I THE GIFT OF PIUS IX
The nineteenth century commenced with the near universality of the confessional state under which one religion, or Christian denomination, was privileged by the state, while other denominations and religions were tolerated at best. By the century’s close, these arrangements had been abandoned, or modified, almost beyond recognition. This was done either to accommodate dissenters and religious minorities, or as a result of sustained assaults from liberal and radical anticlericals, either acting alone as in the French Third Republic or, as in Bismarck’s Germany, in temporary alliance with the far from liberal wielder of state power. These clashes, many of which endured for decades, largely established the formal framework within which state and Church, or, to be more punctilious, faith groups, operate in Europe to this day. People nowadays may be unaware how France, Germany, Italy or Spain resolved these issues; at the time they were being resolved, people followed these events with avidity. Yet the consequences are important for understanding how we choose to live now; on an optimistic reading, these developments have enabled Europe’s Churches to rediscover their spiritual and social mission within a free market of opinion, while states have been liberated from the sometimes deleterious influences that over-mighty religions exert on semi-formed states elsewhere.1
British experience during the Victorian era reminds us that the separation of government and religion (though not of Church and state, whose formal union continues to this day) was not always the result of laicising aggression on the part of liberal anticlericals, even though the latter typified continental European and Latin American experience. The impetus behind disestablishment in the British Isles came from those seeking to make society more religious, aided and abetted by those who sought to strengthen the Church of England by discarding its abuse-ridden accretions, rather than from militant secularists or devotees of state power. Opponents of establishment wanted to strip one denomination of its privileges, but they were also keen to use the state to protect Britain from ‘popery’, to maintain Sunday observance, and to close the sluices through which torrents of beer and gin poured down the gullets of the lower classes.
No British political party espoused either anticlericalism or the confessional politics to be found on the continent; and churchmen were agreed that, as one London vicar said, they ‘should think it most wrong to pervert the pulpit into a platform, whence to denounce one political party and uphold another’. Where else in Europe could one imagine a bishop telling a working men’s meeting (in Swansea), ‘my advice to you is this: Think for yourselves, and mind when you vote that it is according to your conscience’? In practice these honourable attempts to eschew partisan loyalties were progressively abandoned towards the close of the nineteenth century as the identification of Liberalism with Nonconformity and the cause of disestablishment meant the emergence of the Church of England as the Tory Party at prayer.2
Both major political parties undertook piecemeal reforms, whose cumulative effect was to dismantle the single-creed state that the century began with, gradually removing those features that discriminated against, or disadvantaged, Protestant Dissenters, Roman Catholics and Jews. The state’s establishment of a permanent vehicle for Church reform, the Ecclesiastical Commission of 1836, and the passage of the Irish Temporalities Act three years earlier, contributed to the rise within Anglicanism of an anti-Erastian movement known as Tractarianism, part of whose rationale was to stress the apostolic roots of the Church of England rather than treating it as something cobbled together by the state during the Reformation to facilitate a royal divorce. Having started their journey as convinced opponents of Roman Catholicism, many of the leading lights of the Oxford Movement, the epicentre of Tractarianism being Britain’s premier university, left a Church whose spiritual purity was being sullied by subordination to an increasingly pluralist state, and headed for Rome.
Thenceforth, the Anglican Church would be pulled in three different directions, by Evangelical Low, High and latitudinarian Broad churchmen. At about this time, the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland was rocked by the ‘Great Disruption’, a protracted clash between the authority of the Church’s ruling General Assembly and local congregations and a state that supported the right of patrons to make appointments to the ministry, a battle that English wits attributed to a surfeit of oatmeal porridge. The result was that in 1843 a third of so-called Non-Intrusionist ministers decamped from the General Assembly to form the Free Church of Scotland. The established Church of Scotland continued as the Church of a scant majority. The most glaring disjunction between a Church’s privileged status and its following, amounting to one in fourteen of the population, was that of the Church of Ireland which Gladstone’s Liberal government disestablished in January 1871.
It was characteristic of the peculiarity of British conditions that the greatest nineteenth-century leader of a Liberal Party that derived support from Scottish Presbyterians, English and Welsh Nonconformists and Irish Roman Catholics was a High Church Tractarian, who to his dying day regarded the seventeenth-century archbishop Laud as a martyr. Such idiosyncrasies are integral to the British way. Like his Tory predecessor Peel, Gladstone thought that the best way to bolster the Church of England was to discard its most indefensible aspects. ‘I am convinced’, he wrote to his eldest son, ‘that the only hope of making it possible for her to discharge her high office as stewardess of divine truth, is to deal tenderly and gently with all the points at which her external privileges grate upon the feelings and interests of that unhappily large portion of the community who have almost ceased in any sense to care for her.’ Not the least of Gladstone’s achievements was surgically to remove the diseased limb of the Church of Ireland establishment, without this leading to removal of the equally anomalous Welsh establishment (a measure only taken in the First World War) or general disestablishment of the Church of England itself.3
Periodically, vaster developments on the continent intruded into these British debates, in the form of what English Protestants dubbed ‘papal aggression’, as when pope Pius IX sought to restore an English Catholic hierarchy in 1850, a development that led the newly appointed cardinal Wiseman of Westminster to gush triumphantly–‘from out of the Flaminian Gate’–to the effect that ‘Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished’.
Protestant Englishmen, accustomed to putting a torch to effigies of Guy Fawkes every 5 November, shuddered at the prospect of rampant baroque churches looming up alongside the delicate tracery of their beloved neo-gothic. The ensuing furore, which resulted in effigies of Wiseman and Pius being burned along with Guy Fawkes that bonfire night, inclined the Whig leader lord John Russell, who had been a lifelong supporter of religious toleration, to pander to mounting Protestant fears of ‘popery’ by introducing Britain’s last venture in discrimination against a (tolerated) religious minority. This was the 1851 Ecclesiastical Titles Act which prohibited Catholic prelates from using territorial titles on pain of a £100 fine.4 Since its author had also taken a sideswipe at Tractarian pseudo-Catholics, one of its fiercest critics was Gladstone, who not only delivered a major speech opposing this legislation, attempting to reverse, as it did, ‘the profound tendencies of the age towards religious liberty’, but abolished this reversion to penal legislation when prime minister twenty years later.5
That Gladstone was an enthusiastic admirer of the liberal Catholic German theologian Ignaz Döllinger, and became a fiery critic of Pius IX, reminds us of the interconnectedness of the epic culture wars on the continent. These wars were partly fought in the ramifying journals and newspapers of liberals and their papalist or ultramontane opponents. The press followed these conflicts in minute detail, while cartoonists reduced complex issues to crude and sometimes vicious stereotypes, for it was far easier to depict a freemason or Jew than a liberal, or a Jesuit rather than a moderate lay Catholic. The nineteenth century may have been the apogee of rival nation states, but it was also one in which divisions between anticlericals and ultramontanes, and those who for whatever reasons sympathised with them, ran through nations and across borders, agitating a pan-European interested public.6
At the eye of the storm was one old man, convinced that the Catholic Church was under siege from a satanic conspiracy of anticlericals, freemasons and liberals, whose menace had become global. It would be over-ambitious to give more than the barest indication of the sheer scale of events. Colombia had been the first independent Spanish republic to be recognised by the Holy See in 1835; since 1843 Catholicism had been acknowledged as the official state religion. However, successive liberal governments introduced anticlerical measures, annulling tithes and abolishing sanctuary, while a new constitution in 1853 introduced Latin America’s first separation of Church and state. Under general José Maria Obando, civil marriage was made mandatory, cemeteries were secularised and Colombia’s diplomatic representatives were recalled from Rome. The Church found its rights curtailed too during the 1860s and 1870s in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, as well as Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.
