# Laïcité France's constitutional principle of state secularism, established by the **law of 9 December 1905 on the separation of the churches and the state**, and the single most useful case study the vault has in **how a genuinely liberal principle is repurposed as a majoritarian weapon without changing a word of its text**. ## What It Originally Was *Laïcité* is not American-style separation of church and state, and reading it that way produces constant confusion. The American principle protects religion from the state. The French principle protects the state — and the citizen in their capacity as citizen — from religion. It was a settlement imposed on a specific defeated opponent: the Catholic hierarchy, whose political power the [[Dreyfus Affair]] had just broken. The 1905 law guaranteed freedom of conscience and free exercise of worship, ended state funding and recognition of any religion, and transferred church buildings to public ownership. It was anticlerical legislation aimed at the majority faith, and its beneficiaries were religious minorities — including, pointedly, French Jews. **That is the fact that makes the modern usage legible.** For most of its life, *laïcité* constrained the strong. The question this page tracks is what happened when the same rule was pointed at the weak. ## The Turn | Year | Measure | |---|---| | 1989 | The first Creil headscarf case; the Conseil d'État finds no general ban is justified | | 2004 | Law banning conspicuous religious symbols in state schools — headscarves, kippas, large crosses — framed as neutral, understood by everyone as being about one of them | | 2010 | Ban on face coverings in public space; upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in 2014 on "living together" grounds rather than security | | 2016 | *Burkini* bans by seaside mayors; struck down by the Conseil d'État | | 2021 | The "separatism" law of 24 August, extending neutrality duties, tightening control of associations and home schooling, and creating a "republican contract" requirement for funded bodies | | 2023 | *Abaya* banned in state schools by ministerial instruction; upheld by the Conseil d'État | The trajectory is one direction. Each measure is defensible in isolation, framed in universal language, and applies in practice overwhelmingly to Muslims. ## Why It Is in This Vault Because it is the most successful available technique for **making an ethnic argument in a civic vocabulary** — and it is now being imported. [[Marine Le Pen]]'s *dédiabolisation* ran on exactly this substitution. The Front National had said Muslims were racially foreign, which was sayable in 1985 and unsayable by 2010. The [[National Rally]] instead says that Islam is incompatible with republican secularism. The policy demands are unchanged; the frame is now one that centre-left secularists, feminists and republicans can endorse without believing themselves to have joined the far right. Many did. **The structural parallel to [[Ethnopluralism]] is exact.** The [[Nouvelle Droite]] swapped "race" for "culture"; the RN swapped "race" for "*laïcité*". Both preserve the demand and change the sentence, and both are hard to answer because the new vocabulary is genuinely valuable and genuinely held by people who are not making the argument in bad faith. The American echo runs through the [[Anti-Sharia Movement]] — the 200-plus model bills that were, in their author's own words, "heuristic" rather than remedial. The French version is more sophisticated because it invokes a real, cherished, century-old republican principle rather than a fabricated threat. > [!warning] The test > The diagnostic is **symmetry**. A *laïcité* claim is doing its original work when it constrains the majority faith too — church funding, Alsace-Moselle's concordat exemption, Christmas displays in town halls, the crucifix in a mayor's office. A *laïcité* claim that only ever produces obligations for one minority is not secularism; it is a dress code with a philosophy attached. ## See Also - [[Dreyfus Affair]] · [[French Fifth Republic]] · [[Algerian War]] - [[Marine Le Pen]] · [[Éric Zemmour]] · [[National Rally]] - [[Islamophobia]] · [[Anti-Sharia Movement]] · [[Great Replacement Theory]] - [[Nouvelle Droite]] · [[Ethnopluralism]] - [[French History Hub]]