The Penalties for the Violation of Separation: A Comparison between the United States and France

Abstract

How do the United States and France guarantee that their proclamations of non-establishment and separation are respected? These two countries employ different types of tools to preserve and protect separation, directly rooted in the contexts from which they differently emerged – the writing of the Constitution in the U.S. and the 1905 law of separation in France: fiscal or financial in the United States, penal in France. This article analyses in detail how these various tools have emerged and developed throughout the 20th century. Since the 1980s, increasing political and judicial struggles raised by the development of new minority faiths (namely Islam) in France and Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. have caused a\ quasi-abandonment of the tools protecting separation that has contributed to regressions, back to the regimes the framers of the Constitution in the United States and authors of the law of 1905 in France respectively sought to abandon: the establishment or the state control of religion.