The Place de la Concorde, once the site of the guillotine that executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution, is being transformed this week for a very different event: a mass by Pope Leo XIV before a crowd that could reach one million people. The temporary structure being built for Saturday’s ceremony will be dismantled afterwards, but the visit is placing France’s long-standing model of secularism at the centre of public debate.
The Revolution pursued a radical break with the Catholic Church, closing churches, persecuting priests, turning Notre-Dame into a Temple of Reason and attempting to replace the Christian calendar. More than a century later, the 1905 law separating the French state from religious organisations formalised a principle that became central to the country’s political identity. The law helped establish the boundaries between public institutions and religion and was later incorporated into the first article of the 1946 Constitution.
Leo XIV’s four-day visit, taking in Paris, Lourdes and Metz, is the first state visit by a pope to France since Benedict XVI travelled there in 2008. Francis subsequently made apostolic visits to Marseille and Corsica. Leo will pray with tens of thousands of young people at the Stade de France, where tickets sold out within half an hour, and will preside over solemn vespers at Notre-Dame before celebrating Saturday’s mass at the Concorde. Some estimates put the attendance at up to one million, with 14,000 security officers deployed for the event.
The Pope will later travel to the Saint-Denis stadium, where he will be received by the city’s Muslim mayor, Bally Bagayoko. “La laïcité n’est pas l’amnésie” — “Secularism is not amnesia” — Bagayoko said, referring to France’s Christian heritage.
President Emmanuel Macron, who has visited the Vatican three times, will not attend any of the masses, citing respect for France’s secular principles. Political scientist Patrick Weil, author of De la laïcité en France, said this was a legitimate position but argued that French secularism did not prevent the president from attending a religious ceremony. “The law of secularism does not intervene on whether the president can or cannot go to a mass,” Weil said.
France remains a country with a strong Catholic tradition. The papal seat was based in Avignon for about 68 years, from 1309 to 1377, while the country’s religious practice has declined over time. The 2015 Islamist attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people, also altered public attitudes towards religion and increasingly focused debates over secularism on Islam.
At the same time, Catholicism has experienced a revival among some younger adults. Baptisms among people aged 18 to 25 rose from 4,124 in 2016 to 13,234 in 2025, a change generally associated with new political currents and renewed interest in spirituality, although overall religious practice in France continues to decline.
The visit also comes amid disagreements between France and the Vatican over recent legislation. Macron’s government secured constitutional protection for abortion and recently introduced legislation regulating euthanasia, measures that have caused concern at the Vatican. Jean-François Colosimo, editor and chairman of the board of the Saint-Serge Orthodox Theology Institute, said Leo was unlikely to attack either law because both had been duly enacted, but described them as a genuine point of tension between France and the Vatican.
Historian Giovanni Maria Vian, former director of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, said the Pope’s return was significant because France remained important to Christianity despite its secular and increasingly de-Christianised character. “France is the oven where the intellectual bread of Christianity is baked,” he recalled, quoting Pope Paul VI.
