Public order before religious freedom. Reflections on a debate

Abstract

A religious practice –the use of the integral veil– opened an important debate on the limits of public order in relation to religious freedom. Following the Étude of the Council of State adopted in 2010, several distinctions were made: between a material and immaterial conception of public order, between its classical conception and a renewed one and, on the political level, between the liberal and the «republican» conception. The link between public order and religious freedom is not exactly the same as the one it maintains with other freedoms, since political history has united them in reflecting on the foundations of the modern state. The search and justification of the limits of religious freedom leads to a more general questioning of the political and social model of the human community. In other words, this debate on the content of public order is based on whether religions, beyond respecting public order in the strict sense, can be required to respect the moral order of a secularized society.