WORLDVIEW Lara MarloweFrance completed its year-long celebration of the centenary of the December 9th, 1905, Law on the Separation of Church and State this week in a flurry of symposiums and ceremonies. La Séparation, a docu-drama re-creating the 1905 debate in the National Assembly, will be broadcast four times between December 2nd and 14th.
Today, 74 per cent of French people love the law and don't want it changed. It was not always so. The debate on "La Séparation" was the longest in the history of French democracy - 48 parliamentary sessions that fill 1,500 pages of archives.
The struggle between secular republicans and Catholic monarchists began with the 1789 revolution. But it took on new vehemence under the Third Republic, founded in 1870, and reached paroxysm at the end of the 19th century with the Dreyfus affair.
Two books published this year reproduce anti-clerical cartoons of the period, showing priests as crows, cockroaches and bats, often in alliance with the military and big business.
Émile Combes, the prime minister who in 1904 announced his intention to legally separate church and state, was forced to resign in January 1905 when it emerged that his defence minister kept files on military officers who attended Mass.
Opposition to the Separation was led by Fr Hippolyte Gayraud, a priest and member of the Assembly who pleaded for a "union of civil and religious society." Gayraud warned advocates of the law: "You want to declare war upon us; it is war you are bringing to us. . . We have centuries to take our revenge." The socialist deputy Maurice Allard was the most extreme proponent of Separation. Allard declared his intention to "de-Christianise" France because "Christianity is a permanent obstacle to the social development of the Republic, and to all progress towards civilisation." Aristide Briand, the statesman who would later serve 11 times as prime minister and win the Nobel Peace Prize, drafted the compromise which eventually carried the day. "You are regaining your freedom," he pleaded with anti-clerical deputies.
"It is only fair that you leave its freedom to the church. . . to the extent that public order is not threatened. That is what the Separation is about." France broke diplomatic relations with the Vatican for 17 years over the Separation. When civil servants began taking stock of church property in 1906, clergy and parishioners resisted, sometimes violently. The state ceased the inventory. "The question of knowing whether we'll count the chandeliers in a church is not worth a human life," Georges Clemenceau, then interior minister, wrote to prefects.
At its best, the Separation has guaranteed state neutrality in religious matters and protects the right to believe or not, to practise or not. In French, the word laïcité connotes something more powerful than the English "secularism". It has been elevated to the status of founding myth, on a par with liberté, égalité, fraternité.
There have been breaches of the principle, notably under the second World War Vichy government, which dispossessed and deported 76,000 Jews. Although Algeria was considered an integral part of France until independence in 1962, "Muslim citizens" did not enjoy the same rights as Europeans. Alsace and Moselle, and France's overseas territories, are exempt from the Separation. Seven of France's 12 bank holidays are Catholic feast days.
At its worst, the Separation has been used as a weapon to enforce conformity with "universal republican ideals" and drive signs of religiosity from the public sphere. In the early 20th century it was used to persecute Catholics. Today, fewer than 10 per cent of the French are practising Catholics. The number of priests has fallen from 55,000 in 1905 to 23,000 today.
In the present century, the attempt to use the Separation to halt the spread of Islam was exemplified by the March 15th, 2004, law banning the wearing of religious symbols in school - labelled "a republican orgasm" by the historian Jean Baubérot. No one was fooled by claims that the law also targeted crucifixes and skull-caps; it was the result of a French obsession with some 1,200 Muslim girls - among nine million students - wearing headscarves.
In his dissertation on French secularism at Cambridge University this year, Brian Coll, an Irish student, applied the words of the Hungarian historian István Bibó to the headscarf debate. Political hysteria, Bibó wrote, "will substitute a fictional problem which can be mediated purely through words and symbols for the real one that it finds insurmountable. In grappling with the former, the community can convince itself that it has successfully confronted the latter." As Coll shrewdly understood before France's immigrant suburbs exploded in rioting last month, "the transference of France's very real social problems, particularly those facing immigrant populations, on to a symbol [the headscarf]. . . acts as a substitute for the political engagement required to deal with the social dislocation present in French society."