French Catholics and Muslims. Secularism isn’t straightforward

The uneasy intertwining of religion and public life has resulted in more power for France's Muslim clerics

OFFICIAL flags, fluttering atop town halls and schools, were at half-mast. Ministers queued up to attend mass at Notre Dame. The government invited all prefects, its departmental representatives, to attend local memorial services. “France has woken up very Catholic,” remarked the left-leaning Liberation newspaper, baffled. For a secular country, which this year marks the centenary of the law that separates religion and the state, France's official reaction to the pope's death has again raised questions about the place of religion in public life.

“We are at risk of re-igniting the war of religion in France,” declared Arnaud Montebourg, a Socialist deputy. Flying the flags at half-mast, added Francois Bayrou, leader of the centrist UDF, “does not correspond to the distinction that should be made between spiritual conviction and national political decisions.” While some 70% of the French have a religion, and 90% of those are Catholic, France wears its spirituality lightly. Only 13% of French Catholics go to church regularly. The state keeps officialdom and religion firmly apart, and President Jacques Chirac has banned Muslim headscarves and “conspicuous” crucifixes in state schools. While this week's official gestures towards the Catholic church were striking, they are unlikely to mark any lasting relaxation of what Nicolas Sarkozy, head of the governing UMP party, calls France's “secular fundamentalism”.

For the real source of tension about religious expression and public life today is not Catholicism but Islam. Home to Europe's biggest Muslim population - some 5m strong - France has been trying to organise a homegrown structure for a religion that has long been under foreign tutelage, notably Algerian and Moroccan. But its efforts to create representative organisations have ended up putting ever more power in the hands of the clerics.

France's first attempt to give Islam an official voice was the creation in 2003 of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM). This brought together the four main Muslim groups, three of them under foreign patronage, the other - the Union of Islamic Organisations of France - close to the trans-national Muslim Brotherhood. They shared out top jobs, under the cautious leadership of Dalil Boubakeur, the Algerian-born head of the Paris Mosque. The idea was partly symbolic: to put Islam on an equal footing with the officially represented Jewish and Christian faiths. It was also part of a plan by Mr Sarkozy, then interior minister, to “de-radicalise” Islam by co-opting hard-talking groups.

Because the CFCM was organised through the mosques, the structure was inevitably tilted towards the practising faithful. Only 5% of French Muslims attend mosque once a week. Those who do not felt unrepresented. Many women, who felt liberated in France from conservative Islamic dress codes, were disappointed by the CFCM's opposition to the headscarf ban. Dounia Bouzar, one of the only female members of the CFCM's board, explains that Muslims were told “OK, Islam is becoming a religion of France, but we are going to define you completely according to your religious dimension.” Exasperated, she quit the council earlier this year.

Last month, the current interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, created yet another Muslim body: the Foundation for Islamic Welfare. The idea, he said, was to “organise and develop a modern and tolerant French Islam.” While this body will receive no public finance, it is supposed to channel private money from sponsors, foreign or French, into such activities as the mosque-building, social affairs, and the training of imams. And who is to run the foundation? None other than the same four groups that run the CFCM.

The government says that outsiders will be appointed to the foundation. Abdelatif Benazzi, a former French rugby captain, is one name circulating. Another is Denis Bauchard, ex-head of the Institute of the Arab World. But it is hard to dispel a sense of collusion. Already, fresh elections to the CFCM have been postponed while its leaders appear to be forging a deal. Voting is now set for June 19th, and there is muttering about the creation of single lists.

Is such complicity a sign of democratic malfunction? Or of the successful forging of a republican consensus within French Islam? As Jocelyne Cesari, a French Islamologist at America's Harvard University, puts it: “the really worrying fundamentalist groups - the Salafists, among others - are the ones outside the council.”