67 Charenton in the Paris suburbs : Saint Pierre : conflict between Church and State

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 Just outside Paris, this 19th century church carries the inscription above the door : « Liberté Egalité Fraternité » the motto of the French Revolution. The inscription dates back to the conflict between the Church and left political forces at the end of the 19th century. The Church had a huge influence, particularly in education, and one of the huge battles of the day was to win a (relative) separation of Church and State. The conflict was very much calmed by the law of 1905 on laïcité, a law which in France everyone speaks about and noone has read. The law made all church buildings state owned, and ordered that they be leased back to the parishes almost free, and that the state would pay for repair and upkeep. The law also ruled on certain other conflicts, guaranteeing, for example, the right of churches to hold religious processions on public roads. Anyway, in the period before this when the conflict of ideas was very strong, the local government ordered (in 1892) the slogan to be engraved on the church, to kind of show who was boss.

Inside the church is a plaque to the memory of a priest killed during the Paris commune. The carved stations of the cross are interesting.

When I visited it, This church had just organized a public meeting with a Rabbi to explain to the congregation the Jewish feast of Pessah.

The parish have a troop of the Scouts Unitaires de France. This movement was founded in the 1970s and has about 33 000 scouts today. The official story is that they broke away from the main scout movement in the 1970s, because they refused the reorganization into separate groups for different age ranges. This sounds really unlikely to me – surely there were more important political or ethical differences to persuade them to take the risk of splitting off.

 

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