Only museums, cemeteries, or places of worship are exceptions to the rule, the court said last Wednesday. According to an earlier judgment of 2015, the entire memorial had violated the law and had to be removed, but following an appeal, the court has only demanded the removal of the cross.
The cross sits on top of a memorial dedicated to Saint John Paul II, the Polish pontiff, in the French town of Ploërmel. It was donated to former mayor Paul Anselin in 2006 by its creator, the Georgian-Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli.
Ploërmel, a medieval town in Brittany, has six months to remove the cross from the public square. French tourists and Polish reporters have crowded the square to get a last glimpse of the cross soon to be removed. The court stated that the cross’s “presence in a public location is contrary to the law,” Le Point reported.
Many Poles are unhappy about the harsh ruling, and a diplomatic spat has erupted between France and Poland over a top court order to remove the cross.
Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło suggesting that the ruling has revealed a spirit of anti-European totalitarianism, which has in turn introduced terrorism to the continent.
“John Paul II said that history teaches that democracy without freedom transforms into open or disguised totalitarianism,” she told the Polish Press Agency. “Our great Pole, our great European, is a symbol of a Christian, united Europe. The dictate of political correctness — the secular state — introduces a place for values that are alien to our culture, (and) which lead to terrorism to the daily life of Europeans.”
Szydło said the Polish government would try to save the memorial from “censorship” and she has proposed its relocation to Poland, with the permission of French authorities and the local community.
Despite the decision by French Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte to re-establish the Church as the national religion of the country in the Concordat of 1801, the Paris Commune of 1871 proclaimed France a secular state, and in 1879 the French government actively began the expulsion of priests and nuns from the hospitals their orders had founded.
The 1905 Law of Separation of the Churches and the State, further entrenched the secularism of the French state and its public institutions.
While state ownership of churches was retained, Republican laws soon replaced Christian laws, including those governing divorce and Sunday trading.
Instrumental in the country-wide removal of nativity scenes from public places in France, is the National Federation of Free Thought, a humanist organisation. In this case, the small town was ordered to pay €3000 to the organisation.
The current Mayor of Ploërmel, Patrick Le Diffon, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the ruling against the cross which had been a part of the town for 12 years, and a tourist asset.
To counter the ruling, Le Diffon is planning to sell the town square to a private investors, “thus circumventing the problem” of a cross appearing on public land.
Spreading the hashtag #montretacroix [show your cross], France’s conservative parties have decried the decision, labeling the ruling as “madness” and “destructive to the country’s history”.
Valérie Boyer, MP of the Republicans party noting: “When will this madness consisting of trying to erase our roots end?”
Louis Aliot, vice president of the Front National, denounced the “iniquitous” decision that would lead to “the destruction of our Judeo-Christian society”. One commentator even likened the Council of State to ISIS, The Telegraph reported.