Chapter 9 explores the recent re-politicisation of religion in France in more detail and finds that it was less linked to a revival of Catholicism than to the emergence of a new identity cleavage in French society, which itself is partly rooted in France’s rapid secularisation and Catholicism’s demise. Under the pressure of this new identity divide between cosmopolitans and communitarians, France’s political system has undergone a fundamental transformation, leading to a new bipolarity between the liberal-cosmopolitan camp of Macron’s La République en Marche and the populist-communitarian camp around the Rassemblement National and Éric Zemmour.

Chapter 11 explores France’s Catholics’ reactions to the religiously laden references of the Rassemblement National (RN) and Éric Zemmour. It finds that in spite of historical animosities and the abiding policy clashes between the far right and Catholic values, beliefs and institutions identified in Chapter 10, French Catholics’ traditional religious immunity to the far right has begun to erode since the mid-2010s. Whilst this development chronologically coincided with the emergence of the conservative Catholic movement around the Manif pour Tous, the analysed evidence suggests that Catholics’ electoral opening towards the populist right was primarily driven by political and religious supply-side factors. In particular, the narrowing of electoral alternatives for Catholics and the softening of the bishops’ language against the populist right, in the context of the church’s gradual shift from a politically engaged national church, towards a more inward-looking minority church, have contributed to the relative dédiabolisation of the RN and Zemmour amongst Catholics.

Chapter 10 examines the French far rights references to both Catholicism and laïcité in greater detail. Based on several dozen interviews with right-wing populist politicians, mainstream party representatives and faith leaders it reveals how the French far right rediscovered both religion and secularism as political wedge-issues and cultural identity markers against Islam. However, instead of a rapprochement with Christian policy positions, ethics and institutions, Chapter 10 finds open clashes between the Rassemblement National and Zemmour on the one hand and Frances Catholic Church on the other over social policy, the populist right’s identitarian conception of Christendom, and its secularist reading of laïcité, all of which suggested a further secularisation of Christian symbols in the hands of the populist right rather than a Catholic revival in French politics.