Nearer home, by the last third of the nineteenth century, there were acute tensions between Church and state in overwhelmingly Catholic Austria–Hungary, Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain; in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany where Catholics were substantial minorities; and finally in the parts of partitioned Poland administered by Prussia and Russia. While the conflict in each country was shaped by its separate experiences and history, important common denominators emerge. We turn first to Italy.7
Inherited hostilities between the Piedmontese state and the papacy were writ larger following the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The status of Rome poisoned relations between the Church and an Italian nation state, belief in whose legitimacy was thinly spread among the population. The pope regarded his patrimony as crucial to the fulfilment of the Church’s spiritual mission; the Italian state viewed national unification as incomplete without Rome as Italy’s capital.
The state needed the support of the Church, if only to deepen the legitimacy of the liberal regime among people as yet unpersuaded by the benefits of abandoning the legacy of particularism in favour of what was tantamount to rule by the northern Piedmontese. Hence it proclaimed that ‘The Roman Catholic religion is the only religion of the state. The other cults that now exist are tolerated insofar as they conform with the law.’ A Catholic editor, Giacomo Margottis, coined the motto ‘neither elected nor electors’, which served to undermine the legitimacy of both government and state, although Catholics sat as deputies in the Italian parliament once the oath of allegiance had been amended to make this possible. The state responded by confiscating ecclesiastical property, subjecting clergy and seminarians to military conscription, and invalidating church weddings unless accompanied by civil marriage by the state. By 1873 it had abolished all university theology faculties throughout the country. In Italy, as elsewhere, the state’s right to review, or veto, ecclesiastical appointments was especially contentious. By 1864, nearly half the dioceses of Italy were without bishops. Ten bishops went on trial after incurring the wrath of the state, forty-three went into exile, and a further sixteen had been prevented from taking up their posts. These assaults resulted in a commensurately belligerent response from the burgeoning Catholic press, whose most aptly militant representative was the Jesuit La Civilità Cattolica that had commenced publication in 1850. This was the Holy See’s equivalent of the semi-official newspapers that proliferated in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, a useful instrument whose contents could be denied whenever they proved inexpedient.8 In keeping with the view that the laity were soldiers of an army whose officers were the clergy and whose commander was the pope, a number of lay organisations were founded, including a youth organisation in 1868 and six years later the Opera dei Congressi, which was modelled on Belgian and German national associations of Catholics.9
The situation of the pope went from bad to worse, although he was sometimes collusive in this process, since rhetorical moderation, sensitivity and subtlety were alien to him. In September 1864, the Minghetti government concluded a Convention with Napoleon III that regulated the future of the patrimony of St Peter without any reference to the pope himself. Throughout Europe, liberalism seemed to be in the ascendant, seeping gradually into the Church itself in the form of Lamennais and his disciples. At an 1863 congress in Belgian Malines, the prominent liberal Catholic Montalembert said that the Church accepted the principles of 1789 and would thrive in the atmosphere of ‘modern liberty, democratic liberty’. That autumn Döllinger defended the right of the new critical scholarship to pursue the truth, regardless of dogmatic authority–the one exception to this rule being that critical scholarship’s own implicit assumptions.
These attacks, together with the encroachments of the Italian state, prompted Pius to issue a comprehensive condemnation of contemporary errors, the eightieth of the eighty errors listed in his 1864 Syllabus (or catalogue) being that the pope should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation. In that bald formulation, the eightieth article lost any connection with its original context, which was a papal condemnation of secularising trends in the Piedmontese educational system, a specific context Pius did not deign to retain so as to pre-empt liberal outrage. The Pope’s declaration of Infallibility led to much mockery. Cartoonists on liberal papers had a field day with such images as the pope betting on the lottery, while the ticket vendor exclaimed: ‘For God’s sake don’t do it! You are infallible, so you will win every time and bust our lottery.’10
What is not often stressed, in the customary identification of the Syllabus with its final jarring assertion, is that in article 39 the pope denounced the doctrine that ‘the State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits’. The Moloch-like expansion of the modern state into areas where it had hitherto acknowledged limits was one of the two most important aspects of these nineteenth-century conflicts, and Catholics were not slow to draw attention to this as they sought to limit state authority. One unfortunate consequence of this battle was that the Church itself took on many of the authoritarian, bureaucratic and centralising features of the states it was being persecuted by. In the eyes of many Catholics, an authoritarian pope became the ultimate defender of liberty against states that liberals were pushing in a highly illiberal direction. This was the immediate background to the Declaration of Papal Infallibility, the cynosure of international liberal animadversion.11
In the summer of 1868 Pius summoned the first General Council of the Church for three hundred years. Over seven hundred Catholic bishops convened in St Peter’s on 8 December 1869. Difficulties in understanding the variant national pronunciations of Latin, the lingua franca of the Council, were compounded by acoustics that lifted speech into an incoherent babble echoing from the roof of the north transept.12 It took until the following May to promulgate a constitution containing fundamental statements of faith, which was finally issued with over five hundred amendments. A separate constitution on the Church proved more contentious, because of chapters on the primacy and infallibility of the pope. The Council divided into a Majority, who supported the notion of papal infallibility, and a Minority of roughly 150, who regarded this doctrine as either inopportune or untrue. Supposedly confidential discussions were leaked to the press, while caucuses acquired assiduous publicists, notably the polyglot liberal Catholic peer lord Acton, who supported the dissenting Minority, and the French ultramontane polemicist Louis Veuillot, who took up the cause of the conservative Majority. A leaked draft designed to clarify relations between Church and state was hurriedly retracted, and never resurrected, once governments had voiced their alarm. Over a long hot Roman summer the Council debated the issue of infallibility, which was voted through on 18 July 1870 as thunder cracked over St Peter’s. Fifty-five dissenters slipped away from Rome, leaving a majority of 533 to approve the declaration against two bishops who voted against. The Council declared that ‘the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is…by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church…is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith and morals’. In a famous pamphlet, William Gladstone wrote: ‘With this decree the claims of [the thirteenth-century] Innocent III over mankind have been resurrected in the nineteenth century–like some mummy picked out of its dusty sarcophagus.’ The distinctive individualism of European civilisation, in its ascendant liberal, Protestant form, was threatened with being ‘politically debased to the Mahometan and Oriental model’.13
The following day France declared war on Prussia, and the last French troops evacuated Rome to fight the invading Teutons. An emissary from Victor Emmanuel explained to the pope the need for Italy to occupy his territory to forestall a republican revolution or to pre-empt disorder. ‘Nice words, but ugly deeds,’ replied the seventy-eight-year-old pontiff. Following the defeat of France at Sedan, Italian troops under general Rafaelle Cadorna launched an assault on Rome, which they took after a brief morning battle. After a rigged election, Rome and its environs were incorporated into the Italian kingdom. Announcing his future role as martyr–pontiff, Pius said: ‘I surrender to violence. From this moment I am the prisoner of King Victor Emmanuel.’ Everyone connected with the invasion and occupation was excommunicated. On various occasions Pius likened the Italian sovereign to Goliath, Holofernes and Sennacherib.14
Meanwhile, the Italian monarch occupied the Quirinal Palace and monasteries were converted into government ministries. The War Ministry moved into the convent of the Twelve Apostles, and a Carmelite nunnery at Regina Coeli became Rome’s main prison. Ancient monastic libraries were subsumed into the Victor Emmanuel Library. Cardinals found it expedient to erase coats of arms from their carriages and to slip in or out of the Vatican in mufti as Roman anticlericalism lost its few remaining inhibitions.
