Too Religious to Protest? Contested Thresholds of Catholic and Muslim “Intransigence” in the French Public Sphere

Abstract

This article examines French Catholics’ recruitment, organization, and policing of Muslim participants in the 2012 to 2013 anti-same-sex-marriage protests La Manif Pour Tous. It argues that French Catholics are alert to forms of public participation which suggest religious “intransigence” (strict religious observance) and can be said to transgress the secular character of the public sphere. Instead, they craft a public presence that can be interpreted as secular, or “liberally” religious-and-secular, without passing the implicit threshold of intransigence. But French Catholics’ efforts to police Muslims’ and their own public visibility reveal the subjectivity and impermanence of the thresholds that are held as proof of religious intransigence. This article contributes ethnographic evidence to the historical and sociological investigation of “liberal” versus “intransigent” forms of French Catholicism and advances the anthropological study of the inequalities and privileges of Muslim and Catholic representation in secular French politics.

Introduction

Same-sex marriage has been legal in France since May 2013. Rather than drafting new legislation focused on same-sex couples and their rights, the French government abolished the prerequisite of sexual alterity, which was intrinsic to the existing marriage law. This allowed “Marriage For All” (le mariage pour tous). In the months leading up to May 2013, large-scale street marches took place in resistance to this proposed legal transition, responding to the bill’s claims of universalism—marriage for all—by coordinating its detractors into an all-inclusive opposition: La Manif Pour Tous, the “Demonstration for All.”

Throughout the autumn of 2012 and the spring of 2013, the successive demonstrations of La Manif Pour Tous captured the attention of national and international news media through their vehemence, duration, and sheer numerical size, as hundreds of thousands of protesters converged on Paris from across France. Many will remember the televised coverage of the protests: the organizers of La Manif Pour Tous chose an attention-catching gendered color scheme of pale pink and light blue, uniting the protesters into a homogeneous tide whose flags and sweatshirts bore La Manif’s logo, a cartoon family with one father, one mother, one son, and one daughter. This iconography was carefully curated by Manif leaders to signal that their resistance was directed, not against same-sex unions per se, but against the possibility of same-sex parenthood. Indeed, by folding same-sex unions into the pre-existing marriage law, the “Marriage for All” reform would de facto grant access to adoption and reproductive technologies to same-sex couples. To insist on the object and cause of their resistance, Manif leaders distributed placards with slogans such as: “Dad + Mum: nothing better for a child!”; “All born from a man and a woman”; “One Dad, one Mum, don’t lie to children”; and finally, “Dad, Mum, and the kids: it’s natural.” ¹ By stating so conspicuously that their refusal of the reform was motivated by a “universal,” “natural” conception of the family, Manif leaders were also implicitly signaling that theirs was a scrupulously secular protest. Back in 1998 to 1999, the “Civil Solidarity Pact” bill granting same-sex couples access to civil union (Pacte Civil de Solidarité [PACS]) had been resisted in religious terms, through the constitution of a multidenominational Front de la Foi, or “united front of faith.” More than 20 years later, amid ongoing controversy concerning the place of religion in secular France—the 2003 to 2004 “Veil Affair” culminating in the ban of headscarves and “ostentatious” religious signs from schools, the more recent 2010 to 2011 debate over the ban of full-face coverings including burqas and niqābs in the public sphere—the resistance to “Marriage for All” did not follow this precedent: the Manif Pour Tous released a manifesto stating that their protest was aconfessional, and independent from all religious hierarchies. Rejecting same-sex marriage in the name of religious morals might be considered legitimate in other Euro-American countries, but it was now anathema in the secular public sphere of the French Republic (cf. Fassin, 2016, p. 175; Robcis, 2013).

But the French liberal press, and the government, instead referred to the protest as overarchingly Catholic. Media coverage judged that the protest’s “apolitical and aconfessional independence” was an “illusion” behind which were “omnipresent Catholic networks” (Mouillard & Hullot-Guiot, 2013). Some went so far as to claim that the entire protest had been “orchestrated by the Church” (Observatoire du Journalisme [OJIM], 2013). This was a fair assessment in many ways: the majority of demonstrators were Catholic, and the organizers of the protest were, for the most part, members of well-known Catholic associations and charities, many of which had spearheaded the anti-PACS protests of the late-1990s. But external commentators’ forceful labeling of the Manif as “Catholic” obscured two key features. On the one hand, it diverted the public gaze away from the sociocultural, religious, and political diversity of the participants who had rejoined this “Demonstration For All”—notably, the presence of Muslim, Jewish, and Evangelical associations was erased from sight (Raison du Cleuziou, 2019, p. 209). On the other hand, it preemptively undercut any possibility of engaging with La Manif Pour Tous on secular terms, despite its organizers’ efforts to conduct their protest with reference to “universal” ² or “natural” conceptions of the family, eschewing any mention of religious doctrine—Catholic or otherwise.

In this paper, I aim to address both of these blind-spots by engaging ethnographically with the narratives memories of French Catholics who not only participated in La Manif Pour Tous, but actively recruited French Muslims to join in the demonstrations, and attempted to corral these Muslim allies’ public presence into what they saw as the “proper” forms of secular political participation “for all.” In other words, the French Catholic interlocutors whose Manif memories I explore here negotiated the religiosity or secularity of the demonstration on two fronts: on the one hand, when seeking to swell the number of protesters, they specifically targeted and recruited a religious community, on the expectation that Muslims might, like Catholics, feel particularly invested in “defending the family.” On the other hand, during the protest itself, they sought to avoid being portrayed as religious actors, and they attempted to ensure that their newfound Muslim allies would, like themselves, insist on the secularity of their cause—“the family”—and its legitimacy in the public sphere of French laïcité (cf. Asad, 2006; Bowen, 2007). This paper, therefore, addresses the peculiar secular-and-religious character of Manif Pour Tous protesters as both an ethnographic puzzle and a theoretical one. Ethnographically, I ask: how did Catholic demonstrators understand their opposition to the bill as other-than or more-than-religious, and curate their demonstration so that it might fit the secular mandates of the French public sphere, such as they understood them? And theoretically, I ask: what conception of religiosity and secularity rendered this flexible negotiation possible at all? Rather than focusing directly on the religious-and-secular subjectivity that my French Catholic interlocutors tried to sustain, I suggest that the answer to both questions is more easily obtained by considering the subjectivity that my interlocutors were trying to avoid—the hypothetical figure of the strictly religious subject, who may straightforwardly be considered “matter out of place” in the secular public sphere. Drawing conceptually on the work of French sociologists of religion (Frölich, 2002), I call this strictly religious figure the “intransigent” Muslim or Catholic. I argue that my French Catholic interlocutors’ participation in the public sphere in 2012 to 2013 was predicated on not crossing the intangible threshold which would see them emerge as unambiguously “intransigent” religious actors.

