Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
The Law of 9 December 1905 ended the Napoleonic Concordat regime, guaranteed freedom of conscience and worship subject to public order, and stopped the republic from recognising or salariedly funding any religion. Although remembered above all as the founding text of French laicite, it was also a major institutional settlement: the state moved toward a single secular public-law framework rather than confessional administration, while church property and worship were reorganised through legally defined association and building rules.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.