1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State

Prior to the French Revolution of 1789 — since the days of the conversion of Clovis I to Christianity in 508 AD — Catholicism had been the state religion of France, and closely identified with the Ancien Régime.

[4][5] After the 16 May 1877 crisis and the victory of the Republicans at the following elections, various draft laws requesting the suppression of the Concordat of 1801 were deposed, starting with the 31 July 1879 proposition of Charles Boysset.

[19] In 1903, while former Catholic seminarian Émile Combes was minister, a commission was selected to draft a bill that would establish a comprehensive separation between the state and the churches.

[25] Other articles of the law included the prohibition of affixing religious signs on public buildings, and laying down that the Republic no longer names French archbishops or bishops.

[34] In 1908, the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Penitentiary ruled that all Deputies and Senators who had voted in favour of the law were latae sententiae excommunicated.

[25] These laymen associations created under the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State were independent legal entities having rights and responsibilities in the eyes of the law in all matters appertaining to money and properties formerly owned in France by organized religions: churches and sacred edifices, ecclesiastical property, real and personal; the residences of the bishops and priests; and the seminaries.

These laymen associations were also authorized by the law to act as administrators of church property, regulate and collect the alms and the legacies destined for religious worship.

[30][42] The Affaire Des Fiches produced a considerable backlash, after it was discovered that the Combes government worked with Masonic lodges to create a secret surveillance of all army officers to make sure devout Catholics would not be promoted.

[44] With the exception of the historically anomalous Alsace-Lorraine,[29] followers of Islam and other religions more recently implanted in France instead have to build and maintain religious facilities at their own expense.

[45] This was one of the controversial arguments used by Nicolas Sarkozy, when he was Minister of Interior, in favour of funding other cultural centers than those of Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism.