At the end of 1897 M. Scheurer-Kestner, an Alsatian devoted to France and a republican senator, tried to persuade his political friends to reopen the case; but M. Méline, the prime minister, declared in the name of the Republic that theDreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.Dreyfus affair no longer existed. The fact that the senator who championed Dreyfus was a Protestant encouraged the clerical press in its already marked tendency to utilize anti-Semitism as a weapon of ecclesiastical warfare. But the religious side-issues of the question would have had little importance had not the army been involved in the controversy, which had become so keen that all the population, outside that large section of it indifferent to all public questions, was divided into “Dreyfusards” and “anti-Dreyfusards.” The strong position of the latter was due to their assuming the position of defenders of the army, which, at an epoch when neither the legislature nor the government inspired respect, and the Church was the object of polemic, was the only institution in France to unite the nation by appealing to its martial and patriotic instincts. That is the explanation of the enthusiasm of the public for generals and other officers by whom the trial of Dreyfus and subsequent proceedings had been conducted in a manner repugnant to those who do not favour the arbitrary ways of military dictatorship, which, however, are not unpopular in France. The acquittal of Major Esterhazy by a court-martial, the conviction of Zola by a civil tribunal for a violent criticism of the military authorities, and the imprisonment without trial of Colonel Picquart for his efforts to exonerate Dreyfus, were practically approved by the nation. This was shown by the result of the general elections in May 1898. The clerical reactionaries were almost swept out of the Chamber, but the overwhelming republican majority was practically united in its hostility to the defenders of Dreyfus, whose only outspoken representatives were found in the socialist groups. The moderate Méline ministry was succeeded in June 1898 by the radical Brisson ministry. But while the new prime minister was said to be personally disposed to revise the sentence on Dreyfus, his civilian minister of war, M. Cavaignac, was as hostile to revision as any of his military predecessors—General Mercier, under whom the trial took place, General Zurlinden, and General Billot, a republican soldier devoted to the parliamentary régime.
The radical minister of war in July 1898 laid before the Chamber certain new proofs of the guilt of Dreyfus, in a speech so convincing that the house ordered it to be placarded in all the communes of France. The next monthPolitical results of Dreyfus agitation.Colonel Henry, the chief of the intelligence department, confessed to having forged those new proofs, and then committed suicide. M. Cavaignac thereupon resigned office, but declared that the crime of Henry did not prove the innocence of Dreyfus. Many, however, who had hitherto accepted the judgment of 1894, reflected that the offence of a guilty man did not need new crime for its proof. It was further remarked thatthe forgery had been committed by the intimate colleague of the officers of the general staff, who had zealously protected Esterhazy, the suspected author of the document on which Dreyfus had been convicted. An uneasy misgiving became widespread; but partisan spirit was too excited for it to cause a general revulsion of feeling. Some journalists and politicians of the extreme Left had adopted the defence of Dreyfus as an anti-clerical movement in response to the intemperate partisanship of the Catholic press on the other side. Other members of the socialist groups, not content with criticizing the conduct of the military authorities in the Dreyfus affair, opened a general attack on the French army,—an unpopular policy which allowed the anti-Dreyfusards to utilize the old revolutionary device of making the word “patriotism” a party cry. The defamation and rancour with which the press on both sides flooded the land obscured the point at issue. However, the Brisson ministry just before its fall remitted the Dreyfus judgment to the criminal division of the cour de cassation—the supreme court of revision in France. M. Dupuy formed a new cabinet in November 1898, and made M. de Freycinet minister of war, but that adroit office-holder, though a civilian and a Protestant, did not favour the anti-military and anti-clerical defenders of Dreyfus. The refusal of the Senate, the stronghold of the Republic, to re-elect M. Scheurer-Kestner as its vice-president, showed that the opportunist minister of war understood the feeling of parliament, which was soon displayed by an extraordinary proceeding. The divisional judges, to whom the case was remitted, showed signs that their decision would be in favour of a new trial of Dreyfus. The republican legislature, therefore, disregarding the principle of the separation of the powers, which is the basis of constitutional government, took the arbitrary step of interfering with the judicial authority. It actually passed a law withdrawing the partly-heard cause from the criminal chamber of the cour de cassation, and transferring it to the full court of three divisions, in the hope that a majority of judges would thus be found to decide against the revision of the sentence on Dreyfus.
This flagrant confusion of the legislative with the judicial power displayed once more the incompetence of the French rightly to use parliamentary institutions; but it left the nation indifferent. It was during the passage of the bill that the president of the Republic suddenly died. Félix Faure was said to be hostile to the defenders of Dreyfus and disposed to utilise the popular enthusiasm for the army as a means of making the presidential office independent of parliament. The Chambers, therefore, in spite of their anti-Dreyfusard bias, were determined not to relinquish any of their constitutional prerogative. The military and plebiscitary parties were now fomenting the public discontent by noisy demonstrations. The president of the Senate, M. Loubet, as has been mentioned, was known to have no sympathy with this agitation, so he was elected president of the Republic by a large majority at the congress held at Versailles on 18th February 1899. The new president, who was unknown to the public, though he had once been prime minister for nine months, was respected in political circles; but his elevation to the first office of the State made him the object of that defamation which had become the chief characteristic of the partisan press under the Third Republic. He was recklessly accused of having been an accomplice of the Panama frauds, by screening certain guilty politicians when he was prime minister in 1892, and because he was not opposed to the revision of the Dreyfus sentence he was wantonly charged with being bought with Jewish money. Meanwhile the united divisions of the cour de cassation were, in spite of the intimidation of the legislature, reviewing the case with an independence worthy of praise in an ill-paid magistracy which owed its promotion to political influence. Instead of justifying the suggestive interference of parliament it revised the judgment of the court-martial, and ordered Dreyfus to be re-tried by a military tribunal at Rennes. The Dupuy ministry, which had wished to prevent this decision, resigned, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau formed a heterogeneous cabinet in which Socialists, who for the first time took office, had for their colleague as minister of war General de Galliffet, whose chief political fame had been won as the executioner of the Communards after the insurrection of 1871. Dreyfus was brought backSecond trial of Dreyfus.from the Devil’s Island, and in August 1899 was put upon his trial a second time. His old accusers, led by General Mercier, the minister of war of 1894, redoubled their efforts to prove his guilt, and were permitted by the officers composing the court a wide license according to English ideas of criminal jurisprudence. The published evidence did not, however, seem to connect Dreyfus with the charges brought against him. Nevertheless the court, by a majority of five to two, found him guilty, and with illogical inconsequence added that there were in his treason extenuating circumstances. He was sentenced to ten years’ detention, and while it was being discussed whether the term he had already served would count as part of his penalty, the ministry completed the inconsequency of the situation by advising the president of the Republic to pardon the prisoner. The result of the second trial satisfied neither the partisans of the accused, who desired his rehabilitation, some of them reproaching him for accepting a pardon, nor his adversaries, whose vindictiveness was unsated by the penalty he had already suffered. But the great mass of the French people, who are always ready to treat a public question with indifference, were glad to be rid of a controversy which had for years infected the national life.