For the next fifty-eight years, no pope set foot outside the walls of the Vatican once he had been elected. The May 1871 Law of Guarantees was intended to soften the blow by treating the pope as a sovereign, and affording him a large tax-free annuity to maintain his greatly reduced state. Pius rejected this deal, for, as he acidly observed, little faith could be put in Italian governments of which there had been nine in ten years. Paradoxically, although he continued to lament the acts of state piracy that had stripped him of his temporal dominions, the pope benefited in terms of a significant increase in his spiritual authority, this being partly attributable to his charisma, but also to his status as a victim of secular power. Propaganda on behalf of the poor martyred pope clearly did its work, at least judging from an 1877 letter to him from a concerned Parisian woman: ‘Permit your humble daughter, Holy Father, to offer You a little underclothing intended for your personal use: I have heard harrowing details of the deprivations of Your Holiness in this regard! And I am happy to alleviate your distress!’ Looking to the example of Pius VII, the pope thought he just had to wait on the course of events to regain his patrimony; as yet, in 2005, there has been no movement.15
Elsewhere, Church and state relations took the form of the pattern we have noticed in France: a revival of Church influence after 1848, followed by attempts to undo this by those who were suspicious of Church encroachments on the territory of the state. The 1848 revolutions led the rulers of Austria to revive the close association between Church and Habsburg monarchy, conceding a Concordat in 1855 that granted the Church far more privileges than it had enjoyed in the Josephist past. This outraged both liberals and members of religious minorities within the Empire, and liberals and Protestants elsewhere. The revival of the alliance between throne and altar meant that liberals construed curbs on the former as indirect, but related, challenges to the absolutism of the latter. Once they had achieved power in the wake of the Austro-Prussian War, Austrian liberals sought to dismantle the privileges the Church had gained under the Concordat, which was unilaterally abrogated in 1870 on the ground that the declaration of papal infallibility had so altered the character of one of the contracting parties that the agreement should be considered null and void. Besides, the Concordat was not reconcilable with the new liberal Austrian constitution, or new laws that sanctioned civil marriage and toleration of what could be taught in schools. Clergy who persisted in such quaint customs as describing children of couples who had undergone civil marriage as ‘illegitimate’ in their records found themselves harried by the courts. When the bishop of Brixen in the Tyrol refused to hand over records relevant to a woman seeking a divorce from a man who had fled to the USA, the police raided his diocesan office, and the bishop received a hefty fine. When Rudigier, bishop of Linz, declined to hand over marriage documents to the civil authorities, he was cited before a court whose authority he refused to recognise, and then arrested and tried. A liberal satirical weekly crowed that the law was not ‘simply made for artisan youths’.16 They crowed too soon, for among the legacies of these conflicts in Austria were the demise of a liberal politics that failed to find a mass base, and the rise of a militant political Catholicism that did not scruple to blame Vienna’s Jews for their tribulations at the hands of liberals.
II ‘THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVILISATIONS’
As in Austria, conservative Prussian governments during the 1850s regarded religion as a source of social stability. This was reflected in the 1848–50 Prussian constitution that granted the Catholic Church extensive rights and separate representation alongside Protestants within the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs. This did not mean that Catholics were proportionately represented in the civil service, army officer corps or professoriat, which continued to be overwhelmingly Protestant, even in predominantly Catholic areas like the Prussian Rhine provinces which nonetheless were largely administered by Protestants. In 1852 Catholic deputies in the Prussian parliament formed their own caucus, known from 1859 onwards as the Centre Party so as to lose any explicit reference to confession, sometimes making common cause with the liberal opposition when the issues at stake were constitutional, fiscal or military. The coolness of the clergy was among the reasons why this party disintegrated within a decade.
Prussia’s stunning military victories in 1864, 1866 and 1870 were enveloped in nationalistic fervour and Protestant triumphalism, the two increasingly hard to tell apart. The successive defeats of Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, resulting in the establishment of the North German Confederation followed by the German Empire, were viewed as victories for ‘Germandom’, Protestantism and German philosophical idealism. Some Catholic politicians, many of them Prussians, were as fervid about Prussia’s triumphs as the next man. However, those whose loyalties were to the more intimate dynastic states were cool towards the chauvinism and militarism that characterised German unification, and sympathised with the ‘reluctant Germans’, or ‘must-be Prussians’, be they Alsatians, Danes, Lithuanians or Poles, who were then subjected to conquest and germanisation by the self-consciously steely Sparta on the Spree. These particularist Catholics were bundled together with non-German Catholic minorities and dubbed ‘enemies of the Reich’. Cosmopolitan dual allegiances, or what might be called multiple identities, be they Jewish, Marxist or in this case Roman, were portrayed as inherently sinister. In addition to blurring the civil and spiritual spheres, Catholicism seemed to have little or no respect for national boundaries at a time when in some countries these were being defined for the first time.17
The papal secretary of state Antonelli was said to have exclaimed, ‘the world is collapsing,’ when he heard news of the Prussian victory over Austria. In confessional terms, a predominantly Protestant power had rudely extruded a venerable Catholic Empire from influence in Germany, and German Catholics had exchanged approximate parity for being a minority of a third of the population. This made the political representation of Catholic interests urgent.
The Centre Party was refounded in 1870, to defend religious freedoms; it was then given tremendous focus and impetus by the Kulturkampf. Many lay Catholic politicians were unsympathetic to the hard-line infallibilist and ultramontane direction of their Church, a view shared by the majority of German bishops who had opposed the Vatican Council’s declaration. The crisis facing the papacy led them into what was clearly a misjudgement. In March 1871 they struck out an assurance in their version of the Reichstag’s congratulatory address to the Crown, to the effect that the new German Empire would not intervene in the affairs of foreign states. This was construed as an attempt by Catholics to inveigle the emperor into using force to restore the temporalities of the pope. This lapse of tactical judgement confirmed the dominant Protestant version of the national story, whereby since the Middle Ages ‘German’ potency had been sapped by diversions to the south, while it also offended German liberals who sympathised with the national aspirations of their Italian confréres. When the Centre Party tried to extend the Basic Rights enshrined in the 1850 Prussian Constitution to the new constitution of the Reich, both liberal parties voted this measure down as an act of spite against their Catholic opponents. The cause of freedom took a back seat to that of consolidating the new nation.
