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Abstract
This article explores how questions of religion have impinged on or informed various dimensions of culture‐shaping policy in France. Firstly, it considers not only how religious references have been orchestrated in high‐level attempts to frame secular national identities, but also how such processes have assumed quasi‐religious forms and functions. Secondly, it analyses the changing place of religion in French educational curricula and recent contested endeavours to introduce it as a cultural ‘fact’ into those curricula. Thirdly, the article examines influential framings of art policies in their relation to religion. It considers the pivotal function of religious fragments and debris in Malraux’s vision of the imaginary museum and the use by Bourdieu of sustained religious metaphors to describe the sacralizing dynamics of secular art world. Finally, the article examines, in a long‐term perspective, the implicit and explicit cultural policies of religious bodies themselves in their attempts to act upon prevailing cultures.
Notes
1. On the imperative for social groups to work against their ‘entropic’ disintegration, see, for example, Debray (Citation1981, Citation1997). The same issue is treated in canonic sociological texts such as Durkheim ([Citation1912] Citation1976) and Berger ([1967] 1990) (the principal focus of both the latter is specifically the sociology of religions as a foundational socio‐symbolic question).
2. See, for example, Durkheim ([Citation1912] 1976) or, more recently, Debray ([Citation2003] 2007) (or even, in certain respects to be discussed below, Bourdieu [Citation1992] 1996). Rousseau’s notion of ‘civil religion’ ([1755 and 1762] Citation1994, pp. 158–168) has also recurrently been adapted to frame such perspectives (e.g. Bellah [Citation1975] 1992, Baubérot Citation2004, pp. 163–186).
3. Sarkozy’s orchestration of potent religious symbolism at the level of ‘national identity’ policy has been complex and deliberate, both during his period as minister of the interior and as president. He – with the help of his speech‐writers Henri Guiano and Emmanuelle Mignon – has extolled the virtues of Catholicism (symbolically at the Vatican’s Lateran Palace in Citation2007) as a force for social cohesion in France, and indeed quite explicitly as an integral part of France’s fundamental ‘culture’ (Sarkozy Citation2007). In so doing he self‐consciously transgressed certain enshrined principles of laicity (setting the figure of the priest, for example, above that of the republican primary school teacher). Sarkozy also set up in 2003, as ‘minister of the interior and religions’, a ‘French council for the Muslim religion’ designed to provide the state with an official interlocutor (a pragmatic move that is closer to the Napoleonic concordat model than to the post‐1905 separation of church and state). As president, he nonetheless maximized in his legislative programmes the rhetorical charge of images of extreme ‘Islamism’, such as the full‐length veil (the burqua), thereby retaining at the same time a necessary foil for the political projection of a self‐consciously lay national cultural identity.
4. This is, of course, not the only possible linkage of republican identity and religious tradition – see, for example, Bellah ([Citation1975] 1992).
5. For a particularly striking example, see Hunt’s analysis of revolutionary ‘Festivals of Reason’ ([Citation1984] 2004, pp. 60–66).
6. These celebrations could usefully be related to Raymond Williams’ category of ‘cultural policy as display’ as placed into contemporary debate and suggestively extrapolated by Jim McGuigan (see Williams Citation1984, McGuigan Citation2004, pp. 61–91). More generally, on the parallel construction in Europe since the eighteenth century of manifold overarching ‘national’ identities based on ‘cultural’ programmes, see Thiesse (Citation2001) or Hobsbawm ([Citation1990] 1992).
7. For an authoritative survey, see, for example, Prost (Citation1968).
8. For accounts of the developments synthesized in this paragraph, see Langlois (Citation2007) and Willaime (Citation2007).
9. I am setting aside here the question of Catholic schools in France, which currently educate some 17% of pupils. Although notionally private, nearly all such schools have operated after legislation introduced in 1959 under contract with the state.
10. See (Bourdieu Citation1968, Saint‐Martin Citation2007, pp. 140–142).
11. For an account of the circumstances surrounding the report, the report itself (Debray 2002) and its reception, see, for example, Ahearne (Citation2010, pp. 70–76).
12. On ‘inculturation’, see Roy (Citation2008, pp. 86–93).
13. On the wider contexts of such harnessing (or instrumentalization) of religious education for both national and European general cultural and inter‐cultural policy objectives, see, for example, Jackson (Citation2007).
14. For the status of such capitalized abstractions as ‘enchanted’ myths, and the disenchantment that decapitalized them through the twentieth century, see, for example, Gauchet ([Citation1998] 2005, pp. 38–39).
15. The term was originally coined by Derrida (Citation1993, p. 15). It is designed to echo ‘its near‐homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. [It is] a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving’ (Davis Citation2005, p. 373). On the reception of Malraux among art historians, see Tadié (Citation2004).
16. For a fuller development of these terms and the accompanying perspective, see Bourdieu ([Citation1992] 1996).
17. For a recent variant, see, for example, Self (Citation2010).
18. I am indebted to Jeremy Lane for this observation.
19. See de Léry ([1578] Citation1994) and Lévi‐Strauss ([1955] Citation1975, p. 85). Roy discusses the text in (Citation2008, pp. 70–73).
20. For a suggestive analysis of counter‐reformation artistic strategy within a ‘cultural policy’ framework, see Mulcahy (Citation2011, this issue); for an approach to the modern Catholic Church within such a framework, see Bennett (Citation2009, Citationforthcoming).
21. Tom Conley helpfully proposes the term ‘governance’ in his translation.
22. The term ‘exculturation’ was coined by Hervieu‐Léger (Citation2003, p. 97). She uses it to describe a general socio‐cultural process affecting the position of Catholicism within contemporary French society. I am using it here in a more voluntaristic or strategic sense.
23. I am indebted to Anita Kangas for the idea of ‘latent’ cultural policies.
