| Summary: | If, by passing the law of December 9th 1905, France adopted « the most radical system of government in the world which separated the Church and the State », as the historian Jean-Marie Mayeur wrote, it also broke in the process with a very old custom, the one which consisted in the prayers that the Church (in this instance, the Catholic Church) addressed to the State. The different political systems that succeeded one another after the French Revolution required the clergy and the congregation to sing Domine salvam fac Rempublicam or salvum fac regem. But the political upheavals, the affirmation of the people’s sovereignty and the ever growing dissociation of the State and the Church turned that rite into an object of debate in the bosom of both the national and the church communities.
|
|---|
