French Freemasonry Sets its Sights on (Catholic) Private Schools Ahead of Presidential Elections| National Catholic Register

Just days after the Catholic funeral of a prominent Freemason and former senator sparked controversy among French Catholics, the newly reelected head of France’s largest Masonic organization reignited a long-running fault line between French Freemasonry and Catholic education.

Speaking with Le Figaro Aug. 28, Guillaume Trichard, reelected grand master of the Grand Orient de France (GODF), said his obedience — the term used for a Masonic Lodge’s jurisdiction — intends to shape the 2027 presidential race, starting with education, and announced that it will publish “a white paper on the school of the Republic, with numerous proposals.”

In his sights are independent schools operating outside state contracts, known in France as écoles hors-contrat, or “non-contract schools,” many of which are Catholic in identity or inspiration, and which, he said, “have no place in the Republic.” Unlike France’s much larger network of state-contracted private schools, most of which are Catholic, hors-contract schools receive no regular state funding and retain greater autonomy, although they remain subject to government inspection and basic educational requirements. 

The majority of these non-contract schools targeted by Trichard are officially nondenominational, but a large number of them are founded by Catholic communities, often of a traditionalist bent, that choose not to register with the Church in order to escape both diocesan and state scrutiny.

‘No Place in the Republic’

Education is just one item on the agenda of the newly reelected head of the GODF, which has a long precedence of putting political pressure in areas that align with its agenda. For instance, Trichard recently credited his obedience with paving the way for France’s new law legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide. These openly political statements stand in contrast with Freemasonry’s traditional culture of discretion.

Trichard, 50, won 31 of 36 votes at the GODF’s 161st Convent in Bordeaux on Aug. 28. According to the order’s own account, he became the first former grand master in 37 years to return to the position, having already led the GODF in 2023-2024. 

Asked by Le Figaro what he wanted to see among the 2027 presidential candidates’ education proposals, Trichard answered that “the Grand Orient de France is an ardent promoter of free, secular public education.” 

“Everyone knows the role Freemasons played in the Jules Ferry laws [the 1881-1882 laws that made French primary education free, mandatory and secular], but I believe non-contract private schools have no place in the Republic” he said. “Because ‘non-contract’ means there is no contract with the indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic, which can open the door to significant abuses.”

The Grand Master also said that by early 2027, GODF will also publish a broader manifesto laying out “our hopes for France, Europe, the world” on issues from the rule of law to artificial intelligence. “We hope the [presidential] candidates will draw on these forthcoming proposals in their platforms and their arguments,” he said.

The reaction from Catholic commentators was swift, with several accusing the GODF of attempting to interfere in societal issues. “The Church of the Republic prepares its weapons for 2027, in particular against free education,” Le Salon Beige titled its commentary. 

Reflecting on the reasons why the non-contract schools had become “the school to be torn down,” columnist Gabrielle Cluzel claimed on the news site Boulevard Voltaire  that it is because “they are essentially denominational — that is, Catholic.” Cluzel clarifies that Islam,  which accounts for a very small portion of non-contract schools, “is not Guillaume Trichard’s concern.” She called non-contract schools “the untouched control sample, kept safe from the great apprentice-sorcerer pedagogical experiment” of the national school system. 

An Old Rival, Renewed

France counted 2,557 non-contract schools as of the 2025-2026 school year, according to the association Créer son école  — a sector that has grown steadily since 2017. Officially, only about one in six register as Catholic. But that figure understates the sector’s real character, since most newly created Catholic “non-contracts” do not seek recognition from their local bishop, the Catholic daily La Croix has reported, for fear of “alignment with contracted Catholic education” and its closer oversight.

In 2020, the left-wing magazine Politis lamented that more than three-quarters of the schools funded by the Fondation pour l’école, the movement’s leading private backer, were in fact Catholic, including dozens tied to traditionalist orders such as the FSSP or even the SSPX. 

Trichard’s remarks, therefore, were not an isolated outburst. In July 2025, the GODF was also among 24 secularist and Masonic organizations that signed a joint statement opposing the opening of the Académie Saint-Louis de Chalès, a single-sex Catholic boarding school for boys in the Sologne region backed by Catholic billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin. The statement argued the school’s Catholic “integral education” model amounted to indoctrination and broke with the republican consensus on coeducation. The regional education authority approved the school anyway, that same month, for its September 2025 opening.

GODF’s role in building the secular Third Republic (1870-1940) and its lasting education system is a matter of historical record the order itself takes credit for. In the so-called Affaire des Fiches, exposed in 1904, Grand Orient lodges around France fed the War Ministry secret intelligence on army officers’ Mass attendance and their children’s religious education. Officers judged too Catholic were filed under the code name “Carthage” and disadvantaged, while Freemasons and committed republicans, filed as “Corinthe,” were favored. The scandal brought down the government in place, but not before thousands of careers had already been shaped by it.

The “school war” that scandal partially exposed has never really stopped. In 1984, Mitterrand’s socialist government tried to fold private schools into a unified public system under the Savary Bill, triggering a backlash unmatched in postwar France. A June 24 demonstration in Paris — which drew between 850,000 and 2 million people, according to estimates by police and organizers — led to the withdrawal of the bill a few weeks later.

France’s Catholic schools have been contending with intensified state scrutiny over the past few years. A parliamentary report on violence in schools, published in July 2025, devoted much of its attention to Catholic institutions under state contract. In December that year, French Catholic education’s own general secretariat published a report of its own, alleging abusive and intrusive state inspections of Catholic schools, including teachers questioned about their Mass attendance and students’ private spiritual journals photographed by inspectors.

The Grand Orient, which is preparing to mark its 300th anniversary in 2028, claims that it is mobilizing some 1,400 lodges nationwide for public events ahead of the election. That public push marks a break from the order’s traditional culture of discretion, one reinforced two days after Trichard’s reelection, when he became the first grand master in GODF history to rekindle the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Aug. 30.

Meanwhile, the grand master also took credit with Le Figaro for France’s new assisted-dying law as proof that positions GODF has long championed eventually become policy. “The law’s promulgation on Aug. 18 didn’t come out of nowhere,” he said, tracing the effort back to a bill introduced in the Senate in the 1970s by Henri Caillavet, who had also been the Senate’s rapporteur for the law that legalized abortion in France. “Look at how far we’ve come.”