Culture of France
The culture of France has been shaped by geography, by historical events, and by foreign and internal forces and groups. France, and in particular Paris, has played an important role as a center of high culture in the late Middle-Ages and again since the 17th century and from the 19th century on, worldwide. France and in particular Paris was viewed during the 19th and early 20th century as the capital of Western art and culture. From the late 19th century, France has also played an important role in cinema, fashion, cuisine, literature, technology, the social sciences, and mathematics. The importance of French culture has waxed and waned over the centuries, depending on its economic, political and military importance. French culture today is marked both by great regional and socioeconomic differences and strong unifying tendencies. A global opinion poll for the BBC saw France ranked as the country with the fourth most positive influence in the world in 2014.
French culture
The Académie Française sets an official standard of linguistic purism; however, this standard, which is not mandatory, is occasionally ignored by the government itself: for instance, the left-wing government of Lionel Jospin pushed for the feminisation of the names of some functions while the Académie pushed for some more traditional madame le ministre.Some action has been taken by the government to promote French culture and the French language. For instance, they have established a system of subsidies and preferential loans for supporting French cinema. The Toubon law, from the name of the conservative culture minister who promoted it, makes it mandatory to use French in advertisements directed to the general public. Note that contrary to some misconceptions sometimes found in the Anglophone media, the French government neither regulates the language used by private parties in commercial settings, nor makes it compulsory that France-based WWW sites should be in French.
France counts many regional languages, some of them being very different from standard French, such as Breton and Alsatian. Some regional languages are Roman, like French, such as Occitan. The Basque language is completely unrelated to the French language and to any other language in the world; it is spoken in an area that straddles the border between the southwest of France and the north of Spain.
Many of these languages have enthusiastic advocates; however, the real importance of local languages remains subject to debate. In April 2001, the Minister of Education, Jack Lang, admitted formally that for more than two centuries, the political powers of the French government had repressed regional languages. He announced that bilingual education would, for the first time, be recognised, and bilingual teachers recruited in French public schools to support teaching these other languages.
In French schools, pupils are expected to learn at least two foreign languages, the first of which is typically German or English.
A revision of the French constitution creating official recognition of regional languages was implemented by the Parliament in Congress at Versailles in July 2008.
Religions in France
France is a secular country where freedom of thought and of conscience which encompasses and supersedes freedom of religion is preserved, by virtue of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The Republic is based on the principle of laïcité, which relies on the division between private life, where adherents believe religion belongs, and the public sphere, in which each individual should appear as a simple citizen who is equal to all other citizens, not putting the emphasis on any ethnic, religious, or other particularities. French secularism also includes freedom of conscience i.e. the freedom to believe or not to believe and even to change one's faith across one's life enforced by the Jules Ferry laws and the 1905 law on the separation of the State and the Church, enacted at the beginning of the Third Republic. A 2011 European poll found that a third of the French population "does not believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force". In 2011, in a poll published by Institut français d'opinion publique 65% of the French population describes itself as Christians, and 25% as not adhering any religion.According to Eurobarometer poll in 2012, Christianity is the largest religion in France accounting 60% of French citizens. Catholics are the largest Christian group in France, accounting for 50% of French citizens, while Protestants make up 8%, and other Christians make up 2%. Non believer/Agnostic account for 20%, Atheist 13%, and Muslim 7%.
France guarantees freedom of religion as a constitutional right, and the government generally respects this right in practice. A long history of violent conflict between groups led the state to break its ties to the established Catholic Church early in the last century, which previously had been the state religion. The government adopted a strong commitment to maintaining a totally secular public sector.
Catholicism
Long the established state religion, the Catholic Church has historically played a significant role in French culture and in French life. Kings were prominent members as well as head of the state and social order. Most French people are Catholics; however, many of them are secular but still place high value on Catholicism.The Catholic faith is no longer considered the state religion, as it was before the 1789 Revolution and throughout the various, non-republican regimes of the 19th century. The institutional split of the Catholic Church and French State was imposed by the latter in 1905 and represented the crest of a wave of the laicist and anti-clericalist movement among French Radical Republicans in this period.
At the beginning of the 20th century, France was a largely rural country with conservative Catholic mores, but in the hundred years since then, the countryside has become depopulated as people have become urbanized. The urban populations have become more secular. A December 2006 poll by Harris Interactive, published in The Financial Times, found that 32% of the French population described themselves as agnostic, some 32% as atheist, and only 27% believed in any type of God or supreme being. according to the French Market research Ipsos, Catholics today constitute 57.5% of the French population.
Protestantism
France was touched by the Reformation during the 16th century; some 30% of the population converted to Protestantism and became known as French Huguenots. Some princes joined the reform movement. But the national monarchy felt threatened by people who wanted to leave the established state religion. Protestants were discriminated against and suppressed. On 24 August 1572, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre took place in Paris and the French Wars of Religion are considered to have begun. this French civil war took place between Catholics, led by Henry I, Duke of Guise, and Protestants, led by Henri de Navarre. Henri de Navarre became king after converting to Catholicism in 1589.Louis XIII, Henri IV's son, began to suppress Protestants in violent attacks, such as the Siege of La Rochelle. After Louis XIV revoked the Edit de Nantes in 1685, Protestants who did not leave the country were generally suppressed. Thousands of Protestant Huguenots emigrated from France for their safety and to gain religious freedom, generally going to Protestant nations such as the Netherlands, England, South Africa, and the North American colonies. Their exile continued during the 17th century and until 1787, when religious freedom was re-established by Louis XVI.
Judaism
The current Jewish community in France numbers around 600,000, according to the World Jewish Congress and 500,000 according to the Appel Unifié Juif de France. It is concentrated in the metropolitan areas of Paris, Marseille and Strasbourg.The history of the Jews in France dates back over 2,000 years. In the early Middle Ages, France was a center of Jewish learning, but persecution increased as the Middle Ages wore on. France was the first country in Europe to emancipate its Jewish population during the French Revolution, but despite legal equality anti-Semitism remained an issue, as illustrated in the Dreyfus affair of the late 19th century. However, through the 1870 Décret Crémieux, France secured full citizenship for the Jews in then French-ruled Algeria. Despite the death of a quarter of all French Jews during the Holocaust, France currently has the largest Jewish population in Europe.
Following emancipation In the 19th century, Jews would come to play a larger role in French culture. Jewish artists were a major part of the School of Paris and included artists such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Yitzhak Frenel, Chaim Soutine, Jules Pascin and others. Frenkel said the Jewish artists were "members of the minority characterized by restlessness whose expressionism is therefore extreme in its emotionalism". Camille Pissaro was also a major figure in the Impressionism movement.
In the early 21st century, French Jews are mostly Sephardic and of North African origins. More than a quarter of the historic Ashkenazi Jewish community was destroyed during the Holocaust of World War II after German forces occupied France and established the Vichy Regime. Jewish religious affiliations range from the ultra-Orthodox Haredi communities to the large segment of Jews who are secular and identify culturally as Jews.