In late June Hervé Lebreton received an email containing a lengthy pdf file, the culmination of two-and-a-half years of work by the maths teacher and freedom of information campaigner from the south-west of France. For the message from the ministry of the interior contained details of thousands of discretionary grants given by France's MPs and senators to local mayors and councils from the notoriously secretive fund the 'réserve parlementaire' or parliamentary reserve fund.
Each year the states provides more than 150 million euros for this fund which is used by elected representatives not just to help local council projects but also to hand over to associations. The payments are made entirely at the individual MP's or senator's discretion and until now no details have ever been officially released by the state as to how much each elected representative hands out – and to whom. The reserve fund is one of the few opportunities that members of Parliament have to display real power locally under the heavily-centralised presidential system in France, and until now has remained one of the Republic great secrets.
It is only due to Lebreton's persistence that the veil has now been lifted on these payments. It was back in 2011 that this teacher from the Lot-et-Garonne département – roughly equivalent to a county – and founder of the pro direct democracy group Association pour une démocratie directe first tried to obtain details of these grants from the ministry of the interior that controls them. After the ministry refused, Lebreton took action through various administrative and legal bodies until finally, on April 23rd this year, the administrative court in Paris ruled in his favour. For the first time the ministry of the interior chose not to appeal against the decision, and two months later the email with a list of the parliamentary reserve fund donations for 2011 appeared in Lebreton's email inbox.
The document is revealing. In 2011 the right-wing UMP was in power, and it was senior members of that party who handed out the lion's share of the reserve in that year. Topping the list was the then-president of the National Assembly Bernard Accoyer, who donated 11.9 million euros.
The list also reveals that the then-president of the Senate Gérard Larcher, from the Yvelines département south-west of Paris, spent 83% of his 3 million euro reserve or 2,600,891 euros, in communes that were voting in that year's senatorial elections – Senate elections are staggered, with elections for half of its seats every three years, and only certain communes are involved at any one election. Larcher does not deny the figures but his entourage points out that “only” one third of the cash was spent in his own département.
One of the more unexpected findings, however, was that a great deal of this cash – some seven million euros in all – was spent on repairing local churches, as Mathieu Magnaudeix reports below.
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A glance at the way France's 'parliamentary reserve fund' was spent in 2011 immediately highlights a curious fact; the words 'church', 'chapel', 'abbey', 'bell-tower' or 'stained- glass window' crop up frequently in the list.
According to Mediapart's calculations, in 2011 French senators and MPs allocated nearly seven million of the 150-million-euro reserve to some 650 projects for renovating, re-building or maintaining religious buildings. The buildings in question belong overwhelmingly to the Catholic Church – they include just five Protestant churches and not a single mosque or synagogue.
This duty of maintenance can certainly put a heavy financial burden on those local authorities where such historical buildings are located. It is also an issue that generates some controversy – there are those within the Catholic Church for whom public spending in the parishes is never enough, and the issue of “the disappearance of our bell-towers” is used by far-right politicians to try and drum up grass-roots support.
Mostly the work financed by MPs and senators involves redoing a church roof, painting a parvis, restoring stonework, repairing stained-glass windows or modernising electrical fittings. In some cases a building can be dangerous and urgent work is needed to make it safe.
But using the réserve parlementaire intrigues specialists in secularism contacted by Mediapart. For one thing, they were unaware of the practice, even though it seems widespread.
“It is a hidden way of financing, such secrecy is unusual,” says historian Jean Baubérot, who writes a blog for Mediapart. Peña-Ruiz adds: “When things are not clear, there is always something to fear and suspect.”
There are political stakes involved. In 2011 the Right was in power, and as noted above it allocated much of the share of the 150 million-euro parliamentary reserve to itself and its cronies. It is hard not to wonder whether there is a connection between financing religious buildings and a desire to pander to the Catholic electorate, which traditionally votes for the Right.
Among parliamentarians belonging to the right-wing UMP party, Bernard Accoyer, who was still president of the National Assembly in 2011 and disposed of the tidy sum of just under 12 million euros of réserve parlementaire cash, used 310,000 euros of it to fund the renovation of 18 churches and abbeys across France. A third of this, 100,000 euros, went to restoring the roof and bell-tower of the church in Thorens-Glières (see photo above), a Catholic edifice in his own Haute-Savoie constituency.
Hervé Mariton, UMP MP for the Drôme département in south-eastern France, who opposed the recent law introducing same-sex marriage, had access to 730,000 euros and ploughed 26,000 euros into work on four churches in his département. Marc Le Fur, the UMP deputy for Côtes d’Armor in Brittany and a militant Catholic, put 24,000 euros into restoring two chapels in Côtes d'Armor.
Seven churches in Lot-et-Garonne, south-western France, benefited from grants for a total of 100,000 euros from the reserve controlled by the département's two MPs, Michel Diefenbacher of the UMP and centrist Jean Dionis du Séjour.
Nicole Ameline (UMP, Calvados) set aside 39,000 euros of her 150,000 euros for work in five churches. And Xavier Bertrand, then education minister, released 32,400 euros for four churches in his constituency in Aisne, north-eastern France, as well as 5,100 euros to restore the doors of the parish church in Aregno, the village in Corsica from which his wife hails. UMP deputy Jérôme Bignon, who lost his seat in the 2012 election, disseminated 38,000 euros across several parishes to renovate churches in his constituency in the Somme, northern France.
A popular system with senators...
Sometimes the distinction between restoring a building and financing a belief system – which is theoretically illegal - seems rather small. For example, UMP senator Alain Vasselle paid 1,100 euros from his reserve to buy a series of Stations of the Cross paintings for the church at Maisoncelle-Tuilerie, near the town in northern France where he is the mayor. Yet, according to Peña-Ruiz, “you cannot use public money to create new religious assets”. And Jean-François Humbert, UMP MP for the Doubs département in eastern France, spent 4,800 euros on restoring the chapel in Silley, which is not a protected building.
Senators, who are elected by indirect suffrage – mayors and municipal and general councillors are their electorate – are particularly generous when it comes to restoring religious edifices. A few thousand euros is like manna from heaven for mayors of small communes, and the senator who provides them can hope for a favour in return at the right moment.
The most prodigious giver in this regard is Philippe Marini, UMP senator for Oise in northern France. He disposed of a weighty 2.8 million euros in 2011, which was mostly spent in Compiègne, the town where he is the mayor.
Marini released nearly 215,000 euros for work in 28 religious buildings in Oise, including restoring the church in Saint-Médard d'Attichy and statues in the church at Nourard, installing heating in the church of Saint-Michel in Mesnil-en-Thelle and the church in Quesmy, and fitting a lightning conductor at the church at Bretigny. A further 15,000 euros went to fund the first tranche of work on the arched ceiling and polychrome beams in the Saint-Blaise chapel in Silly-Tillard (see photo above right), which is a classified historical monument.
Gérard Larcher, then president of the Senate, used 150,000 euros from his reserve of three million to fund restoration work in 13 churches and abbeys across France, of which two were in his Yvelines constituency west of Paris. Mediapart has already reported that Larcher used most of his 2011 allocation to back projects by local councillors and mayors who were to vote in the Senate elections that year, thus giving weight to his own candidacy as Senate chairman.
Joël Bourdin (UMP, Eure) made grants worth 70,000 euros to renovate eight churches. Philippe Adnot, independent senator for Aube, south-east of Paris, allocated 38,000 euros to restore 10 churches in his département.
Senators on the supposedly secular Left were involved in such handouts too, even if they had a lower allocation from the reserve in 2011 and spent less overall on restoring religious buildings.
David Assouline, a senator for Paris and currently the Socialist Party's (PS) spokesman, distributed 19,000 euros attributed to other PS senators to help restore Catholic edifices. Nicole Bricq, who is currently President François Hollande's minister for foreign trade, contributed 20,000 euros for churches in the Seine-et-Marne département near Paris she represents in the Senate.
Jean-Louis Carrère, senator for the Landes in south-western France, ploughed 56,000 euros into renovating three churches there. Jean-Pierre Sueur and François Rebsamen spent respectively 19,000 euros and 8,000 euros on churches in their Loiret and Côte-d'Or constituencies.
And even fervently secularist Communist senators do not hold back from using this method of funding in their constituencies. André Chassaigne allocated 3,250 euros to restoring the church bells in Novacelles in Puy-de-Dôme, Auvergne, in central France. And Michèle Demessine, who was tourism minister under Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2001 and is senator in the Nord department and deputy mayor of Lille, spent 65,800 euros for the partial rehabilitation of the church in Prouvy (see photo, below left), which is in poor condition.
Jean-Pierre Chevènement, MP for Belfort in eastern France and a renowned figure on the French Left, meanwhile gave 12,500 euros to fund the restoration of a harmonium and an organ in two Belfort churches.
The réserve parlementaire was also used to finance numerous renovations of 'presbyteries' to the tune of 500,000 euros, but this was usually to convert them into municipal buildings or housing.
In the long list of religious buildings that receive funding on this list there are just five donations for Protestant ones: 11,000 euros for the church at La Roque-d'Anthéron in the Bouches-du-Rhône; 8,000 euros for repairing two churches in the Gard, including one at Les Mages; 8,000 euros for the church at Fouday in the Bas-Rhin in Alsace; and 15,000 euros in Haut-Rhin to restore a church at Fellering. This was built in 1912 by German civil servants based in Alsace. The region of Alsace and the neighbouring département of the Moselle are not covered by the 1905 seperation of church and state law, but by a Concordat which means that local communes maintain religious buildings constructed at any time.
Finally, though the list refers to the financing of 209 cemeteries throughout France – walls, extensions, parking and so on – there are only two cases that involve the Muslim section of cemeteries. In non-Muslim countries the remains of Muslims are buried in a dedicated area of certain cemeteries, known in French as a 'carré'. These donations were 30,000 euros to maintain a Muslim section at a cemetery at Puy-en-Velay in central France, home town of the former Europe minister Laurent Wauquiez and 7,401 euros for an access route to the Muslim carré at a cemetery at Saverne in the Bas-Rhin.
“This funding, which no one knew about, shows once again that it is time to have an audit of French secularism, which should finally ask very clearly what the state should finance and what it should not finance, in respect of the different religions,” says Jean Baubérot. Henri Pena-Ruiz adds that “in this time of crisis we can ask whether or not these sums of money should not be invested elsewhere, for example in housing or public services”.
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English version by Sue Landau and Michael Streeter