France

Key documents represent four periods of church-state relations in France:

♦ Separation of Church and state (1795-1905)

♦ Napoleon's concordat (1801)

♦ Marshal Pétain’s laws (1940-1943) 

♦ Under-the-radar concordats (today)

(Not covered here are the evolving relations, as of 2019, between mosque and state. These concern not just the French state, but also foreign ones, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, all vying to speak for the Muslims of France.)

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• Separation of Church and state (1795-1905)

• ♦ Church-state separation in the French Constitution of 1795 and Law of 1905: Excerpts
  ♦ France cancels the concordat
  ♦ Benjamin Franklin's contribution to French secularism
  ♦ Secularism as precondition for human rights
  ♦ French baby's human rights cause confrontation with Pope

• 
• Napoleon's concordat and Organic Articles (1801): texts and commentary

• ♦ Napoleon’s concordat: Introduction and summary 
  ♦ Napoleon’s concordat (1801): text 
  ♦ Organic Articles: (1801): text (How Napoleon tamed the concordat)
  ♦ Imperial catechism (1806): Extract
  ♦ Napoleon’s concordat lives on and the Kaiser adds another

• 
• Marshal Pétain’s laws (1940-1943)

• This Nazi puppet regime quietly passed laws which amounted to a kind of creeping concordat that eroded French secularism.
  ♦ Marshal Pétain's marriage of convenience with the Church 
  ♦ Text of Pétain's law of 25 December 1942 — his Christmas gift to the Church

• 
• Under-the-radar concordats

• In secular France no one calls them concordats and most French people don't realise that they actually have 14 of them.

  ♦ Steady erosion of church-state separation in France today 
  ♦ About the Trinity-of-the-Mountains concordats (1828, 1974, 1999, 2005)
  ♦ Concordat on church & convent of Trinity-of-the-Mountains, Rome (1999): text
  ♦ Higher education concordat (2008): text