I explore this hypothetical “intransigent” religious subject through the lens of Catholic Manif protesters’ interactions with their Muslim counterparts, whom they ultimately castigated for behaving too religiously for the secular political arena of the demonstration—much as the wider TV and press coverage, by labeling La Manif Pour Tous as overarchingly “Catholic,” implicitly framed it as too religious also. This paper, therefore, rejoins the ever-growing body of anthropological literature which engages with forms of public religiosity and religious publicity (Casanova, 1994; Engelke, 2013), but it does so by considering the perspective of French political actors for whom religious visibility—being recognized as Catholic or Muslims subjects—was felt to be problematic and undesirable. Ethnographic engagements with the lives of French Muslims have already shed considerable light on the complex negotiations of religious, cultural, gendered, sexual, and racial identity which are undertaken by—and imposed upon—Muslim subjects as they endeavor to construct and inhabit identities as visibly pious French citizens (Asad, 2006; Bowen, 2007; Fernando, 2014; Iteanu, 2013). By contrast, very little attention, if any, has been devoted to the ways in which French Catholics conceive of their own identities as French citizens and religious subjects. Indeed, French Catholicism has so far primarily been studied in terms of its ability to “disappear”: anthropologist Elayne Oliphant (2019) has convincingly shown that the Catholic Church exists in the “background” of French public consciousness, and is able, at times, to reclaim a position of public visibility by narrating its art and architecture as national cultural heritage, thereby reappearing as a secular institution rather than a religious one (2015). At the level of the Church as an institution, Oliphant (2021) argues that flexible (in)visibility is a privilege: other faiths—Muslims in particular—do not share the Catholic Church’s ability to negotiate their own public presence. Here, I aim to open a related but differently-scaled investigation into the contested visibility, not of the Church, but of Catholic subjects, who resist and resent the mainstream press’s categorical labeling of La Manif Pour Tous as “Catholic”—even as they criticize Muslim protesters in turn for being “overly visible” as religious subjects during their political opposition to same-sex marriage.

In exploring the modalities of my French Catholic interlocutors’ reflections about public visibility during La Manif Pour Tous, I draw particular inspiration from the work of Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando (2015). They warn that, by characterizing interlocutors as “everyday” religious subjects, anthropologists tacitly construct as a negative image the figure of “extraordinary” pious subjects—and may unintentionally cast ultra-orthodox interlocutors as less “real” than their “ordinary” counterparts. Their critique is an ethical and conceptual one, but I suggest that it can also be repurposed as an ethnographic prompt: in our various fieldsites, do our religious interlocutors themselves construct such images of extraordinary pious subjectivity? And if they do, what roles do these hypothetical extraordinary figures play in our interlocutors’ positioning as religious subjects, particularly in secular spheres? Here, just as Susan Harding (2000) followed her American born-again Christian interlocutors’ self-definition as “fundamentalists,” I grant heuristic and “epistemological status” to the “native voice” (Trouillot, 2003, p. 129) by drawing on the binary distinction between “Catholic intransigence” and “Catholic liberalism” which has been employed by French Catholics since the Revolution of 1789. It has since become a conceptual staple of French historians and sociologists of religion, who contrast “intransigent” Catholics’ scrupulous religious observance and rejection of modernity, with “liberal” Catholics’ efforts to conciliate their faith with modern ideas (Donegani, 1993; Poulat, 1986). Crucially, the threshold between religious liberalism and intransigence has been discursively assessed, by French Catholics themselves, with reference to a range of criteria according to eras and contexts: “liberals” and “intransigents” are both moving targets, whether they use those terms to define themselves, or to critique one another. La Manif Pour Tous is one such era or context: I now turn to the ways in which French Catholic demonstrators presented themselves—and their Muslim allies—in secular terms as “citizens,” and attempted to avoid discursive missteps which would establish them categorically in the public eye as not-secular, strict religious observers.

“I’m a Citizen, So I Believe in the Family”: Conservative Morality, Religious Doctrine, and a Citizen’s Duty

April 2017: Tension is rising throughout France as the presidential election approaches, which will determine who will succeed Socialist President François Hollande. President Hollande is particularly known for having spearheaded the legalization of same-sex marriage, a topic which returns to the fore as a polarizing theme in 2017. Indeed, although “Marriage for All” was enshrined into law on May 17, 2013, the government of the time backtracked on its initial plans of allowing reproductive technologies to lesbian couples (Béraud & Portier, 2015, p. 67). Several of the presidential candidates are now promising to widen access to medically-assisted procreation, and possibly allow surrogacy. Others instead guarantee to enshrine biological fertility and procreation as the only legal modes of filiation, or even to revoke the “Marriage for All” reform outright. Four years after La Manif Pour Tous, therefore, its legacy is kept alive in the constitution of electoral blocks. I have been undertaking ethnographic fieldwork in Lyon—the second-largest metropolis in France—for a few months and many of my interlocutors are invested in campaigning for right-wing candidates who have taken position against any expansion of reproductive rights.

