ABSTRACT
A major characteristic of French republican ideology has been laïcité, or secularity. The notion that the state should be independent of, and separated from, religion goes back to the early days of the French Revolution, when church property was confiscated, the Christian calendar was replaced by a revolutionary one, and Christianity itself was replaced by a ‘religion of reason’. Indeed, laïcité was to become one of the fundamental elements of Jacobin doctrine. With their commitment to the idea that a proper democracy implied the sovereignty of the people, the Jacobins insisted that there be no intermediaries between the individual and the state, and hence rejected all mediating institutions, such as provinces, ethnic communities, trade unions and churches. The principle of separation of Church and state was an elementary ingredient of French republican thinking from the very beginning, and even antedated the Revolution. Hostility to the Catholic Church marked the thinking of a number of Enlightenment intellectuals; to Voltaire, for example, religion was incompatible with reason and progress. To be sure, he directed his anti-religious feelings especially to the Catholic Church; because that Church was identified with absolute monarchy, with the Inquisition, and with other manifestations of intolerance, he called for the removal of its influence from public life.
