Interview with Jean Baubérot on the Theme of "Sects"

Jean Baubérot is a French historian and sociologist, the founding holder of the chair “History and Sociology of Laïcité” at the École pratique des hautes études and a leading specialist in the history of French secularism. He contributed to the Stasi commission on laïcité and was one of the three principal drafters of the 2005 International Declaration on Laïcité, signed by nearly 300 academics from 32 countries. In this interview with CICNS he discusses the 1905 law of separation, the shift from the MILS to the MIVILUDES, and the treatment of religious minorities in France.

CICNS video interview. (English translation of the interview transcript, transcribed from the CICNS YouTube channel, where the video was published on 9 November 2006. Internal references — the centenary of the 1905 law, the approaching 2007 presidential election — are consistent with that date.)

[Interviewer]: What is laïcité?

[Baubérot]: There are people in different countries working on these questions of laïcité, of the relationship between politics and religion, civil society and religion, education and religion. Ultimately, the study of laïcité is something quite transversal, which puts me in contact not only with fellow historians and sociologists from my own disciplines, but also with political scientists, with specialists in the sciences of education, with philosophers, and even with people interested in the study of medicine, for there are links between laïcité, religion and medicine.

Before 1905, there were faiths that were recognized faiths: Catholicism, the two forms of Protestantism, Lutheran and Reformed, and then Judaism. And the other faiths were non-recognized faiths — tolerated, broadly tolerated during calm periods, much less tolerated during politically sensitive periods. And the law of 1905, in principle, puts all faiths on an equal footing and guarantees freedom of conscience and the free exercise of worship, without saying that this belongs to one religion and not to another.

But a law is one thing; mentality is another. And in the French mentality there is first of all one religion, Catholicism, and when one says “the Church” in France, it means the Catholic Church. And then, of course, people know that Judaism has existed for a long time, that the Jews were persecuted in the Middle Ages, that they were emancipated by the French Revolution; for the Protestants, we remember the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. So people know there are a few other faiths, but in the average French mind, the faiths are capped at five or six at most. We now know that there is Islam too, of course, and Buddhism — the great religions, in short.

The law of 1905 transforms a-priori surveillance into a-posteriori control. Under the regime of recognized faiths, the State could monitor the churches a priori. That is to say, for example, a bishop needed the prefect’s authorization to leave his diocese. The bishops needed the government’s authorization to meet collectively. In principle, from 1905 onward, there is no more a-priori surveillance — a priori, there is liberty — but of course, a posteriori, one can check whether the exercise of worship has or has not broken the law. And if the exercise of worship has broken the law, then indeed the State can act. There are [inaudible ?] under the ordinary judicial procedures. The problem is that for some people, a-priori surveillance really ought to continue to exist. And whereas for the old, historic faiths, known for centuries, this transfer to a-posteriori control is ultimately accepted, for the faiths people are less used to, they would like to remain under a-priori surveillance.

At the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s there was a hardening. This hardening was linked to certain affairs — the Solar Temple affair was one of them, but not the only one. So there was the era of the MILS. And the era of the MILS was a very harsh time, when the Interministerial Mission for the Fight against Sects was very combative. And the reproach one can level at the MILS is that link between the State and the fight. That there are associations fighting against other groups — that is part of society at large, that is part of freedom of expression. That these associations should be tied to the State, recognized as being of public utility, and able to instrumentalize the State — that is serious. And that is what distinguishes France from the other democracies. In the other democracies there are associations that call themselves anti-sect, and so on. But they do not have, with rare exceptions, this link with the State, and they do not instrumentalize the State. So there was this instrumentalization, and it was very harsh.

And then, after 2002, there was a period when the MILS became the MIVILUDES, the interministerial mission for the fight against sectarian aberrations (“dérives sectaires”). Replacing “sect” with “sectarian aberration” was important, because it effectively said: it is no longer groups that we are going to fight, but perhaps certain behaviours. If we look at this a bit more closely, we may try to do prevention; but, if you will, as long as nothing unlawful has occurred, there is no question of repression, and so on.

