Today’s meeting is a major clarification exercise. It reveals the reality of the secular movement: it is a social and democratic movement, deeply committed to individual and collective freedoms and social rights; it is an anti-racist and profoundly international movement because its cause is universal: that of human freedom and equality for all. Implicitly, this reminder of the fundamentals also shows the extent of political betrayals on secular and republican issues in recent decades; the extent of the regression towards authoritarian chauvinism and subsidised ideologies, which are always state ideologies.
All these legislative betrayals under the Fifth Republic stem from a single precedent: the Debré Law of 1959, which established public funding for private Catholic education. The Debré Law was adopted despite opposition from all defenders of the secular Republic. It represents the money pact between the Church and Gaullist power, the pact that made all subsequent anti-secular regression possible.
The state and local authorities are now the main financiers of religious education, to the tune of 12 billion per year, according to the most reliable estimates – because, of course, these transfers are very difficult to track. It was by starting with schools that the Third Republic became secular, and it was also by starting with schools that the Fifth Republic lost its secularism.
The political confusion of recent years has not spared the issue of the repeal of the Debré Law. Defeatism sometimes seemed to be the order of the day: private education, it seemed, was too big to be absorbed. It was necessary to fight for a “better application of the Debré Law“, particularly in terms of controls. But the lack of control over Catholic schools is not a dysfunction of the Debré Law, it is at its heart!
At times, this defeatism even took the form of a superficial radicalism, “you can’t get more secular than me“, but without any strategic proposals, so that in the end, no prospect of breaking the deadlock emerged. The advocates of a certain supposedly uncompromising secularism thus found themselves holding the candle at dinners between the princes of the Church and those of a misnamed Republic. Noisy secularism at parties in town, but in daily work, organised impotence and ultimately complacency towards the Church: no one here eats that bread.
Thanks to the missteps of recent governments, the masks have come off and here too, clarification has come. A collective bringing together many organisations present or excused today has drawn up a plan to repeal the Debré Law, on the initiative of Libre Pensée.
This exit plan does not consist of getting lost in prophylactic measures that are supposed to lead one day to repeal: on the contrary, it takes repeal as its starting point and then rolls out the transitional provisions through which the public school system will grow in strength to accommodate almost all of the pupils currently enrolled in private schools, while offering solutions for current private education employees.
In other words, it is not a question of persecuting private education in order to reduce its size before repealing the law, but rather of repealing the law while giving ourselves the means to subsequently absorb the demographic weight of private education. These transitional provisions will last for six years. Starting with repeal also protects the law from a change in majority: if the Debré law is repealed and the exit is achieved through transitional provisions, a government allied with the Church would have to start from scratch and vote on the Debré law again to reverse the decision.
Placing the repeal at the end of the cycle, on the other hand, would compromise the entire project at the first sign of hesitation. There is no other path to freedom than immediate repeal. The Republic does not recognise or subsidise any religion: this also applies to diocesan associations and congregational schools. So, public funds for public schools, private funds for private schools, and long live the School of Freedom, the secular school!
