Earlier this year a legal dispute arose between Michaela School, a state-funded non-religious school in London, and one of its Muslim pupils, who wished to be allowed to pray in the playground during lunch breaks. The school opposed this on the basis that allowing prayer rituals risked ‘undermining inclusion’ between pupils, and the High Court found in its favour. Though it arose in multicultural Britain, this story, hinging as it did on the idea of secularism within an educational project, might instead have arisen in France, where the 1905 law decreeing the separation of the Churches and the State still underpins the Republic’s legal framework for democratic co-existence.

Laïcité is the French version of secularism – the separation of the religious from other realms of life – and it takes its distinctive meaning from the specific historical context in which it developed. The parliamentary regime of the Third Republic, established after Napoleon III’s Second Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, was characterised by tremendous social and political reform. One prominent aspect of this was a cluster of early-1880s laws bearing the name of their originator, Jules Ferry, then Minister for Public Instruction and the architect of the French state school system as it still exists today. Schooling was to become compulsory, free of charge and, crucially, laïque (secular) for children aged 6-13. This was later extended to older children.

This exclusion of religious presence and influence from state schools marked the ‘small separation’ between the Churches and the State, a process that would be completed in the more comprehensive separation brought about by the law of 1905, whose text was crafted by Socialist statesmen Aristide Briand and Jean Jaurès. Although the law of 1905 defined the separation of the Republican State from more than one Church, namely Catholic, Protestant (Lutheran and Reformed) and Jewish, the specific enemy being kept out of laïque state schools was the Catholic Church, the dominant religion in France at the time.

French laïcité emerged out of an embattled history between Catholics, who were often also Monarchists, and Republicans who saw themselves at the heirs of the Revolution. Both the 1880s Ferry laws on education and the 1905 law of Separation were crafted against the backdrop of the Dreyfus Affair, the political scandal that split French society into two camps: the Republican Dreyfusards, believers in the innocence of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, pitted against the anti-Dreyfusards, staunchly persuaded of Dreyfus’s guilt, whose ranks included, in alliance with the Army, the Catholic Church. The Affair intensified antagonisms between Right and Left, the competing of Church and Republic over French hearts and minds, and it nurtured the anti-clerical policies of successive Radical-Socialist governments.

It is illuminating to contrast this background with that of another nation, the United States, which shares much of France’s legal framework: a constitutional commitment to freedom of conscience and no established church. America was built by dissident religious groups fleeing oppression, and its approach to the separation of Church and State is aimed primarily at protecting the Churches against the authoritarian encroachment of the State. French laïcité, on the other hand, is designed to protect the State and its citizens against the potentially nefarious influence of the Churches.

In spite of these considerable tensions, it is worth bearing in mind that the text of the 1905 law was the fruit of careful compromise, with the aim of devising a way for French citizens to co-exist peacefully. It is most notable for its first two articles, which state respectively that the Republic guarantees freedom of conscience absolutely, and that it does not recognise or subsidise any religious sect. This remains the case today, though there have been exceptions to this rule, for example, the sponsoring by the French state of the Paris Mosque, inaugurated in 1926 as a mark of gratitude to the Muslim soldiers who had fought for France.

The aim of the Separation of the Churches and States was not to abolish religion, nor to promote laïcité as a kind of alternative religion or Revolutionary-style cult of Reason. Rather it was to provide a resilient legal framework that would enable the peaceful co-existence of people of all faiths – and people with no faith – while safeguarding against sectarianism or favouritism. The aim was to achieve a workable democratic ideal: the equality of all before a State that does not pronounce itself on the existence of God.

The law of 1905 was conceived and passed at a time when the vast majority of French people were Catholics, and when Islam was quasi-absent from the French landscape. This has now changed, and, as a result, the idea of laïcité has come under attack for being too rigid, and for excluding those of a particular faith. Some revile it as a form of institutionalised racism, and it is no accident that the figure of Jules Ferry has also being recast in that light, in view of his support of French colonialist expansion in Africa.

This brings us back to the Michaela story of the prayer ban. In a British context of multicultural inclusivity this has raised some objections. It might seem narrow-minded, even cruel, to forbid a child to pray during lunch breaks. From a French point of view, however, one might see the desirability of adopting inclusive secularism within a school that is open to children of all denominations. Interestingly, the canteen at Michaela School only serves vegetarian meals, to ensure communal eating and avoid dietary issues related to faith. In France, where state schools have a duty of religious neutrality, the issue of special meals has also arisen: on days where pork is served, another meal may be made available provided it is offered to all children and is not labelled as a religious option.

Again one might ask what harm it would do for French schools to bend a little, and offer a variety of options. But if there is no state religion in France it is primarily in order to protect French citizens – including children – from the oppression of religion and from pressuring each other. This idea, which crystallised into a widely accepted status quo over the course of the 20th century, is increasingly being challenged. In early October this year a teacher at a lycée in Tourcoing in north-east France was physically attacked by a female student when she asked her to remove her headscarf while within the precincts of the school. The teacher was merely pointing out the laïque rule that prohibits the ostensible display of religious signs in state schools. Such incidents point to a growing concern, summed up by the ethnologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler in her book Le frérisme et ses reseaux (The Brotherhood and its Networks), that concerted attacks are being launched by Islamists against democratic Republican values.

It was also in the context of Republican laïcité, specifically the 1881 law that guarantees the freedom of the French press and, crucially, allows the mocking of political and religious beliefs, that the 2015 terrorist attacks against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – which calls itself ‘journal satirique et laïque’ – erupted. After Charlie Hebdo had published some caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, two Islamist terrorists walked into the offices of the magazine during an editorial meeting and killed 12 people. In 2020, Samuel Paty, a secondary-school teacher of history and geography who had used two of the Charlie Hebdo caricatures in a civics class about freedom of expression, was decapited by an Islamist militant. Soon after that, three people were killed in a knife attack in the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption: the perpetrator was exacting reprisals for the publication of the caricatures in France.

The Republican idea of laïcité was devised as a legal framework to pacify the political landscape, to forge a common citizenship and to enable what in contemporary French political speak is called ‘le vivre ensemble’. This is no longer taken for granted, but is having to be explained, taught and defended, sometimes in the face of violent opposition from fundamentalists who cannot countenance any separation of the religious from other areas of life. It does perhaps require something of a Copernican revolution to recast inclusivity in terms of French laïcité rather than British multiculturalism. But ultimately, as the Michaela story has shown, the challenging questions facing our two nations are the same.