Bismarck may or may not have been keen on separating Church and state; if he was, then rolling back the privileges that the Catholic Church had achieved since 1850 may have been a question of attacking the weaker of the two faiths first. What is clear is that his detestation of ‘political Catholicism’ drew its potency from several sources. Catholic deputies had co-operated with liberals in the Prussian parliament in opposing him. Memories of this collaboration festered in a man whose grudges were like those of characters in medieval Scandinavian sagas. At a time when Bismarck was engaged in nation-and state-building, Rome claimed that the rights of the Church trumped those of the state, and the Centre Party appeared to be the natural rallying point for every group disaffected from the new Empire. Under enormous stress during the daytime, Bismarck literally dreamed of a disintegrating map of the new Germany whenever before dawn he snatched his shallow dyspeptic’s sleep.18
The most worrying disaffected group appeared to be the Prussian Poles, who after 1867 found themselves part of Germany, as opposed to Prussia, for the first time. Traditional Prussian policy in Prussian Poland had been based on isolating a patriotic nobility that was wedded to romantic insurrectionism, while respecting the Poles’ language and religion and hoping that material betterment might incline the peasant majority to Prussian dynastic rule. But as the Prussian administration became more conscious of being German, the Polish leadership responded by mobilising a peasant base, principally through the strategy of ‘Organic Work’, a series of measures designed to modernise the structure of Polish society preparatory to regaining national independence. Although the control the Polish Catholic Church allegedly exercised over the Polish masses was one of the grounds for launching the Kulturkampf, by alienating the Polish Catholic Church the Kulturkampf played a major role in the transformation of Polish nationalism from an aristocratic into a mass phenomenon.19 Ironically, during the 1860s the Catholic Church in Prussian Poland had been apathetic or hostile towards Polish nationalism, with archbishop Ledóchowski of Gnesen-Posen banning priests from involvement in Organic Work, and prohibiting the singing of patriotic hymns in churches. In 1870 Bismarck described the archbishop–whose spoken Polish was poor–as ‘an excellent man who keeps the Poles in order for me and on whom I can rely’.
But the culture wars that raged across Europe were never simply concerned with the juridical rights of Church and state, or the anodyne-sounding administrative and legal measures used to adjust this relationship in the state’s favour. They reminded some contemporaries of a war of religions, with anticlerical liberalism and the Positivist scientism that often accompanied it standing in for sixteenth-century Protestantism, a Protestantism that many liberals often construed as their historical precursor, and certainly part of their wider identity.
As in the Wars of Religion, there were similar paranoias about foreign meddling in domestic politics; in the predominantly Calvinist Netherlands, Catholics were still referred to as the ‘Spanish–Roman party’ to conjure up memories of the fearsome duke of Alba. To fanatical liberals, these culture wars were a struggle between the bringers of modern, scientific light and those still atavistically mired in medieval darkness and superstition, variously known to liberal opponents as the ‘black gang’ or ‘plague’ because of clerical clothing. Catholics responded by regarding themselves as victims, which they certainly were, not just of liberalism, which was hard to put a face to, but of what they more narrowly construed as a Jewish–masonic–satanic conspiracy.20 Part of the trick of conveying what this was about involves defying the stereotypical antimonies that the contestants imposed upon these conflicts, for, as mention of Catholic newspapers and political parties already indicates, the Catholic Church can hardly be construed as being uniformly hostile to modern civilisation since it cleverly exploited many of its instruments.
The term Kulturkampf, or struggle for civilisation, was coined in 1872 by the Progressive deputy, pathologist and popular science writer Rudolf Virchow, whom we encountered earlier as a leading example of scientific hubris.21 The Kulturkampf could not have been waged without pervasive liberal and Protestant anti-Catholicism that ranged from crude expressions of prejudice to stealthier institutionalised discrimination. Most German liberals were Protestants, some of their leaders being sons of pastors or former theology students. The main liberal political party, the National Liberals, had fifty-one Catholic deputies in the Reichstag between 1867 and 1917, in contrast to 569 Protestants. This disproportion was replicated in virtually every state assembly, in the civil service and among the learned professions.22 Of the ninety most senior positions in the German Reich, Catholics occupied eight in the quarter century before the First World War. The only Catholic in the Ministry of the Interior was a messenger; there was one Catholic in the Finance Ministry, two in the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs; and only five among the forty-nine senior officials in the Foreign Ministry.23
Catholics were also excluded on more symbolic levels, insofar as there was little or nothing for them to identify with in the publicly celebrated myths that brought Protestants together. Hermann the Cheruskan and Luther had revolted against the Roman Empire or the Rome of the popes; the battle of Leipzig, Sedan Day and the 1871 peace of Versailles were partly commemorated as victories over Catholic France. Monumental statues were a favoured form of nineteenth-century provocation. In 1875 Catholics were explicitly excluded from the inauguration in the Teutoburger Forest of the monument to Hermann, fabled liquidator of a first-century Roman legion.24
A number of venerable anti-Catholic stereotypes resurfaced under the guise of Progress rather than Providence. Much of this derived from the Enlightenment copybook of clerical concupiscence, although not even Voltaire managed to blame the Jesuits for allegedly poisoning a cardinal, or the sudden death of a popular lion in Berlin’s zoo. In liberal Protestant eyes, Catholics personified economic backwardness and cultural obscurantism, while Protestantism was synonymous with ‘Kultur’, an identification partly made to reinvigorate Protestantism among a bourgeoisie that no longer attended church. Modern people made their own rational choices; priests exercised an unnatural suasion over old crones and children, many of them country folk, who composed the majority of Catholics.
