Introduction

Abstract

Nearly a century after the promulgation of the 1905 law separating state and church, the French state sparked a remarkable revival of the political debate regarding freedom of religion in schools and a new legislative impetus to regulate this relationship. The French Third Republic was committed to fighting against an established political and religious institution, the Catholic Church, over the fate of public education and more broadly the role of religion in the public sphere. The Church objected fiercely to the establishment of the principle of laïcité in schools, and more generally to the creation of a free, compulsory and secular primary education. Jules Ferry, then Minister of Education, stated in 1881 that ‘the subordination of schools to the Church is against all our institutions, which are based on an opposite concept, the concept of secularization of the state, of its institutions and public services’.¹ Schools, as the principal mechanism of preparing a new generation of French citizens, could not be left in the hands of an external religious retrograde power. The tumultuous debates in the nineteenth century reflect a historical tension in French public education over the influence of religion and its role in public spaces such as education.