Legal Arguments Against Emotions – How the Law Silences Militant Disillusionment Within the Identity Evolution of a Nonreligious Organisation

I. The legal argument to silence the emotions born of doctrinal refoundation

Although the use of the concept of identity in social sciences has been criticized (Brubaker 2001), it is still useful for characterizing the common specificities of an organisation from a constructivist perspective. Identity makes it possible to define the specificity of a social group, to propose a universe of meaning capable of mobilizing the collective, to bring individuals together around a common goal, a common cause, a common history and common actions (Voegtli 2009). As Jordi Gomez explains, ‘because it tends to foster a sense of belonging to a group, provoke emotions, and reinforce a belief in a “community of origin” (Max Weber), “identity politics” appeals to the emotions’ (Gomez 2017) and is of great interest in our analysis for that reason.

At the heart of the Ligue de l’enseignement’s secular identity has been the fight against the maintenance of a dual school system, made up of public and private schools. Jean-Paul Martin, a historian specializing in the organisation, underlines this perfectly: ‘the main factor in perpetuating [the secular identity] was its militant strength and rivalry with the Catholic Church’ (Martin 2006: 25). Under the Fifth Republic (from 1958 onwards), the organisation mobilized extensively to prevent the adoption of the Debré law, which allowed private schools to be financed by public funds. In 1960, it launched a petition with over 10 million signatures denouncing the same piece of legislation. In June 1960, in front of 400,000 people, the organisation leaders and the leaders of other French secular organisations swore the following oath: ‘We solemnly swear to demonstrate in all circumstances and in all places our irreconcilable opposition to this law, which is contrary to the historical development of the Nation; to fight tirelessly and without fail until it is repealed; and to ensure that the educational effort of the Republic is reserved solely for the School of the Nation, the hope of our youth’. Subsequently, each of the Ligue’s assemblies and congresses was an opportunity to reiterate its opposition to private denominational schools. In 1971, it mobilized against the Pompidou law, which perpetuated the contracts with private education established in 1959. In 1984, it supported the adoption of the Savary law, which was intended to establish a unified, nonreligious and public education service (SPULEN)—a project ultimately abandoned by the Socialist government of the day. The vocabulary used with regard to the Catholic Church confirms the movement’s opposition to the religious establishment. As one example, this opposition can be seen in the speech given by a former president of the Ligue, Henri Fauré, at the 1963 Montpellier congress:

Similarly, in 1986, Michel Morineau, national secretary of the Ligue de l’enseignement, recalled that the Catholic Church was the movement’s ‘irreducible adversary’ (Morineau 1986).² These comments are not confined to the Ligue’s national leaders. A similar tone of vocabulary in relation to the Catholic Church can be seen at the federation level. At the 1961 Toulouse congress, one delegate denounced the Church as the antithesis of freedom; another criticized it for maintaining temporal power. A third recalled the words allegedly spoken by Leo XIII in 1894:

However, from the end of the 1980s, the Ligue de l’enseignement changed its strategy and started advocating for a dialogue with religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church. It began defending the teaching of ‘religious facts’ in schools; its leaders appeared alongside ecclesiastical personalities; and it even envisaged opening public schools to catechism classes.

This strategic change can be viewed in the context of broader developments in French society. At that time, the societal context was characterised by a ‘softening’ of secularism, now firmly established within society, involving certain concessions with regard to religions (Baubérot 2024).³ This development can be seen in the Ligue’s approach to the school system dispute particularly towards its end. Although tensions still existed in 1984, these were merely a ‘lingering’ effect of a conflict that had in fact been resolved (Portier 2016: 7). More and more French people supported the existence of religious schools (71% were in favor of maintaining them in 1983).⁴ This highlights how secularism, as a legal and political system that guarantees a modus vivendi between religious groups and the state, interacts and transforms within social and political complexities (Martinez-Arino 2020). The relationship between local manifestations of secularism and religion evolves according to the social and political context in question. Regarding these developments in France, Baubérot does not hesitate to highlight ‘seven French laïcités’. The laïcité of the 1980s, defended by the state, is characterized by an inclusive separation, in line with the 1905 law: it recognizes the collective dimension of churches and even their social utility. This strategic change must also be viewed in the context of a more general shift among European secular and humanist movements toward a less confrontational approach than had previously characterized their actions (Tyssens, De Nutte & Schröder 2024).

