France's passion for religion has always been "the first to be kindled and the last to be extinguished," according to historian Alexis de Tocqueville. President Emmanuel Macron's plan to attend the huge mass led by Pope Francis on Saturday, September 23 in Marseille has served as a reminder of this in recent days. Invited by the pontiff to attend the religious service he will conduct at the Stade-Vélodrome in front of 57,000 people, the president of the Republic, who maintains friendly relations with the Argentinian pope – he has met him on the same morning for a record fourth time – has decided to attend the "celebratory moment" with his wife, the Elysée Palace has said. He was immediately accused by the left-wing opposition of "trampling" on the state's religious neutrality.
Why are elected officials from La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left), the French Communist Party (PCF) and Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (EELV, green party) reacting so strongly to this decision? Because it comes just three weeks after Macron asserted that he would allow "nothing to pass" when it came to abayas and khamis, garments now banned in schools in the name of secularism. This decision could be interpreted by some French Muslims as a sign of mistrust towards their faith.
On September 15, the head of state responded that he would attend mass as the "president" of a secular country, but not as a "Catholic." "The state is neutral, the public services are neutral and we are upholding the same for schools, as we reiterated at the start of the new school year," he added, referring to the abaya ban. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne deemed the controversy sparked by the left-wing opposition as "ridiculous."
The Elysée pointed out that in 1980, former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was the first to attend a mass by Pope John Paul II on the forecourt of Notre-Dame de Paris, without any objections. "But back then, the debate on secularism was nowhere near as heated as it has been since the early 2000s," said sociologist Philippe Portier, director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.
Moreover, it is not Macron's first mass as president: he was present at singer Johnny Hallyday's religious funeral at La Madeleine Church in 2017 and at former president Jacques Chirac's at Saint-Sulpice Church in 2019. At the time, "there was no controversy." In the first case, however, the young president, who had been elected only a few months earlier, came close to committing a blunder. In front of the cameras, he reached for the aspergillum, used to sprinkle holy water, to bless the singer's coffin – before changing his mind and putting it down.
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