The Dreyfus affair was severely judged by foreign critics as a miscarriage of justice resulting from race-prejudice. If that simple appreciation rightly describes its origin, it became in its development one of those scandalsReal character of the Dreyfus agitation.symptomatic of the unhealthy political condition of France, which on a smaller scale had often recurred under the Third Republic, and which were made the pretext by the malcontents of all parties for gratifying their animosities. That in its later stages it was not a question of race-persecution was seen in the curious phenomenon of journals owned or edited by Jews leading the outcry against the Jewish officer and his defenders. That it was not a mere episode of the rivalry between Republicans and Monarchists, or between the advocates of parliamentarism and of military autocracy, was evident from the fact that the most formidable opponents of Dreyfus, without whose hostility that of the clericals and reactionaries would have been ineffective, were republican politicians. That it was not a phase of the anti-capitalist movement was shown by the zealous adherence of the socialist leaders and journalists to the cause of Dreyfus; indeed, one remarkable result of the affair was its diversion of the socialist party and press for several years from their normal campaign against property. The Dreyfus affair was utilized by the reactionaries against the Republic, by the clericals against the non-Catholics, by the anti-clericals against the Church, by the military party against the parliamentarians, and by the revolutionary socialists against the army. It was also conspicuously utilized by rival republican politicians against one another, and the chaos of political groups was further confused by it.
An epilogue to the Dreyfus affair was the trial for treason before the Senate, at the end of 1899, of a number of persons, mostly obscure followers either of M. Déroulède the poet, who advocated a plebiscitary republic, or of the ducThe State trial of 1899.d’Orléans, the pretender of the constitutional monarchy. On the day of President Faure’s funeral M. Déroulède had vainly tried to entice General Roget, a zealous adversary of Dreyfus, who was on duty with his troops, to march on the Elysée in order to evict the newly-elected president of the Republic. Other demonstrations against M. Loubet ensued, the most offensive being a concerted assault upon him on the racecourse at Auteuil in June 1899. The subsequent resistance to the police of a band of anti-Semites threatened with arrest, who barricaded themselves in a house in the rue Chabrol, in the centre of Paris, and, with the marked approval of the populace, sustained a siege for several weeks, indicated that the capital was in a condition not far removed from anarchy. M. Déroulède, indicted at the assizes of the Seine for his misdemeanour on the day of President Faure’s funeral, had been triumphantlyacquitted. It was evident that no jury would convict citizens prosecuted for political offences and the government therefore decided to make use of the article of the Law of 1875, which allowed the Senate to be constituted a high court for the trial of offences endangering the state. A respectable minority of the Senate, including M. Wallon, the venerable “Father of the Constitution” of 1875, vainly protested that the framers of the law intended to invest the upper legislative chamber with judicial power only for the trial of grave crimes of high treason, and not of petty political disorders which a well-organized government ought to be able to repress with the ordinary machinery of police and justice. The outvoted protest was justified by the proceedings before the High Court, which, undignified and disorderly, displayed both the fatuity of the so-called conspirators and the feebleness of the government which had to cope with them. The trial proved that the plebiscitary faction was destitute of its essential factor, a chief to put forward for the headship of the state, and that it was resolved, if it overturned the parliamentary system, not to accept under any conditions the duc d’Orléans, the only pretender before the public. It was shown that royalists and plebiscitary republicans alike had utilized as an organization of disorder the anti-Semitic propaganda which had won favour among the masses as a nationalist movement to protect the French from foreign competition. The evidence adduced before the high court revealed, moreover, the curious fact that certain Jewish royalists had given to the duc d’Orléans large sums of money to found anti-Semitic journals as the surest means of popularizing his cause.
The last year of the 19th century, though uneventful for France, was one of political unrest. This, however, did not take the form of ministerial crises, as, for the fourth time since responsible cabinets were introduced in 1873,French parties at the close of the 19th century.a whole year, from the 1st of January to the 31st of December, elapsed without a change of ministry. The prime minister, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, though his domestic policy exasperated a large section of the political world, including one half of the Progressive group which he had helped to found, displayed qualities of statesmanship always respected in France, but rarely exhibited under the Third Republic. He had proved himself to be what the French callun homme de gouvernement—that is to say, an authoritative administrator of unimpassioned temperament capable of governing with the arbitrary machinery of Napoleonic centralization. His alliance with the extreme Left and the admission into his cabinet of socialist deputies, showed that he understood which wing of the Chamber it was best to conciliate in order to keep the government in his hands for an abnormal term. The advent to office of Socialists disquieted the respectable and prosperous commercial classes, which in France take little part in politics, though they had small sympathy with the nationalists, who were the most violent opponents of the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry. The alarm caused by the handing over of important departments of the state to socialist politicians arose upon a danger which is not always understood beyond the borders of France. Socialism in France is a movement appealing to the revolutionary instincts of the French democracy, advocated in vague terms by the members of rival groups or sects. Thus the increasing number of socialist deputies in parliament had produced no legislative results, and their presence in the cabinet was not feared on that account. The fear which their office-holding inspired was due to the immense administrative patronage which the centralized system confides to each member of the government. French ministers are wont to bestow the places at their disposal on their political friends, so the prospect of administrative posts being filled all over the land by revolutionaries caused some uneasiness. Otherwise the presence of Socialists on the ministerial bench seemed to have no other effect than that of partially muzzling the socialist groups in the Chamber. The opposition to the government was heterogeneous. It included the few Monarchists left in the Chamber, the Nationalists, who resembled the Boulangists of twelve years before, and who had added anti-Semitism to the articles of the revisionist creed, and a number of republicans, chiefly of the old Opportunist group, which had renewed itself under the name of Progressist at the time when M. Waldeck-Rousseau was its most important member in the Senate.
The ablest leaders of this Opposition were all malcontent Republicans; and this fact seemed to show that if ever any form of monarchy were restored in France, political office would probably remain in the hands of men who were former ministers of the Third Republic. Thus the most conspicuous opponents of the cabinet were three ex-prime ministers, MM. Méline, Charles Dupuy and Ribot. Less distinguished republican “ministrables” had their normal appetite for office whetted in 1900 by the international exhibition at Paris. It brought the ministers of the day into unusual prominence, and endowed them with large subsidies voted by parliament for official entertainments. The exhibition was planned on too ambitious a scale to be a financial success. It also called forth the just regrets of those who deplored the tendency of Parisians under the Third Republic to turn their once brilliant city into an international casino. Its most satisfactory feature was the proof it displayed of the industrial inventiveness and the artistic instinct of the French. The political importance of the exhibition lay in the fact that it determined the majority in the Chamber not to permit the foreigners attracted by it to the capital to witness a ministerial crisis. Few strangers of distinction, however, came to it, and not one sovereign of the great powers visited Paris; but the ministry remained in office, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau had uninterrupted opportunity of showing his governmental ability. The only change in his cabinet took place when General de Galliffet resigned the portfolio of war to General André. The army, as represented by its officers, had shown symptoms of hostility to the ministry in consequence of the pardon of Dreyfus. The new minister of war repressed such demonstrations with proceedings of the same arbitrary character as those which had called forth criticism in England when used in the Dreyfus affair. In both cases the high-handed policy was regarded either with approval or with indifference by the great majority of the French nation, which ever since the Revolution has shown that its instincts are in favour of authoritative government. The emphatic support given by the radical groups to the autocratic policy of M. Waldeck-Rousseau and his ministers was not surprising to those who have studied the history of the French democracy. It has always had a taste for despotism since it first became a political power in the days of the Jacobins, to whose early protection General Bonaparte owed his career. On the other hand liberalism has always been repugnant to the masses, and the only period in which the Liberals governed the country was under the régime of limited suffrage—during the Restoration and the Monarchy of July.
