1905 French Law On The Separation of The Churches and The State - Politics

Politics

The leading figures in the creation of the law were Aristide Briand, Émile Combes, Jean Jaurès and Francis de Pressensé.

Initially, Catholics were seriously affected, as the law declared churches to be the property of the state and local governments. A point of friction was that public authorities had to hand over the buildings to religious organisations (associations cultuelles) representing laymen, instead of putting them directly under the supervision of the church hierarchy. This spurred civil disobedience and even riots by Catholics. The Holy See urged priests to fight peacefully in the name of Catholicism. Pope Pius X issued the Vehementer Nos encyclical denouncing the law as contrary to Church teaching (which considered the "ideal state" to be Catholic) and to still legally binding concordat between the Church and the French state. At the same time, the law did free the Church from state control in some regards, since it could raise more funds than the modest amounts the state provided and it could choose its own bishops, as was the case for Catholics in the United States, Poland, and Ireland. Previously, the bishops would only be approved and confirmed by the Pope after the state selected them.

The law and its early implementation was controversial, mainly because of the anti-clericalism found among much of the French political left at the time. The law angered many Catholics, who had recently begun to rally to the cause of the Republic, supported by Leo XIII's Inter innumeras sollicitudines 1892 encyclical (Au Milieu des sollicitudes) and the Cardinal Lavigerie's toast in 1890 favour of the Republic. However, the law progressively became almost universally accepted among French citizens, including members of the Catholic Church, who saw in it a possibility of greater freedom from state interference in cultural matters, now that the government had completely stripped itself of its former Catholic links.

Recently, however, a few politicians and communities have put the law into question, arguing that the law, despite its explicit stance in favour of state secularism, allegedly favours de facto traditional French religions, in particular the Catholic Church, at the expense of more recently established religions, such as Islam; while most Catholic churches in the country were built before 1905, and thus are maintained largely at public expense, followers of Islam and other religions more recently implanted in France have to pay the full price of founding and maintaining religious facilities. This was one of the arguments noted by Nicolas Sarkozy, when he was Minister of Interior, to controversially argue in favour of funding other cultural centres than those of Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism.

The 1905 law, however, is often considered politically untouchable. Rivals of Sarkozy, such as Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, made it a point that no amendments were made to the law.