This meant that if you were a protestant in France during the days of the monarchy, life was not good – there was an infamous massacre of protestants in 1572 (the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre). The 1598 Edict of Nantes granted a considerable amount of religious freedom to French protestants, but it was consequently abolished by King Louis XIV in 1685, leading to further violence against protestants, until the French revolution. Since the Catholic church and the French monarchy were so intertwined with each other (French kings such as Louis XIV declared themselves as God’s representative on Earth), those in favor of democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries had a political interest in minimizing the influence of the Catholic church in France. According to notes from my French foreign and European policy class, the 1905 law passed in France saying that the French government may not endorse any particular religion may be understood therefore as a reaction against the historical political dominance of the Catholic church. Laïcité continues to be a concept very much on the minds of French people, and it is considered part of the assimilationist model of immigration, allowing one to be assimilated into French society regardless of what one’s religious background might be.
Although in principle, immigrants in the assimilationist model are expected to leave their old identities behind, the principle isn’t really applied in absolute terms in France – in a few ways there is very obvious, visible cultural diversity, especially in Paris. For instance, there are restaurants serving food from various parts of the world all over the place.
