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religion], and the present conception of the laïque State. He contends that Voltaire, more than anyone else, made tolerance a positive and universal value to the point of imposing it on public opinion as the cardinal virtue of an enlightened spirit.148 Denis Lacorne describes the tolerance advanced by Voltaire and others in the context of terrorist attacks which have afflicted Europe for several years:

The great emancipating project for the freedom of conscience and the freedom of expression, inaugurated in the sixteenth century and generalized in the century of the Enlightenment, continues to be fought throughout the world. . . . The very conceptions of tolerance have evolved from one century to another up until now, but their final object remains the same: tolerance is that which leads to religious pluralism, whatever may be the nature of relations between Churches and the State.149

The tolerance found in the edicts of tolerance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, was viewed negatively by “princes and peoples who were unable to conceptualize tolerance as an ‘amicable coexistence’ of religious communities separated by strong doctrinal differences.”150 Lacorne explains how tolerance in a pejorative sense was transformed from a pragmatic inconvenience to what he calls the tolérance de Modernes. This modern tolerance produced rights and new freedoms—freedom of conscience, the free exercise of religion, the freedom of expression and by extension the freedom to blaspheme.151 The struggle for these freedoms would eventually lead to the Law of Separation in 1905. Today, in the context of religion, and particularly in the context of radical Islam, “this tolerance has its limits and the ultimate limit is fanaticism.”152

The influence of Enlightenment thinking contributed at least indirectly to the development of laïcité and the eventual separation of Church and State. Dusseau argues that its firstfruits are found in philosophers’ ideas as well as in political practices of the French monarchy.153 When Enlightenment philosophy imprinted its mark on the movement of ideas, there was an intense clash with the all-powerful Church in its total alliance with the absolute monarchy.154 The ideals of tolerance, equality, and autonomy could not exist alongside religious constraints imposed by a State Church. These ideals would ferment and lead to the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

      Revolution

Ducomte considers that the French Revolution marks the starting point of the laicization of French society and her institutions. The term laïcité was not yet in use at the time. Its substantive form appeared as a neologism in the nineteenth century in the context and struggle of removing the Church’s influence over public education. Laïcité however gave a name to a reality which already long existed beginning with the French Revolution and the attempts to free the State from all confessional control.155

The French Revolution has been described as “the most far-reaching political and social explosion in all European history.”156 It was more than an event. It was a series of events which played out for a tumultuous decade. The period extends from 1789 to 1799 with the introduction of a constitutional monarchy and the inception of the disestablishment of the official and dominant Church. “The Revolution, for those who made it, was the construction of a new political order symbolised by the terms liberty, equality, and (later) fraternity.”157 The arrival of the Revolution must be viewed as a break with the past model of governance (Ancien Régime) with its societal divisions and the mingling of Church and State in the affairs of the citizenry. Michel Vovelle has characterized the Ancien Régime by three interlocking themes. Economically, in its mode of production, the nation was dominated by the feudal system; its class structure revolved around a three-tiered hierarchy; its political system was one of absolutism, the divine right of kings consecrated by the Church.158 “Absolute monarchy legitimated by divine right was replaced by the sovereignty of the people with power vested in their elected representatives.”159

      The Revolution would be interrupted with the coup d’état and rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 followed by his ascension as hereditary emperor in 1804. He became the founder of the First Empire which lasted until his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, then exiled on the island of Saint Helena until his death in 1821. However, the ideals of the Revolution would return in force and compete with counter-revolutionary forces for the next century. Davis quotes approvingly French historian Ernest Lavisse to describe this period:

No country has ever influenced Europe as France did between 1789 and 1815. Impelled by two dreams—the dream of a war against kings on behalf of the people, and the dream of the foundation of an empire of the Cæsarian or Carolingian type—the French armies overran the continent, and trampled underfoot as they went, much rank vegetation which has never arisen again.160

He further states, “There is not a single civilized man on the earth today whose life, thought, and destinies have not been profoundly influenced by what happened in or near France during those five and twenty years of action, wrath, and fire.”161 Davis’s remarks may sound like hyperbole to those in the twenty-first century as he writes from his early twentieth-century perspective. However, the influence of the French Revolution on future generations cannot be denied. The Revolution’s significance undoubtedly goes far beyond the nation of France and has been studied and considered an essential foundational moment, not only for French national history, but in the history of humanity.162

There is some debate as to whether France was more miserable than other European nations at the time of the Revolution. In Davis’s opinion “the French were probably, all things considered, the most progressive, enlightened, and in general fortunate people of continental Europe.”163 While that may be true in relative terms, we may question whether this description applied to the common people. The pre-revolutionary feudal system functioned in a world dominated by a rural economy. The majority of the French population, estimated at 85 percent, was concentrated in rural areas. The French peasantry lived under the seigneurial system where the seigneur levied heavy taxes and meted out justice. Roger Magraw discusses the social-political consequences of the Revolution and the mobilization of the peasantry. In his opinion, “it was the anti-seigneurial peasant revolution of 1789–1793 which swept away the ancien régime.”164

It should then come as no surprise that the populace in principle welcomed the French Revolution. The atrocities of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror which followed are well known and in hindsight rightly criticized. Less well known is the oppression endured by the people under the nobility and the clergy which wielded secular power. An assessment of life in France at the time of the Revolution provides a sobering picture of the wealth of the Church and its princes. In 1789, France had a population of 26 million and 130,000 clergy. The clergy, representing a tiny fraction of the population, possessed large swaths of territory in the kingdom.165 The pre-revolutionary social hierarchy in France was composed of three orders or estates (les trois états): clergy, nobility, and peasantry (le tiers-état). The first two groups were largely exonerated from the crushing taxes imposed on the peasantry. Added to the contempt felt by the peasants was their exclusion from the ranks of military officers. Magraw states, “Until 1789, the ‘Second Estate,’ some 1 percent of the population, owned 25 percent of the land and monopolised posts in Army, Administration, and Church, giving aristocratic bishops and monastic heads access to income from church lands and tithes.”166 The monarchy was the third rail in the structure of the Ancien Régime, having reached its zenith under Louis XIV and then greatly weakened under the mediocre Louis XVI (1754–1793) beginning in 1774. The king remained the living symbol of a system in which the Church was the state religion and which hardly flinched during the last years of the Ancien Régime by the promulgation of the Edict of Tolerance in 1787 for the benefit of Protestants.167

Montclos sketches three grand moments which constitute the revolutionary process regarding religion. These are the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, the antireligious terror from October 1793 to April 1794, and the separation of the Church from the State in the 1795 Constitution. He remarks that during the Terror there was a brutal fight against persons and possessions led by proconsuls who not only preyed on Catholicism but also on Protestantism and Judaism.168 These moments coincided with the foundational texts of the Revolution—the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, and the

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