Despite this context, the fairly radical change in the Ligue’s stance towards religion was to provoke what could be described as a ‘moral shock’ within the organisation. This expression was formalized in 1997 by James M. Jasper in his book The Art of Moral Protest (Jasper 1997). For the author, moral shock refers to a rupture in an individual’s biography, a more or less sudden change in his or her environment, resulting in a sharp, brutal reaction to the realization of the inadequacy between his or her values and that environment. This moral shock is particularly visible in some long-standing militants of the Ligue de l’enseignement. It is particularly visible insofar as it concerns the very definition of the identity of the organisation to which they are affiliated.

This moral shock is particularly visible in some long-standing militants of the Ligue de l’enseignement. It is particularly visible insofar as it concerns the very definition of the identity of the organisation to which they are affiliated. This can be seen in the answers to a questionnaire sent to the federations of the Ligue de l’enseignement in 1989. The responses to the survey to Ligue’s federations reveal a wide range of ‘passions’ (what the body imposes on the mind), an expression often used similar to emotions. The term was originally put forward by Aristotle in his Rhetoric was used in the plural until the 18^th century to designate collective agitation and social unrest (Sommier 2010). In the survey responses, we identified five such passions: anger, shame, fear, contempt and indignation. Following later suggestions on more embodied ‘passions’, such as one put forth by Descartes, we also identified other emotions in the survey responses from Ligue activists. One particularly evident emotional response was sadness. Demonstrating the moral shock, the activists express stupefaction related to an experience of disillusionment in the face of the Ligue’s shifting strategy.

Stunned and outraged, for example, Eddy Khaldi, an activist with the Loiret federation, wondered ‘whether these are demands from the Church or the Ligue’, and reminds us that ‘there is a law separating Church and State’. The response from André Bernos, a member of the Pyrénées Atlantiques federation, was one of amazement, anger, indignation, sadness and even contempt:

Similar to the above quotation from the Pyrénées Atlantiques federation, indignation and anger are also expressed by the Brittany federation, which refers to “unacceptable” proposals.

The Ligue’s proposals were not only denounced by its federations but also by affiliated associations. The Union Cantonale des Oeuvres Laïques de Beaujeu, for example, denounced a question that ‘could deeply shock former secular activists’ and commented that it seemed ‘unsuited to open debate’. The vocabulary used by this organisation illustrates the emotional charge of the school debate and the Ligue’s evolution on this issue. The union delegates wrote that they are ‘deeply shaken’, underlining their ‘strong dissatisfaction’, and speak elsewhere of ‘a scandal’. The organisation was not alone in their reaction. The Patronage Scolaire Laïque d’Oullins (Oullins secular school organization) spoke of its ‘indignation’, ‘great concern’, and even about the Ligue’s ‘ANTI-LAIC’ proposals.

While the majority of the Ligue de l’enseignement’s federations seemed fairly open to dialogue with religions, the organisation’s leaders wanted to circumscribe any internal opposition. They feared that these individual emotions could turn into collective mobilization, putting the brakes on the doctrinal rethinking envisaged. Indeed, according to the theoretical notions developed by Jasper, a moral shock leads to a characteristic trajectory of emotions, the final modality of which is a commitment to action, as in collective mobilizations. Furthermore, previous research indicates that anger, but also fear and sadness, play a particularly important role as catalysts for political action and engagement—emotions that were frequently expressed by activists of the organisation (Groenendyk & Banks 2014; Valentino, Brader, Groenendyk, Gregorowicz & Hutchings 2011).