Pierre-Marie Delorme ³ is one of my interlocutors: in his late-30s, he is one of three brothers from an upper-class, conservative Lyonnais Catholic family. Amid the renewed political fervor of 2017—driving to and from election rallies, for instance—Pierre-Marie, his younger brother Thomas, and their extended family and friends, reminisce about La Manif Pour Tous 4 years previously. They insist that my ethnographic fieldnotes should count the Delorme brothers among the organizers of La Manif, and that I should treat their recollections not as the subjective memories of individual demonstrators, but as objective synopses of the protest. Indeed, Thomas Delorme had served as the personal assistant of one of the leaders ⁴ of La Manif throughout 2012 to 2013, and helped her lay the groundwork of the protest’s rhetoric surrounding the “defense of the family.” Pierre-Marie Delorme, for his part, had taken the initiative of contacting Muslim associations in Paris and in Lyon, in order to convince them to join in successive local and nationwide street demonstrations. Therein lies the ethnographic focus of this article: Pierre-Marie Delorme’s efforts to “mobilise the Muslims” (in his words), seen through the retrospective filter of his own and his family’s efforts to produce authoritative accounts of La Manif Pour Tous.

In this section, I explore Pierre-Marie’s account of the ways in which he persuaded Muslim communities to participate in La Manif. I dwell on the layered registers of justification that he employs, interweaving conservative morality, implicit references to religious doctrine, and calls to the duties of French citizenship. Accounts of Catholic participations in French political debates in past decades (McCaffrey, 2005, pp. 19–28) have already highlighted that they rarely employ explicit references to religious doctrine, but instead draw on the language of universalism and public duty. ⁵ However, there has been a tendency to dismiss this discursive positioning as a “strategy” (Béraud & Portier, 2015, p. 64) or a “rhetorical cloak” (Béraud & Portier, 2015, p. 69); implying that religious identities and motivations are fundamentally incompatible with the identities and motivations of “citizens,” which they nonetheless mimic so as to “satisf[y] the expectations of public reason” (Béraud & Portier, 2015, p. 64). Here, rather than treating Pierre-Marie’s self-definition as “a citizen” as a smokescreen for truer religious motivations, I attempt to parse the ways in which diverse, interwoven, but equally genuine sources of motivation are revealed in his attempts to recruit Muslim protesters.

When explaining his engagement in La Manif Pour Tous in 2012 to 2013 and his continued political activism in 2017, Pierre-Marie is insistent: he may be a Catholic, he acknowledges immediately, but his political endeavors surrounding the family are “a matter of citizenship.” “I am engaged in the polis,” Pierre-Marie explains,

I’m a citizen, so I believe in the value of the family. I think family is the bedrock of society, and that if we preserve this bedrock and this family—the nuclear family [la cellule familiale]—then we will manage to have coherent societies. In fact the nuclear family is the first society—there you have it. [. . .] I tried to mobilise the Muslims, because they understand what we mean by this basis of the family.

At this introductory stage of Pierre-Marie’s account, two layers of justification flow into one another: one is a moral stance on the foundations of social order, and the other is a political claim to the duties of citizenship, while religious motivations are only hinted at. Pierre-Marie alludes to a particular vision of the nuclear family as the most basic order of society; a viewpoint which he claims “we” share with Muslims—and implicitly, a viewpoint which pits Pierre-Marie and his Muslim allies against the secular government proposing “Marriage for All.” It is tempting to read in his words an allusion to the Catholic doctrine of “natural law,” which sets out a theological stance on sexual alterity, the order of the nuclear family, and the order of society (cf. Fassin, 2016, p. 181; Robcis, 2015, pp. 920ff). In the decades since the decriminalization of birth control (1967) and of homosexuality in France (1982), Catholic actors have often attempted to ensure that legal reforms remain in line with “natural law” (Béraud & Portier, 2015, pp. 57ff). And yet, when Pierre-Marie states that he “believes in the value of the family,” he neither references natural law nor any other form of religious doctrine: instead, he claims to do so “as a citizen.” The seeming ambiguity of these multiple sources of motivation can be clarified further by exploring how—and not only why—Pierre-Marie proceeded in his recruitment of Muslim protesters.

Pierre-Marie first contacted a Muslim association called “Children of the Republic,” ⁶ a nationwide collective founded in the early-2010s and which immediately drew attention from mainstream media for organizing public talks and colloquia advocating a “patriotic Islam.” Calling on French Muslims to value their Frenchness over any other national or cultural allegiances, the intellectuals-cum-activists leading “Children of the Republic” are also known for cultivating ties to sovereignist political movements, including on the far-Right. It is significant already that, when seeking Muslim allies for the protest, Pierre-Marie initially reached out to this particular association of self-consciously patriotic Muslim citizens. While “Children of the Republic” had no particular affiliation to the mosques in Lyon, they were able to perform introductions between Pierre-Marie and the local Muslim communities. Alongside leaders of “Children of the Republic,” Pierre-Marie began regularly visiting Lyonnais mosques, joining in their communal Friday meals and discussing the still-nacent Manif. Pierre-Marie admits easily that he did not have many Muslim acquaintances beforehand: he considers that he “truly discovered the Muslims [les musulmans]” at this stage. He does not dwell on the possible distinctions or divides which might have been present within the communities he encountered, or between these communities and the openly-political “Children of the Republic.” What Pierre-Marie insists on, however, is his surprise when he heard that “the Muslims” (in other words, the particular communities he met) had thus far paid little attention to the news that same-sex marriage might soon be legalized.

“The Muslims,” Pierre-Marie recalls, “lumped together gay marriage and alcohol: it’s not their problem, they just abstain.” Put differently, the pious Muslims Pierre-Marie encountered considered that this law would have little to no impact on their own lives, which would continue to be guided by religious strictures: pious Muslims would not partake of the new possibility for same-sex marriage, just as they abstained from alcohol consumption regardless of its legality. But Pierre-Marie was shocked by this stance, repeating during each meeting: “If these were the only stakes, Catholics wouldn’t be in the streets!.” ⁷ In interfaith contexts, then, Pierre-Marie not only acknowledged his own Catholicism, but mobilized it to argue that the stakes of the protest went beyond personal piety, and beyond religious groups’ self-referential ability to constrain same-sex partnerships within their own communities. Instead, Pierre-Marie convinced his Muslim interlocutors to join in La Manif by arguing that all families—not only same-sex families—would be affected by the legal transition. He did so by circulating home-printed documents (drafted centrally by Manif leaders, with whom Pierre-Marie’s brother Thomas was working in Paris), which illustrated what a marriage certificate and birth certificate might come to look like once the “Marriage for All” law was entrenched. These documents, copied from genuine certificates, had been Photoshopped to remove mentions of sexual alterity: instead of “wife” and “husband,” the marriage certificate now read “spouse 1” and “spouse 2,” while the birth certificate read “parent 1” and “parent 2” in lieu of “mother” and “father.”

