In the course of the institutionalisation of modern school systems, the originally confessional schooling sector was largely transformed into a system regulated by public law, a process which is interpreted as secularisation. In a historical-comparative analysis, the secularisation paths of the classical educational nations England and France are retraced to identify their causal and path-dependent determinants. While the educational secularisation in France made the Catholic Church and its schools move into private education, in England the Anglican Church and other Christian denominations continue to be involved in the public school system through both religious education in state schools and their own private schools. It is argued that the various configurations of the nation-state context that developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, along with the changing relationship between state and church in the nineteenth century, can explain the course of secularisation.