The Ligue de l’enseignement was subsequently faced with the risk of internal mobilization:⁷ in the late 1980s, a petition was circulated denouncing the strategic evolution decided upon by the organisation’s leaders. Here again, the content of the petition reflects a range of emotions, from indignation to anger, from amazement to disillusionment. The authors speak of their ‘amazement’ at the participation of national leaders in a symposium organized by the Catholic chaplaincies of the public education system; they go on to state that ‘such events, if they were to become institutionalized, or even repeated, would definitively undermine the foundations of our daily secular activity of popular education, and remove all credibility from our associations’. Finally, they expressed their ‘strongest protest’.

However, the organisation’s General Secretary, Jean-Louis Rollot, was in no way prepared to negotiate with the movement’s rank and file over strategic changes decided by the national authorities. As he later mentions it: ‘I wasn’t there to assume what the base thought if I wasn’t happy with it. I never really negotiated. I had intentions and I fought to get them across. If I’d wanted us to follow the usual approach, we still wouldn’t have moved.’

To avoid translating emotions into collective action by militants, the Confederal Board of the Ligue de l’enseignement mobilized various tools, notably the legal argument. The latter was used at the Toulouse congress in 1992. Recourse to the law constituted an argument of authority at the service of the strategy of the Ligue’s national bodies, and legitimized its policy internally. Jean-Louis Rollot insisted that La Ligue is a republican movement and, as such, complies with current legislation, which is not open to challenge. The argument came up twice in the General Secretary’s moral speech. Firstly, he stated that ‘we live in a system of law, in an institutional system, organized by the Debré law for a third of a century’; then, adding history to the legal argument, he pointed out that ‘the secularisation law of October 30 1886, continuing the law of obligation and gratuity, recalls that private elementary school can be maintained by associations. Freedom of education is the institutional rule in our country (Ligue de l’enseignement 1992)’.⁸

The argument here was particularly fine-tuned. Indeed, Jean-Louis Rollot mentioned the Goblet law of 1886, which, for secular activists, represented a step forward, a victory against denominational establishments (Ligue de l’enseignement 2000b). Even today, the Ligue de l’enseignement presents this legislation as the law that ‘completes the Jules Ferry laws (free schooling –1881, compulsory education and secular public education –1882) by entrusting exclusively nonreligious staff with teaching in public schools, replacing the congregation’s teachers’. An illustration accompanies the explanation, clearly showing how the legislation is presented as a victory for the secular camp.

In his commentary on the Goblet law, Jean-Louis Rollot recalled an article of this legislation that was no doubt forgotten by the organisation’s militants, article 2, which is particularly clear on the subject of denominational establishments: ‘Primary education establishments of any kind may be public, i.e. founded and maintained by the State, departments or communes, or private, i.e. founded and maintained by individuals or associations’. This legislation, celebrated by secularists, thus allows the coexistence of public and private schools. The General Secretary went even further in his argument. He referred to ‘freedom of education, the country’s institutional rule’, protected by the same article. Mentioning freedom of education mobilizes the ‘emotional capital’ that this expression carries. Secularism and freedom are inseparable for secular activists. The freedom they defend is based on the primacy of reason. It is equated with freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, the right to choose one’s beliefs or to remain religion-free. In 1961, M. Benzecri, a member of the Ligue’s board of directors, stressed that ‘the essential idea that must dominate our secular struggle is the idea of freedom. Secularism and freedom are closely linked and mutually supportive’.⁹ Similarly, Jean Boussinesq, a sociologist close to the organisation,¹⁰ emphasised in his work that ‘secularism is first and foremost freedom’¹¹ (Boussinesq 1995).

However, Rollot, in presenting the Goblet law as a legislation allowing freedom of education, ‘hijacked’ this expression fraught with meaning for secularists. He turned the ‘freedom of education’ into an argument in favor of private education, emphasizing the compatibility of denominational schools with the notion of freedom. In other words, he adopted an argument successfully used by supporters of private education. They equate the defense of ‘free education’ (or private religious education) with that of freedom of education, and then with that of freedom of conscience, the right to faith and the transmission of faith. For the supporters of private education, this argument has the advantage of showing that school dualism is perfectly in keeping with a secular approach. The Ligue, through the speech of its General Secretary, took up this same argument. It indicated that the freedom so dear to secular activists is not threatened by dualistic schooling; on the contrary, it should allow it.