Also, the MILS — in a manner entirely congruent with its policy — spoke very ill of sociologists, of historians, of academics in general; it did not at all like people who tried to take an approach of knowledge, an approach of scholarship, but it wanted to be in the fight, in ideological inflation, and so on. And the MIVILUDES, on the contrary, tried to open up. And there was a MIVILUDES colloquium where there were many questions, points of view being expressed — militant points of view, but also academic points of view which tried to put forward a certain number of analyses. That was a notable evolution. I am not saying the MIVILUDES between 2002 and 2005 was perfect, but the evolution was very notable, and things were becoming more rational. One could discuss, one could debate. We were finally within the possibility of democratic debate.

And then, crash — over the last few months, everything has been changing. And it is quite interesting to observe this change. Because at the moment the MIVILUDES became more rational, did we see a multiplication of affairs in which there was child abuse, in which there were deaths? No, not at all. The country was extremely calm. The change of attitude, from the combative MILS to the more rational MIVILUDES, translated into absolutely no situation in which any danger was perceived. Nobody can recall one. Nobody can maintain that. There is perhaps a campaign of explanation to say that there is a stiffening. This stiffening was in fact noted by Nathalie Luca, who is a sociologist and who left the MIVILUDES saying: I do not want to be complicit in this refusal, in the end, to analyse. And it is very significant that it was someone who represented, in some small way, the concern for analysis, the concern for scholarship, the concern for the approach of knowledge, who left because she saw there was no longer any space for that rational approach. If, all of a sudden, we see a certain number of problems being re-inflated, well, that will be due to this change of politicking policy. And it will not be due to a real danger. In any case, one will have to look much more closely before knowing whether it is really due to a real danger.

So we have a situation that zigzags somewhat. I do not despair that — in particular from 2007, after the presidential election, because this seems to me also to be very much tied to the preparation of the presidential election — the MIVILUDES will become a little more reasonable again and the MIVILUDES will become a little more rational again. In any case, as an academic, I will be very vigilant to see whether the new-style MIVILUDES remains within rationality, or whether it moves, as the MILS very largely did, into fantasy.

A country always has the right, if you will, to decide that it will be a little stricter as regards liberties, or a little broader as regards liberties, depending on circumstances. That is for the law and the majority to decide. But in any case, what a country cannot do, according to democratic principles, is to make a variable-geometry liberty, which is broad for some and narrow for others. That is what I had said to the Stasi commission: if one finds that laïcité is too liberal, then it must be tightened for everyone, from the Catholics to the others, to the new minorities, to Islam. But if one does not want to tighten it for the Catholics, then one has no business tightening it for the others. So I had asked the Stasi commission for a global evaluation, if you will, of the state of laïcité: was the state of things satisfactory? Was it too liberal? Was it too strict? Of course, the staff of the Stasi commission refused to work in that way and to launch that general evaluation. And precisely, I find that as a result we are making variable-geometry laïcité and a variable-geometry conception of liberty. The law must be the same for all. And one must not try to scheme in order to fight certain associations while being lax with respect to others.

And notably, the reproach one can make against the About-Picard law is the interpretation that was given of it — and I believe that there, she said a little of what was masked by the law — but Madame Picard, in the Chamber of Deputies, said: “Naturally, we will not apply this law to a trade union or to a political party.” There, we are in a discriminatory practice, and one sees clearly that it is religious groups, groups that declare themselves religious, that are targeted. And that discriminatory practice is not democratic. One may raise the question of the post-psychological situation [inaudible ?], of religious manipulation, and so on, but on condition that it be posed at the level of society as a whole. That is to say, on condition that it also be posed at the level of advertising messages, on condition that it be posed at the level of political parties and the means at their disposal, and so on.

The law on compulsory schooling dated from Jules Ferry. So the idea, a century or more than a century later, of revisiting it and seeing whether it corresponds to today’s educational conditions does not seem to me a bad thing. In this law on strengthening the control of compulsory instruction there are, for me, positive things, I do not hide it; and then there were indeed deviations which meant that this law found itself, once again, instead of being positive, being used to fight certain groups. We ought first to make positive laws, first laws to build something; and it is, moreover, never a good way to proceed, to first make laws against, first laws to exclude.