The most important event in France during the last year of the century, not from its political result, but from the lessons it taught, was perhaps the Paris municipal election. The quadrennial renewal of all the municipal councils of France took place in May 1900. The municipality of the capital had been for many years in the hands of the extreme Radicals and the revolutionary Socialists. The Parisian electors now sent to the Hôtel de Ville a council in which the majority were Nationalists, in general sympathy with the anti-Semitic and plebiscitary movements. The nationalist councillors did not, however, form one solid party, but were divided into five or six groups, representing every shade of political discontent, from monarchism to revisionist-socialism. While the electorate of Paris thus pronounced for the revision of the Constitution, the provincial elections, as far as they had a political bearing, were favourable to the ministry and to the Republic. M. Waldeck-Rousseau accepted the challenge of the capital, and dealt with its representatives with the arbitrary weapons of centralization which the Republic had inherited from the Napoleonic settlement of the Revolution. Municipal autonomy is unknown in France, and the town council of Paris has to submit to special restrictions on its liberty of action. The prefect of the Seine is always present at its meetings as agent of the government and the minister ofthe interior can veto any of its resolutions. The Socialists, when their party ruled the municipality, clamoured in parliament forParis and the provinces.the removal of this administrative control. But now being in a minority they supported the government in its anti-autonomic rigours. The majority of the municipal council authorized its president to invite to a banquet, in honour of the international exhibition, the provincial mayors and a number of foreign municipal magnates, including the lord mayor of London. The ministers were not invited, and the prefect of the Seine thereupon informed the president of the municipality that he had no right, without consulting the agent of the government, to offer a banquet to the provincial mayors; and they, with the deference which French officials instinctively show to the central authority, almost all refused the invitation to the Hôtel de Ville. The municipal banquet was therefore abandoned, but the government gave one in the Tuileries gardens, at which no fewer than 22,000 mayors paid their respects to the chief of the state. These events showed that, as in the Terror, as at thecoup d’étatof 1851, and as in the insurrection of the Commune, the French provinces were never disposed to follow the political lead of the capital, whether the opinions prevailing there were Jacobin or reactionary. These incidents displayed the tendency of the French democracy, in Paris and in the country alike, to submit to and even to encourage the arbitrary working of administrative centralization. The elected mayors of the provincial communes, urban and rural, quitted themselves like well-drilled functionaries of the state, respectful of their hierarchical superiors, just as in the days when they were the nominees of the government; while the population of Paris, in spite of its perennial proneness to revolution, accepted the rebuff inflicted on its chosen representatives without any hostile demonstration. The municipal elections in Paris afforded fresh proof of the unchanging political ineptitude of the reactionaries. The dissatisfaction of the great capital with the government of the Republic might, in spite of the reluctance of the provinces to follow the lead of Paris, have had grave results if skilfully organized. But the anti-republican groups, instead of putting forward men of high ability or reputation to take possession of the Hôtel de Ville, chose their candidates among the same inferior class of professional politicians as the Radicals and the Socialists whom they replaced on the municipal council.
The beginning of a century of the common era is a purely artificial division of time. Yet it has often marked a turning-point in the history of nations. This was notably the case in France in 1800. The violent and anarchicalFrance at the opening of the 20th century.phases of the Revolution of 1789 came to an end with the 18th century; and the dawn of the 19th was coincident with the administrative reconstruction of France by Napoleon, on lines which endured with little modification till the end of that century, surviving seven revolutions of the executive power. The opening years of the 20th century saw no similar changes in the government of the country. The Third Republic, which was about to attain an age double that reached by any other regime since the Revolution, continued to live on the basis of the Constitution enacted in 1875, before it was five years old. Yet it seems not unlikely that historians of the future may take the date 1900 as a landmark between two distinct periods in the evolution of the French nation.
With the close of the 19th century the Dreyfus affair came practically to an end. Whatever the political and moral causes of the agitation which attended it, its practical result was to strengthen the Radical and Socialist parties inResults of the Dreyfus affair.the Republic, and to reduce to unprecedented impotence the forces of reaction. This was due more to the maladroitness of the Reactionaries than to the virtues or the prescience of the extreme Left, as the imprisonment of the Jewish captain, which agitated and divided the nation, could not have been inflicted without the ardent approval of Republicans of all shades of opinion. But when the majority at last realized that a mistake had been committed, the Reactionaries, in great measure through their own unwise policy, got the chief credit for it. Consequently, as the clericals formed the militant section of the anti-Republican parties, and as the Radical-Socialists were at that time keener in their hostility to the Church than in their zeal for social or economic reform, the issue of the Dreyfus affair brought about an anti-clerical movement, which, though initiated and organized by a small minority, met with nothing to resist it in the country, the reactionary forces being effete and the vast majority of the population indifferent. The main and absorbing feature therefore of political life in France in the first years of the 20th century was a campaign against the Roman Catholic Church, unparalleled in energy since the Revolution. Its most striking result was the rupture of the Concordat between France and the Vatican. This act was additionally important as being the first considerable breach made in the administrative structure reared by Napoleon, which had hitherto survived all the vicissitudes of the 19th century. Concurrently with this the influence of the Socialist party in French policy largely increased. A primary principle professed by the Socialists throughout Europe is pacificism, and its dissemination in France acted in two very different ways. It encouraged in the French people a growth of anti-military spirit, which showed some sign of infecting the national army, and it impelled the government of the Republic to be zealous in cultivating friendly relations with other powers. The result of the latter phase of pacificism was that France, under the Radical-Socialist administrations of the early years of the 20th century, enjoyed a measure of international prestige of that superficial kind which is expressed by the state visits of crowned heads to the chief of the executive power, greater than at any period since the Second Empire.
The voting of the law which separated the Church from theChurch policy.state will probably mark a capital date in French history; so, as the ecclesiastical policy of successive ministries filled almost entirely the interior chronicles of France for the first five years of the new century, it will be convenient to set forth in order the events which during that period led up to the passing of the Separation Act.
The French legislature during the first session of the 20th century was chiefly occupied with the passing of the Associations Law. That measure, though it entirely changed the legal position of all associations in France, was primarily directed against the religious associations of the Roman Catholic Church. Their influence in the land, according to the anti-clericals, had been proved by the Dreyfus affair to be excessive. The Jesuits were alleged, on their own showing, to exercise considerable power over the officers of the army, and in this way to have been largely responsible for the blunders of the Dreyfus case. Another less celebrated order, which took an active part against Dreyfus, the Assumptionists, had achieved notoriety by its journalistic enterprise, its cheap newspapers of wide circulation being remarkable for the violence of their attacks on the institutions and men of the Republic. The mutual antagonism between the French government and religious congregations is a tradition which dates from the ancient monarchy and was continued by Napoleon I. long before the Third Republic adopted it in the legislation associated with the names of Jules Ferry and Paul Bert. The prime minister, under whose administration the 20th century succeeded the 19th, was M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who had been the colleague of Paul Bert in Gambetta’sgrand ministère, and in 1883 had served under Jules Ferry in his second ministry. He had retired from political life, though he remained a member of the Senate, and was making a large fortune at the bar, when in June 1899, at pecuniary sacrifice, he consented to form a ministry for the purpose of “liquidating” the Dreyfus affair. In 1900, the year after the second condemnation of Dreyfus and his immediate pardon by the government, M. Waldeck-Rousseau in a speech at Toulouse announced that legislation was about to be undertaken on the subject of associations.
