Established in the 2nd century in unbroken communion with the bishop of Rome, it was sometimes called the "eldest daughter of the church" (French: fille aînée de l'Église).

In 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, forming the political and religious foundations of Christendom in Europe and establishing in earnest the French government's long historical association with the Catholic Church.

Approximately 45,000 Catholic church buildings and chapels are spread out among 36,500 cities, towns, and villages in France, but a majority are no longer regularly used for mass.

In recent decades, France has emerged as a stronghold for the small but growing Traditionalist Catholic movement,[9] along with the United States, England and other English-speaking countries.

On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, forming the political and religious foundations of Christendom and establishing in earnest the French government's longstanding historical association with the Catholic Church.

[4] The Council of Clermont, a mixed synod of ecclesiastics and laymen led by Pope Urban II in November 1095 at Clermont-Ferrand triggered the First Crusade.

Following the Protestant Reformation, France was riven by sectarian conflict as the Huguenots and Catholics strove for supremacy in the Wars of Religion until the 1598 Edict of Nantes established a measure of religious toleration.

During the Reign of Terror, traditional Christian holidays were abolished and Catholic priests were brutally suppressed, locally through mass imprisonment and executions by drowning.

[4] Napoleon Bonaparte negotiated a reconciliation with the Church through the 1801 Concordat, whereby the State would subsidize Catholicism (recognized as the majority religion of the French), as well as Judaism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.

[14] After the 1814 Bourbon Restoration, the ultra-royalist government, headed by the comte de Villèle, passed the 1825 Anti-Sacrilege Act, which made stealing of consecrated Hosts punishable by death.

During the application of the 1905 law, prime minister Emile Combes, a member of the Radical-Socialist Party, tried to strictly enforce measures which some Catholics considered humiliating or blasphematory, leading to clashes between the Congregationists and the authorities.

Anti-clericalism slowly declined among the French left-wing throughout France in the twentieth century, while the question of religion and of freedom of thought seemed to have been resolved.

Thus, the draft laws presented by François Mitterrand's government in the early 1980s, concerning restrictions on the state funding of private (and in majority Catholic) schools, were countered by right-wing demonstrations headed by the then mayor of Paris, the Gaullist Jacques Chirac, who was to be his prime minister in 1986 and would succeed him in 1995 as president.

In the same way, the 2004 law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools, revived the controversy twenty years later, although the dividing lines also passed through each political side due to the complexity of the subject.

This state neutrality is conceived as a protection of religious minorities as well as the upholding of freedom of thought, which includes a right to agnosticism and atheism.

Only some minority traditionalist Catholic groups, such as the Society of St. Pius X, push for the return to the Ancien Régime or at least pre-separation situation, contending that France has forgotten its divine mission as a Christian country (an argument already upheld by the Ultras presenting the 1825 Anti-Sacrilege Act).