Les mutations du religieux dans la France contemporaine

Abstract

The author champions the idea that the evolution of religion in contemporary France cannot be regarded as a scoreless draw in which the advance of modernity is accompanied by a parallel decline in religion. There is no doubt that ‘Catholic civilization’, underpinned by the massive support of the system of practices and standards established by the Roman institutions, has collapsed during the half last century, mainly due to the effect of the process of individualization, itself linked to an emphasis on the process of social differentiation. Nevertheless, this process of diminution of the parochial world has not led to an extinction of belief : ‘republican civilization’, whose theorists announced, at the end of the 19th century, that it would soon be reliant solely on the power of reason, has opened itself up, in recent years, to a renewed expansion of religion, often in the guise of a proliferating ‘spirituality’, as much in the field of private existence as in that of public debate.