Pope Benedict’s speech to France’s bishops at Lourdes was a classic example of an “iron first in a velvet glove” address. Delivered calmly and in elegant French, it basically laid down the law to a group that has been among the most critical in the Church of his turn towards traditional Catholicism. It was billed as a meeting but was in fact a monologue. He read it out without hardly ever looking at the 170 cardinals and bishops before him and left right after finishing the text.

“Benedict XVI gave the bishops a veritable road map to help them trace the paths of the future for the church in France,” wrote Jean-Marie Guénois, religion correspondent of Le Figaro. “He wanted this meeting. It’s the only one he imposed on the organisers. Which shows the importance, in his eyes, of what he wanted to tell them.”

The most striking part was his call to the bishops to make more place for traditionalists. The French bishops lobbied the Vatican last year before Benedict liberalised the use of the Tridentine Latin Mass, arguing that giving the traditionalists too much leeway would undermine the authority of the bishops. The “tradis” are especially strong in France, both in the form of those loyal to Rome and those who have broken with it. The culture war between them and the majority church is deeply rooted and mutual suspicion is strong. Bishops worry that traditionalists want to form a “church within a church” if given the slightest chance. Among mainstream Catholics, that can translate into a high sensitivity to anything seen as rolling back the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

“I am aware of your difficulties, but I do not doubt that, within a reasonable time, you can find solutions satisfactory for all, lest the seamless tunic of Christ be further torn,” the pope said while talking about the Tridentine mass. “Everyone has a place in the Church. Every person, without exception, should be able to feel at home, and never rejected.”

To bishops faced with serious priest shortages, Benedict warned the bishops not to rely too much on the lay people who now replace missing priests in many functions. He urged them to continue to try to encourage vocations instead. “Where their specific missions are concerned, priests cannot delegate their functions to the faithful,” he said.

With a growing number of Catholics divorcing and then remarrying outside the Church, bishops in several developed countries have asked whether the Vatican could relax the marriage laws that require an annulment before a divorced Catholic can remarry in the Church. Benedict recognised that “a particularly painful situation concerns those who are divorced and remarried.” But he said he could not change Church teaching: “The Church, which cannot oppose the will of Christ, firmly maintains the principle of the indissolubility of marriage, while surrounding with the greatest affection those men and women who, for a variety of reasons, fail to respect it. Hence initiatives aimed at blessing irregular unions cannot be admitted”

Benedict also encouraged the bishops to remind the French of their country’s Christian roots now that President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he wants to take a more flexible approach to laïcité, the traditionally rigid separation of church and state. He said: “Drawing attention to France’s Christian roots will permit each inhabitant of the country to come to a better understanding of his or her origin and destiny. Consequently, within the current institutional framework and with the utmost respect for the laws that are in force, it is necessary to find a new path, in order to interpret and live from day to day the fundamental values on which the Nation’s identity is built. Your President has intimated that this is possible. The social and political presuppositions of past mistrust or even hostility are gradually disappearing.”

Things are changing, but this is still a touchy issue in France, where many Catholics are wary about reopening the debate on laïcité. One of them, for example, is François Bayrou, a prominent centrist politician and practicing Catholic who boycotted Benedict’s speech at the Elysée Palace because he thought it violated the separation of church and state. But he was here in Lourdes for the pope’s mass on Sunday, as a private citizen. Another issue is whether the bishops want to be seen to be so close to Sarkozy himself. “Speedy Sarko” was quite close to France’s Muslims a few years ago, before they fell out in a big way. He has made pitches to the Jewish community with mixed success. The Catholics are the focus at the moment, but you never know with Sarko when his attention will shift elsewhere.

The bishops gave Benedict a standing ovation at the end of his address, which is probably to be expected during a papal visit. It remains to be seen how much of his road map they follow.

The French are a tough audience to please and speaking to them about church-state relations is a tall order. Pope Benedict got right down to it at the start of his visit to France, using his courtesy call on President Nicolas Sarkozy to outline his view of the role religion should play in the public sphere. Fluent in French and well-read in the country’s history and culture, he made several interesting points in his short speech.

