Laicite

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.

Laicite's practical application has generated sustained and often sharp controversy in recent decades, most visibly around Muslim religious dress: a 2004 French law banned conspicuous religious symbols, including headscarves, in state schools, and later legislation extended restrictions on face covering garments in public space, measures defenders present as consistent applications of laicite's principle of a neutral public sphere and critics, including many French Muslims and international human rights bodies, have argued disproportionately burden one religious minority's practice under a principle stated in universal terms.

The controversy reflects a deeper and unresolved tension within laicite itself, between its original nineteenth century target, curbing the institutional power of the Catholic Church within a majority Catholic society, and its application today to religious minorities whose relationship to French public life and to the state is historically quite different from the Catholic Church's own. Laicite remains a defining and actively contested feature of French national identity, regularly invoked across the political spectrum in debates that extend well beyond its original nineteenth century context of church and state relations.