At that period the hostility of the Revolution to the principle of associations of all kinds, civil as well as religious, was still enforced by the law. With the exception of certain commercialsocieties subject to special legislation, no association composed of more than twenty persons could be formed without governmental authorization which was always revocable, the restriction applying equally to political and social clubs and to religious communities. The law was the same for all, but was differently applied. Authorization was rarely refused to political or social societies, though any club was liable to have its authorization withdrawn and to be shut up or dissolved. But to religious orders new authorization was practically never granted. Only four of them, the orders of Saint Lazare, of the Saint Esprit, of the Missions Étrangères and of Saint Sulpice, were authorized under the Third Republic—their authorization dating from the First Empire and the Restoration. The Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne were also recognized, not, however, as a religious congregation under the jurisdiction of the minister of public worship, but as a teaching body under that of the minister of education. All the great historical orders, preaching, teaching or contemplative, were “unauthorized”; they led a precarious life on sufferance, having as corporations no civil existence, and being subject to dissolution at a moment’s notice by the administrative authority. In spite of this disability and of the decrees of 1880 directed against unauthorized monastic orders they had so increased under the anti-clerical Republic, that the religious of both sexes were more numerous in France at the beginning of the 20th century than at the end of the ancient monarchy. Moreover, in the twenty years during which unauthorized Orders had been supposed to be suppressed under the Ferry Decrees, their numbers had become six times more numerous than before, while it was the authorized Congregations which had diminished. The bare catalogue of the religious houses in the land, with the value of their properties (estimated by M. Waldeck-Rousseau at a milliard—£40,000,000) filled two White Books of two thousand pages, presented to parliament on the 4th of December 1900. The hostility to the Congregations was not confined to the anti-clericals. The secular clergy were suffering materially from the enterprising competition of their old rivals the regulars. Had the legislation for defining the legal situation of the religious orders been undertaken with the sole intention of limiting their excessive growth, such a measure would have been welcome to the parochial clergy. But they saw that the attack upon the congregations was only preliminary to a general attack upon the Church, in spite of the sincere assurances of the prime minister, a statesman of conservative temperament, that no harm would accrue to the secular clergy from the passing of the Associations Law.
In January 1901, on the eve of the first debate in the Chamber of Deputies on the Associations bill, a discussion took place which showed that the rupture of the Concordat might be nearing the range of practical politics, thoughAssociations Bill.parliament was as yet unwilling to take it into consideration. The archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Richard, had published a letter addressed to him by Leo XIII. deploring the projected legislation as being a breach of the Concordat under which the free exercise of the Catholic religion in France was assured. The Socialists argued that this letter was an intolerable intervention on the part of the Vatican in the domestic politics of the Republic, and proposed that parliament should after voting the Associations Law proceed to separate Church and State. M. Waldeck-Rousseau, the prime minister, calm and moderate, declined to take this view of the pope’s letter, and the resolution was defeated by a majority of more than two to one. But another motion, proposed by a Nationalist, that the Chamber should declare its resolve to maintain the Concordat, was rejected by a small majority. The discussion of the Associations bill was then commenced by the Chamber and went on until the Easter recess. Its main features when finally voted were that the right to associate for purposes not illicit should be henceforth free of all restrictions, though “juridical capacity” would be accorded only to such associations as were formally notified to the administrative authority. The law did not, however, accord liberty of association to religious “Congregations,” none of which could be formed without a special statute, and any constituted without such authorization would be deemed illicit. The policy of the measure, as applying to religious orders, was attacked by the extreme Right and the extreme Left from their several standpoints. The clericals proposed that under the new law all associations, religious as well as civil, should be free. The Socialists proposed that all religious communities, authorized or unauthorized, should be suppressed. The prime minister took a middle course. But he went farther than the moderate Republicans, with whom he was generally classed. While he protected the authorized religious orders against the attacks of the extreme anti-clericals, he accepted from the latter a new clause which disqualified any member of an unauthorized order from teaching in any school. This was a blow at the principle of liberty of instruction, which had always been supported by Liberals of the old school, who had no sympathy with the pretensions of clericalism. Consequently this provision, though voted by a large majority, was opposed by the Liberals of the Republican party, notably by M. Ribot, who had been twice prime minister, and M. Aynard, almost the sole survivor of the Left Centre. It was remarked that in these, as in all subsequent debates on ecclesiastical questions, the ablest defenders of the Church were not found among the clericals, but among the Liberals, whose primary doctrine was that of tolerance, which they believed ought to be applied to the exercise of the religion nominally professed by a large majority of the nation. Few of the ardent professors of that religion gave effective aid to the Church during that period of crisis. M. de Mun still used his eloquence in its defence, but the brilliant Catholic orator had entered his sixtieth year with health impaired, and among the young reactionary members there was not one who displayed any talent. At the other end of the Chamber M. Viviani, a Socialist member for Paris, made an eloquent speech. As was anticipated the bill received no serious opposition in the Senate. Though not in sympathy with the attacks of the Socialists in the Chamber on property, the Upper House had as a whole no objection to their attacks on the Church, and had become a more persistently anti-clerical body than the Chamber of Deputies. The bill was therefore passed without any serious amendments, even those which were moved for the purpose of affirming the principle of liberty of education being supported by very few Republican senators. In the debates some of the utterances of the prime minister were important. On the proposal of M. Rambaud, a professor who was minister of education in the Méline cabinet of 1896, that religious associations should be authorized by decree and not by law, M. Waldeck-Rousseau said that inasmuch as vows of poverty and celibacy were illegal, nothing but a law would suffice to give legality to any association in which such vows were imposed on the members. It was thus laid down by the responsible author of the law that the third clause, providing that any association founded for an illicit cause was null, applied to religious communities. On the other hand the prime minister in another speech repudiated the suggestion that the proposed law was aimed against any form of religion. He argued that the religious orders, far from being essential to the existence of the Church, were a hindrance to the work of the parochial clergy, and that inasmuch as the religious orders were organizations independent of the State they were by their nature and influence a danger to the State. Consequently their regulation had become necessary in the interests both of Church and State. The general suppression of religious congregations, the prime minister said, was not contemplated; the case of each one would be decided on its merits, and he had no doubt that parliament would favourably consider the authorization of those whose aim was to alleviate misery at home or to extend French influence abroad. The tenor of M. Waldeck-Rousseau’s speech was eminently Concordatory. One of his chief arguments against the religious orders was that they were not mentioned in the Concordat, and that their unregulated existence prejudiced the interests of the Concordatory clergy. The speech was therefore an official declaration in favour of the maintenance of the relations between Church and State. That being so, it is important to notice thatby a majority of nearly two to one the Senate voted the placarding of the prime minister’s speech in all the communes of France, and that the mover of the resolution was M. Combes, senator of the Charente-Inférieure, a politician of advanced views who up to that date had held office only once, when he was minister of education and public worship for about six months, in the Bourgeois administration in 1895-1896.
