Inside the French youth’s divisive relationship to secularism

Laïcité is at the heart of France’s national identity. But more and more young people do not feel comfortable with it anymore.

Floriane Gouget's eyes are glued to the television evening news program. A few hours earlier, Islamist terrorists killed twelve people in the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, including the cartoonists who published drawings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It is January 7, 2015. Floriane is 12 years old and starts to ask herself questions.

The next day, at her private Catholic school in Brittany, where she is in Year 8, she listens carefully to the adults’ explanations. "The cartoonists were killed for their drawings," says the school principal. Floriane doesn’t understand. Drawings don’t kill people, do they? The principal does not know what to say.

The following Sunday, Floriane goes to Paris with her family, where 1.5 million people march to pay tribute to the victims and defend freedom of speech. Floriane and her father subscribe to Charlie Hebdo and start reading it together.

At a very young age, she learned about laïcité, the French brand of secularism, and became aware not only of the necessity to keep politics separate from religion, but also to protect the right to criticize and mock religions.

As France goes through a string of Islamist terrorist attacks, culminating in the brutal assassination of secondary school teacher Samuel Paty, Floriane’s engagement for laïcité grows stronger. Now 20 years old, she promotes it through her organisation Dernier espoir (Last Hope) while studying literature.

“I don’t hate religions nor believers”, she said, adding that she is an atheist. “But it is important and healthy to criticize problematic religious dogmas and to reject fundamentalisms, like Islamism”.

Floriane is not representative of all the people her age. More and more teenagers and young adults see laïcité as too exclusive and are open to much more visible religious expression. This makes for a passionate and fascinating debate in a country whose conception of secularism is unique in the world. 

More radical and more political, laïcité is often misunderstood or frowned upon in Anglo-Saxon countries, where the relationship to religion is much less regulated. French laïcité – from the Latin laicus, or of the people, by opposition to the clergy – is the singular product of a thousand-year-old history.

For centuries, French monarchs drew their legitimacy from God, so much so that France was nicknamed “the Catholic Church’s eldest daughter” by Pope John Paul II. Religion and politics were inseparable, even though the relation between the French State and the Catholic Church was often strained.

In 1905, the French Republic enacted a major law, establishing the principle of laïcité. “The first pillar was freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, which means the freedom to believe or not to believe, to show one’s religion or not, without pressure”, said historian Patrick Weil.

The law also famously implies the separation of the Churches from the State, so that religious authorities do not interfere in public affairs and vice versa. Finally, and uniquely so, laïcité is based on the strict neutrality of the State and its employees. Judges, elected officials, police officers or teachers are not allowed to display their religion in the performance of their duties.

Another law, adopted in 2004, banned pupils from wearing ostentatious religious symbols in public schools, causing great turmoil in France. The ban meant to free children from potential religious pressures, provide them with a space free from religion, and put them all on an equal footing.

The 2004 law also has to do with the vision that the French have of their public schools, which should not only teach knowledge, but also thwart economic, social, religious, and cultural determinisms to create more equality. But the ban was accused of targeting Muslim schoolgirls wearing a headscarf and feeding Anti-Muslim hate.

The French youth is increasingly divided on this matter. According to a 2021 survey, 52% of students aged 15 to 17 are against "the right to criticize, even in an outrageous way, a religious belief, symbol or dogma" and 43% of them think that French secularism is discriminatory towards a religion. The figure even reaches 89% among Muslim high schoolers.

“There is a lot of Islamophobia in France, and laïcité is often used to discriminate against Muslims”, said 23-year-old Emma, a literature student living in Paris. “Muslims just want to practice their religion in peace but are often suspected of being against the Republic.”

A self-identified decolonial feminist, Emma is particularly committed to defending minority rights and fighting racial discrimination. “Many people who point fingers at Islam are flat out racist towards Muslims”, she said.

Although some do invoke laïcité to hold a racist discourse, racism and criticism of religions are not the same thing. The confusion between the two is an important explanation for the new relationship that young people have with laïcité, according to Floriane. “Denouncing or mocking someone's beliefs, no matter what they are, is considered intolerant or, depending on the person's religion, racist”, she said.

French secularism is also competing with more flexible, allegedly open-minded models. “French people want to smooth everything out, make everyone the same, and almost erase religions from the public space," said Emma, who defines herself as agnostic. “In the United Kingdom, in the United States or in Canada, religious, ethnic, or sexual identity is a simple manifestation of oneself.”

For Emma, French laïcité is an outdated concept, with not much meaning anymore. “A girl in my class was allowed to wear her veil during a school trip, but not on school premises. This ban is absurd!”, she said. “It did not change the relationship we had with her or the way she behaved”. She would not be bothered by teachers, MPs or judges wearing religious symbols either, going against one of the core principles of laïcité.

Of course, not all young Muslims are critical of it. Younès Ben Haddou, a 19-year-old French Muslim, feels like his faith is protected by the French law. At 17, he joined Printemps républicain (Republican Spring), a political movement promoting laïcité and fighting Islamism as much as the far right.

“The fact that some young people don’t condemn the barbaric attacks against Charlie Hebdo’s journalists, Jewish citizens, or public employees like Samuel Paty, is as worrying as it is revolting”, Younès said. 

Such a stance comes with a price. On Twitter, he receives dozens of hateful comments and death threats. Many insults come from other Muslims, who call him a Harki, in reference to the Algerian Muslims who fought for the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence. “They defile my faith”, Younès said.

But the rise of Islamism, complacency towards it in the name of tolerance, and the influence of Anglo-Saxon “inclusive” secularisms are not enough to explain the French youth’s division on this issue.

“Deep down, most young people do not understand laïcité”, said historian Patrick Weil. For him, France took it for granted and stopped teaching it. “Teachers did not explain the reasons behind it because they did not have the proper tools and did not even receive training for it!”

Samuel Paty’s assassination was a turning point. Since then, entire classes and workshops are organized to help children and teenagers understand the philosophy behind laïcité. Books and guides have been written to help teachers and parents navigate this complex issue, creating optimism in the face of despair. Whether this will repair the fracture or not remains to be seen.

Par Aurélien Tillier