Paris—The main body representing Protestants in avowedly-secular France has warned of a climate of “secularist zeal” as the country marks the centenary this year of the separation of church and state.

At a meeting with French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the president of the Protestant Federation of France, the Rev. Jean-Arnold de Clermont, said Protestant churches were facing a host of “administrative irritations”.

These included being denied planning permission by local authorities, and the refusal of social security offices to subsidise young people taking part in holiday camps which included times of prayer, although the camps had already been approved by the Ministry of Youth and Sport.

In one town the authorities had refused to deliver tax certificates for donations and legacies to the local Lutheran church. Another difficulty had been the cancellation, by three major insurance companies, of coverage for Protestant religious associations because the insurance companies asserted they would not cover “risks due to religion”.

“I felt the prime minister showed a real willingness to listen and was concerned that Protestantism should not feel discriminated against,” de Clermont told Ecumenical News International after meeting Raffarin on Tuesday.

About 2 per cent of France’s 60 million people are estimated to be Protestants, compared to 80 per cent who are nominally Roman Catholic, 1 per cent Jewish, and between 5 and 10 per cent Muslim.

The Protestant federation said that Protestants had “already been victims of collateral damage because of fears about Islam and sects” and said a new debate about religion within the governing UMP party threatened to make them victims again.

Prominent politicians have, in the face of the problems posed by new religious movements, and the greater public visibility of Islam in recent years strongly restated France’s secular principles which were enshrined in the 1905 law separating church and state.

Citing its secular principles, France last year introduced a ban on school students wearing conspicuous religious symbols in state schools. The ban followed a heated debate on how the country should deal with female Muslim students who wear Islamic veils or headscarves. But the debate on religion has re-ignited with the publication of a new book on religion by Nicolas Sarkozy, a former interior minister, who is widely seen as a contender in the presidential election in two years time.

Sarkozy heads President Jacques Chirac’s UMP party and calls in his book for the scrapping of the section of the 1905 law that prevents the state from subsidising religions. The idea has been rejected both by Chirac and by Raffarin.