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| French President Emmanuel Macron |
A fascinating debate is bubbling along among intellectuals in France
following M Macron’s election as President of France, concerning something the French political
system is supposed to be completely free from: religion. In 1905 a law
of
laïcité formally separated Church and state.
Most French
people are notionally Catholic, and a significant proportion appear to
be observant. The Protestant church in France estimates a following of
just over a million people, or 2% of the population.
President Macron grew up in a secular household, and he has several times expressed his commitment to the idea of
laïcité:
but when he was 12 years old, feeling, as he has put it, the need for
some “spirituality”, he asked to be baptised as a Catholic.
It is worth parsing Mr Macron’s ideas about religion because
he has a particular interest in the subject.
He was baptized into the
Catholic faith at his own request at the age of 12, and schooled by
Jesuits, brainy Catholics who often live on the border between their own
religion and other faiths and cultures.
Mr Macron has
in his speeches likened the internal problems of the European Union and its monetary
system to a religious conflict. The Protestant north had a rigid and
moralistic attitude towards debt while the Catholic south, with its
culture of confession and absolution, took a more happy-go-lucky view,
he once said.
On the subject of Islam, some of what Mr
Macron says is broadly what you would expect from a centrist politician
in France.
French Muslims must be encouraged to develop their own,
enlightened reading of the faith, fully compatible with the laws of the
republic. They must be helped to wean themselves off dubious sources of
foreign funding. They must be part of the struggle against terrorism.
Although the state can facilitate all these developments, the main
responsibility must be borne by Muslims themselves.
Most
of these sentiments have been expressed by other French office-holders,
and they are worthy if difficult to put into practice. But in that
Montpellier speech, Mr Macron said one thing which was highly
contentious for Muslims and non-Muslims alike:
"Our
mission…it will be difficult, it will take time, it will be demanding
for all men and women…will be to act in such a way that French people of
the Muslim faith are always more proud of being French than of being
Muslim…"
Is that actually conceivable? Being a
citizen of the French republic, with all its rights, obligations and
ideological axioms, is a demanding business. For its most fervent
adherents, French republicanism is supposed to supersede all previous
loyalties, be they Catholic, Protestant or Jewish.
But being a Muslim, a member of the
umma, the
global community of believers, is pretty demanding too. In practice,
people do find ways of negotiating their political and religious
loyalties.
Traditional Islam does not urge its followers to disobey the
laws of well-organized states: on the contrary, it encourages a cautious
and conservative way of life. But for many Muslims, asking them to be
“less proud” of their faith than their passport will still be asking too
much.
For all his cerebral intensity, Mr Macron was not giving a history
lesson for its own sake. His aim was to warn his compatriots not to
repeat the mistakes of the Middle Ages. Just as it was wrong and
inexpedient for medieval France to demonize the Protestants, so too it
would be wrong for today's politicians to demonize Islam or its
followers.
EU-Digest
