Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas in France without a good old-fashioned brouhaha about cribs and candles in official buildings. The season of goodwill is an annual occasion for a highly politicised bout of ill will between traditionalists, who see a nativity scene in the town hall as an expression of France’s Christian heritage, and secularists, who say it violates la laïcité (secularism), the strict separation of state and religion enshrined in a 1905 law.
The squabbles are so fierce, yet so petty, that they recall Clochemerle, Gabriel Chevallier’s 1934 satire about a feud over the erection of a public pissotière (urinal) in the church square of a bucolic village. The comic novel pits a secular republican mayor and schoolteacher against the reactionary local priest, aristocrat and notary.
