Laïcité
The French settlement between religion and the state, given juridical form by the law of 1905. Raphaël Liogier notes that most serious researchers know laïcité is not, concretely, the separation of churches and state that the law's own title announces.
Laïcité names the French settlement between religion and the state. Its juridical form is the law of 1905. Jean Baubérot describes the France the law had to settle as two Frances in conflict: Catholicism on one side, the laïque movement on the other. He holds that the law gave that conflict a juridical solution, one in which official status no longer existed but the churches had more liberty: less officiality, more liberty. It was not a complete solution, he argues, because the conflict continued on the terrain of schooling.
Why this archive keeps the word French
The obvious English rendering is the one the 1905 law itself supplies: its title is « Séparation des Églises et de l’État ». Raphaël Liogier says that most serious researchers know today that, concretely, laïcité is not that.
The title is a thin thing to translate from. In CICNS-published commentary, an unnamed speaker describes the 1905 law as a compromise (a fabric of rules that contradict one another across its clauses) and notes that its title is the only place “separation of Churches and State” appears in the law at all, and that under the Third Republic a title carried no legal force.
So the word stays French here. Pages republished before that decision may still render it “secularism”.
Baubérot’s history of the term
Baubérot argues that French laïcité did not break with the old gallican tradition of surveillance and domination of religion by the political power. It largely took that tradition over, including the officialisation of a certain religion as a national religion.
In 1984, he argues, the school conflict ended and laïcité could at last become consensual. It was at that moment that laïcité constructed itself new adversaries: what would come to be called the sectes. This consensual laïcité, on his account, needed new adversaries: they permitted a reconciliation of the two formerly warring Frances, Catholicism and the laïque movement, at those new adversaries’ expense.
A further adversary was constructed with the first headscarf affair of 1989: Islam. Baubérot situates it in a year that opened with Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Neutrality, and what is done in laïcité’s name
The same CICNS commentary defines the state’s « neutralité » not as a manner of abstaining (which is what a true separation would be) but as a manner of acting, and of acting all the more, without having to bear discussion. It sets that against democracy in Habermas’s sense, which is precisely bearing discussion of what we do.
CICNS argues that MIVILUDES does not restrict its action to observing strict respect for public order: by designating what is dangerous and what is not, it intervenes in the space of liberty of conscience “guaranteed” by article 1 of the 1905 law. CICNS further argues that MIVILUDES’s generalisation of the term « secte » (applied, in its view, without precaution or sufficient expertise beyond the strict respect of public order) de facto removes the targeted groups from laïcité’s theoretically protective frame.
Liogier puts the paradox more broadly: it is the defenders of modernity who end up sabotaging modernity, and those who end up defending laïcité are those who end up participating in its destruction in the name of its protection.
Baubérot’s own remedy is a laïcité de sang-froid (cold-blooded), one that can go beyond media emotion and beyond social feeling to face problems with serenity and vigilance, but coldly; as against what he calls a laïcité à géométrie variable, soft on some and hard on others.