In Belgium, where there were similarly acute conflicts, as late as 1936 a liberal historian could write that liberal ‘Brussels had no intention of being trodden underfoot by thousands of clogs’, this being a reference to the clog-shod Catholic farmers who flooded into the capital city to protest against liberal policies. This suspicion of priestly dominance of credulous peasants was why leading German National Liberals opposed the introduction of universal manhood suffrage, for it would enable the Jesuits to herd their dim and docile flocks through the polls, just as they and O’Connell had allegedly done in Ireland or the Polish clergy might do in Prussian Poland.25 Although there were no more than two hundred Jesuits in Germany, cartoons by Wilhelm Busch–the Protestant and antisemitic father of the modern comic strip–ensured that everyone knew the grinning, treacherous and wily face of ‘Father Filucius’ (from the French ‘filou’).26
Prejudice was accompanied by the customary demographic paranoia. The Catholic population was believed to be increasing at an alarming rate, allegedly through conversions and mixed marriages, although many Protestants credulously assumed that the peasants of Prussian Poland bred like rabbits. In fact, the only area to register a striking increase in the Catholic population was Upper Silesia, where this was attributable to migration into its industrial hellholes, rather than to a religiously inspired lack of sexual continence, while conversions to Rome were outnumbered by those of Catholics to Protestantism. More than half of the children of mixed marriages were brought up as Protestants rather than Catholics.27 Liberals regarded schools where clerics had influence as places where the impressionable were subjected to divided loyalties and Roman superstition; in Prussian Poland the clergy were helping to promote Polish as the language of instruction, a strategy which surreptitiously tilted the ethnic balance of these territories by turning little Germans into tiny Polish speakers. Charitable institutions were attacked for promoting dependence and sloth or subtracting productive resources from the national economy. Something as harmless as the opening of a Dominican convent in Berlin’s Moabit seemed sinister when it coincided with the discovery, in a Carmelite convent in Cracow, of Barbara Ubryk, a nun who had been confined for breaking her vow of chastity, and who after over twenty years had become ‘a naked, barbarised, half-insane female’. The Moabit Dominican house was repeatedly stormed by an outraged urban mob.28 Convents and monasteries were castigated as cold citadels of cruelty or hot debaucheries, in wilful ignorance that they played a leading role in the nation’s charitable, educational and hospital provision, as no less a personage than the minister of war acknowledged in 1875 when during this moment of national emergency he said: ‘without the Sisters of Mercy I can’t wage war’. Of the 914 religious foundations, with over eight thousand members, 623 and their five thousand members were involved in caring for the sick and infirm. Many western industrial cities, including Düsseldorf, Duisburg and Essen, would have had no hospital arrangements whatsoever without the dedication of nursing orders. So far from living a life of genteel contemplation, female religious active in hospitals toiled 250 day and 180 night shifts in a single year, naturally without material recompense.29
Protestant purpose and sobriety, later conveniently identified as an ‘ethic’ by the Protestant Max Weber, was contrasted with a drunken lackadaisical mob of priest-ridden peasants, who bestirred themselves only to gawp at hocus-pocus involving relics and shrouds perpetrated by their evil clerical masters. Germany’s academic finest took a dim view of an elderly Italian’s claims to infallibility, rarely extending that critical stance to the authoritarian hierarchism that characterised their own academic profession. Even in the late nineteenth century, only 13 per cent of Prussian academics were Roman Catholics, percentages that further declined in medicine, science and technology.30 Impeccably liberal academics deplored the papacy’s treatment of one of their own, the excommunicate scholar Döllinger, while disdaining the credulous stupidity of the Catholic masses, although as liberals they were not especially keen on the masses in general. Germany’s great historian steam-engines, Baumgarten, Droysen, Mommsen, Sybel and Treitschke, many of them admirers of amoral power, indulged themselves as armchair generals, warning: ‘Just as they vanquished Paris, the German people will also subdue the Vatican.’ Heinrich von Sybel added: ‘We must do to the clericals in cassocks what we have done to the clericals in white officers’ uniforms.’31 Their very notion of historical progress, attributing ‘religious freedom’ to the Reformation, ‘intellectual freedom’ to the Enlightenment and ‘the state’s freedom’ to the present, implicitly denied the notion that there had been any ‘progress’ in religion since the sixteenth century. Progress was something achieved despite religion, an unhistorical stance that overlooked how Christian monotheism had separated God from the world and hence encouraged man to make it intelligible, but also what might be called the palaeo-liberal religious origins of many essential limitations on secular power that the modern world has inherited from much earlier clashes of Church and state.32
Liberal rhetorical violence was directed not just towards the Catholic Church but towards the Catholics in general, for unlike modern progressives they abhorred diversity, or what is now called multiculturalism. This reflected their frustration with the confessional, cultural and ethnic heterogeneity of the newly founded nation state, a diversity which subverted their desire for that spiritual unity which would enable the Protestant German nation state to achieve yet higher cultural goals.33 This led liberals on to treacherous terrain. Since Rome’s indoctrinated army could allegedly be prevailed upon to vote this way or that, liberals were more than prepared to allow Caesar his due, insofar as state coercion would expedite their goal of a modern unified polity based upon their values. They discovered a newfound respect for eighteenth-century absolutism, which had forged a primitive unity by destroying intermediary corporate and feudal powers. On to essentially traditional ideas about subordinating the Church to the state, liberals grafted the more modern, egalitarian notion that the state alone could guarantee the autonomy of the individual in a society of equals. Stripped of abuses and subjected to the rule of law, the state could be used to pursue liberal goals, becoming what one historian described as ‘the magic spear which heals as well as wounds’.
One of the more influential and, at least in terms of literary accomplishment, the most talented of Germany’s nineteenth-century historians, Heinrich von Treitschke, expressed this disarming trust in the benevolence of the state with characteristic trenchancy when he wrote: ‘For us the state is not, as it is for the Americans, a power to be contained so that the will of the individual may remain uninhibited, but rather a cultural power from which we expect positive achievements in all areas of national life.’34 Prominent Catholic politicians rejected this dubious doctrine: ‘That is a political science I completely and decidedly reject. The state is the protector of existing right, it is not the sole creator of right.’35 Perhaps above all, liberal enthusiasm for harassing Catholics reflected their guilt at having surrendered so many of their earlier principles in order to collaborate with that whiskery bruiser Bismarck. They could pretend to a certain residual militancy, while basking in the power of the state, as it sought to deliver the individual from the clutch of antiquated intermediary corporations, failing to notice that the state had an iron grip itself.
In July 1871 Bismarck merged the Catholic and Protestant sections of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, transferring the Catholic head of the former and appointing a Protestant to lead the combined section. The transferred official had been both a Centre Party deputy and, so Bismarck alleged, involved in dealings with disaffected Polish aristocrats. The formal measures of the Kulturkampf began with the December 1871 imperial ‘pulpit law’ which made it illegal for the clergy to criticise the Reich and its constitution from the pulpit. One National Liberal, Eduard Lasker, who was Jewish, and only twelve of the forty-seven Progressive liberal deputies voted against a measure that interfered so egregiously with free speech.36 In early 1872 the Prussian School Supervision Law removed all clergy from the schools inspectorate, in order to diminish clerical influence while boosting that of the liberals’ creatures among the teachers. In Prussian Poland, this measure was designed to curtail the ‘polonising’ influence of the Catholic clergy in the schools.37
In May 1872 Bismarck appointed Cardinal Gustav von Hohenlohe as ambassador to the Vatican, anticipating that the pope would find this pupil of Döllinger, brother of a notorious Bavarian anticlerical and foe of the Jesuits, unacceptable. Pius IX did. In the Reichstag Bismarck vowed, ‘Have no fear, we are not going to Canossa,’ a provocative reference to the medieval emperor Henry IV who in 1077 had had to do penance to the pope at Canossa. So-called alien Polish priests and journalists (that is those from Austrian Galicia) were expelled from Prussian-controlled Poland. In July 1872, the houses of the Jesuit order and its unnamed ‘confederates’ were closed and the order’s foreign members expelled from the country. Only the socialists, eight Progressives and two prominent Jewish National Liberals sprang to the Society’s defence. By Christmas, diplomatic relations between Berlin and the Vatican had been severed, following Pius IX’s condemnation of persecution designed ‘to put the laws of the worldly power before the most sacred laws of God and the Church’.
