Defending the Separation of Church and State at the Sorbonne<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Colloque International : 1802-2002

L'heritage Universel de Jefferson

 

This September La Libre Pensée Française organised a successful International Franco-American Colloquium. Intended to mark the bicentenary of Jefferson's famous letter on the Wall of Separation between the Church and State, supported by the prestigious Sorbonne university and organised under the aegis of IHEU, this important event was the third in a series of International events organized by the IHEU and its Full Member organisation in France.

 

Erudite but simple presentations, animated discussions, debates, humour and comparing notes on the contemporary status of the Separation of Religion and State in various countries marked this bilingual International Colloquium with participants from France, United Sates, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, Tunisia and Switzerland. Among the over 250 Academics and freethinker activists were renowned expert on Jefferson and Madison Prof. Robert Alley from the University of Virginia (Keynote speaker: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the First Amendment to the Unites States Constitution), Rob Boston from

Americans United for Separation of Church and State (Knocking down the Wall: The ongoing attack on Thomas Jefferson's legacy of Church-State Separation), Prof. Olivier Frayssé (Abraham Lincoln and Religion: Public and Private spheres in American political life), IHEU Vice President Roy Brown (who read out a note from Ibn Warraq: No to Sharia: For a Separation of Mosque and State) and Mohamed-Cherif Ferjani (Is Secularism French, Western or Universal?).

 

An American delegation from Atheist Alliance International was led by Bobby Kirkhart. The American freethought activist and academic Fred Whitehead, victim of bigots at the University of Kansas, spoke on The Freethought struggle in the US during the 19th century. Henri Laberge, President of Mouvement Laique Québecois (Laicité in Québec and in North America) and Richard Thain from the Canadian Humanist Association regaled the audience with their fine humour while reporting the state of affairs in their country. Mme. Ulrike Tietze from Bund Gegen Anpassung spoke of the situation in Germany for atheists. A special focus on Latin America was possible through Bolivar et les Libertadores, a presentation by Freemason Jacques Lafouge, past Grand Maître of the Grand Orient de France.

 

Selected presentations at this Colloquium (ably assisted with volunteer simultaneous interpretation) held with Prof. Olivier Frayssé as Scientific Director and Babu Gogineni as President, are available from  IHEU's website at www.iheu.org. Colloquium proceedings will be published in 2003.

 

In the Old Continent, like in the New World, people of the Enlightenment took hold of the ideas of democracy, republicanism and freedom of conscience to turn them into real facts. Philosophers from the Enlightenment in Europe showed the way, our peoples went along the path. Fundamentally, the French Revolution went further by the eruption of the masses on to History's stage, where their destiny was settled. Formally, the American Revolution went further in its formal conquest of democratic institutions.

 

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the USA formulated and realised the fundamental principles that have brought humanity out of the dark night of the ancient monarchical and clerical regimes. Let us once again read the first article of the American Bill of Rights of December 1791: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".

 

In just these few words, a democratic programme was written. It will stir up peoples and nations in the centuries to follow. It is neither American nor French: it is Mankind's heritage.  From now on, there will not be a rebellion, nor a revolution, nor an act of decolonisation that will not draw from this democratic programme the theoretical weapons to move forwards along the path of complete emancipation.

 

We can find the political formulations of the First Amendment in the work of the French Revolution, in the 1793 French Declaration of Human Rights and in the great laws of liberty of the Third Republic. It took 15 years for the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 to lead to the Bill of Rights of 1791; France would need nearly a hundred years to follow on the same path.

 

1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1882, 1884, 1886, 1901, 1905 are milestones in the history of France. One by one, the French people, calling the whole world to witness, were to conquer the right to petition, the right to assemble, universal franchise, the freedom of the press, the freedom to establish free political parties, the intangible right to establish independent labour unions to fight for workers' rights and the separation of Church and State.

 

Each time the people rose to defend their rights and liberties. The battle for economic emancipation (an end to exploitation of the one by the other) becomes consubstantial with that for political emancipation (equality of citizens in law) and that for the flourishing of complete liberty of conscience (laicité). Today, in fact, it is one single fight: that for the emancipation of Humanity.

 

Christian Eyschen, Secretary General of La Libre Pensée Française, speaking at the IHEU Colloquium at the Sorbonne