The process of laicisation of French society in the 19th century had a loser, Catholicism, and several winners, the Protestant and Jewish minorities. And yet they had been doing rather well at first from the system of “recognised cults” which gave them protection and even reparations on the part of a State that had ceased to be Catholic. But the Ultramontane radicalisation of the Church, the vote for the Falloux law (1850), and the progress of religious liberalism within their own ranks, led Protestants and Jews to want the secularisation of schools and in a general way of the public spaces and culture of the nation. The Protestants in particular gave secularisation in the latter third of the century a certain umber of first rate thinkers and leaders. They nourished the dream, which was quickly disappointed, of instating in France a kind of Kantian republic, which would have united secular religion and religious secularism.