Bringing the State Back in Secularization: The Development of Laïcité in the French Third Republic (1875–1905)

The secularization literature increasingly recognizes the role of historical state‐building processes and the manifest agency of sociopolitical actors in shaping public secularity. Based on archival data from the French Third Republic, this article offers three contributions to the historicizing agenda. First, to better capture the contingent and agency‐driven nature of secularization, it reoperationalizes the concepts of separation and regulation as contentious strategies of state‐building used toward religious authority. Second, it identifies and exemplifies four interrelated yet uneven spheres in which secularization is prompted through governmental action: politico‐institutional, socio‐pedagogical, symbolic‐ideological, and property‐distributional. Third, it suggests going beyond viewing secularizing agents as disconnected elites operating independently of grassroots movements. The French case shows that the Republicans’ engagement with the pressures of various class forces had a significant impact on their secularizing policies. The analysis advances the study of the mechanisms whereby state‐building engenders and mediates secularization as a nonlinear and heterogeneous process.