The point, Pierre-Marie argued, was not to approve or disapprove of same-sex unions in moral terms—in his view, this was a private matter for each protester to ponder. The issue must instead be treated as a keenly public one, with ramifications for all families, the “bedrock of society.” Indeed, the notion that the nuclear family is the core unit of society is not only a feature of Catholic natural law; it is also a longstanding principle of French political philosophy:

Both the 1804 Napoleonic Code and the 1939 Family Code, the foundational texts for French civil law and for family policy, [. . .] set up the family as the best unit to organize solidarity and build political consensus, the most universal and most abstractable mode of social representation, and the purest expression of the general will. Both documents insist on the idea that the family is never simply private: as the foundation of the social order, it is intimately connected to the public. (Robcis, 2013, p. 4)

Drawing on this political-philosophical conception of the social order, Pierre-Marie, his Catholic family and friends, and the Muslim leaders of “Children of the Republic,” advocated the stance that same-sex unions were acceptable in public and legal terms so long as they remained distinct in law from heterosexual marriage. This had been the case in France since 1999: same-sex couples could contract a Civil Solidarity Pact (PACS), which

[. . .] essentially encompassed the same rights and benefits as marriage, except for two: filiation and nationality. Unlike married couples, PACS contractors could neither acquire French citizenship nor have access to adoption and medically assisted procreation. (Robcis, 2013, p. 262)

The creation of the PACS in 1999 had allowed same-sex unions but re-entrenched the legal definition of “marriage” and “the family” in solely heterosexual terms. But, as Pierre-Marie explained to his Muslim audiences in 2012 to 2013, the “Marriage for All” reform would drastically transform the legal terms of all marriages, as well as all records of filiation.

His narrative illustrates the argumentative style employed by the vast majority of my conservative French Catholic interlocutors, who, when explaining their motivations for protesting same-sex marriage, immediately shift the debate from a personal scope (“does this matter to me?”) to a much broader scale of abstract philosophical and political reflection. Same-sex marriage is a “Trojan horse,” for Pierre-Marie, or the “thin end of the wedge”: what is at stake, more profoundly than same-sex marriage itself, is nothing less than the symbolic order of human society. Protesting same-sex marriage is therefore “a matter of citizenship” in several respects, Pierre-Marie explained to me 4 years after holding the same discourse to his Muslim audiences: most obviously, it is an instance of democratic political opposition, but more fundamentally, it is an effort to control the reproductive capacities of the national community, and thereby to protect the “bounded integrity” of the French Republic (cf. Franklin & McKinnon, 2001, p. 19).

Pierre-Marie’s efforts to convince Muslim audiences to join the anti-same-sex-marriage protests of 2012 to 2013 both confirm a trope highlighted elsewhere in the literature, and offer a corrective to its usual analysis. The fact that Catholic organizers and spokespersons for La Manif Pour Tous prioritized references to universalism and abstract legal principles in their public discourses has been justified as a “rhetorical cloak” (Béraud & Portier, 2015, p. 69) designed to hide underlying religious beliefs and “satisf[y] the expectations of public reason” (Béraud & Portier, 2015, p. 64). This is a compelling argument in the secular, if not outright anticlerical, context of the French public sphere. But here Pierre-Marie’s dialogues were not conducted in the public eye, and they were not crafted with secular audiences in mind: rather, he was addressing religious communities whose baseline stance was to rely on religious strictures in matters of morality and family life. In such a context, he might have foregrounded religious doctrine: instead, the mindset that he attempted to foster among his Muslim interlocutors was one of political philosophy, even as he acknowledged its reliance on a particular (but nominally “universal”) conception of the family which coincides both with conservative morals and with his own religious tradition. Rather than viewing French Catholics’ political discourses as “cloaks,” then, I suggest that we take them seriously—and focus on examining the ways in which multiple orders of moral, religious, and political justification are interwoven in these discourses, sometimes flowing seamlessly from one to another (as in the case of Pierre-Marie, who did not need to unpack his own arguments into distinct religious and non-religious strands), and at other times requiring more effort to reconcile seemingly disparate or contradictory views. As historian Camille Robcis (2015), sociologist Céline Béraud and political scientist Philippe Portier (2015), and sociologist Éric Fassin (2016) have all shown, Manif rhetoric concerning the “universal” or “natural” family was an aggregate of many traditions of thought—that Catholic (sexual) doctrine could, in this instance, coincide with various secular and “universalist” narratives of citizenship, Republican social order, or “biological” sexual alterity and reproduction, can be analyzed both as a manifestation of Catholicism’s plasticity of thought (cf., e.g., Muehlebach, 2009), and as a privileged affordance when it comes to inhabiting the public sphere (cf. Oliphant, 2021).

“Mobilizing the Muslims”: Interfaith Comparisons and Republican Interfaces

When Pierre-Marie describes his 2012 to 2013 efforts to “mobilise the Muslims,” he occasionally phrases them as an endeavor to “make them see the bigger picture, what really matters.” His tone when relating these meetings is unselfconsciously patronizing:

[. . .] they understand what we mean by this basis of the family, except they’re more violent about it. So first, we had to do some work against homophobia, because contrary to us, they . . . Well, the Catholic Church has a coherent stance against homophobia, I mean, acknowledging and including homosexuals ⁸ , but the Muslims . . . Anyway once we managed to do that, then we did some work to get them to accompany us on those big demonstrations. And by the way, I told them, you did more for your integration as French citizens in 6 months of Manif, than in 15 years of joining left-wing anti-racism associations that basically typecast you, really.

