The surveys confirm to us what we have sensed for a long time: secularism is no longer popular, especially among young people. This century-long consensus continues to crumble: why? Should it be put back in the museum? Revamp it to make it compatible with the era of “come as you are” identity? Make it accommodating as some on the left demand, to take discrimination into account and draw a line under our post-colonial neuroses? Or on the contrary make it a heritage value without which, alongside the cheese platter and quotes from Audiard, there would be no national conscience possible?
For lack of having been able to think calmly about this unprecedented social situation, which is seeing the emergence of a new French religion, Islam, in a country that is more secular than many others, our country has been engaged for thirty years in all sorts of do-it-yourself, institutional and ideological, where the emphasis of the slogans – “new secularism”, “peaceful secularism”, “iconstruction of an Islam of/in France”, etc.- hardly hides the disarray of a political class which seems as dumbfounded by Islam and the Arab-Muslim world, as forgetful of what historically founded secularism.
Secularism, or the birth of modern France
Churchill is said to have said “the further you can look into the past, the more you will see the future”. But secularism has a history. Since we talk about it so little, the reader will forgive me if I talk about it a little at length here; because this story does not begin in 1905, nor even in 1789, and no more with the Enlightenment. This “secular idea”, long before becoming the politico-legal principle that we know, slowly matured among medieval jurists. It already manifests itself, if we want to date it at all costs, in the quarrel between Philippe Le Bel and Pope Boniface VIII.
We are at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, the Pope claims to impose his supereminence on all human creatures and their laws, precarious and revocable. Thus power wields “two swords”: the spiritual, wielded “by the Church”, and the temporal, wielded “for the Church”. Nothing outside the Church, nothing above it. Philippe Le Bel does not see it that way: in 1302, he convenes the States General for the first time, and it is to the representatives of this nation which does not yet exist, France, that he asks for their support in the face of the papal claims. Support acquired, including that of the bishops. “Ausculta, fili!”, urges the pope, who threatens him with excommunication: Philippe Le Bel does not care. The apostolic letter is burned in his presence, the king sends Guillaume de Nogaret to threaten the pope in his turn: the latter dies a few weeks after a brief confinement.
End of the quarrel, triumph of the reckless king, and especially birth of a political reason which admits only God above it, but not its intercessors. Later, there will be the Pragmatic sanction of Bourges (1438), the Concordat of Bologna (1516), the edicts of peace trying to put an end to the wars of Religion, including the Edict of Nantes (1598). With varying and always fragile successes, what is proper to politics is gradually freed from the shadow cast by the divine sacraments. This process does not only establish the rights of the State in the face of the power of the Church: it stages a public power which takes note little by little, and in spite of violent reversals (the Revocation…), of the irreducible diversity of convictions, and which seeks a balance, by nature unstable, between unity, guarantee of stability, and plurality, manifestation of freedom.
Long after the Revolution, Michelet and especially Quinet will meditate on the impasse in which the first Republicans found themselves on the religious question. What to do: delete it? impossible. Change it? impracticable. Let it be? Dangerous. It is no coincidence that Aristide Briand, in his report presenting the Separation Bill, gives over a hundred pages a masterful history lesson that literally puts the France Nation in the footsteps of secularism. It is up to Jaurès to add a decisive idea, let us say more in keeping with the requirements of the time, when he affirms that secularism and democracy are, so to speak, synonymous.
It was enough to convince a country crossed by so many divisions that Separation was possible: many, on the left, feared the power of a Church restored to freedom; the right, on the contrary, feared that society would move away from a trivialized Church, deprived of its official status, which clearly shows that symbolic super-eminence had long since changed hands.
A challenged compromise?
It took this slow work of centuries, completed by the accelerated secularization of contemporary French society, to establish secular peace. It will only take two schoolgirls wearing what is still called, improperly, a “tchador”, to make her waver. This “Creil affair” (1989), we did not get out of it, and it is hardly if the State of 2022 is less sure of its fact than it was, when the Minister of Education, Lionel Jospin returned the ball to the Council of State.
Not wanting to upset anyone, the State takes the risk of dissatisfying everyone: it is always too soft for those who, in less and less covered words, have the sole obsession of subduing Islam and Muslims. But it will always be too hard, conversely, for those who claim to be the guardians of a “Only and True Secularism”, moreover imaginary and fantasized, who would have promised the unconditional freedom of believers without putting the solid guards on it. madmen of title V of the law of 1905, with the explicit title: “Police of the cults”. A cult “placed under the surveillance of the authorities”, this is what is called a framed freedom! And this is certainly not, far from it, the model of separation as the Anglo-Saxons understand it, they who, in North America, enshrine in law the possibility of setting aside the common law in favor of religious law – that is “reasonable accommodation”.
By stubbornly denying the real – that is to say the continuous progression of a harsh, rigorous Islam, intolerant of sexual minorities and contemptuous of women – and by seeking to “do judo” with renowned preachers among less extreme extremists, in the name of a typically colonial paternalism towards the descendants of immigrants – a whole intellectual and militant generation carried this “secularism of appeasement” which will have welcomed Tariq Ramadan and big eyes Charlie . By constantly watering down Islamist blood red, passing it off as new-age bigotry and pretending there was no problem with secularism in France, this school of thought, strong in its audience and its will have in educational circles in particular, has caused havoc, because it has both forged the conviction, now widespread among young teachers, that it is necessary to relax all the rules of secularism, but it has also reinforced the partisans of a secularism of exclusion – that is to say of a false secularism – and allowed the extreme right to give credibility, against all likelihood, to its secular conversion.
A freedom compass for navigating in heavy weather
Corny, secularism? It’s his scorners, or self-interested zealots, who are corny. The profound modernity of the secular idea consists in saying that the city recognizes no laws other than those it gives itself. No exterior or superior principle is opposable to it; no social power has rights over individuals: they are free, and the democratic state is there to guarantee that this freedom is effective. Contrary to a criticism too easily put into circulation today, on the left, but which can be identified historically in the attacks of the conservative right against the Republic – left and right decidedly playing with reversed fronts -, these rights have nothing abstract: they experience themselves in a social reality, that of the “environment” in which we are born and grow up, from which individuals have the absolute right to emancipate themselves. Secularism protects the believer who wants to believe and practice, but it does not only protect that: by separating conviction, which is free, from social institutions that claim to say what faith commands, it gives the individual the possibility of believing. as he sees fit, and not according to the standard that the group imposes on him. This is a fundamental point that adherents of laissez-faire religion seem to have forgotten.
We are experiencing, on a global level, a new time of trial for freedoms. Aspirations for authority, the manipulation of truth through the commodification of images, the destruction of the knowledge on which a common culture is based, are immense challenges from which no one can say that democracy will emerge victorious. The secular idea is an asset that we cannot afford to neglect: it constitutes a compass of freedom for sailing in heavy weather.