In May 1873 the new minister of education and religious affairs, Adalbert Falk, introduced the ‘May Laws’ to the Prussian parliament. Candidates for ordination must be German citizens and graduates of state grammar schools and theology faculties at state universities; moreover they had to pass ‘cultural examinations’ in history, literature and philosophy, after they had completed their theological training, examinations designed to test patriotic commitment. This had implicitly grave consequences for the Polish clergy of Prussian Poland. A second law gave the state the right to veto all Church appointments; there were penalties for bishops who simply left the posts vacant rather than submit to government dictation. The third law dealt with the general issues raised by incidents like that in the West Prussian diocese of Ermland, where a chaplain had been dismissed from his teaching post by his bishop, for refusing to read to his pupils a pastoral letter explaining the dogma of papal infallibility. Since teachers were also state officials, the government refused to dismiss the chaplain and compelled pupils to attend his classes on pain of expulsion from the school. Under the new legislation, a Royal Tribunal for Ecclesiastical Affairs consisting of twelve judges would hear appeals from episcopal decisions. They could institute such proceedings without the plaintiff’s consent and they could dismiss bishops whom they found against. Finally, a fourth law made it easier for Prussian subjects to abandon their tax-paying Church allegiances. The ponderously named Law for the Administration of Vacant Bishoprics and Parishes of May 1874 allowed the authorities to take control of dioceses where the incumbent had been dismissed or imprisoned for infractions of the earlier Kulturkampf laws. The Catholic press was disbarred from running lucrative government announcements. A new Press Law, whose target groups went beyond the Catholic media, permitted the confiscation of newspapers, books and pamphlets on grounds of suspected violation, while editors, publishers, printers and distributors faced draconian fines and up to a year’s imprisonment. Prussia introduced compulsory civil marriage, extended a year later to the Reich as a whole. Separate laws were addressed to the use of Polish in schools. Polish-speaking teachers were transferred to German-speaking areas, while German was imposed as the sole language of instruction, first for classes on religion and then for everything else. The Official Language Law of 28 August 1876 made German the sole medium of intercourse for Poles dealing with the German-speaking bureaucracy and the courts, while bilingual signs and many Polish place names disappeared.38
In April 1875 Prussia legislated to cut state subsidies to the Catholic clergy, while that summer a Congregations Law sought to dissolve or suppress religious orders. An Imperial Expatriation Law enabled the state to banish priests to such remote spots as the island of Rügenorto expel them from the country. Simultaneously, the Prussian diet promulgated the Old Catholic Law, which allocated this anti-infallibilist sect, in which Catholic academics who thought the papacy guilty of dangerous innovations were prominent, a share of existing Church resources. Government attempts to promote a professorial sect that made much noise but which had few adherents were largely attributable to its potential to divide the Roman camp. The Old Catholics’ resistance to absolutist papal innovations was somewhat queered in the eyes of the traditional faithful by their enthusiasm for abolishing clerical celibacy and for a married clergy. The foolishness of academics and intellectuals was also amply displayed in Old Catholic confidence that ‘If twelve simpletons [the Apostles] could regenerate the world, what can we not do–we who have science on our side?’39
‘The struggle for civilisation’ stands at a midway stage between the sort of Erastian checks that the absolutist states had sought to impose on the Church and the ideologically motivated assaults it was subjected to by the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. Although historians have emphasised that there were genuine limitations in the nineteenth century on the exercise of state power–not the least being that imperial Germany practised the rule of law and was unwilling to elaborate the administrative structures necessary to state persecution–there can be no doubt that Catholic clergy and their sympathisers were subjected to harassment, hardship and petty-minded vexations.
This began with fines which the courts levied whenever a bishop filled an ecclesiastical vacancy without the state’s approval. These sums quickly mounted so that the archbishops of both Cologne and Gnesen-Posen owed almost thirty thousand thalers, the Prussian currency until it was replaced by the mark in 1875. When the bishops refused to pay these fines, their salaries or property were distrained and the proceeds put to paying off the penalties. Lay Catholic sympathisers either underbid so as to return the confiscated property to the bishops on the cheap–it seems improbable that the possessions of the bishop of Trier were worth only fifty thalers–or bid far too much so as to liquidate the fines entirely, as when a cheap plaster bust of Pius IX went for a fortune or the modest carriage of the bishop of Ermland achieved 770 thalers at auction, that being exactly what he owed in fines.40
Refusal to pay these fines resulted in imprisonment, the fate of five of Prussia’s twelve Catholic bishops before the conflict concluded in 1887. Those who went on the run were the objects of wanted posters customarily used to track down wilder game: ‘Dr theol. Paulus Melchers, formerly Archbishop of Cologne, born in Münster and last known to be living in Cologne, 64 years of age, 1.70 metres tall, with blond hair and eyebrows, open forehead, brown eyes, slightly bent nose, normal mouth, pointed chin, elongated face, pale complexion and slender build’.41
Of course, the terms of imprisonment were relatively mild, given the social standing of those involved, and given that the kaiser was sometimes keen not to see aristocratic prelates treated like common felons. Liberals, democratic in this if in not much else, wanted the bishops confined in cells alongside burglars and footpads, arguing that their favoured treatment ‘did not deserve the name imprisonment’. The bishops were held in fortress confinement, enjoying exclusive suites of rooms, exercise, peace and quiet, flowers from well-wishers and brought-in food. When they were old and frail, like the octogenarian Marwitz of Culm, his inability to negotiate steep prison stairs meant that he was not incarcerated at all, although two bishops are said to have died as a result of the stress they were subjected to. By contrast, mere priests who violated the May Laws forfeited their salaries and hence could not pay fines–their modest boots, clocks, walking sticks and umbrellas not making a dent in these when they came to auction. Neither eliciting deference nor able to pull strings, these unfortunates–perhaps as many as eighteen hundred in Prussia alone–were subjected to the normal Spartan version of the contemporary carceral regime: a board bed, little warmth, bullying warders, and a diet of bread and water served in what looked like a dog’s bowl. Even though they were not imprisoned, monks and nuns, accustomed to a tranquil and useful life, found being turfed on to the streets or out of the country a bewildering and distressing experience. The English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote one of his greatest poems about five Franciscan nuns, exiled by the Falk laws, who were drowned in a storm off the English coast when the appropriately named Deutschland went down in early December 1875:
Loathed for a love men knew in them,
Banned by the land of their birth,
Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;
Surf, snow, river and earth
Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;
Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,
Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers-sweet
Heaven was strew with them.42
Of course, the authorities of imperial Germany were not the Gestapo. Not all Protestants were comfortable with persecution of their fellow Christians, and some feared that what could be done to Catholics might be done to them too, for pastor Niemöller’s oft-cited Nazi-era dictum ‘first they came for’ had local precedent. In 1873, for example, the Allgemeine Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung fulminated against Prussian ‘idolatry of the state’ (Staatsvergötterung). Nor were arch-conservatives sympathetic to the Kulturkampf, fearing that the advance of liberalism would undermine their rights of ecclesiastical patronage and secularise the schools, resulting in the end of life as they knew it. A distinguished minority of liberals from both the National and Progressive camps wondered where their patriotic colleagues had buried civil liberties.