Through the lens of Pierre-Marie’s continued narrative, this section explores the ways in which conservative bourgeois Catholics can discursively frame their own place in France with reference both to other religious populations and to the Republic. Here, two aspects of Pierre-Marie’s positioning vis-à-vis French Muslims prove striking. First, Pierre-Marie’s dismissive attitude toward his own Muslim contacts reproduces the critiques formulated by secular political commentators against La Manif Pour Tous overall, namely that protesters are problematically homophobic, that this homophobia is entrenched in their religious doctrine and institutions, and finally that the community under discussion inadequately satisfies the requirements of secular political participation, and by extension of French citizenship. But when critiquing the alleged homophobia of his Muslim contacts, Pierre-Marie choses to do so from the standpoint of Catholicism—a rare explicit mention of the Church. When suggesting “coherent” ways of combating homophobia, it is to the Catholic Church that Pierre-Marie claims affiliation, rather than to secular, humanist, or human-rights discourses. When he tries to encourage an “acknowledging and inclusive” stance toward LGBT+ persons, it is in the image of the Catholic Church (as he himself sees it) that he tries to mold his Muslim contacts.

The second striking point proceeds directly from the first. Even as he highlights his Muslim contacts’ alleged flaws, Pierre-Marie positions himself and French Catholics as intermediaries between Muslims and the Republic, capable of teaching the former how to fully integrate into the latter. The anthropology of France has conclusively unveiled the neocolonial undertones of ongoing public debates which continuously reassert the marginal place of Muslims in the Republic (Asad, 2006; Bowen, 2007; Fernando, 2014; Iteanu, 2013). Pierre-Marie rather transparently subscribes to the already well-documented view that French Muslims remain an “internal Other”; but his narrative nonetheless offers an unprecedented addition to the ethnographic record insofar as he brings French Catholics into the conversation, positing their role in a triangular relationship vis-à-vis French Muslims on the one hand, and the French Republic on the other. In preparation for the 2012 to 2013 street demonstrations, Pierre-Marie felt compelled to “educate” Muslims (cf. Iteanu, 2013) in a variety of ways—about “violence,” about homophobia, about “integration as citizens” through the practice of street demonstrations. Indeed, “integration” is a central concern in French political philosophy: new citizens such as children and foreigners can and must assimilate into the body politic of Republican civic nationalism.

It is worth pausing here for a rapid summary of what is entailed in the political philosophy of “French Republicanism,” which rejoins the earlier discussion of the abstract terms which have, for centuries, underpinned legal definitions of the family and French social order. Such abstract philosophical notions are constitutive of French political philosophy and public discourse as a whole (Bowen, 2007). The “French model” ⁹ of Republicanism, le républicanisme, is a commitment to prioritize abstract universalism and refuse any legitimation of empirical internal divisions, such as class interests, identity politics, or religious communalism:

To be able to speak and govern in the name of the general interest, of everyone, [is] the guarantee of equality before the law and [preserves] the unity, cohesion, and integration of the French nation. (Robcis, 2013, p. 7)

In recent decades, this nominal rejection of internal particularisms, superseded in theory by the “general interest” of the French people, has played a central role in public debates both about same-sex marriage and about the rising visibility of religious communities in the public sphere. Since the 1980s, French proponents and opponents of same-sex civil unions have all articulated their views in terms of Republicanism: for some, same-sex unions were

[. . .] deemed anti-republican because they were perceived to be catering to the particular—and hence nonuniversal—interests of homosexuals. They were [. . .] communitarian, the opposite of republican. (Robcis, 2013)

Others argued that the legalization of same-sex unions was “quintessentially universalist, [because] it refused to distinguish homosexual from heterosexual” (Robcis, 2013, p. 241; cf. McCaffrey, 2005, pp. 15ff). Republican narratives have proved equally ubiquitous in debates concerning religion (Bowen, 2007, pp. 11–13). The French form of state secularism, la laïcité, was entrenched in law in 1905: rather than permitting religious pluralism outright (which would amount to legally recognizing internal divisions within the national community), la laïcité nominally removes religion to the private domain, in order for the public sphere to remain putatively unified. “Religion divides, la République unites” (Salton, 2012, p. 139): such views underpinned the much-discussed 2004 “law of the veil” banning religious signs such as Islamic headscarves from schools, on the basis that they can be construed as forms of anti-Republican religious communalism (Asad, 2006).

Following the tradition of claiming the moral high ground in public debates through references to Republicanism, the very name of La Manif Pour Tous—“The Demonstration for All”—had, in the early Autumn of 2012, been chosen to index the “general interest.” Manif leaders’ incessant efforts to increase the number of protesters were driven by the goal of reaching the symbolic bar of a million demonstrators, in order to signal that their opposition to the law was representative of the whole French population’s. Pierre-Marie’s initiative of reaching out to Muslim associations was partly motivated by these numerical concerns; and proved successful beyond his hopes. Thomas Delorme, Pierre-Marie’s younger brother, offered an estimate:

My brother, with some Muslim friends, they created Les Musulmans Pour l’Enfance, “Muslims For Childhood.” With a nice logo, little kids in a crescent . . . I don’t know the numbers for sure, but they filled fifty-ish coaches, with Muslims who went up to Paris from Lyon for the demonstrations in March . . .

Fifty coaches of 50 seats each: Pierre-Marie and the leaders of “Children of the Republic” collaboratively recruited 2,500 “Muslims For Childhood” protesters in Lyon alone, and coordinated their travel to Paris on March 24, 2013 for the largest of the successive Manif demonstrations, rejoining a record-breaking 1.4 million protesters. ¹⁰

At this stage in Pierre-Marie’s narrative about his (successful) efforts to “mobilise the Muslims,” I want to draw out a new takeaway point. When Pierre-Marie positions himself as a Catholic in his own narrative, he is able to shift between discursively “siding with” his Muslim interlocutors against secular modernity, for instance on the basis of valuing “the family”; and discursively “siding with” the Republic against (his assessment of) religious “Others,” who must be guided into particular forms of civic integration. Moreover, the transition from one subject-position to the other seems rather seamless. In 2012 to 2013, Pierre-Marie’s self-conscious stance as a Republican ambassador vis-à-vis Muslim communities showcased the extent to which he, as an upper-class Catholic, could imagine himself as a fully-integrated member of the Republic—rather than a member of a bounded, “particularist” religious community. In fact, Pierre-Marie proposed his entire religious community, the French Catholic Church, as an exemplar of anti-homophobic advocacy and mastery of the civic codes of “big demonstrations.” Pierre-Marie’s confidence in his own legitimacy as a Republican subject was unwavering even as he prepared to protest the passing of a law. In his own view, his critique of the bill was operated from within the Republic: indeed, it is by protesting in the streets and claiming a stake in the government of the whole nation and its “general interest” that he considered his—and French Muslims’—duty to the Republic to be fulfilled, and their Republican integration re-affirmed.

