I participated in a panel show on the English version of France 24 this week. I am often a bit wary of this format, but I was happy with the quality of the programme. I found that the presenter gave us each ample time to develop our ideas (within the restrictions of the medium). At the end, I make the point that (contrary to a widely-held belief, which I have often heard repeated in Anglo-American academic settings) it is possible to collect data on people's ethnic and religious identity in France, subject to authorisation by the CNIL.
For those interested, the relevant legislation is the Loi n° 78-17 du 6 janvier 1978 relative à l'informatique, aux fichiers et aux libertés. Art. 6 of this law does state a principle of prohibition regarding the collection of data which could reveal a person's "supposed racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical convictions, or membership to a labour union". However, the law also permits derogations from the principle, on a case-by-case basis. Patrick Simon has written extensively on this topic.
In 2007, the Conseil constitutionnel reaffirmed the principle that the collection of data for the purposes of measuring diversity, discrimination, and integration, could not be based on ethnic or racial origin without violating Art. 1 of the Constitution. However, the Sages did not extend this prohibition to the collection of objective characteristics (such as name, geographical origin, nationality prior to French naturalisation) nor to subjective characteristics, such as the feeling of appartenance (religion counts here).
In practice, these indicators can be used as heuristics for race - but then again, race itself is a socially constructed and inherently ambiguous concept. It would be an essentialising fallacy to consider it to be inherently truer than those indicators authorised by French law.
29 Oct 2020. Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière
I recently heard about about St Columba’s Church, a new Anglican place of worship housed in a purpose-built floating barge on the Lee navigation in Hackney Wick. In the adjacent picture, we see that the exterior of the boat does not display any overt Christian iconography, but the design is perhaps reminiscent of the bellows on an organ. This area of East London is changing rapidly with the recent creation of the Olympic Park and the large adjoining housing developments.
This immediately remined me of another barge-church, the Je sers, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, near Paris. The Je sers was originally intended as a chapel for the bargemen's mission on the river Seine. However, as the number of barge crews gradually decreased in recent decades, the pastoral orientation of the Je sers has evolved. It now functions as a parish church for the local community and also offers housing for local apprentices.
St Columba’s boat-church was created long after the Lee navigation ceased being exploited for commercial transportation. Instead, its creation is attributable to the shifting demographics of East London and the restrictions imposed by the local planning authority.
Although national attendance figures for the Church of England continue to decline (between 2009 to 2019, most key measures of attendance for the Church of England fell by between 15% and 20%), new urban developments create new pockets of population density, which include practicing Anglicans. Many of the existing churches owned by the CofE are located in sparsely populated areas where attendance has fallen - whereas the Church lacks facilites in the new urban developments where its remaining members are concentrated. St Columba’s is part of a larger strategy by the Anglican Diocese of London to build 100 new "new worshipping communities" in underserved areas - even though the overall rates of attendance in the Diocese are not growing (see graph).
But why put a church on a barge? According to The Guardian, this is because the London Legacy Development Corporation (which acts as the area's planning authority) prefers not to deliver permits for single-denomination religious buildings, encouraging instead the development of multi-faith spaces. Placing a church on the water was a way of bypassing this planning restriction.
Interestingly, the specification of multi-faith spaces is included in the planning authority's 2019 document on inclusive design standards. Multi-faith spaces are presented as a neutral provision in a context of religious diversity. However, as many critical religion theorists have argued, secular decision-making bodies rarely adopt (indeed cannot adopt) a neutral stance with regards to religious practice. Ryszard Bobrowicz has written a good paper in which he argues that multi-faith spaces are often used as the means to promote either a more privatised version of religion, or a certain denominational preference.
It is hard not to see St Columba’s as a metaphor for the increasing separation between England and its established Church. Lacking foundations in stone, the church is moored to the periphery of its parochial territory - a gangway still connects the two, but how long until it is raised and the ship either sinks or raises anchor?
25 Oct 2020, Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière.
Le colloque final du projet RELIMIG aura lieu les 5 et 6 novembre 2020.
Programme_ANR_Avec_Résumé_Justifié 19 oct.pdf
The history of human mobility is marked by numerous flows of populations who left their territory of origin because of religious persecution.