The modest reach of the nineteenth-century state, whose budgets were about 2 per cent of what they are today, meant that the laws were patchily and poorly enforced. German officialdom was scrupulous in its respect for legal norms, observing such quaint restrictions as the ban on authorities entering private homes during the long hours of winter darkness. The Pulpit Law was virtually unenforceable, especially where what had allegedly been said was open to interpretation by auditors more sympathetic to the priest than policemen. The volume of cases brought against priests who were repeat offenders meant that the courts drowned in a sea of paperwork awaiting scribbled authorisations, initialling and the official stamps without which no document could be considered properly Prussian. Wherever they enjoyed popular support, intrepid priests managed to keep several steps ahead of plodding policemen, using disguises or submerging into the urban population. Sometimes, wise and timid bailiffs and policemen put their own safety first before enforcing the laws in predominantly Catholic areas. Ecclesiastical geography multiplied the state’s problems. Diocesan boundaries were not necessarily coterminous with the writ of the Prussian state. Catholics could exploit the separate jurisdictions of the German federal states, or indeed of neighbouring countries, for some archdioceses had their seats in Austria–Hungary. Exiled bishops were adept at using proxies to run their dioceses. Military barracks were not always within marching or riding distance of places whose lone gendarmes were intimidated by a large Catholic presence. If the state attempted to solve the problem represented by non-compliant Roman Catholic officials by dismissing them–a course urged upon Bismarck by leading liberals–they could do little about popular support for the plucky Catholic clergy. Bishops and priests released after serving prison sentences were treated as returning conquering heroes by kneeling crowds that lined their route. Every opportunity was taken to celebrate the anniversaries of Pius IX, the particular target of liberal Protestant animosities.43
Instead of limited arrests and prosecutions leading to a victory of state over Church, the clumsy enforcement of the Kulturkampf legislation resembled pushing a stick into a hornets’ nest. For Catholic Germany (and Catholic Poland) mounted an impressive counter-campaign of civil disobedience and passive resistance that sometimes tipped over into riot and violence. Unlike victims of liberalism in Italy, Germany’s Catholic community participated robustly in the political system to defend themselves. During the Kulturkampf the Centre Party’s vote doubled, and their representation in the Reichstag rose from sixty-three seats in 1871 to ninety-three by 1877. Capable Centre Party leaders, such as Mallinckrodt or Windthorst, used their parliamentary platform to inveigh against the anti-Catholic legislation, despite the efforts of the president of the Reichstag to ignore their presence whenever they rose to speak. Despite being slight and virtually blind, Windthorst routinely got the better of Bismarck in debate, where the latter seemed blustering, bullying and tetchy. Centre Party leaders repeatedly exposed the hypocrisy of their liberal opponents by championing freedoms that the latter preferred to overlook. They were also steadfast in opposing Bismarck’s draconian Anti-Socialist Law, seeing parallels between their own fate and attempts to stigmatise an entire class. Although secular liberal Jews were enthusiastic supporters of the Kulturkampf, the Centre Party leadership resisted attempts by individual Protestant and Catholic antisemitic demagogues to lure them on board platforms allegedly based on supra-confessional, or just ‘Christian’, values that thinly camouflaged antisemitism.44 Of course, not all Catholics were so fastidious, with no less a personage than Ketteler, bishop of Mainz, convinced that the Kulturkampf was the brainchild of a ‘masonic–Jewish conspiracy’, for where passions were so engaged it was not surprising that people groped for conspiratorial explanation.45
Burgeoning extra-parliamentary associations, notably the Mainz Association, which mutated into the general Catholic Assembly after it was proscribed in 1876, organised huge public demonstrations. The authorities and their liberal accomplices were exercised by the social composition of Catholic resistance since it often emanated from aristocrats (of whom the liberal bourgeoisie disapproved), women (whom they regarded as superstitious simpletons) and peasants ‘with blank, stupid faces’ who liked to combine demonstrating with inebriation. Intricate arrangements were developed to compensate for the deprivation of state subsidies. Catholics began to boycott days of public celebration, notably by refusing to display flags on Sedan Day which commemorated victory over France, which the socialists boycotted too. Old Catholic clergy and laity, as well as orthodox ‘state priests’, who took an oath of allegiance to the Prussian authorities, were exposed to ecclesiastical sanction–excommunication and a broken candle tossed into their church–and social ostracism by hostile neighbours. Policemen were sometimes met with showers of stones. In Prussian Poland, the Catholic Church swung its support behind the nationalist movement, with priests moving into key positions in the organisational network that underpinned that movement for the first time. The Kulturkampf managed the considerable feat of temporarily uniting ultramontane and secular liberal Poles behind the common cause. Worse, from Bismarck’s perspective, it provided the noble and clerical leaders of Polish nationalism with something like an army of followers, who responded to rhetoric that told them they were like ‘redskins’ being subjected to ‘a national political war of extermination’. Thanks to Bismarck’s clumsy assault on their religion, intermediary ethnic groups that had hitherto held aloof from Polish nationalist politics, such as the Kashubians in West Prussia or Polish-speakers in Upper Silesia, began to identify with the Polish national cause.
The principal architects of the Kulturkampf received death threats, with Bismarck narrowly evading assassination when a young Catholic butcher’s boy Eduard Kuhlmann shot the chancellor in the hand as he journeyed to the spa of Bad Kissingen. In what was widely recognised as an all-time nadir in the tone of parliamentary debate, the chancellor insinuated that the Centre Party was implicated in this attempt to assassinate him:
When I asked him [the assassin Kuhlmann] ‘If you did not know me, why did you want to kill me?’ the man answered: ‘Because of the Church laws in Germany. And then he added: ‘You have insulted my fraction.’ (Great laughter) I said, ‘Which then is your fraction?’ To that he said to me before witnesses: ‘The Centre Fraction in the Reichstag.’ (Laughter. Pfiu! From the Centre) Yes, gentlemen (turning towards the Centre), you may repudiate the man as much as you like! He still hangs on your coattails.
The Kulturkampf was gradually defused through diplomacy rather than abruptly terminated. That process continued from Falk’s resignation in 1879 until the Peace Bills of the mid-1880s. Bismarck had achieved the rebalancing of relations between Church and state that had been his goal from the start. Having launched an assault against the Social Democrats, it was time to patch matters up with the Catholics, not with the aid of either the Centre Party or the old guard in the German Church, but through the Vatican, which might be deployed against democratic Catholicism. Mortality facilitated these developments; Pius IX’s long, fulminating pontificate ended in 1878. When he heard of the pope’s death, Bismarck exclaimed, ‘We must drink to that,’ and ordered a noble wine. Few deals could be made with a pope who had publicly dubbed the German chancellor ‘a modern Attila’, ‘Satan in a helmet’, ‘the great sorcerer’ and the ‘boa constrictor’ of contemporary diplomacy.46
The new pope was Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci, cardinal archbishop of Perugia, who took the name Leo XIII. He had had some diplomatic experience as a nuncio to Belgium, and was known to regard the Syllabus of Errors with reserve. Without consulting the Centre Party, he authorised talks with German diplomats to explore ways out of the Kulturkampf. Princes of the Church mistrusted democratically elected Catholic politicians, with their propensity to make compromises with the Church’s enemies on issues that were not narrowly religious: far better to revert to the high-level diplomacy of the era of absolutism. This was a game Bismarck was only too willing to play. Bribes from the government’s ‘reptile fund’ rewarded the more politique curial cardinals, while in bishop Georg Kopp of Fulda, who was elevated to the Prussian upper chamber, Bismarck found a tractable Catholic bishop. Kopp was fully prepared to relay to Bismarck confidential discussions among Prussia’s bishops and instructions from Rome. Another useful fault line Bismarck exploited involved retaining, or sharpening, repressive measures against Prussia’s Polish Catholics, so as to divide his Catholic opponents on ethnic lines. In other words, in the 1880s the Catholic camp was divided in ways that had not been true of the 1870s.
Having no personal investment in the German struggle, in February 1880 Leo conceded the need to inform the state about ecclesiastical appointments, and that the state had the right to approve candidates. Windthorst remarked that he had been shot in the back by the papacy. Bismarck in turn alighted upon the strategy of seeking parliamentary approval for successive Discretionary Relief Bills. In essence, these were designed to retain state subordination of the Catholic Church, while leaving it up to the government whether or not to enforce the Kulturkampf laws. This adroit step prevented the pope from deriving any credit for improving the position of German Catholics, while warning the latter of the cost of continued non-cooperation. Most damagingly, it meant that the Centre Party voted against measures that appeared to alleviate the lot of their co-religionists, at a time when papal pressure to accommodate Bismarck took the bizarre form of encouraging the Centre Party to vote for a prolongation of the military budget.