“That Imam Shot Us in the Foot”: Religious Signs and Intransigent Subjects in the Secular Public Sphere

While Pierre-Marie had insisted on briefing his Lyon-based Muslim contacts before they joined La Manif Pour Tous, other non-Lyonnais Muslim protesters ultimately “tripped up” in an unforgivable manner, in Pierre-Marie’s view—as he puts it, they exposed “their” underlying anti-Republicanism, and threatened the public image of the entire protest. Pierre-Marie pinpoints this occurrence rather early on in the course of La Manif, in the Autumn of 2012, when representatives of the main religious communities in France released statements outlining their respective positions on the “Marriage for All” bill. The Catholic Permanent Episcopal Council and Episcopal Council for the Family, the Council of the Protestant Federation of France, the National Evangelical Council of France, and the Assembly of Orthodox Bishops of France, each made reference to “anthropological,” “psychological,” and “natural” arguments reiterating the “ontological complementarity of woman and man.” By contrast, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) ¹¹ based its protestations on “Islamic law, Koranic text and prophetic traditions” (Béraud & Portier, 2015, pp. 67–82). In Pierre-Marie’s cruder assessment, “that imam went and said they were against gay marriage because of the Shari’a and bam, shot us all in the foot.”

Interestingly—and here I take some distance from Pierre-Marie’s narrative—none of the news reports I have read from 2013, and none of the French-language academic analyses of La Manif published in later years (Brustier, 2014; Raison du Cleuziou, 2019), dwell at length on the statement by the CFCM. This episode went relatively unnoticed in the grand scheme of the protest, and hardly “shot [it] in the foot,” as Pierre-Marie alleges. In this sense, what is significant about the statement by the CFCM is not its (debatable) importance on the national public stage, but the way in which Pierre-Marie himself hones in on it as a critical strategic misstep. Pierre-Marie’s reaction is precisely the sort which has been analyzed as revealing that Catholics’ universalist arguments were a “strategy” all along, meticulously prepared to ensure an unimpeachable legitimacy to the demonstration in the secular, Republican public sphere (Béraud & Portier, 2015, p. 69). I have argued above that Catholics’ references to Republicanism and the duties of citizenship are more genuine than that; my exploration of Pierre-Marie’s rejection of the piety-driven statement of the CFCM, therefore, takes a different angle in this final section. Here, I question why Pierre-Marie turned a blind eye to other mentions of religious identities over the course of the protest, but reacted so strongly against this particular instance. I suggest that Pierre-Marie’s anger toward his Muslim counterparts reveals, like a negative image, his conception of public politics and political-religious subjectivities—which he never quite defines explicitly when discussing his own presence as a Catholic in the public sphere.

Anthropologists of France have long argued that religious visibility in the French public sphere highlights the points of friction in the public-private binary, a key element of the French notion of secularism or laïcité. Talal Asad (2006) has shown that although the secular Republic upholds “religious freedom” as a fundamental right, it nonetheless holds power over the exercise of religious activity within what it chooses to define as “public.” In this perspective, legal steps taken to remove “ostentatious religious signs” (signes religieux ostentatoires) from the public sphere (such as the 2004 “Veil Affair”) are but one case, among others, of the Republican readiness to restrict fundamental individual rights for the sake of the primacy of “public order” (Gervier, 2014). From a governmental standpoint, the question in such cases is whether the irruptive religious matter can be shifted back into the private sphere, in order to return the public sphere to its protected, universalist, Republican character. Asad (2006) makes the case that Islamic veils, insofar as they are wearables, have been considered “displaceable” religious signs in this way (p. 96).

Asad and many others (Bowen, 2007; Fernando, 2014) have pointed out that French governments have in recent decades been quite inconsistent, if not outright discriminatory, in their rejection of “religious signs”: while Islamic headscarves and, more recently, Islamic swimwear (burkinis) have been banned from a range of public spaces, “signs” of Catholicism such as nuns’ habits remain commonplace and accepted. In other words, if the anthropology of French Islam has framed its analysis in terms of religious “signs,” it is in part because in recent years, any discrete symbol of Islam has been at risk of causing controversy in the public sphere. By contrast, Catholic signifiers have been shown to merge into the “cultural background” (Oliphant, 2015, 2019). This is not to say that French Catholics can exhibit “ostentatious religious signs” in the public sphere with complete impunity, but rather that discrete signs of Catholicism tend not to trigger forceful displacements. To complement Asad’s (2006) argument about the variable discursive “recognitions” of religion in the French public sphere, I would suggest that while French Muslims have had to be mindful of the “signs” they exhibit, French Catholics rather focus on gauging the threshold of “ostentation.”

While French Catholics’ religious “thresholds” have not been explored in English-language academia, they have been the focus of attention by French historians and sociologists of religion. By examining the narratives of “liberalism” and “intransigence” which emerged in the 19th century among rival branches of French Catholicism, they have evidenced the internal heterogeneity of French Catholicism (Donegani, 1993) and attempted both positivist and heuristic definitions of its main factions and essences (cf. the works of Émile Poulat from the 1970s to the 1990s, e.g., Poulat, 1986). After the Revolution of 1789, they suggest, French Catholicism faced a contradictory “double demand” to both find ways to inhabit the new secular order of modernity and resist its gradual sociocultural slide away from the values of Christianity (Pelletier, 2019, pp. 279–280). This paradoxical impetus polarized “liberal” and “intransigent” French Catholics according to their progressivism or uncompromising scripturalism (Tincq, 2008, pp. 299ff):

[Intransigent Catholics are] those who scrupulously obey, or attempt to obey, the entire teaching and all the prescriptions of the Church, sole holder of the truth, and [liberal Catholics are] partisans of a conciliation with modern ideas, who wish to combine their faith with private morals leaving space for free will, notably in sexual matters. (Frölich, 2002, p. 8, my translation)

