France must define its values so it can defend them

France is the most rigorously secular state of the democratic world. Separation of Church and State enshrined in the famous 1905 law was the result of over a century of hostility between the Catholic Church and the French State. Mutual hostility began with the 1789 French Revolution. Until then monarchical France bathed in the glory of being recognised as the ‘elder daughter of the Catholic Church’. But the revolutionaries saw the Church, like the aristocracy, as a pillar of the old regime that had to be rooted out, often by violence. Many took their cue from the Enlightenment philosopher Diderot: ‘Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’ Anticlericalism and de-christianisation of the State became features of the revolutionary tradition that has continued until today, albeit in muted form. The Islamist terror attack in Nice’s Notre-Dame – two worshippers and the church’s sexton murdered by attempted decapitation – had a remarkable effect.