“If religion did not exist, the poor would assassinate the rich.” This cutting formula attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte is not blasphemy, but the coldest form of state pragmatism. For the Emperor, builder of institutions and lawmaker, knew that law alone is never enough to contain human passions. It needs an inner counterweight, a moral authority that precedes punishment and anticipates it. And that authority is precisely what religion has always offered to societies: a fear that goes beyond the fear of the policeman.

This Napoleonic intuition finds a singular echo in contemporary political discourse in Morocco. Indeed, while the context has changed, the equation remains: how to maintain the cohesion of a social body riddled by inequalities, rapid transformations, and the erosion of collective reference points? In Morocco, the answer has never been sought outside the religious sphere. On the contrary, reference to religions occupies a central place in public debate, and it was the Islamist currents first and foremost that made it a major axis of their discourse and political action. For them, as for a large part of public opinion, religion is not a mere spiritual fact; it is conceived as an instrument of public regulation, a moral grammar capable of giving meaning to the law and framing behavior.

“Where the law sets an external limit and threatens with sanction, belief establishes an internal limit and elicits restraint. Where law intervenes after the act, faith prevents it before it occurs.”

From this point on, religious dogma does not play only a spiritual role. It operates as a genuine operator of cohesion. Where the law sets an external limit and threatens with sanction, belief establishes an internal limit and elicits restraint. Where law intervenes after the act, faith prevents it before it occurs. In this sense it functions as a social regulator: it educates, it deters, it normalizes, and above all it gives ethical legitimacy to obedience. In a time when political ideologies struggle to mobilize and distrust toward institutions can grow, this function appears all the more decisive in the eyes of those who see in religion the last bulwark against social disintegration.

That is why the question of the foundation of the social contract is being posed with renewed urgency. Does it rest first on law, as the expression of the general will and of the state’s coercion? Or does it rest first on belief, that is, on the internalization of norms and on the prospect of a judgment that transcends the courtroom? Yet it would be reductive to set the two terms in direct opposition. For if law punishes, belief prevents; if law organizes living-together through constraint, belief makes it possible through adherence. And it is precisely on this articulation that Islamists base an important part of their argument: a society does not hold together by the force of law alone, but also by the force of conscience.

At bottom, Napoleon’s sentence obliges us to lucidity. It reminds us that every society must choose what holds it back from the brink of chaos: the fear of the policeman or the fear of God. In the Moroccan case, experience shows that one cannot do without the other. And perhaps that is where the current stakes of the debate lie: how to make religion not an obstacle to the modernity of the state, but a lever of stability, without it encroaching on freedoms and without it substituting itself for the law. For at a moment when so many imported models are showing their limits, reflection should not focus on the disappearance of religion from the public sphere, but on how to integrate it as a factor of regulation and social peace.