The legislative rhetoric was thus mobilized for strategic purposes by the organisation. The rhetoric was ‘malleable’, and its use depended on the context. Indeed, at the start of the Fifth Republic, the organisation called for mobilization against the laws passed under General de Gaulle’s government: since, in its view, the political regime put in place by the latter had not respected legality,¹² the laws passed by its legislative bodies could not be accepted, and the organisation, as a republican movement, had a duty to denounce them. Delegate Buard used this as the basis for his argument against the Debré law: ‘We have known since May 13 that, because the Republic has disappeared, and because the Fifth Republic is not ours, its eldest daughter, the free and compulsory nonreligious school, would immediately be under attack’.¹³ The aforementioned Vincennes oath followed a similar approach: ‘we vow […] to fight without respite and without fail until it is repealed’. This time, Jean-Louis Rollot insisted on the need to comply with the law.

Did the strategy utilising legislative rhetoric work? In the end, the reservations of members hostile to the doctrinal overhaul had little impact. The strategic evolution was carried out, in the direction desired by the organisation’s national leaders. In the end, the archives make no mention of the petition, which circulated at the end of the eighties, and there is no indication of the number of signatories finally obtained. Another sign that this strategy of employing legal rhetoric has worked: the activity report presented at the end of the Toulouse Congress, the vote on which indicates whether or not there is support for the policy pursued by the Ligue’s leaders, was adopted, even though almost 17% of federation delegates voted against it or abstained.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the movement’s membership declined from the same period onwards. There are many reasons for this decline; the disillusionment of some militants with the evolution of the movement’s secular identity is one of them.

II. The legal argument to silence militant emotions about Islam

Another moment in the Ligue’s history also supports my suggestion that the legal rhetoric was used to silence militant emotional responses. The legal argument was used again a few years later, in the early 2000s, in a context of internal division on the subject of Islam.

The Ligue de l’enseignement applied its policy of openness to other religions, advocated since the late 1980s, to Islam. It defended the principle of ‘laïcité ouverte’, then ‘laïcité plurielle’, in favor of cultural diversity and the expression of individual diversity in the public arena.¹⁵ In 1989, when two schoolgirls were expelled from their school because they were veiled and refused to uncover their heads, the Ligue de l’enseignement distinguished itself from other secular organisations by advocating dialogue. But positions became tense and the organisation became internally divided, particularly from the 2000s onwards. The divisions centered on two points of contention. The first concerns the presence of Tariq Ramadan on a think-tank set up by the Ligue de l’enseignement. The Islamologist, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was not met with unanimous approval within the movement. He was accused of ‘double-talk’, particularly on the subject of Islam’s ability to blend into a democratic, secular society, and on the subject of women’s rights. Several Ligue members criticized the movement’s overly consensual stance towards the preacher. More generally, the movement advocated the existence of two Islams: one liberal and progressive, reconcilable with republican ideals; the other radical, fundamentalist, which must be fought. The national leaders advocated dialogue and openness to Islam, on an equal footing with other religions; but several militants denounced the ‘organisation’s naivety’ about Islamism.

