Recalibrating Laïcité from Brazzaville to Bruges

Abstract

This chapter examines the political, social, and geopolitical developments that drove the postwar culturalization of Christianity through time and across space. French education officials moved away from a version of laïcité that dissociated French national identity from Christianity at the very moment that France was trying to build a more democratic Franco-African community. The equation of Christianity, French culture, and “European civilization” turned non-Christian religious difference into a starker boundary between European and African France. As French leaders, educators, and activists considered to what extent France and Europe's “Christian inheritance” should guide education reform across metropolitan, colonial, and European space, they developed substantively different approaches to youth and education policy depending on the religion. The novel contours of postwar laïcité emerged at the crossroads of national reconstruction, postwar colonialism, and European integration. Ultimately, the critical interplay between the culturalization of Christianity, racist ideas about African Islam, and institutional arrangements in the late 1940s located France more firmly in a Europe that was understood to be both secular and Christian, which created new patterns of inequality and exclusion in the French Union.