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Many perspectives by political thinkers on this. The primary idea is that a country's laws are most often defined by their specific histories. In this case, French Revolution was inspired because of the corruption of the Church and the increasing wealth of the clergy class. The idea of separation of "church and state" (or their idea of secularism) is very much a consequence of the rigid power structures in favour of religious institutions that went onto encroach upon personal liberty of individuals.
The country sees the separation of church and state (or the restriction of religious symbol in public) as the way to protect individual liberty (or to put it another way - protect the state from the influence of religion and hence carry out its job as a non partisanship law making/protecting body)
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@happySisyphus If you're interested in exploring it academically, Machiavelli was the first proponent of it. John Locke is a popular thinker who is primarily associated with this church-state separation.
If you wish to go even further back, the Ancient Greece had Aristotle who is considered amongst the first political philosophers to advocate this idea.
Ofcourse, this is not to say that the ground realities in France are exactly this. There are multiple contradictions and overlap of religion with public spaces. Then there's the common argument of "positive secularism" (allow display of religious symbols in public and a celebration of it) that the country routinely brings up for discussion.
