An Embattled Public Servant in a Fractured France - The New York Times - 0 views
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rance is in theory a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality and people are free to believe, or not, in any God they wish. It is a nation, in its self image, that through education dissolves differences of faith and ethnicity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship.
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This model, known as laïcité, often inadequately translated as secularism, is embraced by a majority of French people. They or their forebears became French in this way. No politician here would utter the words “In God we trust.” The Roman Catholic Church was removed more than a century ago from French public life. The country’s lay model supplants any deity.
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Mr. Cadène, 39, runs the Laïcité Observatory as its “general rapporteur,” a weighty title for a young man
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