Since the middle of the 1980s there has been a resurgence of interest in the republican ideal, or model, in France. Intellectuals like R. Debray, P.-A. Taguieff, and P. Bourdieu have alleged that the French national community’s once firm foundation in “republican” values has been gravely undermined by the spread of so-called postmodern ideologies of ostensibly foreign (i.e. American) origin: neo-liberal marketplace economics (the driving force of globalization), the cultural logic of spectacle and electronic mass communication (major elements of the “Videosphere”), multicultural tribalism (an affront to republican universalism and indivisibility), and so on. Other intellectuals (e.g., P. Rosanvallon, A. Touraine, M. Wieviorka) have denounced the nostalgic and reactionary connotations of neo-republican discourse. The phenomenon surely has broader significance given the number of important questions that lie at the heart of this Franco-French quarrel between “republicans” and “democrats.” Is France really in danger of losing its republican identity? If so, is this a bad development given the model’s longstanding collusion with Jacobinism and colonialism? Does the republican model still make sense in the deterritorialized and virtualized world of today, or is it to be considered a mere lieu de mémoire, a noble idea perhaps but obsolete nonetheless? What philosophical and institutional changes could save the republican model from irrelevancy without causing it to lose its distinctness? What, if anything, could one expect to find at the “sacred center” of a post-republican France?

This paper will concentrate on this last question. Its thesis will be that a residual form of republican faith—one that has become more polycentric, personalized, depoliticized, and undisciplined—can still be found at the “sacred center” of an already post-republican France. Its argument will be based largely on an adaptation of theories developed by Danièle Hervieu-Léger in two recent sociological studies of contemporary religiosity: La religion pour mémoire (1993) and Le pèlerin et le converti: La religion en movement (1999). Hervieu-Léger maintains that we have mistakenly equated the modern “exit from religion” (M. Gauchet) with the near total eclipse of religiosity by secularism when it would in fact be more accurate to speak in terms of a two-fold process of “institutional deregulation of the religious” (i.e., institutional churches have lost much of their authority to give definitive shape and form to communities of faith and to ensure the reproduction of the “lines” of religious memory upon which the latter are founded) and “dispersion of belief” (individuals are free to invent their own religious identities with whatever beliefs and practices they may find meaningful). In structural terms, institutional deregulation means that the four “poles” of religious identity in the western tradition of organized religion as identified by Hervieu-Léger (emotional, communitarian, ethical, and cultural) have begun to evolve in an increasingly autonomous manner. In certain cases, they have become so dissociated from one another other that individuals who identify with one pole in particular can no longer be said to believe in a specifically religious manner; however, in other cases, partial combinations of two or more “poles” may constitute the beginning of a tentative but no less meaningful reaffiliation with a particular lignée croyante.

It makes sense to examine “republican faith” from the standpoint of Hervieu-Léger’s conceptual framework given its historical role as a secular substitute for religious faith at in the context of France’s “exit from religion” and its longstanding mimetic rivalry with Catholicism. The paper will argue that republican faith has undergone a similar process of institutional deregulation and dispersion of belief. Furthermore, it will suggest that republican faith has splintered into six semi-autonomous styles of republican belief—none of which exercises ideological or institutional hegemony over French political culture—quite similar to the six styles of religious belief Hervieu-Léger has identified in contemporary religious experience: patrimonial republicanism (a combination of the communitarian and cultural poles), humanitarian republicanism (a combination of the emotional and ethical poles), political republicanism (a combination of the ethical and communitarian poles), esthetic republicanism (a combination of the emotional and cultural poles), humanist republicanism (a combination of the ethical and cultural poles), and affective republicanism (a combination of the emotional and communitarian poles).

In closing, the paper will consider some of the political ramifications and limitations of this approach to French republicanism.