Secularism is supposed to be at the heart of free thought and expression, not an excuse to suppress them

Written over the door of the Faculte de Droit in Paris is the promise of liberty, equality and brotherhood from the secular state to its citizens, yet secularism still faces accusations of overbearing paternalism.

Secularism, at its most literal, means the separation of church and state. At the core of the principal is the idea that no religion - or any other formal, organised, set of beliefs - should play an integrated role in the governance or administration of civic institutions, so as to maintain their neutrality.

However, it is also intended to guarantee to citizens the freedom of conscience, and through that policy give support to freedom of thought. So as much as it means religion staying out of public administration, it also meant the state leaving personal beliefs, including religion, as a private matter.

How that principle is applied in practice, in modern times, has come under a spotlight in the past week thanks to the response of some to a rising fear in Europe of fundamentalist Islam. In France, local government in some areas have passed prohibitions against certain kinds of outward religious expression - the most notable result so far being the clamp down on 'burkinis' (Amrani, 2016).

One thing is absolutely clear. Issuing legal commands as to what women can and cannot wear does not convey "la légitime et saine laïcité", the legitimate and healthy secularity, or the guarantee of the freedom of conscience, promised by the French secularism that descends from the 1905 laws.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the world today is not the world into which those particular laws where issued. Listed amongst the laws of 1905, almost paradoxically next to the freedom of conscience, was the prohibition of public displays of religion.

The France that had the 1905 law applied to it was a country deeply entwined with the Catholic Church. The entangling influence of the church was deeply resented and the emergence of laicite came hand in hand with a history of anti-clericalism that pushed back and tried to wrestle society out of the grip of the clergy..

The Left bloc government that advocated secularism, formed by Radicals and Socialists, wanted in particular to end the influence of Catholicism over education - which had been traditionally provided almost exclusively by the clergy. Yet the broken clerical influence was simply replaced with that of the centralised state.

As much as laicite, and in particular secular education, was a republican and humanist project, it was also deeply nationalist. In early twentieth century France, secularism was at the centre of a broader policy of 'modernisation', that sought to establish and project the power of a centralised nation-state - seeking to make the civic state the centre of a society with a singular, integrated and unifying, language and culture.

In modern Europe, secularism has largely succeeded, yet it has done so alongside the advance of the centralised nation-states and nowhere in Europe has secularism and the nation-state been so heavily intertwined as in France - as to represent a major component of the 'national values' and national identity.

The rise of extremist and fundamentalist religion, and extremist and fundamentalist ideologies - that seek to play an active role in government to directly impose their values on citizens - do call for careful thought. The Nationalist Right's answers to these complex matters has been to call for a more strict imposition of 'national values' - and in France that has meant using secularism as the means to legitimise an overbearing policy.

This is a threat to the principles of secularism. The independence of the functions of government from any interest group is a worthy idea. The freedom of conscience is essential. As George Clemenceau - former Prime Minister of France, a radical and a contemporary to the 1905 laws - argued that you do not get liberty by fighting one tyranny with another tyranny.

Clemenceau wrote of his certainty that "apprenticeship in liberty can only be served through liberty" and that to "struggle against the church there is only one means - the liberty of the individual". Support for free thought, openness and tolerance are the progressive response to closed tyrannical intolerance. Stooping to the regulation of citizens' clothing just swaps one degrading paternalism for another.

References

Iman Amrani's 'France’s burkini ban exposes the hypocrisy of its secularist state: The French state assumes that laïcité means equality but fails to monitor it. This policing of its Muslim citizens runs counter to its prized freedom of expression'; in The Guardian; 24 August 2016.

J. Hampden Jackson's 'Clemenceau and the Third Republic'; from The English Universities Press; 1959.