The Law of 9 December 1905 on the Separation of the Churches and the State

The operative core of the law is two sentences. The Republic assures liberty of conscience and guarantees the free exercise of worship, subject only to the restrictions enacted below in the interest of public order. The Republic does not recognise, salary or subsidise any religion.

Everything else follows from the second. The budget for religions was abolished, ending the salaries the state had paid to Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Jewish clergy since 1801. The ministry that had administered them was closed. Concordat appointments ceased, so the state lost any say in the nomination of bishops and gained no obligation toward them.

The property settlement was the hard part. Church buildings had been nationalised in 1789 and placed at the disposal of the clergy under the Concordat. The law transferred them to the state, the departments and the communes as owners, and provided that associations formed for the exercise of worship, the associations cultuelles, would hold and use them. Pius X rejected the associations in 1906 on the ground that lay controlled bodies would displace the hierarchy, and Catholic parishes therefore formed none. That left buildings with owners and no legal occupant, and a further law of 1907 resolved it by leaving them at the free disposal of the ministers and the faithful without a formal tenancy. The result, which surprises visitors, is that the French state owns and maintains almost every parish church and cathedral built before 1905 while subsidising no religion at all.

The law is short and the doctrine built on it is not. Two clarifications are worth making because both are widely misread outside France.

Laicite is not a rule about citizens. The obligation of neutrality falls on the state and on its agents: a public servant may not display religious affiliation in the exercise of the office, and the public authority may not endorse a religion. Private persons retain the free exercise the first article guarantees, and the law of 1905 imposes no dress rule, no speech rule and no restriction on public worship. Later statutes have done so in specific settings, notably the 2004 law on conspicuous religious signs in state schools and the 2010 law on concealing the face in public, and those are separate instruments with their own histories.

Nor is the separation uniform across the territory. Alsace and the Moselle were annexed by Germany in 1871 and did not return to France until 1918, by which time the 1905 law had passed without applying to them. The Concordat regime continued there and continues today: clergy of the recognised religions are paid by the state, and religious instruction is provided in public schools. Guyane operates under a different arrangement again.

The law also required an inventory of church property, and the inventories of 1906 produced riots and at least two deaths. Jean Bauberot has traced how the settlement moved from that conflict to something close to consensus over the following decades.