France’s Laïcité: A Model of Secularism or a Challenge to Religious Freedom?

In the past hundred years or more, France has proudly touted the concept of laïcité as being the core of their national republican identity. This is because the concept is so intrinsic to the French identity that Article 1 of the constitution adopted in 1958 states that “France is an indivisible, laïque, democratic and social Republic.” Laïcité dates back to the period of French revolution where it served to distance the church from any role in public affairs and became enshrined in the 1905 Separation of Churches and State Act. This act is founded on two main concepts: freedom of individual conscience and neutrality of the state towards all religions and their views of the world.

Nevertheless, the more laïcité has departed from its anticlerical roots, the less possible it becomes to maintain its claim of neutrality. Starting from the end of the twentieth century, increased religious diversity resulting from the influx of immigrants, especially from Muslim-dominated states, has pushed this concept to its boundaries, while the prohibition of wearing religious symbols at school and a ban on face veils introduced in 2010 have rekindled doubts about laïcité’s role in creating an atmosphere of equality or imposing cultural uniformity. According to proponents, this is nothing but a natural continuation of the deal made more than a century ago, namely, ensuring that a religious-free public sphere where no religion is dominant over the other is maintained. However, opponents argue that such a “neutral” approach has actually been implemented selectively, targeting predominantly one particular group. This dichotomy is not an abstract one. France hosts the largest number of Muslims in all of Western Europe, and while its constitution provides for the freedom of religion, that freedom has to be reconciled with the neutrality of the state provided for under the 1905 law — a reconciliation that has turned out to be much more difficult than those who drafted the law probably envisaged. It is telling that a French minister would assert that Muslims “can practice their religion freely but discreetly in public.”

The thesis of this paper is that laïcité, no matter its enlightenment roots, has evolved from being a safeguard for the individual’s right to conscience to a device by which religious visibility has become increasingly regulated, and this evolution poses a genuine danger to religious liberty in France. There is no denial that the concept of a secular state has many positive functions, such as preventing any one religion from gaining control over the state’s institutions and allowing space for dissent and atheism. However, an ideology intended to free people from religious coercion must not be used as a means of forcing people to stop expressing their beliefs. The coming chapters explain the history behind this paradox and what the resolution of this paradox is important for.

Partisans of laïcité find its history firmly grounded in its roots in the Enlightenment. Far from being a reaction against religion, laïcité was consciously formulated to protect the individual conscience against the rule of the clergy — Voltaire’s condemnation of religious intolerance included in his arguments the notion that separation of church and state was a prerequisite to civic equality and individual freedom, including the requirement of state neutrality towards religion in the Enlightenment tradition. The law of 1905 is thus not an assault on religion, but rather an affirmation of it — it upholds freedom of conscience and ensures that the state does not itself take sides. Proponents of the current system see laïcité as providing the foundation for equality — for French Muslim intellectuals like Ghaleb Bencheikh, for example, the secular state acts as a guarantor of religious freedom, with the ideal of laïcité grounded in the principles of equality, freedom of conscience, and rights of citizens. For French intellectuals like Élisabeth Badinter and Alain Finkielkraut, secularism becomes a necessity for civic cohesion — a public sphere filled with competing religious claims could not be one of citizenship. However, the empirical evidence makes this argument somewhat more difficult to support. Legal theorists have noted an irony within the structure of the system in which the concept of neutrality is never considered a legitimate reason to interfere with freedom of religion within the European Convention on Human Rights, which means that France’s use of “neutrality” at home to ban religious symbols is problematic from the perspective of the very human rights system that it seeks to defend. Comparative legal theory has elaborated on this point by suggesting that both legal conventions and social conventions are deeply rooted in history and religion, making neutrality discourse simply a façade for public order management.

This is made clear by the pattern of enforcement itself. According to a study published in the Oxford Journal of Human Rights Law Review, the way in which this doctrine has been put into practice has undergone a radical transformation since 2004: the laïcité of today bears almost no resemblance to the laïcité of the Republic of 1905; it applies to private individuals in addition to the government, it has become synonymous with religious-neutrality when it was never such a mandate throughout the twentieth century, and it affects predominantly Muslim women, leading to the conclusion that this principle can no longer really be called “liberal.” This conclusion is also supported by recent qualitative studies: interviews conducted with French Muslims twenty years after the banning of the headscarf revealed support for the principle of neutrality of the state enshrined in 1905 in spite of its use as a tool for controlling Muslim visibility.

The latter case seems much more convincing to me for one simple reason: a principle must be evaluated by actions, and not just by words. Asymmetrically applied legal neutrality is not neutrality; it is discrimination under the guise of a procedure. As recently stated in one scholarly paper, the point is not that laïcité is claimed to be neutral but whether it can be neutral when it is applied according to the traditions of the majority. The principle created to emancipate individuals from the force of religion, in its latest manifestations, is used for coercing individuals into religious abstention, and the fact that such a shift mainly concerns one particular minority and does not affect others is far from accidental. Nothing about all of this is meant to indicate that secularism in and of itself is at odds with freedom of religion, for it is possible for these concepts to coexist, as has been stated by people such as Bencheikh. What it does show is that, in its attempt to impose equality, France has taken sameness and confused the two, making the erasure of religion the prerequisite of citizenship.

