ABSTRACT
The French Catholic elites had experienced the law of separation of church and state (1905) as a trauma because it terminated the Concordat regime and seemed to return to the period of the French Revolution. But the majority of the faithful accepted secularism without difficulty. The history of the twentieth century was then dominated by a series of confrontations and compromises between the Republic and the church. After the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the French bishops definitively rallied to secularism and political pluralism. Today, in a context dominated by the decline of religious practices and by the crisis of political activism, the Catholic church supports the political commitment of believers and, even when bishops are hostile to a law or a draft law, most of them show respect for the Republican institutions, of which they have become true supporters.