The “Law relating to the contract of Association” was promulgated on the 2nd of July 1901, and its enactment was the only political event of high importance that year. The Socialists, except in their anti-clerical capacity,Socialism.were more active outside parliament than within. Early in the year some formidable strikes took place. At Montceau-les-Mines in Burgundy, where labour demonstrations had often been violent, a new feature of a strike was the formation of a trade-union by the non-strikers, who called their organization “the yellow trade-union” (le syndicat jaune) in opposition to the red trade-union of the strikers, who adopted the revolutionary flag and were supported by the Socialist press. At the same time the dock-labourers at Marseilles went out on strike, by the orders of an international trade-union in that port, as a protest against the dismissal of a certain number of foreigners. The number of strikes in France had increased considerably under the Waldeck-Rousseau government. Its opponents attributed this to the presence in the cabinet of M. Millerand, who had been ranked as a Socialist. On the other hand, the revolutionary Socialists excommunicated the minister of commerce for having joined a “bourgeois government” and retired from the general congress of the Socialist party at Lyons, where MM. Briand and Viviani, themselves future ministers, persuaded the majority not to go so far. The federal committee of miners projected a general strike in all the French coal-fields, and to that end organized a referendum. But of 125,000 miners inscribed on their lists nearly 70,000 abstained from voting, and although the general strike was voted in October by a majority of 34,000, it was not put into effect. Another movement favoured by the Socialists was that of anti-militarism. M. Hervé, a professor at the lycée of Sens, had written, in a local journal, thePioupiou de l’Yonne, on the occasion of the departure of the conscripts for their regiments, some articles outraging the French flag. He was prosecuted and acquitted at the assizes at Auxerre in November, a number of his colleagues in the teaching profession coming forward to testify that they shared his views. The local educational authority, the academic council of Dijon, however, dismissed M. Hervé from his official functions, and its sentence was confirmed by the superior council of public education to which he had appealed. Thereupon the Socialists in the Chamber, under the lead of M. Viviani, violently attacked the Government—shortly before the prorogation at the end of the year. M. Leygues, the minister of education, defended the policy of his department with equal vigour, declaring that if a professor in the “university” claimed the right of publishing unpatriotic and anti-military opinions he could exercise it only on the condition of giving up his employment under government—a thesis which was supported by the entire Chamber with the exception of the Socialists. This manifestation of anti-military spirit, though not widespread, was the more striking as it followed close upon a second visit of the emperor and empress of Russia to France, which took place in September 1901 and was of a military rather than of a popular character. The Russian sovereigns did not come to Paris. After a naval display at Dunkirk, where they landed, they were the guests of President Loubet at Compiègne, and concluded their visit by attending a review near Reims of the troops which had taken part in the Eastern manœuvres. Compared with the welcome given by the French population to the emperor and empress in 1896 their reception on this occasion was not enthusiastic. By not visiting Paris they seemed to wish to avoid contact with the people, who were persuaded by a section of the press that the motive of the imperial journey to France was financial. The Socialists openly repudiated the Russian alliance, and one of them, the mayor of Lille, who refused to decorate his municipal buildings when the sovereigns visited the department of the Nord, was neither revoked nor suspended, although he publicly based his refusal on grounds insulting to the tsar.
It may be mentioned that the census returns of 1901 showed that the total increase of the population of France since the previous census in 1896 amounted only to 412,364, of which 289,662 was accounted for by the capital, while on the other hand the population of sixty out of eighty-seven departments had diminished.
As the quadrennial election of the Chamber of Deputies was due to take place in the spring of 1902, the first months of that year were chiefly occupied by politicians in preparing for it, though none of them gave any sign of being aware that the legislation to be effected by the new Chamber would be the most important which any parliament had undertaken under the constitution of 1875. At the end of the recess the prime minister in a speech at Saint Etienne, the capital of the Loire, of which department he was senator, passed in review the work of his ministry. With regard to the future, on the eve of the election which was to return the Chamber destined to disestablish the Church, he assured the secular clergy that they must not consider the legislation of the last session as menacing them: far from that, the recent law, directed primarily against those monastic orders which were anti-Republican associations, owning political journals and organizing electioneering funds (whose members he described as “moines ligueurs et moines d’affaires”), would be a guarantee of the Republic’s protection of the parochial clergy. The presence of his colleague, M. Millerand, on this occasion showed that M. Waldeck-Rousseau did not intend to separate himself from the Radical-Socialist group which had supported his government; and the next day the Socialist minister of commerce, at Firminy, a mining centre in the same department, made a speech deprecating the pursuit of unpractical social ideals, which might have been a version of Gambetta’s famous discourse on opportunism edited by an economist of the school of Léon Say. The Waldeck-Rousseau programme for the elections seemed therefore to be an implied promise of a moderate opportunist policy which would strengthen and unite the Republic by conciliating all sections of its supporters. When parliament met, M. Delcassé, minister for foreign affairs, on a proposal to suppress the Embassy to the Vatican, declared that even if the Concordat were ever revoked it would still be necessary for France to maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See. On the other hand, the ministry voted, against the moderate Republicans, for an abstract resolution, proposed by M. Brisson, in favour of the abrogation of the Loi Falloux of 1850, which law, by abolishing the monopoly of the “university,” had established the principle of liberty of education. Another abstract resolution, supported by the government, which subsequently become law, was voted in favour of the reduction of the terms of compulsory military service from three years to two.
The general elections took place on the 27th of April 1902; with the second ballots on the 11th of May, and were favourable to the ministry, 321 of its avowed supporters being returned and 268 members of the Opposition, includingResignation of Waldeck-Rousseau.140 “Progressist” Republicans, many of whom were deputies whose opinions differed little from those of M. Waldeck-Rousseau. In Paris the government lost a few seats which were won by the Nationalist group of reactionaries. The chief surprise of the elections was the announcement made by M. Waldeck-Rousseau on the 20th of May, while the president of the Republic was in Russia on a visit to the tsar, of his intention to resign office. No one but the prime minister’s intimates knew that his shattered health was the true cause of his resignation, which was attributed to the unwillingness of an essentially moderate man to be the leader of an advanced party and the instrument of an immoderate policy. His retirement from public life at this crisis was the most important event of its kind since the death of his old master Gambetta. He had learned opportunist statesmanship in the short-livedgrand ministèreand in the long-lived Ferry administration of 1883-1885,after which he had become an inactive politician in the Senate, while making a large fortune at the bar. In spite of having eschewed politics he had been ranked in the public mind with Gambetta and Jules Ferry as one of the small number of politicians of the Republic who had risen high above mediocrity. While he had none of the magnetic exuberance which furthered the popularity of Gambetta, his cold inexpansiveness had not made him unpopular as was his other chief, Jules Ferry. Indeed, his unemotional coldness was one of the elements of the power with which he dominated parliament; and being regarded by the nation as the strong man whom France is always looking for, he was the first prime minister of the Republic whose name was made a rallying cry at a general election. Yet the country gave him a majority only for it to be handed over to other politicians to use in a manner which he had not contemplated. On the 3rd of June 1902 he formally resigned office, his ministry having lasted for three years, all but a few days, a longer duration than that of any other under the Third Republic.
M. Loubet called upon M. Léon Bourgeois, who had already been prime minister under M. Félix Faure, to form a ministry, but he had been nominated president of the new Chamber. The president of the Republic then offeredM. Combes prime minister.the post to M. Brisson, who had been twice prime minister in 1885 and 1898, but he also refused. A third member of the Radical party was then sent for, M. Emile Combes, and he accepted. The senator of the Charente Inférieure, in his one short term of office in the Bourgeois ministry, had made no mark. But he had attained a minor prominence in the debates of the Senate by his ardent anti-clericalism. He had been educated as a seminarist and had taken minor orders, without proceeding to the priesthood, and had subsequently practised as a country doctor before entering parliament. M. Combes retained two of the most important members of the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet, M. Delcassé, who had been at the foreign office for four years, and General André, who had become war minister in 1900 on the resignation of General de Galliffet. General André was an ardent Dreyfusard, strongly opposed to clerical and reactionary influences in the army. Among the new ministers was M. Rouvier, a colleague of Gambetta in thegrand ministèreand prime minister in 1887, whose participation in the Panama affair had caused his retirement from official life. Being a moderate opportunist and reputed the ablest financier among French politicians, his return to the ministry of finance reassured those who feared the fiscal experiments of an administration supported by the Socialists. The nomination as minister of marine of M. Camille Pelletan (the son of Eugène Pelletan, a notable adversary of the Second Empire), who had been a Radical-Socialist deputy since 1881, though new to office, was less reassuring. M. Combes reserved for himself the departments of the interior and public worship, meaning that the centralized administration of France should be in his own hands while he was keeping watch over the Church. But in spite of the prime minister’s extreme anti-clericalism there was no hint made in his ministerial declaration, on the 10th of June 1902, on taking office that there would be any question of the new Chamber dealing with the Concordat or with the relations of Church and state. M. Combes, however, warned the secular clergy not to make common cause with the religious orders, against which he soon began vigorous action. Before the end of June he directed the Préfets of the departments to bring political pressure to bear on all branches of the public service, and he obtained a presidential decree closing a hundred and twenty-five schools, which had been recently opened in buildings belonging to private individuals, on the ground that they were conducted by members of religious associations and that this brought the schools under the law of 1901. Such action seemed to be opposed to M. Waldeck-Rousseau’s interpretation of the law; but the Chamber having supported M. Combes he ordered in July the closing of 2500 schools, conducted by members of religious orders, for which authorization had not been requested. This again seemed contrary to the assurances of M. Waldeck-Rousseau, and it called forth vain protests in the name of liberty from Radicals of the old school, such as M. Goblet, prime minister in 1886, and from Liberal Protestants, such as M. Gabriel Monod. The execution of the decrees closing the schools of the religious orders caused some violent agitation in the provinces during the parliamentary recess. But the majority of the departmental councils, at their meetings in August, passed resolutions in favour of the governmental policy, and a movement led by certain Nationalists, including M. Drumont, editor of the anti-semiticLibre Parole, and M. François Coppée, the Academician, to found a league having similar aims to those of the “passive resisters” in our country, was a complete failure. On the reassembling of parliament, both houses passed votes of confidence in the ministry and also an act supplementary to the Associations Law penalizing the opening of schools by members of religious orders.