These tensions rose once again in the early 2000s, when the possibility of a law against religious symbols in schools emerged. In 2003, the “headscarf affair” was revived: Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior at the time, reminded the UOIF (Union of the Islamist organisations of France) Congress that ‘there can be no Islam in France that promotes a discourse contrary to Republican values’ (Sarkozy 2003), and that Muslim women must therefore be bareheaded on their identity papers. At the government’s request, several commissions met to analyze the impact of social change on French secularism. These new tensions did not not arise as a result of increased visibility of Islamic headscarves within schools. In fact, the number of cases involving the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools was declining: ten were recorded in 2002. However, it was once again the school context that these tensions between the State and religions were discursively located. In December 2003, President Jacques Chirac declared that ‘the wearing of clothing or signs ostensibly expressing religious affiliation must be prohibited in public schools’ (Chirac 2003). In favor of such a law as early as 1997, Chirac was waiting for ‘a maturing of public opinion’.¹⁶ The Socialist Party, previously mostly opposed to legislation on the wearing of religious symbols in schools, rallied behind it in 2003. Contrary to its policy in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Ligue wished to adopt a concerted decision on the subject, defending a position endorsed by the federations. Pierre Tournemire recalls that ‘the question had never been decided at the Ligue, and remained under debate until 2003’.¹⁷ At its general assembly in Troyes in June 2003, the Ligue submitted a declaration entitled: ‘Laïcité pour unir et non pour exclure’ (‘Secularity to unite, not to exclude’). The text began with these words: ‘The Ligue de l’enseignement, whose entire history is marked by constant action in favor of secularism, considers that legislating on the wearing of religious symbols is inappropriate. Any law would be either useless or impossible’ (Ligue de l’enseignement 2003). The declaration won the support of over 90% of the votes cast.¹⁸

In line with its positions of the late 1989’s, the Ligue considered such legislation to be stigmatizing, targeting a particular community, the Muslim community. One year after the law was passed, the Ligue drew up an initial assessment of the law, which confirmed this view: of the 639 pupils wearing conspicuous religious symbols in their schools, 47 exclusions were handed down: 44 to Muslim girls, 3 to Sikhs (Tournemire 2005). At the same time, the Ligue put forward new arguments. It denounced a legislative accumulation that was ineffective, a law that targeted the sign ‘and not what it conveys as meaning’ (Ducomte 2004), a law that missed its objective, since it would not prevent the private schooling of pupils who kept their veils.

It also opposed the secularization of private individuals. Until then, laws secularized programs, premises and teachers. With the 2004 law, it is the children, the public itself, who are secularized. For the Ligue de l’enseignement, the State had no business secularizing private individuals, and religious freedom and diversity must be respected.

However, in the course of these debates, several militants or ‘friends of the Ligue’ expressed their emotion about the positions adopted by the movement. As in the late 1980s and early 1990s, members of the organisation expressed their amazement, fear, anger and sadness. Incomprehension is evoked, as is indignation.

In 2003, Mustapha Sbay of the Allier federation, for example, spoke of his astonishment, fear and shame: ‘I’m a bit shocked by everything that’s happening today, in relation to secularism, in relation to our program […] it’s not because I’m of the Muslim faith or of Arab origin that I’m ashamed, but because I’m very attached to secularism’. He further added that ‘[w]e’re a bit scared, with everything that’s going on around us. Personally, I’m not against the headscarf, because it’s an individual freedom, but not all individual freedoms are collective, and schools are public and collective’. For his part, Ahmed Koulakssis, from the Indre-et-Loire federation, stressed his ‘disappointment’ with the Ligue’s positions on the issue, regretting the movement’s lack of commitment. The movement’s president, Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, expressed her fears about the angélisme of certain Ligue members with regard to Islam, denouncing a secularism that is too tolerant of individuals or cultural, religious or ethnic groups that have little respect for this value and for human rights. In fact, she explained that ‘by trying so hard to respond to the demands of one group or another while maintaining egalitarian treatment, some secularists end up justifying racist, sexist and homophobic thoughts…in the name of respect for customs and faiths!’.¹⁹

People close to the Ligue also wrote about their emotions by letter. Pierre Verne expressed his ‘concern’ of what he considered to be a renunciation by the organisation. He concluded his letter by saying: ‘What a sadness! It was so beautiful, the school of our Republic’. An activist from the Mayenne region expressed his astonishment, adding that he was ‘not sure that the Ligue has made the right choice in sticking to a position that I don’t understand’. Incomprehension was also conveyed by a member of the Ligue, who regretted the presence of Tariq Ramadan within the movement, ‘a notorious Islamist’.