However, if the issue at hand is the fact that laïcité has evolved from a neutral concept to one of forced invisibility, then the answer is clearly not abandoning secularism but redefining it in accordance with actual pluralism rather than homogeneity. Scholars have come up with numerous ideas on how this might be achieved and their thoughts should become policies rather than merely academic discussions.

1. Embrace “covenantal pluralism” framework. The problem that scholars have highlighted is that religious differences need to be accepted rather than neutralized, and thus there needs to be a move from passive tolerance to respect, engagement and joint commitment of religions and secularism. This proposal is by no means an attempt to undermine the foundations of the 1905 law but rather a recognition that pluralism and equality should replace state neutrality in the future definition of secularism. In practice, it would translate into discarding all the rhetoric about religion being disruptive and recognizing its role as yet another way of participating in civic affairs.

2. Distinguish between “neutrality of the state” and “invisibility of the citizen.” Legal scholars have contended that a laïque state must be a neutral state, where neutrality is measured in terms of the institutions, not in terms of the citizens’ neutrality or invisibility. Specifically, this distinction needs to be enshrined in the language of lawmaking — any law concerning the prohibition of religious dress and symbolism will need to prove that the restrictions apply to an institutional entity (public school, courtroom, working civil servant) and not a private individual acting within the public sphere.

3. Design institutions instead of unilateral measures. France had already attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to integrate religion into institutions — the Reform Project launched by Macron in 2017–2020 aimed at designing formal ties with Muslim organizations through certification of their worship places and financial transparency, however, the project failed because of the fears on the part of secularists of losing neutrality and on the part of religious communities of increasing state control. This does not mean that institutional integration is doomed to fail — it simply cannot succeed when designed unilaterally, not negotiated.

4. Apply workplace accommodation approaches to the broader public sphere. In fact, employers in France have already quietly started addressing this issue on a smaller scale: recently conducted studies in the industry have revealed that a majority of firms have started dealing with religious accommodation in the workplace, which includes everything from prayer rooms to dress code negotiations, without falling prey to religious assertiveness or a total ban. If neutrality and accommodation can be reconciled in the context of French workplace, there is no reason why they cannot be so balanced in the wider public policy context, instead of starting with prohibitions.

5. Reform based on international law, not only national one. Since the neutral stance of France conflicts with Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the reform must be based on harmonizing the laïcité doctrine in France with this article on the freedom of religion.

French laïcité was never meant to be used as a means of attack on religion; rather, it was always meant as a way of defending the conscience of the individual, an impenetrable barrier between the state and religion, and between religion and the state. That original intent, founded upon the requirements of the Enlightenment for civic equality and freedom of conscience, continues to be praiseworthy. Yet one hundred years of practice have shown the doctrine in tension with itself. What once protected now has, in its latest form, become a mechanism for discrimination, as legal literature has shown it to become since 2004 in particular, moving from the regulation of public bodies to the regulation of individuals, and from the defense of neutral space to the enforcement of religious invisibility.

This is the paradox at the core of the issue discussed by this article: a principle could be philosophically tenable and socially destructive simultaneously. Neutrality that pretends to be universal but ends up favoring only one group cannot be considered to be neutral in any way whatsoever — it is, as recent qualitative studies of French Muslims have revealed, an approach whose very nature as something experienced by citizens as fragmentary and negotiated in practice is denied by French official ideology which tries to present it as a single principle. This paradox is not a minor technical point. It is the whole argument. None of this suggests that secularism itself has failed or that France needs to jettison the separation of church and state which has served as the basis of its republican government since 1905. The suggestions offered in this article for dealing with religious minorities — covenantal pluralism, clearer demarcation between neutrality and invisibility of the state institutions, negotiated and not unilaterally imposed integration, and conformity with international standards of human rights — all maintain the essential values of secularism but call on France to practice them. This, in other words, is not a question of secularism vs. religious liberty in France. It is laïcité that pretends to be neutral vs. laïcité that is neutral.

REFERENCES

Cesari, J. (2025). Laïcité and Religious Diversity in France: Embracing Institutional and Covenantal Pluralism for a More Inclusive Public Space. The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 23(sup1), 61–75.

Bhuta, N. (2014). Two concepts of religious freedom in the European Court of Human Rights. South Atlantic Quarterly , 113 (1), 9–35.

Bruchhaus, J., & Abbas, T. (2026). Laïcité and the contestation of belonging: Muslim social identities in France twenty years after the headscarf ban. Social Identities , 1–15.

Vauchez, S. H. Is French Laïcité Still Liberal? The Republican Project under Pressure (2004–15)’(2017). Human Rights Law Review, 17, 285.