TRYING TO UNDERSTAND FRENCH SECULARISMambition. By then, of course, the essence of religion had come increasingly to be defined
as consisting essentially of personal belief, so that the Church as a public body appeared
primarily to be a rival for political authority. The result was nearly a century of bitter
conflict between the state and its internal competitor for sovereignty, a conflict finally
resolved under the Third Republic, which was dedicated to a civilizing mission in the
name of the Revolutionary ideals of humanity and progress.^12 When in 1882 the Third
Republic made secular schooling compulsory for six- to thirteen-year-old children, na-
tional education became a means of inculcating positivist humanism in its future citizens
and weaning future generations away from the historical Church. It was coincidentally
then, under the Third Republic, that a significant extension of France’s colonial conquests
took place, justified by itsmission civilisatrice, the crusading complement to its positivist
nation-building at home. (Although Algeria had been conquered earlier in the century,
in 1830, Tunisia was annexed in 1881 and Morocco in 1907, both under the Third Repub-
lic—as were other places in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West Africa.) Anticlerical
schooling at home, unequal agreements with the Church, and imperial expansion abroad
were the pillars on whichlaı ̈cite ́was established under the Third Republic, a significant
moment in the formation of modern French nationalism. Algeria was an exception to the
onslaught of positivist schooling. Here Church and state worked hand in hand, with the
former being encouraged by the latter to organize the religious conversion and appro-
priate schooling of Muslim Algerians.^13
Interestingly, with the coming of the Third Republic, established after the ignomini-
ous defeat of France by Prussia in 1870, some people sought to present the secular Repub-
lic as ‘‘a Muslim power’’ and even tried to invent an ‘‘Islam of France.’’ Established
together with Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism as religions entitled to state fund-
ing for schools, Islam differed from those three in being recognized only in one part of
France: Algeria. Patriotic orientalists like Louis Massignon, who survived the Great War,
became applied Islamologists in the service of France, enthusiasts for the project of eman-
cipating Muslims within the framework of the French empire.^14 It was the Republic that
would decide who was worthy of being emancipated, andhow, by bringing to bear its
own passion forlaı ̈cite ́as the exercise of benevolent power.
I want to suggest that the French secular state today abides in a sense by thecuius
regio eius religioprinciple, even though it disclaims any religious allegiance and governs a
largely irreligious society.^15 In my view, it is not the commitment to or interdiction of a
particular religion that is most significant in this principle but the installation of a single
absolute power—the sovereign state—drawn from a single abstract source and facing a
single political task: the worldly care of its population regardless of its beliefs. As Durk-
heim points out in his writings on integration, the state is now a transcendent as well as
a representative agent. And as Hobbes had shown, it could now embody the abstract
principle of sovereignty independent of the entire political population, whether governors
or governed, and independent of any supernatural power.
PAGE 499499.................16224$ CH25 10-13-06 12:36:25 PS