In spite of the ardour of parliamentary discussions the French public was less moved in 1902 by the anti-clerical action of the government than by a vulgar case of swindling known as the “Humbert affair.” The wife of a former deputyHumbert affair.for Seine-et-Marne, who was the son of M. Gustave Humbert, minister of justice in 1882, had for many years maintained a luxurious establishment, which included a political salon, on the strength of her assertion that she and her family had inherited several millions sterling from one Crawford, an Englishman. Her story being believed by certain bankers she had been enabled to borrow colossal sums on the legend, and had almost married her daughter as a great heiress to a Moderate Republican deputy who held a conspicuous position in the Chamber. The flight of the Humberts, the exposure of the fraud and their arrest in Spain excited the French nation more deeply than the relative qualities of M. Waldeck-Rousseau and M. Combes or the woes of the religious orders. A by-election to the Senate in the spring of 1902 merits notice as it brought back to parliament M. Clémenceau, who had lived in comparative retirement since 1893 when he lost his seat as deputy for Draguignan, owing to a series of unusually bitter attacks made against him by his political enemies. He had devoted his years of retirement to journalism, taking a leading part in the Dreyfus affair on the side of the accused. His election as senator for the Var, where he had formerly been deputy, was an event of importance unanticipated at the time.
The year 1903 saw in progress a momentous development of the anti-clerical movement in France, though little trace of this is found in the statute-book. The chief act of parliament of that year was one which interested theAnti-clerical movement.population much more than any law affecting the Church. This was an act regulating the privileges of thebouilleurs de cru, the peasant proprietors who, permitted to distil from their produce an annual quantity of alcohol supposed to be sufficient for their domestic needs, in practice fabricated and sold so large an amount as to prejudice gravely the inland revenue. As there were a million of these illicit distillers in the land they formed a powerful element in the electorate. The crowded and excited debates affecting their interests, in which Radicals and Royalists of the rural districts made common cause against Socialists and Clericals of the towns, were in striking contrast with the less animated discussions concerning the Church. The prime minister, an anti-clerical zealot, bitterly hostile to the Church of which he had been a minister, took advantage of the relative indifference of parliament and of the nation in matters ecclesiastical. The success of M. Combes in his campaign against the Church was an example of what energy and pertinacity can do. There was no great wave of popular feeling on the question, no mandate given to the deputies at the general election or asked for by them. Neither was M. Combes a popular leader or a man of genius. He was rather a trained politician, with a fixed idea, who knew how to utilize to his ends the ability and organization of the extreme anti-clerical element in the Chamber, and the weakness of the extreme clerical party. The majority of the Chamber did not share the prime minister’s animosity towards the Church, for which at the same time it had not the least enthusiasm, and under the concordatory lead of M. Waldeck-Rousseau it would have been content tocurb clerical pretensions without having recourse to extreme measures of repression. It was, however, equally content to follow the less tolerant guidance of M. Combes. Thus, early in the session of 1903 it approved of his circular forbidding the priests of Brittany to make use of the Breton language in their religious instruction under pain of losing their salaries. It likewise followed him on the 26th of January when he declined to accept, as being premature and unpractical, a Socialist resolution in favour of suppressing the budget of public worship, though the majority was indeed differently composed on those two occasions. In the Senate on the 29th of January M. Waldeck-Rousseau indicated what his policy would have been had he retained office, by severely criticizing his successor’s method of applying the Associations Law. Instead of asking parliament to judge on its merits each several demand for authorization made by a congregation, the government had divided the religious orders into two chief categories, teaching orders and preaching orders, and had recommended that all should be suppressed by a general refusal of authorization. The Grande Chartreuse was put into a category by itself as a trading association and was dissolved; but Lourdes, which with its crowds of pilgrims enriched the Pyrenean region and the railway companies serving it, was spared for electioneering reasons. A dispute arose between the government and the Vatican on the nomination of bishops to vacant sees. The Vatican insisted on the words “nobis nominavit” in the papal bulls instituting the bishops nominated by the chief of the executive in France under the Concordat. M. Combes objected to the pronoun, and maintained that the complete nomination belonged to the French government, the Holy See having no choice in the matter, but only the power of canonical institution. This produced a deadlock, with the consequence that no more bishops were ever again appointed under the Concordat, which both before and after the Easter recess M. Combes now threatened to repudiate. These menaces derived an increased importance from the failing health of the pope. Leo XIII. had attained the great age of ninety-three, and on the choice of his successor grave issues depended. He died on the 20th of July 1903. The conclave indicated as his successor his secretary of state, Cardinal Rampolla, an able exponent of the late pope’s diplomatic methods and also a warm friend of France. It was said to be the latter quality which induced Austria to exercise its ancient power of veto on the choice of a conclave, and finally Cardinal Sarto, patriarch of Venice, a pious prelate inexperienced in diplomacy, was elected and took the title of Pius X. In September the inauguration of a statue of Renan at Tréguier, his birthplace, was made the occasion of an anti-clerical demonstration in Catholic and reactionary Brittany, at which the prime minister made a militant speech in the name of the freethinkers of France, though Renan was a Voltairian aristocrat who disliked the aims and methods of modern Radical-Socialists. In the course of his speech M. Combes pointed out that the anti-clerical policy of the government had not caused the Republic to lose prestige in the eyes of the monarchies of Europe, which were then showing it unprecedented attentions. This assertion was true, and had reference to the visit of the king of England to the president of the Republic in May and the projected visit of the king of Italy. That of Edward VII., which was the first state visit of a British sovereign to France for nearly fifty years, was returned by President Loubet in July, and was welcomed by all parties, excepting some of the reactionaries. M. Millevoye, a Nationalist deputy for Paris, in thePatriecounselled the Parisians to remember Fashoda, the Transvaal War, and the attitude of the English in the Dreyfus affair, and to greet the British monarch with cries of “Vivent les Boers.” M. Déroulède, the most interesting member of the Nationalist party, wrote from his exile at Saint-Sébastien protesting against the folly of this proceeding, which merits to be put on record as an example of the incorrigible ineptitude of the reactionaries in France. The incident served only to prove their complete lack of influence on popular feeling, while it damaged the cause of the Church at a most critical moment by showing that the only persons in France willing to insult a friendly monarch who was the guest of the nation, belonged to the clerical party. Of the royal visits that of the king of Italy was the more important in its immediate effects on the history of France, as will be seen in the narration of the events of 1904.
