France - Religions

Church and state have been legally separate since 1905. In 2002, about 83% to 88% of the population were nominally Roman Catholic, but church officials claim that very few are practicing members of the church. About 2% were Protestant, mostly Calvinist or Lutheran. Muslims (mostly North African workers) make up about 7% to 8%. Jews and Baha'is each made up about 1%. About 4% subscribed to no religion at all.

The French Jewish community is one of the largest in the world, along with those in the US, Israel, and the former USSR; more than half are immigrants from North Africa. The 600,000 to 700,000 members are divided between Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox groups. Jews have enjoyed full rights of citizenship in France since 1791, and the emancipation of Central European Jewry was accomplished, to a large extent, by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. Anti-Semitism became a flaming issue during the Dreyfus affair in the late 1890s; in the 1980s, principal French synagogues were under police guard because of a wave of attacks by international terrorists.