Historical analyses of this polarization are complicated first by the discursive proliferation of labels during successive debates—the labels of intransigents and intégristes (fundamentalists), in particular, are rarely self-proclaimed, but rather applied by analysts or critics to populations who self-define as “traditional,” or do not self-define at all but merely insist on their doctrinal observance (Frölich, 2002). This observance, in turn, has been complicated by the lack of fixity of the Catholic doctrine itself: a liberal/intransigent polarization also characterizes the equivocal guidance offered ex cathedra by Popes from the 1880s to the 1920s, with Pope Leo XIII (1884, 1892) recommending that French Catholics should inhabit the Republic and protect the interests of the Church “from the inside,” while Pope Pius X (1906a, 1906b, 1907) later advised that they should entirely reject the 1905 Republican “Law of Separation of Church and State.” Self-proclaimed French Catholic “progressives” of the 19th century, therefore, accepted the Republic, a stance they accompanied with economic liberalism—by contrast, early-20th-century “progressives” started engaging in increasingly social(ist) movements. Nineteenth-century “intransigents” were monarchists; while their early-20th-century counterparts no longer disputed the Republic but contested any hint of socialism in political and spiritual terms. While fierce tensions between liberal and intransigent French Catholics have followed a broad left/right binary, the observation that these categories index changing economic and political stances is widely acknowledged by historians—as well as by non-academic French Catholics who, since the 1970s, have stayed abreast of academic publications concerning their own lives and history.

By borrowing these terms here, I do not aim to make any claims about Pierre-Marie’s faith and pious practice, nor do I aim to strictly define the criteria of “Catholic intransigence” in 21st-century France. Rather, I aim to illuminate the ethnographic puzzle of Pierre-Marie’s conception of “proper” religious-slash-political participation in the public sphere through the lens of a longstanding and well-known binary with which he himself is familiar. A threshold-gauging attitude is visible in Pierre-Marie’s recollections of La Manif Pour Tous, but its exact limit never quite comes into focus in his references to Catholicism. As we have seen above, Pierre-Marie does not hide his own Catholicism when explaining his multiple sources of moral motivation—but he does not foreground doctrine, let alone as a “sole holder of the truth.” He is comfortable positing the Catholic Church as an intermediary between French Muslims and the public sphere, or as an exemplar for the “proper” way for a religious community to adapt to modern demands such as “acknowledging and including homosexuals”—but the majority of his considerations are secular legal ones. Similarly indeterminate religious-and-secular bodies abounded during La Manif Pour Tous, primary among whom was one of the figureheads of the protest, Thomas Delorme’s boss. A stereotype-defying “trendy Catholic” in her 50s (catho branchée, in her own words), she stood out from bourgeois Catholic women of her generation through her signature outfit of a miniskirt, leather jacket, and layered necklaces bearing a tangle of Catholic medals paired with rainbow bandanas to signify her attachment to the LGBT+ communities of Paris. In short, the Catholic subjects surrounding Pierre-Marie all appear as indeterminately “liberal” religious figures, precisely because they never appear to be only Catholic, or “uncompromisingly” so: they appear Catholic-and-universalist, Catholic-and-Republican, Catholic-and-citizen.

But Pierre-Marie’s gauge of the limits of “proper” political participation on the part of religious actors comes into clearer focus when he speaks of Muslim demonstrators. It seems that appearing in the public sphere explicitly as members of a religious community does not cross his limit-point for “proper” Republican protest—as attested by his own choice of the name “Muslims For Childhood” when coordinating Muslim cohorts in La Manif. In other words, the threshold at hand is not primarily concerned with identifying “religion in the public sphere,” so much as what proves “too religious” for the public sphere—a line that Pierre-Marie considers to have been crossed by the statement of the CFCM rejecting same-sex marriage on the basis of Shari’a law. Indeed, by calling attention to their faith-based motivations, the CFCM failed to show the expected support for a single, “natural” conception of the “universal” family—a common-ground Pierre-Marie imagined them to share with Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish protesters, but which could equally appeal to secular audiences due its “universalist” terms. Pierre-Marie was incensed because Muslim leaders explicitly cast their participation in the protest as a self-motivated one focused on the piety of French Muslims, rather than one concerned with the interests of the whole Republic. This prioritization of piety over the “general interest” is what prompted Pierre-Marie to label the CFCM’s statement “anti-Republican,” driven by particularistic and fundamentally anti-secular motives.

This, then, is the threshold of religious “intransigence” frowned upon by Pierre-Marie in the context of La Manif Pour Tous and of public political participation more widely. In Pierre-Marie’s view, the statement by the CFCM recast Muslim protesters—including his own recruits—as strictly not-secular, but rather wholly conforming to and defending a religious norm (cf. Fadil & Fernando, 2015, p. 69). By asserting that their refusal of same-sex marriage was driven by doctrine, with no reference to “universal” considerations, the CFCM foreclosed (in Pierre-Marie’s view) on his efforts to “educate” Muslim protesters, and conduct his own public presence, according to a multilayered set of motivations including religion but also a keen sense of civic duty. On the basis of his own religious experience—that of a faith whose practice can be kept private, and whose doctrine can be liberally entwined with or subsumed under secular traditions—and on the basis of his acquaintance with the liberally “patriotic” Muslims of “Children of the Republic,” Pierre-Marie could not condone another form of Muslim religiosity whose relationship with modern norms functioned otherwise. Attributing this censure solely to Pierre-Marie’s Catholicism would, however, be missing the point: the rejection of religious intransigence in secular politics is a Republican trait also, and if Pierre-Marie has a “privileged” access to the public sphere (cf. Oliphant, 2021), it is by virtue of his specifically liberal Catholicism—and his whiteness and socioeconomic background—which is grounded in more than a century of accommodation of the Republic and objection to intransigent forms of Catholicism.

