Читать книгу Rise of French Laïcité - Stephen M. Davis - Страница 8

Charles Taylor has argued that secularity must be understood in terms of public spaces “allegedly emptied of God or of any reference to ultimate reality.”1 He then asks the pressing question which his monumental work seeks to answer: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”2 In France, the answer might be largely understood from its religious history beginning with incipient laïcité during the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, the introduction of religious pluralism, the rejection of the transcendent as source of authority, the evolution of laïcité to a prominent and constitutional value of French society, and the marginalization of religion evacuated from the public square.

This book traces the history of the rise and development of laïcité in France from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation to the Law of Separation of Churches and the State in 1905, followed by changes in French society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. French laïcité presents a specificity in origin, definition and evolution which arises from a unique societal context which led to the official separation of Church and State in 1905. Laïcité has been described as the complete secularization of institutions as a necessity to prevent a return to the Ancien Régime characterized by the union of Church and State. To understand the concept of laïcité, one must begin in the sixteenth century with the Protestant Reformation, Wars of Religion, and religious tolerance granted by the Edict of Nantes in 1598 under Henry IV. This has been called the period of embryonic laïcité with the tolerance of Protestantism and incipient pluralism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes under Louis XIV in 1685 reestablished the union of the throne and altar which resulted in persecution of the Huguenots who fought for the principle of the freedom of conscience and religious liberty.

The Law of Separation of Churches and State (Loi concernant la Séparation des Églises et de l’État) was enacted in 1905 in fulfillment of the French Revolution’s attempt to remove the Roman Catholic Church as the State religion. The law abrogated the 1801 Napoleonic Concordat with the Vatican, disestablished the Roman Catholic Church, ended centuries of religious turmoil, declared state neutrality in religious matters, and continues as a subject of debate and dissension one hundred years later with the emergence of Islam as the second largest religion in France. The question at the turn of the twentieth century concerned the Roman Catholic Church’s compatibility with democracy. That same question is being asked of Islam in the twenty-first century.

1. Taylor, Secular Age, 2.

2. Taylor, Secular Age, 25.