In November of heady 1793, a ceremony honouring the Goddesses of Reason and Liberty was held in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The carnivalesque ceremony admirably reflected what bliss it was to be alive in that dawn of reason and liberty, and the proud, parodic impiety with which the people embraced their new freedoms - and their new ethos. There was indeed much reason to celebrate at this moment in European history, and among its many achievements, one of the crowning glories (so to speak) of the French Revolution was establishing the separation of church and state as a principle of political freedom in France.

But the separation of church and state has never meant in France what it has meant in America (which had recently undergone its own revolution) and other modern democracies. In France, that is, it is not invoked to promote freedom of religion, but rather freedom from religion. This fundamentally exclusive principle is founded on the belief that the state of (human) nature is free from religion. Consequently, a neutral educational space for the free exercise and growth of little Emile and Amelie is naturally one in which they - and not only their classrooms - are free from the artificial accoutrements of theology. In France, that is, the separation of church and state is systematically conflated with the separation of church and citizen. And, as the ceremony involving the Goddess of Reason suggests, there is a damning similarity between the French ‘secular’ state and the ‘church’ from which it officially separated in 1905. That is, the contemporary French state exploits the law both in the exclusive, normalising promotion of its own positive claims for ‘natural’ truth, and in the representation of competing claims as negative corruption – forbidden apples in the garden of education.

The pernicious absurdity of this irrational ideology is not limited to the poor timing and gross cultural insensitivity of the ban on wearing most religious symbols in schools which was recently passed in the French parliament. People who have encountered totalitarian religious oppression in history have a good eye for its own portents and symbols, and know how to cope peacefully with leaders who will not go as far as Stalin or Mao in their pursuit of engineering a ‘secular’ people. After all, being sent home from school hardly compares with being sent to Siberia.

The establishment of a ‘natural’, ‘rational’ state in France following the 1789 revolution ultimately transformed itself into the state from which we learned the meaning of Terrorism. This, of course, was not an inevitable consequence of the overthrow of the monarchy and of exclusive established religion, and both achievements contributed positively to our contemporary liberal principles of universal human rights. But it should remind us there is no guarantee, even when the rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity is most fervent, that the state – any state – will not transform itself into an instrument of oppression in the exclusive pursuit of a particular world view. The ban on religious apparel (with the significant exception of small Christian crosses) in French schools represents a thinly-veiled attack on what the head scarf represents, but, symbolically, it is also a ban on symbols of culture and belief which do not coincide with those promoted by the French state. The disturbing banishment of ‘French’ fries from American cafeterias looks timid in comparison with this kind of parliamentary sartorial edict. One wonders how the French parliament would react if another country were to ban the beret.