Restrictive France, permissive Europe? Discussing the specificity of the French public governance of religions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
French public regulation of religions is often portrayed as uniquely restrictive among Western democracies. This article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the French governance of religion by situating it in both international and domestic perspectives, and by contrasting national dynamics with local practices. At the national level, France indeed exhibits an increasingly restrictive orientation, particularly regarding the visibility of religious signs. Yet this trend coexists with other, more accommodating regulatory instruments, and is not exclusive to France but observable internationally, across several Western societies. At the local level in France, the picture is even more complex: numerous public initiatives continue to facilitate or support religious practice, sometimes explicitly framed as contributions to social cohesion or equality of treatment. Based on a study of legal documents and interviews with local elected officials, the article attempts to answer the following question: how can we better assess the public regulation of religions, in particular in the case of France? Departing from a focus limited to the national level and Muslim community practices, the article advocates for an analysis of the public regulation of religion as a whole, taking into account both national and local levels, as well as concepts of restriction and accommodation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".