After conflict, the task of rebuilding national identity requires that all areas of culture should be mobilised. In this, an important role falls to the domain of ideas, beliefs and values. Very frequently, the aftermath of conflict has been accompanied by an upsurge in the role of religion as a key organising framework within which issues confronting the nation can be articulated. In recent years, religion has played this role in European countries such as the components of former Yugoslavia, emerging from civil war. This echoes the experience of countries such as Poland and Lithuania emerging from communism. Conflicts in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa have similarly been followed by an increase in the practice of Islam. In these cases, religious movements have been adopted as a common framework of beliefs and values around which a nation could unite. In France, a similar phenomenon was apparent after the defeat of 1940, when the Vichy regime mobilised Catholic piety in support of its National Revolution. But with the collapse of the regime, the credibility of Catholicism was severely damaged, and the French political and intellectual elites had to look elsewhere for a unifying ideological framework. Although they succeeded in assembling a bricolage of secular and religious symbols and in finding a common vocabulary to articulate the circumstances of the time, they still needed a framework of values to underpin them and provide a degree of coherence.