The session of 1904 began with the election of a new president of the Chamber, on the retirement of M. Bourgeois. The choice fell on M. Henri Brisson, an old Radical, but not a Socialist, who had held that post in 1881 and had subsequently filled it on ten occasions, the election to the office being annual. The narrow majority he obtained over M. Paul Bertrand, a little-known moderate Republican, by secret ballot, followed by the defeat of M. Jaurès, the Socialist leader, for one of the vice-presidential chairs, showed that one half of the Chamber was of moderate tendency. But, as events proved, the Moderates lacked energy and leadership, so the influence of the Radical prime minister prevailed. In a debate on the 22nd of January on the expulsion of an Alsatian priest of French birth from a French frontier department by the French police, M. Ribot, who set an example of activity to younger men of the moderate groups, reproached M. Combes with reducing all questions in which the French nation was interested to the single one of anti-clericalism, and the prime minister retorted that it was solely for that purpose that he took office. In pursuance of this policy a bill was introduced, and was passed by the Chamber before Easter, interdicting from teaching all members of religious orders, authorized or not authorized. Among other results this law, which the Senate passed in the summer, swept out of existence the schools of the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne (Christian Brothers) and closed in all 2400 schools before the end of the year.
This drastic act of anti-clerical policy, which was a total repudiation by parliament of the principle of liberty of education, should have warned the authorities of the Church of the relentless attitude of the government. The most superficial observation ought to have shown them that the indifference of the nation would permit the prime minister to go to any length, and common prudence should have prevented them from affording him any pretext for more damaging measures. The President of the Republic accepted an invitation to return the visit of the king of Italy. When it was submitted to the Chamber on March 25th, 1904, a reactionary deputy moved the rejection of the vote for the expenses of the journey on the ground that the chief of the French executive ought not to visit the representative of the dynasty which had plundered the papacy. The amendment was rejected by a majority of 502 votes to 12, which showed that at a time of bitter controversy on ecclesiastical questions French opinion was unanimous in approving the visit of the president of the Republic to Rome as the guest of the king of Italy. Nothing could be more gratifying to the entire French nation, both on racial and on traditional grounds, than such a testimony of a complete revival of friendship with Italy, of late years obscured by the Triple Alliance. Yet the Holy See saw fit to advance pretensions inevitably certain to serve the ends of the extreme anti-clericals, whose most intolerant acts at that moment, such as the removal of the crucifixes from the law-courts, were followed by new electoral successes. Thus the reactionary majority on the Paris municipal council was displaced by the Radical-Socialists on the 1st of May, the day that M. Loubet returned from his visit to Rome. On the 16th of May M. Jaurès’ Socialist organ,L’Humanité, published the text of a protest, addressed by the pope to the powers having diplomatic relations with the Vatican, against the visit of the president of the Republic to the King of Italy. This document, dated the 28th of April, was offensive in tone both to France and to Italy. It intimated that while Catholic sovereigns refrained from visiting the person who, contrary to right, exercised civil sovereignty in Rome, that “duty” was even more “imperious” for the ruler of France by reason of the “privileges” enjoyed by that country from the Concordat; that the journey of M. Loubet to “pay homage” within the pontifical see to that person was an insult to the sovereign pontiff; and that only for reasons of special gravity was the nuncio permitted to remainin Paris. The publication of this document caused some joy among the extreme clericals, but this was nothing to the exultation of the extreme anti-clericals, who saw that the prudent diplomacy of Leo XIII., which had risen superior to many a provocation of the French government, was succeeded by a papal policy which would facilitate their designs in a mannerDiplomatic crisis with Rome.unhoped for. Moderate men were dismayed, seeing that the Concordat was now in instant danger; but the majority of the French nation remained entirely indifferent to its fate. Within a week France took the initiative by recalling the ambassador to the Vatican, M. Nisard, leaving a third-secretary in charge. In the debate in the Chamber upon the incident, the foreign minister, M. Delcassé, said that the ambassador was recalled, not because the Vatican had protested against the visit of the president to the king of Italy, but because it had communicated this protest, in terms offensive to France, to foreign powers. The Chamber on the 27th of May approved the recall of the ambassador by the large majority of 420 to 90. By a much smaller majority it rejected a Socialist motion that the Nuncio should be given his passports. The action of the Holy See was not actually an infringement of the Concordat; so the government, satisfied with the effect produced on public opinion, which was now quite prepared for a rupture with the Vatican, was willing to wait for a new pretext, which was not long in coming. Two bishops, Mgr. Geay of Laval and Mgr. Le Nordez of Dijon, were on bad terms with the clerical reactionaries in their dioceses. The friends of the prelates, including some of their episcopal brethren, thought that their chief offence was their loyalty to the Republic, and it was an unfortunate coincidence that these bishops, subjected to proceedings which had been unknown under the long pontificate of Leo XIII., should have been two who had incurred the animosity of anti-republicans. Their enemies accused Mgr. Geay of immorality and Mgr. Le Nordez of being in league with the freemasons. The bishop of Laval was summoned by the Holy Office, without any communication with the French government, to resign his see, and he submitted the citation forthwith to the minister of public worship. The French chargé d’affaires at the Vatican was instructed to protest against this grave infringement of an article of the Concordat, and, soon after, against another violation of the Concordat committed by the Nuncio, who had written to the bishop of Dijon ordering him to suspend his ordinations, the Nuncio being limited, like all other ambassadors, to communicating the instructions of his government through the intermediary of the minister for foreign affairs. The Vatican declined to give any satisfaction to the French government and summoned the two bishops to Rome under pain of suspension. So the French chargé d’affaires was directed to leave Rome, after having informed the Holy See that the government of the Republic considered that the mission of the apostolic Nuncio in Paris was terminated. Thus came to an end on the 30th of July 1904 the diplomatic relations which under the Concordat had subsisted between France and the Vatican for more than a hundred years.
Twelve days later M. Waldeck-Rousseau died, having lived just long enough to see this unanticipated result of his policy. It was said that his resolve to regulate the religious associations arose from his feeling that whatever injustice had been committed in the Dreyfus case had been aggravated by the action of certain unauthorized orders. However that may be, his own utterances showed that he believed that his policy was one of finality. But he had not reckoned that his legislation, which needed hands as calm and impartial as his own to apply it, would be used in a manner he had not contemplated by sectarian politicians who would be further aided by the self-destructive policy of the highest authorities of the Church. When parliament assembled for the autumn session a general feeling was expressed, by moderate politicians as well as by supporters of the Combes ministry, that disestablishment was inevitable. The prime minister said that he had been long in favour of it, though the previous year he had intimated to M. Nisard, ambassador to the Vatican, that he had not a majority in parliament to vote it. But the papacy and the clergy had since done everything to change that situation. The Chamber did not move in the matter beyond appointing a committee to consider the general question, to which M. Combes submitted in his own name a bill for the separation of the churches from the State.
