Unveiling Marianne: Religious Symbols at School and the New Secular Grammar

Abstract

Although the controversies surrounding the wearing of religious symbols in schools emerged in the late 1980s, it was not until 2004 that Parliament stepped in to clarify the applicable policies. Public debate on French secularism has taken a new turn since then, bearing almost exclusively on the visibility of religious symbols in the public sphere. I shall revisit this debate here, along with the legal framework concerning the wearing of religious symbols by public school students since 1989. This will serve to uncover the reasoning—upstream of the passage of the Act of 15 March 2004, but also downstream—that gave rise to the emergence of a “new French secularism”.