In this picture, we see the tympanum (semi-circular decorative element over a door) above the entrance of the Eglise protestante française de Londres, located in Soho Square. The stone text reads:
"To the glory of God & in the grateful memory of King Edward VI who by his charter of 1550 granted asylum to the Huguenots from France"
This particular temple was actually built in the 1890's and is still active. It is remarkable to think how long a religious diaspora can maintain its own distinct language, traditions and institutions within a host society. However, if we investigate such cases closely, we find that historical continuity occurs through successive processes of of adaptation and internal change.
Today's congregation of the French Protestant Church of London* looks very different from the 19th century founders of this temple, who themselves were distinct (in demographics, circumstances, and theological outlook) from the refugees of 1550. Yet, the Huguenot identity and memory persists to the present day.
19 Oct. 2020, Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière. Photo taken by the author.
17, Oct. 2020
J'ai eu le plaisir de contribuer un chapitre à cet ouvrage qui vient de paraitre aux Editions du Cerf.
De la philosophie à l’anthropologie, de l’économie à l’épidémiologie, de la sociologie aux sciences politiques, ce livre vise à retracer ce qu’est l’expérience d’un inattendu qu’il nous faut désormais penser, intégrer et surmonter ensemble. Edité par Emmanuel Hirsch.
I took this picture in Aïn-Draham on Easter morning, 2019. A community of Franciscan sisters (Franciscaines missionnaires de Marie) lives in this small town nestled in the north-western mountains of Tunisia. They were hosting an Easter retreat for Christian students living in Tunisia (most from sub-Saharan Africa) and had kindly allowed me to join them. We were also joined by Mgr Ilario Antoniazzi, Archbishop of Tunis. In this picture, three young men are standing ready to be confirmed by the Archbishop. Although the sisters have a small chapel installed in their house, this Mass is being celebrated in a classroom (they run a day-care for local children) in order to accommodate the forty or so people attending.
In the modern Catholic Church, Confirmation is one of seven sacraments, usually administered to older children . It is, in a certain sense, an initiation rite into the age of reason. These men are receiving the sacrament as adults, reflecting the often tumultuous religious lives of international migrants. For adults, this usually occurs at the Easter vigil Mass - however, looking through my notes, this was definitely the next day. I should have asked about this, but at the time there was so much going on. It's easy to get distracted in the field. Only when reviewing notes and data (sometimes weeks or months later) do you realise that you forgot to ask some important question or document some crucial detail.
I also should have asked the guy where to buy one of those sweatshirts!
18 Jun. 2020, Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière. Photo taken by the author.
Changes in religious demographics have always been accompanied by practices of adaptation, (re-)appropriation, and conversion of buildings and landmarks. The Hagia Sophia and the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba are perhaps the most famous examples. The "conversion" of such stunning edifices makes a striking political statement. However, the depth of penetration of social and religious change must be discerned on a smaller scale and more wide-spread scale.
Walking through Tottenham the other day, I noticed this Victorian building, ornamented with both Christian and Islamic symbols (you can just make out the crescent mounter on the ridge of the left-hand roof).
Unlike France, where the religious designation of most religious buildings constructed prior to 1905 is fixed by law, religious buildings in British cities are often re-appropriated as local demographics evolve. Many Methodist churches built in the nineteenth century have been converted into bars; a friend of mine in Portsmouth lives in the upper chapel of a former Catholic convent which was subdivided into apartments in the 1990's. These changes reflect trends in secularisation and religious disaffiliation.
This building photographed in Tottenham was formerly a centre of Catholic life in this East London neighbourhood: St Mary's Priory, founded by a group of Servite Sisters in 1871. Before they moved in, the site was composed of several semi-detached Victorian villas, which the congregation purchased, adapted and enlarged over a number of decades. In 1972 there were 42 sisters living here.
In recent decades, Catholic vocations have fallen in England, whilst increasingly numbers of immigrants from South Asia and Turkey have settled in this area of London. Since 1991, the building has served as the Sheikh Nazim Sufi Centre Islamic, and (more recently) as the Shakhsiyah Foundation school.
