Politics & Power Quote by Jean-Pierre Raffarin

“Let them be reassured” is doing most of the political work here: it preemptively treats outrage as a misunderstanding, not a legitimate disagreement. Raffarin’s sentence is built like a padded cell for controversy. He offers a promise of tolerance (“never...to ban religion in society”) while sliding the real target into a narrower, more defensible frame: schools, not streets; “education,” not “faith.”

The subtext is classic French laicite rhetoric in early-2000s form: the Republic isn’t anti-religion, it’s pro-neutrality, and neutrality is defined not by what the state does but by what citizens visibly are. That’s why the key phrase is “conspicuous display.” It sounds objective, almost aesthetic, but it’s a highly subjective threshold that lets the state decide what counts as “too much” identity. Quiet belief is welcome; visible belonging becomes a problem to be managed.

Context matters: Raffarin was Prime Minister when France moved toward the 2004 law banning “ostentatious” religious symbols in public schools, a debate shaped by anxieties over social cohesion, immigration, and especially Islam. The line “national education system” is not incidental either. Schools are framed as the Republic’s factory floor: a place where future citizens are produced, standardized, and taught to share a common civic language. Under that logic, a headscarf or kippah isn’t merely personal expression; it’s a competing allegiance in a space the state considers its own.

So the rhetorical trick is reassurance paired with containment: religion is permitted, but only once it agrees to be invisible where the Republic most wants to be seen.