Rise of French Laïcité. Stephen M. Davis
12. Monod, Sécularisation et laïcité, 47.
13. Cabanel, “La question religieuse,” 167–69.
14. Cabanel, “La question religieuse,” 171.
15. Cabanel, “La question religieuse,” 174–75.
16. Sarkozy, La République, 59.
17. Sarkozy, La République, 9.
18. Sarkozy, La République, 13.
19. Sarkozy, La République, 15.
20. Wessels, Europe, 3–4.
21. Ferry, L’homme-Dieu, 245.
22. Delumeau, Le christianisme, 90.
23. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, 222.
24. Delumeau, Le christianisme, 29.
25. Delumeau, Le christianisme, 41.
26. Delumeau, Le christianisme, 73.
27. McManners, Church and State, 10.
28. Delumeau, Le christianisme, 22–23.
29. Robert et al., Nouveau Petit Robert, 428.
30. Hall, End of Christendom, 6.
31. Chaunu and Mension-Rigau, Baptême de Clovis, 10.
32. Montclos, Histoire religieuse, 19.
33. Walker et al., History of the Christian Church, 150.
34. McCrea, Religion and the Public Order, 18.
35. Lillback, “Church and State,” 678.
36. Davis, History of France, 34.
37. CNEF, Laïcité française, 12–13.
38. Cameron, European Reformation, 198.
39. Baubérot, Petite histoire du christianisme, 59.
40. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, 25.
41. Carenco, L’Édit de Nantes, 3.
42. CNEF, Laïcité française, 13.
2
Reformation and
Incipient Laïcité
The Protestant Reformation, begun under Martin Luther (1483–1546) in Germany in 1517 and continued shortly after in France under John Calvin (1509–1564), provides a convenient and significant reference in our understanding of historical influences in French society and religious experience. As Reformation church history professor Euan Cameron asserts,
The personal motives for the reformers’ conversions are ultimately inexplicable. However, this overlooks the fundamental point: they were personal motives. One did not become a first-generation reformer by habit, compulsion, or default. Where any evidence exists, it suggests that the reformers reached their position only after serious and earnest heart-searching. They were some of the most conscientious revolutionaries ever to rebel against authority.43
Five hundred years later, the Reformation’s historical and religious importance cannot be exaggerated. “No other movement of religious protest or reform since antiquity has been so widespread or lasting in its effects, so deep and searching in its criticism of received wisdom, so destructive in what it abolished or so fertile in what it created.”44 The late Catholic historian John Bossy questioned the use of Reformation in the singular while recognizing he had no better alternative. He wrote, “Yet it seems worth trying to use [Reformation] as sparingly as possible, not simply because it goes along too easily with the notion that a bad form of Christianity was being replaced by a good one, but because it sits awkwardly across the subject without directing anyone’s attention anywhere in particular.”45 Cameron asserts that although there were reformations throughout Europe in Catholic nations, Reformation in the singular is reserved “for a particular process of change, integrating cultural, political, and theological factors in a way never seen before and rarely since.”46 Walker recognizes that the “defensive action to the Protestant threat is appropriately called the Counter-Reformation” and also that “one may properly speak of an indigenous Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth century.”47 Yet the localized attempts at “spiritual renewal would not have won the support of popes and prelates—would not have been ‘institutionalized,’ so to speak,—were it not for the profound shock administered to the church at large by the Protestant Reformation.”48
The Protestant Reformers clearly believed that the Roman Catholic Church had departed from the truth of Scripture. Protestants generally consider the term Counter-Reformation a better descriptor of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) whose decrees “were clear and definite in their rejection of Protestant beliefs.”49 The Catholic Church may have experienced reforms, renewals or reformations in areas of practice, piety, and missionary zeal, but did not experience Reformation in the weighty sense of the word which describes the reestablishment of apostolic doctrine. Alister McGrath explains Luther’s theological priority:
For Luther, the reformation of morals and the renewal of spirituality, although of importance in themselves, were of secondary significance in relation to the reformation of Christian doctrine. Well aware of the frailty of human nature, Luther criticized both Wycliffe and Hus for confining their attacks on the papacy to its moral shortcomings, where they should have attacked the theology on which the papacy was ultimately based. For Luther, a reformation of morals was secondary to a reformation of doctrine.50
Luther became a priest in the Catholic Church in 1507 and received his doctorate in theology from the University of Wittenberg in 1512.51 Early on Luther accepted the Church’s