The near-unanimous vote in favor of the declaration adopted at the general assembly in Troyes should not minimize the dissension between the confederation and part of the movement on the question of Islam and the wearing of the headscarf. The events that took place in Lyon in March 2003 represent one of the most striking divergences between the positions of the Ligue and those of one of its federations. Following a decision by the rector to reinstate a high school student who had worn a headscarf while attending classes at her school, teachers voiced their opposition by launching a strike. National Secretary Pierre Tournemire looks back at these events:

The issue of Islam also was, and still is, deeply divisive in French society. The Ligue did not want the movement to split on this issue, or for the fears of some, the incomprehension or indignation of others to evolve into militant mobilizations against the organisation. Once again, the legislative argument was used to settle the issue.

Indeed, while the Ligue de l’enseignement had stressed that a new law on the veil would be inappropriate, legislation was finally passed in 2004 – the Stasi law (which prohibits the wearing of conspicuous religious clothing and symbols at school). Surprisingly, however, the organisation remained passive. No mobilization against the law was planned, organized or envisaged. Pierre Tournemire reflects on this position:

Jean-Marc Roirant, the organisation’s former General Secretary, is more precise. On the occasion of a day bringing together the Ligue’s great witnesses in 2014, Frédéric Chateigner, a sociologist, asked him if his policy did indeed consist ‘in saying that once the law had been passed, we wouldn’t talk about it anymore to avoid reopening Pandora’s box’. Roirant replied: ‘The law is passed, it’s passed, we’re obliged to accept it’. Tournemire later confirmed: ‘The law was passed democratically and must therefore be applied’. This is the same argument put forward a few years earlier by Jean-Louis Rollot. The legislative argument puts an end to the debate.

One of the organisation’s leaders offers an illuminating analysis of this legislation ten years later, presenting it as a pivotal moment for the movement. He points out that the 2004 law prompted the Ligue to ‘adopt a method, an apprehension of social facts that are not ipso facto regulated by legal normalization’.²² While the organisation denounces the excessive use of legislation to regulate social facts, this tool has proved particularly malleable in regulating its own internal workings.

III. Governing association emotion: the (scientific and strategic) value of legislative rhetoric

The example of the Ligue de l’enseignement can shed new light on the analysis of governing emotion-laden responses within organisations. For more than twenty years, political science and sociology have taken a keen interest in the role of emotions in collective mobilization as catalysts for engagement (Traïni & Siméant 2009; Blondiaux & Traïni 2018, Goodwin & Polletta 2001; for an overview, see Shah 2024), as well as the use of emotion by governments to harangue crowds and attract activists (Breezen 2019; Osnabrügge et al. 2021) or to strengthen their legitimacy (Bilgic & Gkouti 2021; Pierce 2021). In addition, research has examined the potential of emotions to promote political engagement, including more ‘negative’ emotions, such as hatred (Shi, Hao, Saeri & Cui 2015, for instance).

However, attempts to regulate emotional responses among citizens, members of organisations, or associations to prevent their mobilization has not been analyzed extensively (see, for example, Ford & Feinberg 2020, who show that effective forms of emotion self-regulation can reduce political action). The influence of aiming to regulate emotional responses has been studied more extensively in psychology, particularly in work concerning individual emotion regulation (for an overview, see Gross 2015) and collective regulation of emotions in professional organisations, however without focusing on the strategies used to govern emotional expression of individuals (e.g., Desmarais & Agassis 2024). Similarly, possible mechanisms for emotion regulation has been studied at the level of states and societies (Elias 1939, 1991), without research delving into the tools used to stifle emotions that are inconsistent with the prevailing norm or that those in power wish to impose/disseminate (with the exception of tools based on prohibition, which raise the dilemma surrounding the principle of freedom of expression — when to prohibit speech that threatens the freedom or safety of others, e.g., Richards 2007).

