Berkley Center

The more time I spend in Paris, the more I realize how much that life here revolves around the state. There are no Goodwills to donate clothes—instead, the mayor’s office of each arrondissement provides donation bins. A cultural or political group in need of office services or a meeting space can use one of the government-provided maisons des associations to do so.

The French believe that it is a democratically elected government’s role to provide for the less fortunate and intervene when there is a problem. They consider much of charitable giving in the United States to be pet projects intended to glorify the donors. As a friend in one of my classes put it, “In the United States, you name buildings or institutions after individual donors” (think of the Rockefeller Center or the Koch Theater). “In France, we name our institutions after great scientists, artists, or politicians.”

When I tried to explain to him the good that a Carnegie or MacArthur Foundation does, he told me that I was missing the point; if a museum, theatre, or group (inside or outside of France) needs financial support, it is the government’s role to provide, not any individual’s. In return for a higher tax rate, most French disclaim any need to go above and beyond what the government provides for others. For this reason, government administrators are given the best possible education, as they are expected to maintain this level of government structure over all aspects of society.

This Rousseauean distrust of civil society extends to organized religion. The strict separation of church and state is considered essential to their education system, and religion is considered a strictly private affair. You will never hear a politician talk about the influence that their faith (or lack thereof) has had on their political stances or even know their religion at all. Any display of religion that is considered “ostentatious” is frowned upon, especially in schools, where students may wear a small cross under their shirt, but certainly not a kippah or a headscarf. Even the ash used during Ash Wednesday is a faint grey color, almost invisible to others.

It surprised me, then, to learn that the government owns many of the churches. In 1905, the government confiscated most of them as part of its official separation from the Catholic Church. In turn, the state would no longer interfere with Church affairs and would allow them to use the churches freely and without discrimination. The state runs and maintains these churches as cultural and historic landmarks, but is forbidden by the law from building any new ones.

Although there are some loopholes around this rule, it has the effect of tacitly promoting the predominantly Christian and Jewish religions that were already established in France before the 1905 law was enacted. Muslims in France have to build and maintain their own mosques, aggravating tensions as to what they see as unfair treatment under the law. In my French law class, we learned of efforts to ameliorate this unfair preference, prompted by domestic and EU court rulings, but there is little political momentum to modify the 1905 law.