French La?cité vs. American Secularism

On August 31, 2023, the French Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports issued a statement titled “Respect of Republican Values” (Respect des Valeurs de la République), forbidding pupils to wear the abaya in public schools throughout the national territory. The abaya, also called qamis, is part of traditional Middle Eastern clothing that has become increasingly popular in recent years among France’s Muslim population. Despite its not being a religious garment per se, contrary to, for example, the Islamic veil (hijab), the statement estimated that the qamis still “ostensibly manifests a religious affiliation” in the French context and therefore declared that it “cannot be tolerated” in public schools.?

Since then, the move has been vindicated twice by rulings from the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative court, which rules over disputes between the state and its constituents. The court’s approval was grounded in the article L-141-5-1 of the Code of Education, itself a materialization of the now famous law of March 15, 2004, which outlawed all “signs or clothing through which pupils ostensibly manifest a religious affiliation.” Moreover, polls showed that the decision was supported by no less than 81% of the French population, which added plebiscite to legality.?

All this may at firsthand seem nothing short of tyranny to the common American mind. The informed reader would probably perceive it as yet another confirmation of the “illiberal” tendency at the core of French secularism, while those still unfamiliar with France’s management of religious pluralism would be shocked by what they could only recognize as an infringement on one’s sacred freedom to express and practice their religion. Looking for explanations, they might remember that the French Revolution was, after all, plagued from the beginning by antireligious tendencies; that the Communards kidnapped and executed priests, just as Robespierre guillotined Carmelites; and that Tocqueville himself opposed the religious but “free and enlightened” United States to a French Republic threatened by “incredulity” and victim of “stupidity and ignorance.”

Indeed, despite France’s being one of the first countries that, like the United States, entrenched secularism in its constitution, the French version of secularism has since the late 18th century been perceived and depicted by many as inherently opposed to the American understanding of religious freedom as defined in the First Amendment. For the past three centuries or so, the dominant American perception of la?cité has thus been characterized as “anticlericalism” and “atheism,” in which political and social hostility toward religion supersedes the protection and upholding of religious freedom.?

In fact, this perception of revolutionary France as an anti-clerical and essentially godless nation irritated the writings of prominent intellectuals and politicians of the age. John Adams, perhaps the most conservative of the Founding Fathers, famously shared his circumspection about the Revolution unfolding in France in a letter to one Dr. Price in 1790, confessing that he did not know “what to make of a republic of 30 million atheists.” In 1794, Noah Webster condemned what he perceived as the French revolutionary government’s attempt to suppress religious morals and replace them by a vague and artificial “cult of reason.” Similarly, in History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution some 11 years later, Mercy Ottis Warren critiqued the French spirit of “impiety” and denial of the existence of God. And during the campaign for the presidential elections of 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s opponents, chief among them Alexander Hamilton, warned voters about a “decadent, irreligious, and immoral” Francophile candidate who would flood the country with the “torrents of atheism set free by the French insurrection.” And the list could go on.?

The dominant early-American skepticism regarding the then-burgeoning and “radical” French blend of secularism still influences attitudes to this day. Consider, for example, the outrage that the tasteless depiction of the Last Supper in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics sparked in the United States last summer. Shocking, sure. But surprising? I remember American friends of mine essentially raising their shoulders in a resigned sigh. “It’s France, after all,” they all said, as if this was to be expected. The “republic of 30 million atheists” trope is alive and well.?

As argued by Amandine Barb in Incompréhensions transatlantiques: le discours américain sur la la?cité fran?aise?(2014), la?cité has historically functioned as a counter-model to American secularism, simultaneously shedding light on the singularities and fragilities of the American approach to the relation of church and state. And while its inner mechanisms and implications have significantly evolved since the Bastille fell, in matters pertaining to secularism and religious freedom, France remains to this day that quintessential “Other” through which the “I” is best reaffirmed.?

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What is it, then, about the French understanding of secularism that appears so peculiar to the American mind? First, “secular” (or more exactly la?que) is mentioned in the first article of the French Constitution of October 4, 1958, as one of the defining characteristics of the Fifth Republic, along with “indivisible,” democratic,” and “social.” Note that there is a subtle yet fundamental difference from the formulation found in the Bill of Rights: While the First Amendment effectively prohibits the establishment of a state religion and protects religious freedom, the article does not explicitly define the United States as a secular republic, nor establishes secularism as a central characterizing feature. Consequently, debating secularism implies far more to the French than merely discussing a particular policy or organizing political principle: In the French context, it is one of the fundamental elements of French political identity. Institutionally, this is translated by the recognition of la?cité as defined by the seminal law of December 9, 1905, on the separation of church and state as a principle of constitutional value, placing it on the very top of the legal hierarchy within the French system. The juxtaposition of the terms la?que and indivisible should, therefore, not be taken lightly: It means that, to the French, abandoning la?cité would, in a sense, be akin in magnitude to losing Normandy.

