The Third Republic (1870–1940) firmly established the republican system in France. It was built in opposition to the Catholic Church, which was intrinsically tied to the monarchy and, for a long time, hostile to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and to the regime that succeeded it. The Republic, which separated Church and State in 1905 (fifteen years after the Brazilian Republic), instituted a strict secularism that, to this day, confines religious beliefs and practices to the private sphere and enforces neutrality in the public realm.

It was not, however, only republican France that projected itself beyond its borders. Up until the Third Republic, France behaved as a Catholic power. The protection of Christians was one of the pillars of its foreign policy and served to justify some of its imperialist interventions. By the late nineteenth century, more than two-thirds of the Catholic missionaries working around the world were of French nationality, and they too were agents of influence, particularly linguistic influence. In the 1960s, during the Brazilian military dictatorship, there were numerous connections between theologians and clergy from the two countries. The Dominican priest Henri Burin des Roziers (1930-2017), who lived in the state of Pará from 1978 to 2016, became involved in land disputes in defense of local communities’ rights.

France was also the birthplace of new religions that found in Brazil a more fertile ground than in the country where they originated. Such was the case of the Religion of Humanity, derived from positivism, the philosophy developed by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), and of Spiritism, founded by Allan Kardec (1804-1869).

 

Catholic France in Brazil

The congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion, founded in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, specialized in the education of young women from high society, initially in France and later in around twenty countries. It established itself in Brazil in 1888, first in Rio de Janeiro, then 

Such influence by Catholic France is also expressed in Brazil through the familiar figure of Saint Thérèse (Teresa Martin, Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus (1873–1893), or in a given name such as Lurdes, a reference to the town of Lourdes in the Pyrenees, to this day an important site of Catholic pilgrimage.