During the last three months of 1904 public opinion was diverted to the cognate question of the existence of masonic delation in the army. M. Guyot de Villeneuve, Nationalist deputy for Saint Denis, who had beenWar Office difficulties.dismissed from the army by General de Galliffet in connexion with the Dreyfus affair, brought before the Chamber a collection of documents which, it seemed, had been abstracted from the Grand Orient of France, the headquarters of French freemasonry, by an official of that order. These papers showed that an elaborate system of espionage and delation had been organized by the freemasons throughout France for the purpose of obtaining information as to the political opinions and religious practices of the officers of the army, and that this system was worked with the connivance of certain officials of the ministry of war. Its aim appeared to be to ascertain if officers went to mass or sent their children to convent schools or in any way were in sympathy with the Roman Catholic religion, the names of officers so secretly denounced being placed on a black-list at the War Office, whereby they were disqualified for promotion. There was no doubt about the authenticity of the documents or of the facts which they revealed. Radical ex-ministers joined with moderate Republicans and reactionaries in denouncing the system. Anti-clerical deputies declared that it was no use to cleanse the war office of the influence of the Jesuits, which was alleged to have prevailed there, if it were to be replaced by another occult power, more demoralizing because more widespread. Only the Socialists and a few of the Radical-Socialists in the Chamber supported the action of the freemasons. General André, minister of war, was so clearly implicated, with the evident approval of the prime minister, that a revulsion of feeling against the policy of the anti-clerical cabinet began to operate in the Chamber. Had the opposition been wisely guided there can be little doubt that a moderate ministry would have been called to office and the history of the Church in France might have been changed. But the reactionaries, with their accustomed folly, played into the hands of their adversaries. The minister of war had made a speech which produced a bad impression. As he stepped down from the tribune he was struck in the face by a Nationalist deputy for Paris, a much younger man than he. The cowardly assault did not save the minister, who was too deeply compromised in the delation scandal. But it saved the anti-clerical party, by rallying a number of waverers who, until this exhibition of reactionary policy, were prepared to go over to the Moderates, from the “bloc,” as the ministerial majority was called. The Nationalist deputy was committed to the assizes on the technical charge of assaulting a functionary while performing his official duties. Towards the end of the year, on the eve of his trial, he met with a violent death, and the circumstances which led to it, when made public, showed that this champion of the Church was a man of low morality. General André had previously resigned and was succeeded as minister of war by M. Berteaux, a wealthy stock-broker and a Socialist.
The Combes cabinet could not survive the delation scandal, in spite of the resignation of the minister of war and the ineptitude of the opposition. On the 8th of January 1905, two days before parliament met, an election tookFall of the Combes ministry.place in Paris to fill the vacancy caused by the death of the Nationalist deputy who had assaulted General André. The circumstances of his death, at that time partially revealed, did not deter the electors from choosing by a large majority a representative of the same party, Admiral Bienaimé, who the previous year had been removed for political reasons from the post of maritime prefect at Toulon, by M. Camille Pelletan, minister of marine. A more serious check to the Combes ministry was given by the refusal of the Chamber to re-elect as president M. Brisson, who was defeated by a majority of twenty-fiveby M. Doumer, ex-Governor-General of Indo-China, who, though he had entered politics as a Radical, was now supported by the anti-republican reactionaries as well as by the moderate Republicans. A violent debate arose on the question of expelling from the Legion of Honour certain members of that order, including a general officer, who had been involved in the delation scandal. M. Jaurès, the eloquent Socialist deputy for Albi, who played the part ofÉminence griseto M. Combes in his anti-clerical campaign, observed that the party which was now demanding the purification of the order had been in no hurry to expel from it Esterhazy long after his crimes had been proved in connexion with the Dreyfus case. The debate was inconclusive, and the government on the 14th of January obtained a vote of confidence by a majority of six. But M. Combes, whose animosity towards the church was keener than his love of office, saw that his ministry would be constantly liable to be put in a minority, and that thus the consideration of separation might be postponed until after the general elections of 1906. So he announced his resignation in an unprecedented manifesto addressed to the president of the Republic on the 18th January.
M. Rouvier, minister of finance in the outgoing government, was called upon for the second time in his career to form a ministry. A moderate opportunist himself, he intended to form a coalition cabinet in which all groups of Republicans,Second Rouvier ministry.from the Centre to the extreme Left, would be represented. But he failed, and the ministry of the 24th of January 1905 contained no members of the Republican opposition which had combated M. Combes. The prime minister retained the portfolio of finance; M. Delcassé remained at the foreign office, which he had directed since 1898, and M. Berteaux at the war office; M. Etienne, member for Oran, went to the ministry of the interior; another Algerian deputy, M. Thomson, succeeded M. Camille Pelletan at the ministry of marine, which department was said to have fallen into inefficiency; public worship was separated from the department of the interior and joined with that of education under M. Bienvenu-Martin, Radical-Socialist deputy for Auxerre, who was new to official life. Although M. Rouvier, as befitted a politician of the school of Waldeck-Rousseau, disliked the separation of the churches from the state, he accepted that policy as inevitable. After the action of the Vatican in 1904, which had produced the rupture of diplomatic relations with France, many moderates who had been persistent in their opposition to the Combes ministry, and even certain Nationalists, accepted the principle of separation, but urged that it should be effected on liberal terms. So on the 27th of January, after the minister of education and public worship had announced that the government intended to introduce a separation bill, a vote of confidence was obtained by a majority of 373 to 99, half of the majority being opponents of the Combes ministry of various Republican and reactionary groups, while the minority was composed of 84 Radicals and Socialists and only 15 reactionaries.
On the 21st of March the debates on the separation of the churches from the state began. A commission had been appointed in 1904 to examine the subject. Its reporter was M. Aristide Briand, Socialist member for Saint Etienne.The Separation Law.According to French parliamentary procedure, the reporter of a commission, directed to draw up a great scheme of legislation, can make himself a more important person in conducting it through a house of legislature than the minister in charge of the bill. This is what M. Briand succeeded in doing. He produced with rapidity a “report” on the whole question, in which he traced with superficial haste the history of the Church in France from the baptism of Clovis, and upon this drafted a bill which was accepted by the government. He thus at one bound came from obscurity into the front rank of politicians, and in devising a revolutionary measure learned a lesson of moderate statesmanship. In conducting the debates he took the line of throwing the responsibility for the rupture of the Concordat on the pope. The leadership of the Opposition fell on M. Ribot, who had been twice prime minister of the Republic and was not a practising Catholic. He recognized that separation had become inevitable,; but argued that it could be accomplished as a permanent act only in concert with the Holy See. The clerical party in the Chamber did little in defence of the Church. The abbés Lemire and Gayraud, the only ecclesiastics in parliament, spoke with moderation, and M. Groussau, a Catholic jurist, attacked the measure with less temperate zeal; but the best serious defence of the interests of the Church came from the Republican centre. Few amendments from the extreme Left were accepted by M. Briand, whose general tone was moderate and not illiberal. One feature of the debates was the reluctance of the prime minister to take part in them, even when financial clauses were discussed in which his own office was particularly concerned. The bill finally passed the Chamber on the 3rd of July by 341 votes against 233, the majority containing a certain number of conservative Republicans and Nationalists. At the end the Radical-Socialists manifested considerable discontent at the liberal tendencies of M. Briand, and declared that the measure as it left the Chamber could be considered only provisional. In the Senate it underwent no amendment whatever, not a single word being altered. The prime minister, M. Rouvier, never once opened his lips during the lengthy debates, in the course of which M. Clémenceau, as a philosophical Radical who voted for the bill, criticized it as too concordatory, while M. Méline, as a moderate Republican, who voted against it, predicted that it would create such a state of things as would necessitate new negotiations with Rome a few years later. It was finally passed by a majority of 181 to 102, the complete number of senators being 300, and three days later, on the 9th of December 1905, it was promulgated as law by the president of the Republic.