I see this notably as a reconciliation of the two Frances on the backs of the spiritual minorities, religious minorities, or whatever you wish to call them. That is to say, you have people who are militant anticlericals, for whom all religion is bad, harmful, for whom people ought to be freed from all religion. But now — these are people who, following their predecessors in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, fought Catholicism, and some of them also fought Protestantism, Judaism, and so on — fought religion in general. Now, those people can no longer fight religion in general without appearing sectarian, and so on. Likewise, Catholics can no longer say that heresy or the bad press must be fought, after Vatican II, and so on. But not everyone accepts that turn of Vatican II; not everyone has integrated it, internalized it, and so on. And I have the impression that there is a sort of reconciliation of these two forces, the anticlerical force and the Catholic force, against, precisely, minorities — since there, they tell themselves that at least they can fight, they can strike out; these groups have bad reputations, rightly or wrongly, and so they will be able to exercise an aggressiveness which is in fact more global and more pent-up. That is the whole problem.

One must know whether French political culture is up to the level of the law of 1905. One may wonder whether certain current administrative practices do not derive more from the adversaries of the Bloc des gauches and of the law, rather than from the promoters of the law — from Aristide Briand and Jean Jaurès, who were the promoters of the law. Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, the Minister of the Interior, who is in charge of religious affairs, has appointed a commission chaired by Jean-Pierre Machelon, and this commission will have the task, in the end, of re-examining the law. So I hope that, precisely, in a first phase, it will confront the legal with the administrative, and that it will take an interest in the application of the law, and in seeing whether the application of the law is indeed in conformity with the spirit of the law.

So this law frustrated everyone a little, and I would say that it achieved something of an equilibrium of frustrations. So one must take care that, if changes are made, they do not lose, I would say, this equilibrium of frustrations. If everyone can be happier than with the law of 1905, why not? To me that seems difficult, honestly, and I fear that we would end up with things that create a certain disequilibrium.

Something of a paradox occurred during the year of the centenary, because when I began working on laïcité, for a long time laïcité had been recounted in a very conflictual mode. And ultimately there was a Catholic memory and a laïque memory, and the two recounted it unilaterally, somewhat in the mode of conflict. So, for the laïcs, in the style of “we won”; for the Catholics, in the style of “we were persecuted”. And then, at the centenary, we saw a commemoration that wanted to be consensual; even those who said the law should be modified spoke more of tidying-up than of structural modification, and it was said: “it is a liberal law, it is a law of compromise, etc.” Symbolically, we celebrated the end of the conflict of the two Frances — which was first, for a long time, a head-on conflict over national identity (did France have an official Catholic national identity or not?), and which then narrowed — that was already a reduction, but an important one — to the schools conflict. That is a conflict which is over; now there are new problems, indeed, with Islam, with what are called sects, and so on. And we wanted to celebrate the end of that global Catholicism–laïcité conflict, and mask the problems that may exist today. On that level, indeed, we succeeded in celebrating what we wanted to celebrate; but by masking the problems, we are not giving ourselves the means to build the laïcité of the twenty-first century.

There were three principal drafters, of whom I was the one for France, but there were two other drafters, one from North America, one from South America. And when I say principal drafters — it was thanks to e-mails, thanks to the means of the internet: we went back and forth, we proposed versions, we dialogued with academics from other countries, and in the end, on 9 December 2005, we presented this declaration; it was signed by nearly 300 academics from 32 countries. And it is a rather long declaration, which commits itself strongly, because we wanted to open a debate with this declaration — so it goes some way toward defining, a little more precisely than I have been able to do here in a few minutes, what laïcité is. So it is not merely a vague petition, if you will, that anyone at a university could ratify; it is truly quite a strong commitment on the part of those who signed it. So I consider it a fine success, and excerpts of the declaration have been published around the world; they have been circulated in several other countries; I myself also gave a press conference in Brussels to present this declaration. We will continue: we are now opening the signature to all citizens, men and women, who are interested, and we will take stock in a year or two. And so we want to affirm this universality of the fundamental principles of laïcité, and to provoke a debate on the best way to live laïcité — taking account of national traditions, taking account of places, taking account of circumstances, taking account of the different domains where things may happen a little differently; in short, taking account of flexible applications which, at the same time, do not betray those fundamental principles.