French secularism’s founding rule still governs its regulation of Muslim populations.

Evidence

Public schools at the end of the nineteenth century became a way in which the state schooled its citizens to take on their new role as secular citizens without conflicting loyalties. A significant amount of France’s imperial conquests took place at this time. ‘Anti-clerical schooling at home, unequal agreements with the Church, and imperial expansion abroad were the pillars on which laicité was established under the Third Republic.’ Asad advances the interesting argument that today in France the sixteenth-century political rule (that the religion of the ruler is the religion of the state) is still the operating principle, and what continues to be significant is ‘not the maintenance or interdiction of a particular religion by the state … but the installation of a single power drawn from a single source and facing a single political task: the worldly care of its population regardless of its beliefs.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 371

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on ch11 highight that laicite today still operates on an Early Modern state-power principle.