Religious Diversity and the Divergence of Secular Trajectories: Comparing secularization practices in Quebec and France

Abstract

In this working paper, I propose to analyze the treatment of the wearing of religious symbols in the public sphere in Quebec and France as political and juridical events that have crystallized, in different moments, certain kinds of secularism in each society. My goal is therefore to show how a religious symbol – and in particular those belonging to Islam – may reveal the potency of certain conceptions of secularism in a society, conceptions that may or may not find themselves re-inscribed in the law and as such consolidated by juridical secularism.