However, our argument is to show how leaders of an organisation can utilise legislative rhetoric strategically, for silencing any internal emotion-laden dissent. The Ligue’s use of legal arguments is particularly interesting: as Terry A. Maroney (2006: 119) points out, ‘the notion that reason and emotion are cleanly separable—and that law rightly privileges and admits only of the former—is deeply engrained.’ Katryn Abrams clarifies this point by noting that ‘legal decision-making was a realm which derived its character or at least its legitimacy from its objectivity, meaning not just its neutrality (in the sense of impartiality) but its disengagement from powerful potentially-distortive feelings, and from particulars’ (Abrams 2009: 305). Thus, while Ligue officials mobilize the legal argument by emphasizing its democratic legitimacy, they also use this tool because, by principle, it is beyond dispute.

The argument works all the better within the Ligue because one of the organisation’s fundamental objectives is to promote reason among citizens through education. As stated in the introduction to this article, reason must enable citizens to promote the establishment of representative, democratic, and non-authoritarian power. It must take precedence over emotion—or irrationality—which can lead individuals to bring a despotic figure to power. Thus, when the organisation’s leaders mobilize legal rhetoric, they also mobilize this fundamental ideal of the organisation—justice being the institution that embodies the principle of rationality more than any other. Furthermore, the history of the Ligue cannot be understood independently of that of the French Republic. It has worked extensively to entrench this regime and spread its values within French society. In keeping with its history, compliance with the law adopted by this regime can hardly be objected to.

The combination of these values and ideals undeniably favours the effectiveness of legal rhetoric within this specific organisation. Thus the case study should be compared with other associations whose axiological foundations differ, in order to clarify the effects of legal argumentation on the regulation of members’ emotional responses. Scientific research conducted by legal scholars does not seem to settle the issue. Some warn of the risk of ‘legal intervention in affective states with a form of “mind control,”’ carried out, for example, by the government; others insist on the possibility that legal intervention will produce no change in feeling states (Abrams 2009: 306).

This case study also illustrates the divisions that exist within secular organisations in their relationship with religions, in the context of secularisation, and the difficulty of regulating these disagreements. National Secretary Pierre Tournemire identifies three currents within the Ligue de l’enseignement concerning the definition of secularism. The first tendency is a certain rejection of religion. Religious practice would then be conceived as an anticipated alienation of freedom of conscience, to paraphrase Claude Nicolet (1982: 503), a researcher whose work has greatly influenced the League on these issues. This approach is influenced by positivism, a philosophical doctrine that rejected metaphysics and based all knowledge of the world on scientific experience. Reason and religion are therefore seen as antithetical, resulting in a secularism that could only be anti-religious. Individuals’ beliefs are nonetheless respected, as long as they are expressed discreetly.

The second approach would leave it up to the state to ensure the emancipation of the population, as well as to regulate the public expression of religions, possibly to the point of banning it. This option places a great deal of trust in the state, to the point of accepting that it should be entrusted with determining the common good. This position is not officially defended by the Ligue de l’enseignement. On the contrary, the Ligue considers that all citizens must deliberate to determine the proper administration of the city. However, it is advocated by some members of the organisation. According to Pierre Tournemire (2012: 12), the underlying risk of such an analysis is that it “effectively generates the behavior of new clerics who emancipate people through coercion and repression in order to better liberate them, forgetting that the translation of ‘no freedom for the enemies of freedom’ has ultimately always been ‹no freedom at all’.”

Finally, the third approach is officially advocated by the Ligue de l’enseignement: by using means other than those that are intrinsically its own against its opponents, a democracy contradicts itself (Tournemire 2012). Proponents of this approach believe that a secular democracy must, in addition to promoting citizen education, reconcile respect for each individual and respect for the general interest with respect for ethical debate and respect for time. Freedom of thought is the goal, as in the other two perspectives, but it can only be pursued within the framework of freedom of conscience. It is therefore a question of promoting inclusive separation, to quote Jean Baubérot.

Thus, the emotions expressed by certain Ligue activists reflect both their shock at what they perceive as a profound shift in identity and the differences that have always existed within the organisation regarding the definition of its relationship with religions. The use of legal arguments does not seem to have resolved these differences, which still exist within the organisation today.