Modern Mediterranean Identities: Catholic Pasts and Futures in France

The Modern Mediterranean Identities series reconvened on November 17, 2017 in the EWCJS library, this time focusing on “Catholic Pasts and Futures in France.” Professor Zank welcomed the audience over lunch, and thanked Professor Kimberly Arkin for her continued work to make the series possible.

Professor Arkin introduced Professor Elayne Oliphant, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU, and her respondent Cornell Professor of History Camille Robcis. She also thanked the audience as well as the staff of the Elie Wiesel Center for continuing to host and support this series. 

Professor Oliphant began her presentation by explaining the framework of her research, arguing that permeable ideas about what makes a space “public” allows for nuance in how the French understand Catholic ideas. She challenges the idea that France has moved past the Catholic Church as a guiding social force, and claims that the idea that the culture is “vanishing” highlights how Catholicism is in fact still privileged in France. Catholicism has become part of, as she puts it, “French architecture” as it has become a part of the “ambiance” despite the widely held conception that French society encourages laïcité (secularism).

In the 19th century, churches were designed and built with support from the state, and they have become part of an imagined past of the people of France and what they have believed. Catholicism in France maintains a historical image of being crucial to French life, which Oliphant argues makes it an unmarked, privileged category despite being a religion.

Camille Robcis responded to Oliphant’s paper by complimenting her focus on the “unacknowledged privilege” of Catholicism rather than statistical numbers. Robcis questions the use of the word “infrastructure” to describe Catholicism as ambient rather than “norm” or “ideology”. She also highlights Oliphant’s point about marriage as a social structure, and she argues that marriage became a social and legal agreement (and therefore more secular) to ensure that the state could survive. Both scholars discussed how French society negotiates the Catholic influences on marriage with currently changing norms around gay marriage and national identity. Catholic traditions in public life, they argue, impact the people of France regardless of race, class or religious affiliation.

The event concluded with further discussion about this blend of secularism and religious tradition in political and social life.