Herald the culture in a secular sauce. The struggle of Jacobean associations against religious symbols continues in France. The Higher Administrative Court of Bordeaux ordered the municipality of La Flotte-en-Ré on the Île de Ré to remove a statue of the Virgin located in the middle of a crossroads from public domain, under the 1905 law on the separation of church and state from the France Press and also reported by Le Figaro. It upholds an initial decision by the Poitiers Administrative Court last March, ordering a small Charente-Maritime town of 2,800 inhabitants “to carry out the removal of the statue within six months”. The latter was built after World War II for a family grateful that father and son made it back alive from the conflict. First displayed in a private garden, it was then donated to the municipality, which placed it at a crossroads in 1983.
France, War on Religious Symbols
In the spring of 2020, the statue was damaged in a car accident. The municipality then decided to rebuild it identically on the same spot on a promontory in public space. Following this decision, Libre-pensée 17, an association in defense of secularism, took legal action to request its removal, invoking the 1905 law prohibiting the erection of religious monuments on public property. Her mayor had defined a “ridiculous controversy”. Jean Paul Heraudeauwho argued that the statue was “part of the city’s heritage” and “more of a monument than a religious statue”. However, it also notes that “the figure of the Virgin Mary is an important figure in Christianity, particularly the Catholic religion and that the statue itself has a religious character”, states the Administrative Court of Bordeaux.
identity conflict
The decision of the Bordeaux court is controversial. “The Bordeaux Court of Appeal has ordered the municipality of La Flotte-en-Ré to remove a statue of the Virgin Mary from public spaces. Once again, the judges are accomplices of Goschist associations that want to destroy France’s Christian roots. Shame!” he tweeted Members of the Rassemblement National Nicholas Meizonnet. “In Bordeaux, the court of the municipality of La Flotte-en-Ré has ordered a statue of the Virgin Mary to be removed from public space. Of course we will fight back!” he tweeted Stanislaus RigaultPresident of Generation Z. The story closely resembles the similar clash that unfolded around the statue of Saint-Michel (“Saint Michael and the Dragon”), inaugurated in October 2018 in the square in front of the parish’s Saint-Michel church from Les Sables-d’Olonne, in the Vendée region of western France.
In December 2021, Libre Pensée obtained from the Administrative Court of nantes permission to demolish the statue of Saint-Michel within six months. On this occasion, too, the judges joined the association on the basis of the 1905 Law on Church-State Relations, which “opposes the affixing in public spaces of any sign or emblem expressive of a sect or indicative of a religious preference,” as the phrase recalls. On September 16, the Nantes Court of Appeal upheld the tribunal’s verdict, giving the mayor six months to remove the monument. This prompted demonstrations and marches by thousands of people in support of it oppose the absurd decision, because that of the citizens of Les Sables-d’Olonne is by no means a whim: the fight – summertime – takes on the tone of an argumentFrench identity. Which is indeed based on the secularism of the state, but without abandoning the traditions and symbols of its own Christian history, as the “Taliban” of secularism would like it to have.