Here’s the part on church-state relations:

During your visit to Rome, Mr President, you called to mind that the roots of France – like those of Europe – are Christian. History itself offers sufficient proof of this: from its origins, your country received the Gospel message. Even though documentary evidence is sometimes lacking, the existence of Christian communities in Gaul is attested from a very early period: it is moving to recall that the city of Lyon already had a bishop in the mid-second century, and that Saint Irenaeus, the author of Adversus Haereses, gave eloquent witness there to the vigour of Christian thought. Saint Irenaeus came from Smyrna to preach faith in the Risen Christ. This bishop of Lyons spoke Greek as his mother tongue. Could there be a more beautiful sign of the universal nature and destination of the Christian message? The Church, established at an early stage in your country, played a civilizing role there to which I am pleased to pay tribute on his occasion. You spoke of it yourself, during your address at the Lateran Palace last December. The transmission of the culture of antiquity through monks, professors and copyists, the formation of hearts and spirits in love of the poor, the assistance given to the most deprived by the foundation of numerous religious congregations, the contribution of Christians to the establishment of the institutions of Gaul, and later France, all of this is too well known for me to dwell on it. The thousands of chapels, churches, abbeys and cathedrals that grace the heart of your towns or the tranquility of your countryside speak clearly of how your fathers in faith wished to honour him who had given them life and who sustains us in existence.

Many people, here in France as elsewhere, have reflected on the relations between Church and State. Indeed, Christ had already offered the basic criterion upon which a just solution to the problem of relations between the political sphere and the religious sphere could be found. He does this when, in answer to a question, he said: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mk 12:17). The Church in France currently benefits from a “regime of freedom”. Past suspicion has been gradually transformed into a serene and positive dialogue that continues to grow stronger. A new instrument of dialogue has been in place since 2002, and I have much confidence in its work, given the mutual good will. We know that there are still some areas open to dialogue, which we will have to pursue and redevelop step by step with determination and patience. You yourself, Mr President, have used the expression “laïcité positive” to characterise this more open understanding. At this moment in history when cultures continue to cross paths more frequently, I am firmly convinced that a new reflection on the true meaning and importance of laïcité is now necessary. In fact, it is fundamental, on the one hand, to insist on the distinction between the political realm and that of religion in order to preserve both the religious freedom of citizens and the responsibility of the State towards them; and, on the other hand, to become more aware of the irreplaceable role of religion for the formation of consciences and the contribution which it can bring to—among other things—the creation of a basic ethical consensus within society.

During a Vatican briefing this week on Pope Benedict’s trip to France, a television producer got up and asked the question that surely was foremost in the minds of many photographers and television crews struggling to hold back yawns as subjects such as France’s secular history were discussed:

Will Carla Bruni be at the airport to welcome the pope?

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi smiled. He said Carla Bruni’s husband — who happens to be Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France – had made it known that he might be at the airport. But he said he did not know if Bruni would be there. Heads of state usually wait for popes at their palaces but sometimes, to show their added respect for the pontiff, they also go to the airport.

In Paris, government officials confirmed Sarkozy would break protocol and greet Benedict at Orly airport, something he is not required to do because this is an official visit rather than a more formal state visit. They said they expected Carla to be there … but didn’t want to be quoted on that.

It seems wherever Sarkozy goes these days,  the visual media is less interested in him than in his current wife, the fomer Carla Bruni. The Italian-born singer, song writer and former supermodel who has been the darling of the media since she entered Sarkozy’s life late last year. Bruni, 40, married Sarkozy in February after a whirlwind three-month romance that started one month after Sarkozy, 53, divorced his second wife, Cecilia.

Carla, who has said she sees herself as being akin to the late U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was not married to Sarkozy when he last saw the pope in Rome in December, so she did not — to the disappointment of the media — accompany him. Sarkozy considers himself a “cultural Catholic” and attends mass only occasionally. Under Church law he is not allowed to take communion since he has not received annulments from his previous marriages.

The pope’s trip to Paris and Lourdes begins on Friday and the media surely will have more weighty political and religious subjects to consider. But for the visual media at least, the moment to die for– whether it takes place at the airport or the Elysée Palace or in Notre Dame Cathedral– will be that of Carla and the pope.

France wouldn’t be France if it didn’t satirise the high and mighty — especially when the target is none other than head of the Roman Catholic Church which once held so much power here.

