, like a charm in an Indian tribe. You put secularism on the table and everyone, left and right, dances around it saying 'secularism, secularism, secularism'. The word has become a sort of hold-all that means whatever people want it to mean."