Conclusion

In 2012 to 2013, by consistently referring to La Manif Pour Tous as a “Catholic protest,” mainstream secular French media were attempting to tap into a long history of considering religion as an eruption of particularist and divisive “private matter” into the Republican public sphere. Catholic protesters were aware of this and actively attempted to mitigate such narratives: distributing thousands of matching pale pink and light blue sweatshirts partially erased the visible sociocultural characteristics of demonstrators’ upper-class or conservative clothing. By removing such signs of particularism, protesters hoped that television broadcasts would not be able to sustain the narrative of a “Catholic protest,” for lack of visual support. But the media’s ongoing characterization of La Manif as “Catholic,” rendering visible the presence of religion in the secular public sphere, paradoxically obscured the protesters’ religious liberalism, which, whether self-reflective or not, accommodates the mandates of the Republic where its intransigent alternatives do not.

Where, then, were the “intransigent Catholics” in the months leading up to the “Marriage for All” bill? Neither Pierre-Marie nor his brother Thomas made explicit reference to them, which is why they have been held in abeyance so far. But fierce internal disagreements between Catholics occurred during this period. From the very beginning, Thomas Delorme’s boss, who spearheaded La Manif Pour Tous, refused to include the Catholic Institut Civitas under the umbrella of her Demonstration “for All.” Civitas describes itself as a “political movement” seeking to “promote and defend” the “Christian identity of France” (Civitas, n.d. a), and its website lists the “end of laïcité” as one of its key aims (Civitas, n.d. b). In 2013, Civitas ultimately ran their own demonstrations against what they called the “homofolie” of the “Marriage for All” bill, a pun on homophobia, homophilia, and “gay madness.” In other words, the leaders of La Manif not only curated the protest by encouraging demonstrators to wear matching sweatshirts erasing socioreligious signs, they also barred access to those anti-Republican Catholics who would, in any case, refuse such compromises. Not only do Catholic intransigents not have “privileged” access to the public sphere (cf. Oliphant, 2021), their liberal coreligionists undertake active gatekeeping to prevent conflations which might threaten their own political aspirations and public affordances. But the specter of intransigent Catholicism eventually arose within La Manif too: while Thomas Delorme’s boss supported same-sex civil unions so long as they did not threaten the so-called “natural family,” other Manif leaders broke away on March 24, 2013 to launch the Printemps français, a schismatic parallel protest refusing all forms of same-sex civil unions. In 2013, questions of family life were therefore consolidated as key litmus tests for contemporary Catholic liberalism and intransigeance, replacing or building onto ¹² the political-economic divergences which had characterized liberal/intransigent thresholds throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Disambiguating La Manif from its intransigent alternatives was a key project of Thomas Delorme’s boss; her eventual ousting from Manif leadership following internal disagreements rendered the protest’s official aconfessionalism and underlying liberal Catholicity even less legible to the press.

Throughout 2012 to 2013, Pierre-Marie, his family and friends, and my other French Catholic interlocutors were carrying out an emic version of a conceptual debate which has occupied much anthropological thought in recent years. What, they asked, makes a “secular” or a “religious” body (cf. Scheer et al., 2019)? How and why do we—“we” French political actors, but also “we” anthropologists—recognize or label them as such? How should we recognize and address the entanglement of secular and religious subjectivity within the lives and the very persons we encounter? As I have shown in this paper, my French Catholic interlocutors acknowledge interwoven religious, moral, and political motivations, which they find compatible insofar as they jointly enable universalist claims of protecting the “general interest.” It is on the basis of these abstract considerations, in line with Republican political philosophy, that upper-class French Catholics consider that they are capable of appearing in secular terms as “citizens” in the public sphere. Moreover, they argue that they should be allowed to do so without being “contradicted” by media commentators who take the abusive liberty—in their view—of referring to their private religious beliefs against their own wishes. In this paper, I have suggested that we anthropologists and social scientists will conduct more fine-grained analyses of such forms of public religious visibility if we too refrain from undercutting our interlocutors’ claims to civism by labeling their political discourses as nothing more than rhetorical “cloaks” (Béraud & Portier, 2015, p. 69). Visibility is certainly a key stake, and French Catholics are indubitably strategic in curating their presence in the public sphere—but my interlocutors’ commitment to civic duty is genuine even if their conception of the “general interest” does not, in fact, mobilize the “universal” support they desire.

In curating their presence as “citizens” in the public sphere, bourgeois French Catholics remain attuned to implicit, undefinable, but nonetheless spontaneously recognizable limits, which I here call thresholds of “intransigence.” French Catholics have long employed a sliding scale polarizing “liberal” and “intransigent” religious subjects; a seemingly-clear internal division that has nonetheless shifted according to myriad criteria over the past two centuries (Frölich, 2002; Gauchet, 1998). But intransigents and liberals are not only a binary—instead, I see them as two subject-positions on a scale which also includes “secular bodies.” In this sense, the figure of the liberal Catholic has long operated as a middle-man allowing French Catholics to imagine their own place within French modernity: a “secular religious subject” whose indeterminacy forestalls the strict separation between “secular” and “religious” bodies. By contrast, the “intransigent Catholic” is a strictly religious body—albeit one whose definition has been acknowledged to shift over time. This turns the figure of the intransigent Catholic into a moving target, dependent upon thresholds of intransigence: limits that are contingent to each era and context, but which, when reached, recognizably foreclose upon the possibility of interpreting a subject as anything other than strictly religious.

While my French Catholic interlocutors do not always comment on other Catholics’ breaches of these limits, they have no such compunctions regarding French Muslims—while they discursively align themselves with French Muslims against the secular government in some circumstances, they equally easily take up a privileged position as “Republican ambassadors” by pointing out what they see as civic deficiencies among this still-disenfranchised religious population. By critiquing what they interpret as “signs,” not of “religion” (cf. Asad, 2006), but of strict religious observance among French Muslims, my French Catholic interlocutors construct the nebulous image of extraordinary pious figures (cf. Fadil & Fernando, 2015) whose behavior they consider inappropriate not only for Muslims but also for Catholics and all other religious actors intending to participate in the Republican public sphere. Until this threshold of intransigence is breached, however, my Catholic interlocutors consider that the matter remains indeterminately, “liberally” religious-and-secular. So is the religious subject able to occupy public spaces: not as a secular body, but as a “Not Not-Secular” one (cf. Willerslev, 2004).