With Pope Benedict due to arrive on Friday for his first official visit, the French satirical press is having a field day poking fun at him, Catholics, Church doctrine and anything else to do with religion. Being militantly anti-Catholic is a badge of honour for a certain type of secularist French intellectual, so this week’s editions of their favourite journals were bound to zero in on Benedict. But there’s an interesting twist…

Le Canard enchaîné (picture above), a weekly that mixes satire and investigative journalism, something like Private Eye in Britain, leads its front page with a spoof story claiming Benedict (Benoît XVI in French) has been listed in a controversial classified police registry dubbed Edvige. Pretty tame stuff. Its main scoop — the Canard is a must-read for Parisian political gossip — is the claim that President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to attend just about every important event during Benedict’s stay in France. Like many other anonymously sourced Canard scoops, this may or may not be true. Sounds likely, though…

The other satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, loves to provoke with much cruder fare. This is the magazine that reprinted the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad and was taken to court by French Muslims for defamation (it won easily, because free speech was bound to trump the Muslims’ charges of blasphemy in court). This week’s Numéro Spécial Pape (Special Pope Edition) won’t disappoint its readers. It has a long editorial denouncing the Church, cartoons satirising Sarkozy for speaking positively about religion and a list of planned anti-pope petitions and protests (all a safe distance from any papal events). There are also pages of polemical cartoons, some of them downright pornographic and insulting. The cover (at right) was the tamest of them all.

The most interesting aspect of this criticism, though, is what the French like to call the “non-dit” — the “unsaid”. There is much less snide criticism in the media now than there used to be. Just before the 1997 World Youth Day (WYD) in Paris, the media poured cold water on the idea and made fun of the Catholic Church and the ailing Pope John Paul. Commentators announced in advance that it would be a flop. In the end, it was a stunning success. The final Mass at Longchamp racetrack drew over a million Catholics, twice as many as expected.

“There was a change with the 1997 WYD. Catholics were proud to turn out in numbers,” explained Frédéric Lenoir, editor-in-chief of the bimonthly Le Monde des Religions. “All of a sudden, that gave the media — and French society in general — the feeling that religion was important now and one had to reckon with it. Contrary to what the sociologists had been saying for years, it wasn’t a phenomenon that was disappearing. To the contrary, it was a phenomenon that had never disappeared, it had just gone underground a bit.”

Sensitive about possibly upsetting Beijing, President Nicolas Sarkozy decided not to meet the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan spiritual leader’s current visit to France. But he sent an envoy who got just as much media coverage (if not more) than he would have — his wife. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (left), the pop singer and former supermodel Sarkozy married in February, attended the consecration of a Tibetan Buddhist temple in southern France on Friday. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Human Rights Minister Rama Yade and former prime minister Alain Juppé were also at the Lerab Ling temple, but French media made only fleeting references to their presence.

Read our report by correspondent Estelle Shirbon here.

Even before any comment came from China, France’s opposition Socialist Party criticised the meeting as “a serious slide into celebrity- mania (“peopolisation”) in political life” and rapped the two ministers for taking a secondary role at the ceremony. “They should have received the Dalai Lama in a secular and official setting,” a party spokesman said.

Not that the Socialists are opposed to meeting the Dalai Lama. In fact, former Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal (above) held talks with him last week and said afterwards that she wanted to visit Tibet soon.

The red and gold Lerab Ling is one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist temples in the West. It houses a 7-metre (23-foot) high golden statue of Buddha and many relics and scriptures.

“I told him he was always welcome in France,” said Kouchner, who attended the inauguration and met the Dalai Lama briefly with Bruni-Sarkozy afterwards.

Things seem to be looking up at the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM). The first round of elections for its new national leadership went off well on Sunday — the second round is due on June 22 — and several leaders of member groups expressed confidencethe council can finally get down to work. This will be a revolution in itself. Since it was created in 2003 under heavy pressure from the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy (now M. le Président), the CFCM has been almost completely paralysed by internal rivalries. The reason for hope this time around is that the government didn’t choose winner in advance, as it did in the 2003 and 2005 elections. Instead of naming Paris Grand MosqueRector Dalil Boubakeur the next CFCM president before the vote no matter what his mosque network’s result was, the government let the Muslims decide for themselves who should run the council. The Moroccan-backed Rally of French Muslims (RMF) mosque network came out clearly ahead and its candidate for CFCM president, Mohammed Moussaoui, looks set to win the top job on June 22. Here’s a post-election interviewwith Moussaoui (in French) where he lists his priorities as religious training for imams and chaplains, mosque construction, consumer protection for hajis, better conditions for Eid slaughterhouses and Muslim sections in cemeteries. Without ever mentioning the record of the CFCM to date, he shows all that has to be done. The back story to the CFCM election is fascinating. Back in 2003, Sarkozy insisted that Boubakeur be president in order to:-

