Last summer, during his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, President Barack Obama took America’s harshest rhetorical shot at France since Donald Rumsfeld dismissed it as “old Europe” when he was defence secretary in the run-up to the Iraq war. Alluding to western countries that try to “dictate what clothes a Muslim woman should wear” – as France did when it banned headscarves in schools five years ago – Mr Obama said: “We can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.”
This was bound to confuse his fellow Americans, even the Francophobes among them. They are taught not to be judgmental about customs and rituals that differ widely from their own. And now they are being enjoined to cut no slack to the democratic republic whose political tradition, of all the political traditions on the planet, most resembles theirs.
France aggressively polices the borders between church and state. It rules on questions that other western countries permit to slide. This week, a court in Paris convicted two offices of the Church of Scientology – its “celebrity centre” and an affiliated bookshop – of fraud. It levied a €600,000 ($884,000, £537,000) fine against the group and gave a two-year suspended sentence to the man it described as the French church’s de facto leader, fining him and three others. (In June, prosecutors had called for the sect to be banned, although legal reforms passed the month before rendered that impossible.)
At issue was the church’s sale of courses and products to aid the spiritual “purification” of its adherents. It sold vitamins and an “electrometre” device meant to measure users’ spiritual condition. The electrometre retails for more than €3,500. The judgment arose from the claims of two women who alleged they had been bilked of their life’s savings – about €20,000 each – at a time when they were vulnerable.
