And you think that the ‘Écoles libres’ teach their pupils to detest the freemasons and the Jews … It is true that, for some years now, in the world that comes out of these schools one no longer receives Jews, which does not matter to us in itself, but which signals that dangerous mentality from which the Affair, etc. grew. But I tell you that in Illiers, the small community where my father presided over the distribution of prizes the day before yesterday, one has not invited the priest to the distribution of prizes since the laws of Ferry came into effect. They habituate the pupils to consider those who visit the priest as people that they should avoid, and in this respect, just like those on the opposite side, we are working to create two Frances … The Christian spirit will not be destroyed if we close the Christian schools, and if it is inclined to die … it will do so even under theocratic rule (Proust 1903: Correspondance III, 382, 386, my translation).

In brief, this world is ‘secular’ not because scientific knowledge has replaced religious belief (that is, because the ‘real’ has at last become apparent) but because, on the contrary, it must be lived in uncertainly, without fixed moorings even for the believer, a world in which the real and the imaginary mirror each other (Asad 2003: 64-65).