Emmanuel Macron has a history buffs view of Islam and religious strife

[rug]

France’s new president is less stringent about secularism than some of his compatriots



Erasmus
May 9th 2017

America’s founding fathers, influenced by the French enlightenment, were determined not to let European-style religious wars tear their young republic apart. Although people still argue about what exactly those founders believed, historians agree that avoiding internal strife was one of their main concerns when they barred the establishment of any particular religion.

As educated people of European stock, they knew about the appalling Protestant-Catholic wars of the Old World. No less than eight rounds of denominational fighting had ravaged 16th-century France. Some founders, like the French-descended John Jay, had genetic memories of those horrors. Thomas Jefferson, a sceptical Anglican, boasted that religious liberty in his native Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden [sic], the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”

France’s new President, Emmanuel Macron, seems to have a rather similar sensibility. In one of his most detailed pronouncements about history, religion and the state, a speech in Montpellier last October, he waxed eloquent on the subject of Protestant-Catholic warfare half a century ago:

France was given up to fire and bloodshed, she experienced famine, she experienced the worst of things, she was nearly chopped up in pieces forever because of the decision…to exclude, to brand one party as guilty and annihilate them...

The “excluded” party to which he referred were the Protestants. Like many of his historically-minded compatriots, Mr Macron reveres the memory of King Henri IV, who was tactically flexible about his own religious identity and affirmed confessional tolerance. And he regards with horror the darker moments of French religious history, such as the mass expulsion of Protestants in 1685.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2017/05/france-secularism-and-religion