A Republic Without a Religion

Laicite is the French constitutional tradition of secularism, formally established by the 1905 law separating church and state, which ended state funding and official recognition of any religion and confirmed the Republic's neutrality among all religious and non religious worldviews, a settlement reached after a long and often bitter nineteenth century political struggle between a Republican, anticlerical political tradition and the Catholic Church's previously dominant institutional position in French public life.

Laicite is not simply the absence of an established church, the condition several other Western countries also share, but a more actively promoted public philosophy holding that religion belongs to the private sphere and that the state, its schools and its officials in the exercise of public functions should be visibly free of religious symbols and influence, a stronger and more assertive conception of neutrality than, for instance, the American First Amendment tradition, which restrains government from establishing or favoring religion without requiring the same degree of visible religious absence from public institutions and public employees themselves. The 1905 law itself grew out of decades of conflict over control of public education, since French schooling had long been a central battleground between Republican and Catholic visions of what French civic identity should be built on.