ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the debate over French national culture. With its long history of centralization, the French state has traditionally been unsupportive and often positively hostile towards both regional and religious diversity. Only in recent decades have regional cultures had significant but still limited state support. By introducing a nationwide system of compulsory, non-religious schooling conducted solely in French, the Third Republic set out both to tame the cultural influence of the Catholic Church and to marginalize or eradicate regional languages, which were forbidden altogether on school premises. Multiculturalism is often regarded in France as a dangerous ’Anglo-Saxon’ idea from which the French are mercifully protected by their system of laicite. This kind of reasoning rests in many ways on a faulty understanding of the situation in both Britain and the US, as well as on a failure to appreciate entirely the principles of laicite itself.