Second, the French approach to the relationship of church and state is essentially different from the American one in both its content and scope. La?cité goes well beyond the mere separation of political and religious institutions. While in America the state is legally bound to an attitude of neutrality vis-à-vis religion, the latter’s presence and open expression in the public sphere is nevertheless accepted, if not encouraged, as a safeguard of democracy, tolerance, and civic vitality. In the American conception, civic and religious virtue can be seen as the two separate columns of the same national edifice, each necessary to avoid the crumbling of the whole structure. In contrast, the French conception resembles two separate buildings standing side by side with no communicating corridors, such that getting inside one of them necessarily requires getting out of the other. It consists in the establishment of a sort of security perimeter, of a minimal distance between the political and the religious. “I want what our forefathers wanted … the state in its home, and the church in hers,” wrote Victor Hugo. This “distancing” of civic from religious life is manifested in the imperative of strict division of the private and the public spheres, with religious expression being confined to the boundaries of the former.

Does that mean that, in France, one may wear a cross, a yarmulke, or a hijab at home but must remove it as soon as he or she goes out to the grocery store? Not quite. Aristide Briand, prominent French political figure and one of the “fathers” of the law of 1905, opposed such outright interdiction and reminded everyone that the neutrality of the state implies that there is no distinction between “religious” and “non-religious” garments. He reportedly joked that if one wished to “dress up” by wearing a friar’s robe while walking down the street, the state would not forbid him to do so. Accordingly, far from banning it, the law of 1905 makes no explicit mention of religious clothing. This allows for a clarification of another issue facing the principle of la?cité: that of the ever-moving boundaries of the public sphere. While the early interpretation of the law of 1905 limited the obligation of neutrality to the state and its representatives, France has witnessed an ongoing extension of the public spaces where this obligation applies, including, for example, public schools, transformed into “sanctuaries” where pupils must be preserved from any sort of religious influence.?

Could, then, the American remonstrance against the French model and its “radical illiberalism” be justified, all duly considered? Understood, certainly. Justified, less so. According to French academic Patrick Weil, la?cité is “first of all the freedom to believe or not to believe without exogeneous pressure.” However, for these criteria to be realized, the public sphere must be one where individuals are perceived and treated purely as “citizens,” and where the exercise of religion must be limited so as not to impede on the others’ right to live the life of their choosing in complete freedom, including from religious influence. French MP Jean Jaurès did not say otherwise when he praised la?cité in an article in the newspaper La Dépêche in 1889, exalting it as “this living freedom which refuses no problem and denies itself no height.”?

In France, the law’s protection extends beyond mere freedom of conscience in the positive sense. Rather, the freedom to exercise one’s religion finds its limits in the negative understanding of freedom of conscience, manifest in the explicit consecration of the right “not to believe.” Art. 31 of the law of 1905 accordingly provides for the same punishments for those who would prevent someone to believe in or practice a religion as well as for those who would force them to. An early controversy provides a telling illustration of this last point: In the aftermath of the 1905 law’s adoption, atheists in French communes complained that they did not want to hear church bells ring all day, leading mayors to strike compromises with the local Catholic population to ring them on specific occasions to accommodate the latter’s freedom to exercise their religion with the former’s freedom to be secure in their lack thereof. The principle, at heart, and however paradoxical it might seem, remains a fundamentally liberal one. By banning headscarves and abayas in public schools, the Republic, to quote Weil’s words, frees individuals from the “entrapment” of “the only place where they feel at home, the house of a faith,” and makes them enter into “the space of citizenship.” There come the two buildings.?

Therefore, when we look at such things as bans on religious clothing from beyond the Atlantic, one must begin by remembering that la?cité remains a decisively French answer to universal problems and cannot be fully understood nor sincerely investigated in abstraction of the historic, political, and social context in which it was first formulated. France, since the Revolution, has essentially been fighting off the haunting memory of the collaboration of the historically Catholic majority religion with the “oppressive” and “illegitimate” Ancien régime. But still, one might ask, why not follow the same course as America and adopt a liberal-pluralist approach? Why this need, to this day, to restrict religion to the private sphere and to dissociate it from civic life altogether??

Maybe in part because the Colonies were yet a nation in the making, a political terra nullius with starting points as numerous as the ships arriving to and the languages spoken on its shores, and a horizon so vast that it could fit every aspiration. Everything was yet to be done, and there were no palaces to take, no gardens to be reused, no government buildings to simply step into and redecorate. The French revolutionaries, in a sense, were heirs to a past that was too heavy for them to be entirely rid of, and prisoners of a space whose boundaries were too rigid to move, no matter how hard they tried. While America resolutely advanced toward what could be, France wanted to prevent what had been in order to escape the past.?

By Josef NASR , a graduate student in Corporate Management and Public Administration at 法国HEC管理学院 and Sciences Po (Institut d'études politiques de Paris)