7 Sept. 2020, Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière. Photo taken by the author.
A couple of years ago, I became interested in how Eastern Christians are represented by political and religious actors in the West, and I have published a few articles on this topic (2017, 2018, 2020a, 2020b, 2021). Unfortunately, the peer-review process takes so long that sometimes you get side-tracked before a piece gets to publication. That's what happened with this text, in which I tried to approach the issue in from a perspective that I hoped would interest an IR readership. I found it on the pile recently and still think it's pretty solid.
Abstract: Historically, French foreign policy in the Middle East has been inflected by a special relationship with Eastern Christians, a tradition which has regained prominence since the US-led invasion of Iraq and its ensuing chaos across the region, including the Syrian Civil War. This article argues that France’s mobilisation for Christians in the Middle East demands scrutiny because it runs counter to the dominant assumption that the conduct of foreign policy by modern states is being driven by material interests, and also because it runs counter to the dominant assumption that the French state is thoroughly secular. Counter to these assumption, this article proposes an alternative explanation centred on the concepts of national identity and political imaginary: French foreign policy with regards to Eastern Christians is driven by a constellation of representations of Eastern Christians within the French public sphere which are less informed by the external sociological realities of Eastern Christians themselves than by internal anxieties and desires regarding the identity and ethic of the French nation. More important than the external security and position of Eastern Christians, it is the imagined idea of Eastern Christians which has come to occupy a prominent position within contemporary French politics, functioning as an intermediary between the French nation and its internally competing images of itself.
Artaud de La Ferriere_Eastern Christians and the French political imaginary.pdfJust before the coronavirus pandemic hit France, I spent some time at the Vietnamese Catholic Mission in Paris. Located in a vast (mostly underground) facility in the 17th arrondissement, it is a centre for the religious and social life of the Vietnamese diaspora. It is also a space marked by tension and conflict, reflecting the division between Vietnamese Buddhists and Catholics and the unhealed divisions of the war years.
In the first photo (on the left) we see the altar in the chapel. The altarpiece consists of the cartographic outline of a united Vietnam superimposed by the sign of the crucifix and encircled by palm fronds. It is tempting to see the colour yellow of the map as referring to the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, although yellow is widely regarded as an auspicious colour in Vietnam. The crucifix is also crowned, suggesting a reference to Jesus's title as Christ the King.
Diasporic religious practices often incorporate specific references to ethnic or political affiliations rooted in the territory of origin. In the case of the Vietnamese Catholics, they have historically federated around their opposition to the Communist government in Hanoi. However, this federating force is not as strong amongst younger generations who have no direct memory of persecution or exile.
My work on the Vietnamese Mission is part of a study I am conducting for the Relimig project, a collaborative research project on the social and religious trajectories of Catholic migrants in France. As part of this project, I have been investigating migrant chaplaincies, institutionally sanctioned spaces for the recognition of (ethno-linguistic) difference within Catholic territorial dioceses.
19 Jul. 2020, Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière
In September 2019, I was happy to meet again with friends from the IRLA Meeting of Experts. The meeting was held in Rabat and Fez. As well as being able to hear excellent contributions from colleagues on the subject of non-compulsion in religion (proceedings from the meeting can be found here), we were able to visit numerous sites in these two stunning cities.
Posters illustrating aspects of Catholic life in Rabat.
Transnational liturgy
Al Mawafaqa is a ecumenical Christian theological institute in Rabat, which specialises in issues relating to Christianity in Muslim-majority countries
Poster from Pope Francis's visit to Morocco
Un texte écrit suite au discours d'Emmanuel Macron au Bernardins en 2018. Je ne l'ai jamais publié. Je ne sais pas si je suis toujours d'accord avec la thèse que j'y développe - mais ça fait toujours un peu de lecture légère !
Artaud de La Ferriere_Le besoin national et la sagesse de l’Eglise.pdfUne table ronde organisée lors du colloque "Mobilisations collectives, religions, émancipations'', qui s'est tenu à l'Université Paris 7 Paris Diderot les 25 et 26 novembre 2016. Avec Marilyn Poulain (chargée immigration à Paris pour la CGT) et Jean-Claude Auguin (prêtre ouvrirer et militant CGT dans le 91).
Cette table ronde était en lien avec un article que j'ai publié dans Tumultes : Décomposition nationale et espoir universel, Le syndicalisme et le catholicisme en France face à la figure du migrant