1. Ensure a moderate head of a prestigious mosque headed the CFCM rather than the supposed “radicals” of the Union of French Muslim Organisations (UOIF), which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood and
2. Work closely with Algeria, which supports the Grand Mosque and its network, the main mosque network for Algerian Muslims in France.

The Grand Mosque network came in third in the 2003 and 2005 elections, so the UOIF and the Moroccan mosques — first represented by the National Federation of French Muslims (FNMF) and now the RMF — had serious problems with this interference. Although Sarkozy is now president, it seems he did not bring the same priorities into the Elysée Palace. The current approach shows less worry about the UOIF, which is not really all that “radical” after all, and a tilt towards Morocco. Press reports say Rabat has also become more interested in influencing its emigrants in Europe after Moroccans were implicated in the Theo van Gogh murder and the Madrid train bombings. Anyway, back to the CFCM elections. Once Boubakeur pulled out of the race in supposed protest against the voting mechanism accepted in the two earlier elections, the vote was free for the winners to be the group that actually won the most votes. The Moroccans came in a strong first at 43.2 percent, far ahead of the UOIF at 30.2 percent. This satisfied the Moroccans and smaller groups that will probably ally with them, but left the UOIF very dissatisfied. Now it is clear they are stuck in second place and they don’t like that. So they’re calling for a rotating presidency to let them get the top job some day. Judging from what RMF President Anouar Kbibech said after the results were in (RFI audio here in French), the RMF plans to actually tackle practical problems for Muslims in France. The regional council (CRCM) in Rhône-Alpes, the region in and around Lyon, showed up the national council by producing a 74-page report on its progresson such practical issues over the past three years. The pragmatic regional leader there, Azzedine Gaci (picture at left), has set a high standard for the new boys in Paris to meet. One of the first would be to set up their own website … One fly in the ointment is that the election confirmed the influence of what the French call “consular Islam” — the influence that the so-called countries of origin have on French Muslims. The switch in leadership from the Paris Grand Mosque to the RMF also means a shift in influence from Algeria to Morocco. Turkey has a similar link to ethnic Turks in France, but they are a smaller group (12.7 percent in the election). For all the government’s talk of creating an Islam de France, it persists in fostering this consular Islam.When it was launched, the CFCM aroused interest around Europe because it seemed to be the most developed form of official representation for Islam in a European country. It looked like some kind of answer to the question ‘who speaks for Islam?’ But its immobility over the years made it drop off the radar screen.There are a mixed bag of efforts to create or maintain Muslim councils in other countries, such as the “Islam Conference” in Berlin pictured at right. Here’s a roundup of them by H. A. Hellyer. Each country has a different approach and there doesn’t seem to be any one-size-fits-all solution.How do you think a Muslim council in a European country should be organised?

The future of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), the state-backed body meant to represent the country’s second-largest religion, is once again shrouded in uncertainty. The Grand Mosque of Paris (GMP) announced on Saturday it would boycott elections next month for the CFCM leadership. Although the Grand Mosque and its national mosque network rank third in size behind rival organisations, a CFCM without it is a rump organisation that cannot really claim to represent Islam in France.

The CFCM has been paralysed by internal rivalries for most of its five years of existence. Back in 2003 when he was interior minister, France’s current President Nicolas Sarkozy engineered an agreement among the country’s main Islamic groups to create a council to speak for Muslims similar to the way the French Bishops’ Conference speaks for Catholics or the Consistory speaks for Jews. His ministry’s Religious Affairs Bureau kept close tabs on the Council and influenced its operations behind the scenes. But the CFCM could not overcome the divisions within the Muslim community itself. It rarely acted as a single body and member groups continued to compete with each other.

That competition now threatens the June 8 election.

