FEW could have foreseen that Pope John Paul's fifth visit to France would stir up such a hornet's nest of confrontation and controversy. Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s accepted, for the first time, that in modern democracies such as France there should be separation of church and state, the 200 year old battle between French Catholics and secular republicans appeared to have virtually ended.
This was a case of the Church catching up belatedly with the real world. The French republican state had won that battle legislatively with the passing of a 1905 law respecting private religious practice, but cutting off all state funding of religious activity and making moral education the state's responsibility through the public school system. However, a significant section of conservative Catholic opinion had continued to fight a rearguard action, culminating notoriously in Marshal Petain's efforts to reChristianise the state under the collaborationist Vichy regime in the early 1940s.
Ironically, it was probably the socialist President Mitterand and his Protestant prime minister, Michel Rocard, in the late 1980s who did most to improve church state relations. They included church leaders in a national ethics committee and in a mission to try to solve the problems of the divided Pacific colony of New Caledonia, and they helped to unblock funds for building a new cathedral.
In this, the politicians were also learning lessons, notably from the huge popular outcry the socialist government had provoked by its abortive plan to marginalise Catholic schools in a new unified education system in 1984. The result of lessons being learned on both sides has been the normality, even cordiality, of relations in recent years.
However, both President Mitterand and his Gaullist successor, President Chirac, may have sown the seeds of the ferocious clashes of recent weeks about the place of the Catholic Church in a secular French republic and a secularised French society. By his surprise decision to have a full Catholic funeral, the Jesuit educated Mitterand angered influential anti clerical elements on the French left. More significantly, President Chirac's visit to the Pope in the Vatican last January was seen as a crossing of the line painfully marked out by French history between the sacred and the secular.
It was something new to hear the President of a proudly secular republic reassuring the Pope of the thousand years of ties between France and the papacy, and of his nation's faithfulness to its "Christian heritage". Mr Chirac even used the Vatican's own language to describe France as the "Church's eldest daughter."
All this has added grist to the mill of those French politicians and intellectuals who argue that this Pope is about nothing less than the undoing of 200 years of rights and freedoms won by the French Revolution. They point in particular to his 1995 encyclical on the right to life, Evangelium Vitae, which said that the Catholic moral law was superior to civil law and encouraged conscientious opposition to those "tyrannical" states which had legalised abortion.
This renewed suspicion of the Church's intentions reached feverish proportions as the date approached for the Pope to arrive for the anniversary of the baptism of Clovis. Clovis was a barbarian Frankish king who, by becoming a Christian, has been credited with setting in train the unification of France. Many contest this version of the French nation's birth, noting that France had nothing in common with Poland or Russia - two nations born at the same time as their Christian churches, and examples which the Slav Pope loves to quote.
A few years ago Clovis was almost unknown in France. Even this week, in a national opinion poll, he came ninth behind such figures as Charlemagne, the real consolidator of the French Christian monarchy, Joan of Arc and the 19th century anti clerical leader, Jules Ferry, as key figures in French history. Even the date of his baptism is uncertain, and such lack of historical clarity allows for all sorts of dangerous misrepresentations and ambiguities. It is no coincidence that Clovis's cause has been most passionately espoused by the ultra nationalist and racist National Front leader, Jean Marie le Pen.
In fact, it has been a relatively small group of politicians, intellectuals and newspaper commentators who have argued fiercely about the origins of the French nation, Christian or not, and about what designs a conservative papacy has on hard won French secular freedoms. In a country of elites, the political and media controversies are often far from the concerns of ordinary people.
As a Le Monde poll showed this week, while French people are divided down the middle on whether the national commemoration of Clovis's baptism is a good thing, nearly 60 per cent of them don't think it's of any great interest. Similarly 56 per cent of them thought that the battle between traditional Catholic and secular France was a thing of the past.
Most French people, including many on the left, would probably agree with the influential Paris priest, Father Antoine de Vial, when he says: "Clovis is part of our heritage. The Catholic kings who made France great are part of our heritage. Even an atheist has to accept that." Clovis is only the pretext for a much more important debate which is only just beginning, in France and elsewhere, about the nature of society in the "new Europe".
In this, French Catholicism mirrors the increasingly unconfident and diffuse ambiance of contemporary France. As the distinguished Le Monde religious affairs correspondent, Henri Tincq, wrote this week, the issue is not the unchangeable Pope John Paul but the changing nature of French society. A la carte Catholicism is on the spiritual menu reflected in tendencies as different as the ultra conservative Lefebvrists and the radical followers of the sacked Bishop Gaillot just as unfettered freedom of choice tops the economic and cultural menus. If the Church is in conflict with anything in France, it is less with the state than with French society itself.