ABSTRACT
France’s Catholic culture stretches back some 1,500 years to the baptism of Clovis, King of the Gauls (the ancestors of the French), who embraced Catholicism in AD 496. For centuries the nation was officially Catholic, defined as la fille aînée de Rome (the elder daughter of Rome); the Catholic church was all-powerful, and other religions (such as Protestantism) were persecuted. However, these close ties between the Catholic church and the French state were weakened after the 1789 French Revolution: first, the 1801 Concordat demoted Catholicism from its status as the official religion of France to the religion of the majority; and second, in 1905, the Law of Separation of Churches and State formalized the principle of laïcité (secularism), according to which the state publicly neither recognizes nor subsidizes any religion, but yet guarantees the freedom of all private religious expression.
