note: France maintains a tradition of secularism and has not officially collected data on religious affiliation since the 1872 national census, which complicates assessments of France's religious composition; an 1872 law prohibiting state … [49], Radicals (as they called themselves) achieved their main goals in 1905: they repealed Napoleon's 1801 Concordat. [24], France guarantees freedom of religion as a constitutional right and the government generally respects this right in practice. Antoinist temple of Tours, Indre-et-Loire. Opponents contend that the state should not fund religions. As with neopaganism in other countries, these traditions sit somewhere on a gradient, with one side represented by reconstructionist religious movements and on the other side by a variety of witchcraft and shamanic traditions with a focus on personal revelation. [76], In 2015 there were 2,500 mosques in France, up from 2,000 in 2011. The Republic legalized divorce and transferred the powers of birth, death, and marriage registration to the state. Deep-rooted suspicions remained on both sides and were inflamed by the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906). Anti-clericalism of the sort promoted by the Enlightenment and writers such as Voltaire had not disappeared, but it was in recession. [63] 75% of the local Jewish population in France survived the Holocaust. France is predominantly Christian, and it is considered a Christian nation. to the sample who replied with "Yes". [40], Napoleon III was a strong supporter of Catholic interests, financing the church and supporting Catholic missionaries in the emerging French Empire. The Reims Cathedral, built on the site where Clovis I was baptised by Remigius, functioned as the site for the coronation of the Kings of France. She supported the public participation in financing an Islamic cultural centre in Marseille to encourage Muslims to develop and use French learning materials, in order to thwart foreign indoctrination. Chaplains were removed from naval and military hospitals in the years 1903 and 1904, and soldiers were ordered not to frequent Catholic clubs in 1904. In 2015 the Eurobarometer, a survey funded by the European Union, found that Christianity was the religion of 54.3% of the respondents, with Catholicism being the main denomination with 47.8%, followed by other Christians with 4.1%, Protestants with 1.8% and the Eastern Orthodox with 0.6%. As of the 2000s, Buddhism in France was estimated to have between 1 million (Ministry of the Interior) strict adherents and 5 million people influenced by Buddhist doctrines, very large numbers for a Western country. Civil marriage became the only legal one, divorce was introduced, and chaplains were removed from the army.[45]. It accounts for about 8% of the population majority being of North African origin especially from countries once colonized by France like Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. A 2016 survey held by Institut Montaigne and Ifop found that 6.6% of the French population had an Islamic background, while 6.3% declared they were Muslims by faith. [29] By 1800 it was poor, dilapidated and disorganized, with a depleted and aging clergy. There are 30 Muslim schools in France most of which are privately owned compared to 8,727 non-Islam schools. Often they worked in alliance with Masonic lodges. [36] To tie the church and the state together, the cults transformed traditional religious ideology into politics. He selected the bishops and supervised church finances. According to scholar Dennis Gira, who was the director of the Institute of Science and Theology of Religions of Paris, Buddhism in France has a missionary nature and is undergoing a process of "inculturation" that may represent a new turnin… Catholics were for the most part anti-Dreyfusard. Religious instruction was pushed out of all schools, and religious orders were forbidden to teach in them. James McMillan, "Catholic Christianity in France from the Restoration to the separation of church and state, 1815-1905." (Republicans felt one of the primary reasons for the German victory in 1870 was their superior education system.