While the Grand Mosque of Paris is the symbolic centre of French Islam, the main Muslim group are the Moroccan-backed Rally for French Muslims (RMF) and the Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF), which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood. The RMF has been steadily gaining ground and has strong backing from Rabat (it even held a conference of 250 leaders in Marrakech in February). Moroccan immigrants in France tend to be more observant than the Algerians close to the GMP (which is directly supported by Algiers). They have opened many mosques and prayer rooms around the country, often in suburbs or small towns where they can get ample prayer space.

That factor boosts their clout within the CFCM, because the Council elections are based on the total prayer space each organisation commands, with 10 delegates for every 1,000 square metres of prayer space in the mosques. Only these delegates are allowed to vote in the national and regional Council elections. As one GMP source put it, “All one needs to do is buy premises in the suburbs, throw a few rugs on the floor and declare the place a mosque, even if there isn’t an imam.”

The first two elections, in 2003 and 2005, were decided in advance because the Interior Ministry ensured that Grand Mosque Rector Dalil Boubakeur was installed as the Council’s president no matter result what his network garnered in the actual voting. The Moroccans (then in another organisation called the FNMF) “won” both those polls and Rabat is actively supporting the RMF to do this again. This time around, the current Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie consulted Algiers and Rabat but did not engineer any such deal. The CFCM faced its first open election.

Failing to have the earlier deal upheld, the Grand Mosque has now decided to boycott any election it cannot win. “We can’t be in the CFCM without having the presidency,” Chems-eddine Hafiz, a senior Grand Mosque official, said at the news conference announcing the boycott. Boubakeur denounced the election procedures as unfair, even “iniquitous” and said the number of delegates should be based on a more complex formula that takes into account the other services the mosque provides (like the GMP’s theological school), the educational level of the imams (the GMP’s come off better here too) and the background of the mosque group (GMP again scores high). Boubakeur has argued for years that the voting procedure had to be reformed, but only a small group of African mosques has supported his view.

When it was founded, the CFCM aroused a lot of interest in Europe as a possible model for other European countries trying to integrate their growing Muslim minorities. Now it looks like it will remain moribund beyond the June election (if it is held) and may never get down to tackling the practical problems these minorities face. Some in the GMP seem to think that Sarkozy will step in at the last minute to ensure Boubakeur a third term, but others doubt the president would do that at a time his popularity ratings are so low.

Do you think European governments should get involved in “managing” Islam like this?

The “Sarko & secularism” story takes on ever new twists. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already kicked up lively debates in France by praising religious faith whenever he can, defending his country’s Christian roots in a Roman basilica and complimenting the Saudis in Riyadh for fighting against fanaticism and fundamentalism. After the Catholics and the Muslims, France’s Jews were in line for some presidential stroking. It came on Wednesday evening, at the annual dinner of the leading Jewish organisation here, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF).

Always good for a surprise, Sarkozy unexpectedly announced he wanted each 10-year-old pupil to study the life and death of one of France’s 11,000 child Holocaust victims. The president also announced he would visit Israel in May to mark its 60th anniversary and “won’t shake hands with people who refuse to recognise Israel” — a remark apparently ruling out any face-to-face meetings with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

One of Sarkozy’s remarks at the CRIF dinner seemed to go too far even for his hosts. He said: “The drama of the 20th century was not due to an excess of God, but to his awesome absence. There is not a line in the Torah, the Gospel or the Koran, when seen in its context and the fullness of its meaning, that can put up with the massacres committed in Europe during the 20th century in the name of totalitarianism and a world without God.”

CRIF President Richard Prasquier, who described himself as a secular Jew, made it clear he preferred the the traditional approach of keeping Godtalk down to a whisper. He defended the 1905 law on laïcité and said it had “given Jews the benevolent neutrality (of the state) that guaranteed equality and produced concrete solutions to practical problems. For us, this law is part of the superego that links us to the French republic.” As for the butchery of the 20th century, he said: “I have too much respect for those Righteous among the Nations who were atheists to believe that religions are the only barrier to evil.”

The idea of studying child Holocaust victims ran into criticism from politicians and teachers who said it might be psychologically too much for 10-year-olds to bear. “I don’t think we can impose remembrance,” former prime minister Dominique de Villepin said.

The teachers’ union SE-Unsa said it was “particularly shocked by this presidential initiative that completely ignores how young people form their personalities. Must every child of 10 years now be personally charged with this weighty act of posthumous adoption?”

