France is historically Catholic and constitutionally secular: around a quarter to a third of French people identify as Catholic, only about 5% attend mass regularly, and roughly half say they have no religion. France also has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. What makes it distinctive is not the numbers but laïcité — a doctrine of state secularism far stricter than anything in Britain, Germany or the United States.
Nobody Knows the Numbers Precisely, by Law
France does not collect religious statistics. The census has not asked since 1872, and a 1978 law restricts the gathering of data on religion, ethnicity and race, on the principle that the Republic recognises citizens rather than communities.
Every figure quoted for religion in France therefore comes from private surveys, and they disagree. Catholic identification is variously put between 25% and 47% depending on how the question is worded; estimates of the Muslim population range from around 5 to 6 million, roughly 8 to 10%.
The absence of official data is not an oversight. It is the same principle that produces the rest of French religious policy: the state declines to classify people by faith at all.
Laïcité Is Not the Same as Secularism
English-language coverage usually translates laïcité as secularism, which loses the distinction that matters. American secularism keeps the state out of religion so that religion may flourish freely. French laïcité keeps religion out of the public sphere so that the Republic can address citizens as individuals without intermediaries.
The practical consequences run in the opposite direction from the American model. The state may restrict religious expression in public institutions in ways that would be unconstitutional in the United States, while also being barred from funding or endorsing any religion.
Article 1 of the 1958 constitution states that France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. Secularism is not a policy in France; it is part of the definition of the state.
The Law of 1905
The foundational text is the Law of 9 December 1905 on the Separation of the Churches and the State. It ended the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801, under which the state had paid clergy salaries and had a say in appointing bishops, and it declared that the Republic neither recognises nor subsidises any religion.
It also transferred ownership of church buildings constructed before 1905 to the state and to municipalities, which is why Notre-Dame de Paris belongs to the French state rather than to the Church — a fact that determined who paid for and controlled the restoration after the fire of April 2019, and why the reopening in December 2024 was a state occasion.
The separation was bitterly fought. Inventories of church property in 1906 triggered confrontations and, in places, violence, and relations with the Vatican were severed until 1921.
Catholic by Heritage, Not by Attendance
France was once called the eldest daughter of the Church, a title dating to the baptism of Clovis around 496. It retains the physical inheritance: roughly 45,000 churches, some 87 cathedrals, and a calendar of public holidays that is still substantially Catholic — Easter Monday, Ascension, Pentecost Monday, Assumption, All Saints and Christmas are all public holidays in a state that recognises no religion.
Practice is another matter. Weekly mass attendance has fallen to around 4 to 5% of the population, and the number of ordinations has collapsed — France ordains a few dozen diocesan priests a year for a country of 68 million. Baptisms and church weddings have fallen steeply since the 1960s.
The gap between identification and practice is the central fact about French Catholicism. A large number of French people consider themselves culturally Catholic while never entering a church except for funerals.
Europe's Largest Muslim Population
France's Muslim population, most estimates putting it at 5 to 6 million, is the largest in Western Europe in absolute terms. Its origins are colonial and industrial: Algeria was administratively part of France until 1962, and postwar labour recruitment brought workers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, later joined by families and by migration from West Africa.
Most French Muslims are French citizens, and a majority were born in France. Survey evidence suggests observance varies widely, with a substantial secular or non-practising component — the label describes origin as much as belief for many.
The Grande Mosquée de Paris, opened in 1926, was built by the French state in recognition of the Muslim soldiers who died for France in the First World War, and its rector sheltered Jews during the occupation. It sits awkwardly with the 1905 law, and it is one of several reminders that French practice has always contained exceptions.
The Headscarf Laws
The most internationally visible expression of laïcité is a series of restrictions on religious dress. A law of March 2004 banned conspicuous religious symbols in state primary and secondary schools — headscarves, kippahs, large crosses and Sikh turbans alike, though the debate that produced it was about headscarves.
A 2010 law banned face coverings in public spaces entirely, upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in 2014 on the grounds of "living together" rather than security. More recently, abayas were barred from state schools from the start of the 2023 school year.
Supporters argue these protect pupils from communal pressure and keep the school a neutral space. Critics argue they fall in practice on one community and push some girls out of state education. Both positions are mainstream in France, which is why the argument recurs rather than resolves.
Protestants, and the Revocation That Emptied France
Protestants are about 2 to 3% of the population today, but the number was once far larger and the reason it is not is a single royal decision. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted Huguenots substantial rights after decades of religious war, including the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572.
Louis XIV revoked it in 1685. Somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 Huguenots left for the Dutch Republic, England, Prussia, Switzerland and the Cape — a substantial emigration of artisans and merchants whose loss was felt economically for generations and whose gain is still visible in the surnames of Berlin and London.
French Protestantism survives mainly in Alsace, the Cévennes and parts of the south-west, and has grown modestly through evangelical congregations, many with African and Caribbean membership.
Judaism, and a Community Under Pressure
France has the largest Jewish community in Europe, usually estimated between 400,000 and 500,000. It has two distinct layers: a long-established Ashkenazi population, and a larger Sephardic one that arrived from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia around decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s.
France was the first European country to emancipate its Jews, in 1791. It was also the country of the Dreyfus affair, and of the Vichy regime's collaboration in deportations during the occupation, formally acknowledged by President Chirac in 1995.
Emigration to Israel rose sharply after a series of antisemitic attacks in the 2010s, including the 2012 Toulouse school shooting and the 2015 Hypercacher siege, and has remained elevated.
Alsace-Moselle, Where the 1905 Law Never Applied
The strict national picture has a large and little-known exception. Alsace and the Moselle department were annexed by Germany in 1871 and returned to France in 1918 — meaning they were not part of France when the separation law was passed in 1905, and it was never extended to them.
The Napoleonic Concordat therefore still operates there. The state pays the salaries of Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Jewish clergy; religious education is part of the standard school curriculum, with an opt-out; and Good Friday and 26 December are additional public holidays.
Roughly 1.8 million people live under this arrangement. The Constitutional Council upheld it in 2013 as a legitimate historical exception, which means France maintains, inside its own borders, a working demonstration of the system it abolished everywhere else.
Buddhism, and the Quiet Fourth Religion
Buddhism is often cited as France's fourth-largest religion, with estimates of between 500,000 and one million adherents. Roughly two-thirds are of Asian origin, mostly families who arrived from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after 1975, and the rest are French converts drawn largely to Zen and Tibetan traditions.
The Buddhist Institute at Vincennes, on the eastern edge of Paris, occupies two former colonial pavilions from the 1931 exhibition. The Lerab Ling temple in Hérault, consecrated in 2008 with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy present, is among the largest in Europe — an example of how a religion arriving after 1905 fits into the framework without much friction, precisely because it makes no claim on public institutions.
A Secular State With a Catholic Calendar
The contradictions are worth stating plainly, because they are what make France interesting rather than hypocritical. A state that recognises no religion owns the cathedrals. A country that bans religious symbols in schools takes six Catholic feast days as public holidays. A Republic that refuses to count believers funds clergy in three of its departments.
Each of these has a specific historical cause, and together they describe a country whose religious settlement was imposed after conflict and has been patched ever since. Compared with the rest of the continent — the 44 countries of Europe take widely different approaches, from established churches in Denmark and England to church taxes in Germany — France sits at the strict end of a spectrum rather than defining it — Germany's church tax is the closest thing to its opposite.