Berkley Center

What is France to an American? If pressed, most of us resort to caricature: a sartorially adept man walks in front of the Tour Eiffel, beret-clad, a scarf wrapped around his neck, baguette and bordeaux bottle in hand. Or perhaps we would imagine the humble French countryside cliché of American cinema, where simple farmers lead simpler lives—think the opening scene of Tarentino’s Inglorious Bastards, or any number of films in which one comes across a French monastery.

As it pertains religion in France, too, the American understanding of life in the Métropole is equally lacking, marked by a similar bipolarity. The former baguette-wielding, pinstriped Parisian is decidedly anti-religious, atheist; he spends his days reading Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. He smokes and generally hates foreigners. When judgement day comes, so it goes, the Parisians will have the same contemptuous apathy towards the Almighty himself that they have towards American tourists. Yet, on the other side, one can not help but think of the teeming masses of the faithful in the period novels of Zola, the Catholic austerity of the French countryside, or Jean-Valjean’s Kierkegaardian piety in Les Miserables. The France of these images is pious and humble, moral and salt-of-the-earth.

Officially, France is a pays laïque; that is to say, secular in civil society. Whereas the United States tends toward a religious pluralism in some states and outright, constitutionally-questionable respect for religion, or rather Christian religions, in others—think Bible Belt and Southern states, including my home state’s crazy brother, Kansas—France is mostly unified in opposition to religious expression in the public sphere and apathetic to religious practice in quotidian life. My host family, for example, considers themselves Catholic but does not go to Mass but during the holidays, and I doubt they pray at all.

This curious valley between the stated and the real, the written and the practiced, appears in many aspects of French culture, and it is foundational to modern French religious identity. Pride, piety, and the metaphysical anxiety that psychologist and philosopher Ernest Becker posits initiate the desire for a rapport with the divine or transcendental itself, today in modern France create a two-tiered religious experience. France’s revolutionary and intellectual traditions push the country toward secularism, and on the surface, the French like to seem to have achieved it. However, the religious core of the French soul rests, like the towering cathedrals of Europe’s great cities, omnipresent and imposing.

The governments of the European continent, unlike the United States, have a storied history of relationships with religion. Indeed, the European state would not exist without the tumultuous forces of Protestantism, without the Treaty of Westphalia and the shadow of the Vatican looming over European monarchies until Henry VIII’s break with the church. In France, it is of course the revolution of 1789 that marks the greatest religious change; the Tennis Court Oath led in due course to the imposition of a weird, cultish, revolutionary theology that tried to change even the structure of the French calendar. After Napoleon, France stumbled through the first two Republics until a period of relative stability between 1870 and 1940, when Hitler’s army arrived on the Champs Élysée.

It was during this time that France initiated a legal transition to laïcisme, in 1905, after the widespread reaction to the Dreyfus affair brought the left to power, breaking the religious associations of the French state of the past. But, of course, this is only a part of the story. At the same, the French left put into place a union-supported law to protect the working class, outlawing work on, of all days, Sunday.

Today, as I write this, it is All Saint’s Day in France, and there are but three or four restaurants open in the entire city; traditional merchants are closed, and in Kehl, Germany, too, where I traveled just this morning, the central plaza appears a ghost-town.

This is the irony of the French religious experience: French law purports to respect no establishment of religion, but even the French syndicate left, ideological heirs to Zola’s contemporaries, fiercely oppose work on Sundays. Not Mondays, not Wednesdays, not Thursdays, but the day of the Lord our Father. French businesses have every right to be open on All Saint’s Day, but even outside of the Alsace and Lorraine, where the organization of laïcisme differs from elsewhere in France—Strasbourg, the home of Riesling and the tarte flambée, was until 1918 a German city, and therefore the separation of church and state was passed before it became part of l’Hexagone—town squares are desolate, bookstores and boulangeries closed.

The arguments used by French unions to justify opposition to work on Sunday sound as though they were lifted from Deuteronomy. The French moderate right, citing the importance of rest and family, agrees.

These are just a few examples of the curious function of theological identity in France, but the trend can be found throughout French society. The baguette wielding atheist of American cliché is present here, but his humble, pious, farming cousin is, too, buried deeper in the French identity, his presence evinced by the continuity of religious tradition and ideology in the most unlikely parts of French society.

Here, and elsewhere in French society, unlikely allies in the French political spectrum unite to ensure that despite a stated desire for secularism, France stays, not in word but in deed, deeply religious.