But Jewish writer Marek Halter said it was a “tremendous initiative … for a child at school, the death of six million people is an abstraction.” But they could imagine “the face of a little Moshe, a little Isaac or a Jean-Jacques Rabinovitch.”

Education Minister Xavier Darcos said pupils would not be allowed to refuse to participate. Muslim pupils have been reported to refuse to discuss the Holocaust in class or to deny that it ever happened. “They are rare cases,” Darcos told France2 television. “It’s unacceptable and it is not accepted.”

Click here for interesting Le Monde analysis of “Sarkozy et Dieu” (in French).

We’ve had several news stories and blog posts about President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to modify France’s policy of laïcité, that almost untranslatable term for secularism. The focus in the discussion here is usually on what that would mean for Muslims and Christians. But what about Sarkozy and France’s Jews? Before I got the chance to look into that, my former Reuters colleague Bernard Edinger produced a very informative piece on this for the Jerusalem Report . I’ll let him tell the story right here.

France and India are two countries that proudly proclaim the secular nature of their democracies. The principles of church-state separation and state neutrality towards religion are the same. But somehow the accents were different when French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited India last week. While they both were dealing with the concept called “secularism” in English, it was clear that Sarkozy’s thinking was based on the French word laïcité while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh clearly had the Hindi term dharmanirpekshta in mind.

The visit focused mostly on expanding investment and defence cooperation, with much gossip on the side about whether the freshly divorced president’s new flame Carla Bruni would join him at the Taj Mahal (much to the chagrin of the paparazzi, she didn’t).

Hidden behind the headlines, though, was a fascinating disagreement about Sarkozy’s plan to present Taslima Nasreen, an exiled Bangladeshi writer living in India, with the “Simone de Beauvoir Prize For Women’s Freedom.” This prize sponsored by CulturesFrance (part of the French Foreign Ministry) and a Paris publisher went this year to Nasreen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, two women of Muslim background who have been threatened with death by Islamists because of their forceful criticism of the religion.

Sarkozy wanted to present the award to Nasreen in New Delhi, presumably at a ceremony to be broadcast back home where he is under fire for allegedly violating French laïcité. He was even thinking of doing it at the safe house where she is hiding from death threats. This caused considerable concern in the Indian government, which worried about a possible Muslim backlash over any honour for the award-winning writer they accuse of blasphemy. The Indian army had to be called in to quell anti-Nasreen riots by Islamist groups in Kolkata last November.

In the end, it didn’t happen. The grand French gesture was reduced to a request to India to “facilitate Ms Nasreen’s journey to France” to pick up her award.

It looks like a case of thinking that secularism was the same the world around. The French version, laïcité, was a reaction to the power of the majority Catholic Church and aimed to keep religion out of public life. Defending this is as natural for a French president as praising apple pie and motherhood is for his American counterpart.

With religion such a part of public life, India’s dharmanirpekshta aims more at making sure no one religious group dominates this country of 1.1 billion people. While Hindus are the majority at around 80 percent, Muslims are more than 13 percent of the population. Christians and Sikhs each account for about 2 percent of the population while Buddhists and other religions account for the rest. Indian law also makes major concessions to religions. For example, Indian laws on family, divorce and adoption differ depending on your religion.

Prime Minister Singh was largely silent on Nasreen’s case last year, sparking criticism from secular intellectuals that the government was failing to defend the country’s principles. In the Hindustan Times, Karan Thapar wrote of India: “Democratic we may be, but liberal we most certainly are not.” His low profile has also drawn fire from Hindu nationalists, who charged he was appeasing Muslims by not vocally supporting Nasreen. There may not have been much he could say. Criticism of the Muslims could have prompted the Hindu nationalist opposition to cry even more loudly that Islamist groups are a threat to the Indian state.

For the moment, it seems as if Singh has won on both counts. He headed off both Sarkozy and a possible uproar from Muslims over his award ceremony plans. In a recent broadside, Jamaat-i-Islami Hind focused on the government’s decision to extend the visa of “a foreign controversial lady.”

Nasreen has since said she will not go to Paris for the award and asked that it be sent to her residence in Kolkata.

The controversy, for now, appears to be fading. And the French have bounced back into the cultural news headlines smartly with another, less controversial award. On Sunday, the French ambassador decorated the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan with the country’s highest decoration for artists, the “Order of Arts and Letters.”

In India, it was a much safer bet.