Gay marriage fires up the conservative Catholics
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
“Resistance! Resistance!” urged the voice in the megaphone, galvanising the tens of thousands of marchers waving pink and blue flags in the upmarket 16th arrondissement of Paris on Sunday.
A group of sixtysomethings holding rosaries walked past reciting the Hail Mary. Priests in black soutanes, a rare sight these days, mixed with neat families in Lacoste polo shirts, coloured chinos and brown loafers. Some brandished monarchist flags emblazoned with the fleur-de-lis; more flourished the tricolore. Golden-haired children, running around or in pushchairs, seemed to make up half the crowd.
Marchers of La Manif Pour Tous, the movement born in opposition to the same-sex marriage law introduced in 2013 by president François Hollande, differ from the scruffy protesters who have taken to the streets of the capital this year to oppose labour market reform . But, just like them, they are a force to be reckoned with.
This streak of French Catholic conservatism goes back a long way. In 1905 Catholic conservatives fought anticlerical Republicans seeking to establish a strict separation of state and religion. Today they mobilise on matters dear to them: family and private education.
In 1984 they protested en masse against François Mitterrand’s bill to limit the public funding available to private schools (most of which are Catholic), forcing the Socialist president to retreat. More recently, French opposition to same-sex marriage has been the fiercest in Europe.
“It is a constant force since the Revolution,” Laurent Bouvet, a political-science professor at Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines university, says. “They never really accepted the Revolutionary notion that individual freedom should supersede the moral authority of the priest or the family head. They are a rightwing patriarchal bunch wary of the concept of equality.”
Philippe, a 22-year old student who declined to give his surname, told me: “There is no such thing as equal rights. There is the law — that defines what people are allowed to do or not. Up until two years ago, only a man and a woman were allowed to get married. If it is a question of equality, then the next step is to allow the ménages à trois to marry.”
His friend Gaspard , a 23-year-old seminarist from Bordeaux, said Hollande was eroding family values by challenging conventional notions of gender. “The idea that gender is not predetermined is wrong,” he said.
Albert, a 35-year-old corporate executive who lives in Louveciennes, a wealthy western Parisian suburb, hurried past pushing two of his eight children in a stroller. He said he worried about court rulings circumventing a ban on medically assisted procreation for same-sex couples. “This changes society slowly,” he said. “I don’t want to impose my religion on anyone. It’s not homophobia — I just want to protect my children.”
Philippe, Gaspard and Albert are not entirely foreign to me. They remind me of distant cousins I see in Corsica in the summer. Of the four boys in the family, two have become priests. They are the sort who write to the Vatican to complain that Pope Francis is too liberal. They opposed the bans on the burkini this summer.
This time round there were fewer protesters than in 2013 but resentment towards the ruling secular elite seemed just as acute. “You’re on the good side of the fight,” Marie-Claude Bompard, the far-right mayor of the southern town of Bollène, told the crowd. “No need to be a graduate from Ena [the elite school that grooms top civil servants] to understand that you need a man and a woman to have children.”
The politician was not alone courting the Catholic vote that day. Marine Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader, did not join — but her niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen, and her partner, Louis Aliot, were there. Jean-Frédéric Poisson, leader of the Christian Democrat party — who is vying for the centre-right presidential nomination — was present too. François Fillon, the former centre-right prime minister who is also competing for the nomination, expressed his sympathy.
“Whoever wins the rightwing presidential nomination will have to listen to them,” Bouvet says.
Comments