The chancellor also skilfully played to the pope’s desire to be an international peacemaker. In the autumn of 1885, Bismarck invited Leo to arbitrate a dispute between Germany and Spain over the Caroline Islands, negotiations followed by the dispensing of honours all round. Bismarck, so recently denounced by Pius IX as ‘Satan in a helmet’, metamorphosed into a Knight of the Order of Christ. Two Peace Bills, in 1886 and 1887, abolished the requirement that trainee priests be compulsorily saturated in national cultural values, although the effect was spoiled by continued state regulation of seminaries. The Second Peace Bill allowed most religious orders to return to Germany, although the Jesuits were conspicuously omitted. The government made minimal concessions in rewording the laws on the state’s veto of ecclesiastical appointments. When a senior curial official visited Berlin in March 1887 to participate in the emperor’s jubilee, he slipped easily into the company of those responsible for waging the Kulturkampf while virtually ignoring the leaders of the Centre Party who had borne the brunt of that fight.
III RALLYING TO THE REPUBLIC
Relations between Church and state in France were governed by the 1801 Concordat, with a subsequent accretion of custom as to how these relationships were negotiated in practice. The Church was viewed as an ‘accomplice’ of Napoleon III’s repressive Second Empire, an association all the more bitterly resented because of the more liberal stance the Church had briefly adopted in the late 1840s. However, in the general chaos that followed the Empire’s collapse, the clergy were the sole nationwide pressure group to survive. Bismarck cunningly insisted that the election of a new National Assembly would have to precede conclusion of the war, calculating that a republican France would be weaker than a monarchy. This Assembly, elected in early 1871, was predominantly Catholic and royalist.
The political ascendancy of the right, whose sole unifying focus was conservative Catholicism, was extended long beyond its expiry date, by a spasm of revolutionary violence that seemed to signify a return to the Jacobinism of 1793. The Paris Commune was an attempt to realise a nationwide federation of autonomous communes after elections to the National Assembly had revealed that much of rural France was profoundly conservative. When government forces attempted to retrieve cannons from the heights of Montmartre, a Parisian mob killed their commander and a passing general in civilian clothes. The Commune announced the formation of a Committee of Public Safety, closed opposition newspapers and declared the separation of Church and state. Half of the capital’s churches and convents were turned into political meeting places or munition dumps. Approximately 120 hostages were taken to deter the troops of the provisional government at Versailles from shooting prisoners of their own. On 24 May, as government troops advanced into the burning city, archbishop Darboy of Paris and other clerical hostages were taken from the prison of La Roquette and shot against a wall. Over the following two days another fifty clerics were shot and bayoneted. Between 21 and 28 May 1871 the Versaillais forces repressed the Commune, either shooting communards on the spot or after appearances before perfunctory drumhead tribunals. In nineteenth-century Europe’s largest domestic massacre of civilians, twenty thousand former Communards were killed, and thousands more were deported overseas.
The issue of what sort of state France should become was resolved through the intransigence of the principal candidate for the throne, the ‘miracle’ grandson of Charles X who styled himself Henry V, but was better known as the comte de Chambord. The rival liberal Orléanistes compromised on his candidacy, calculating that since he was childless, and a halfwit who had never learned to tie his own shoelaces, it would only be a matter of time before their man, the comte de Paris, came to the throne. Things went awry for the monarchist cause when on 5 July 1871 Chambord threw down the gauntlet in a manifesto from his exile, in which he insisted upon the tricolour being replaced by the white banner of the Bourbons, rejecting such ingenious compromises as having the tricolour on its reverse side. Already indicating a certain distance from the Bourbons, Pius IX acidly remarked: ‘Henry IV said Paris was worth a Mass, Henry V finds France not worth a serviette.’
While Chambord mulishly stuck to this course, government passed from Thiers to marshal de MacMahon–his erstwhile co-conqueror of the Commune, who then continued in power until early 1879. Down to 1876, the apprehensions of voters regarding another Commune, and the rhetorical intemperance of left republicans, meant that the right dominated the Chamber, and hence that the Catholic Church rejoiced in a continuation of official favour. The papal nuncio exerted considerable influence in the choice of bishops. Clerics were exempted from military conscription in July 1872 and the Ministry of War licensed military chaplains. Three years later, the Catholic Church was authorised to establish its own universities with degree-awarding powers. There was a modest rise in the annual state ‘budget des cultes’ through which the salaries of bishops and some other clergy were defrayed. Anticlericals were incensed by MacMahon’s attempts to put France back on the path of ‘moral order’, deviation from which, according to clericals, had resulted in defeat at the hands of the Prussians and the bloodbath of the Commune. This latest crime was added to the original sin of the Revolution, in a dark catalogue of waywardness that required ever greater acts of national expiation.
In this context, who or what occupied the public sphere intensely mattered. While commemoration of 14 July and such republican symbols as Marianne were banned, the forces of ultramontane conservative Catholicism seemed to be conniving in the diffusion of new Catholic cults, whose mass appeal had been greatly facilitated by the advent of cheap rail transport. The lines between politics and religion were being blurred, although clericalists hardly disguised their belief that the authority of the Church should count in temporal as well as spiritual affairs, determining standards of public and private life.47 Fifty deputies took part in an expiatory festival at Paray-le-Monial, where in the late seventeenth century Christ had reappeared, to a Visatandine nun, revealing His bleeding heart crowned with thorns.
Acting in belated response to the nun’s vow, senior clerics campaigned to build a Church of the Sacred Heart on the heights of Montmartre, the site of the martyrdom of Saint-Denis, where a chapel had stood until erased by earlier revolutionaries in 1793. This imposing Romano-Byzantine pastiche in brilliant white (still the fifth largest tourist attraction in Paris) was regarded as an attempt to expiate the revolutionary tradition recently so grimly active on the city plain below. Attempts to insert an homage to the Sacred Heart itself into the text of the law granting permission to acquire the hilltop site caused an uproar in anticlerical republican circles.48
MacMahon’s presidency limped along until 1879, although republicans had secured a majority in the Chamber in elections three years earlier. One of the republicans’ first initiatives was to remove degree-awarding powers from Catholic universities; next they tried to undermine the minister of war for his refusal to allow honour guards to participate in secular funerals of distinguished public figures. From 1871 the Catholic bishops had clumsily sought French intervention on behalf of the pope regarding the loss of the papal patrimony, the only result of which was to drive Italy deeper into the arms of Bismarck’s Germany. As the Italian statesman Luzzatti crisply remarked: ‘Clericalism generates solitude.’49 In 1876 French Catholics returned to the fray by seeking government condemnation of Italian anticlerical legislation, urging it to ‘use all methods to compel respect for the independence of the Holy See’. Since that presumably included war, the left republican Léon Gambetta exploded: ‘Clericalism, there is the enemy.’ Other republicans spoke of ‘maniacs drunk with holy water’. Clerics were blamed for the downfall of the moderate Simon ministry, whose successor was traduced as ‘the government of the priests’ or the ‘ministry of the curés’. Between 1877 and 1879 republicans gained majorities in the Chamber and Senate. Completely isolated, MacMahon resigned when the republicans extended their purges of officials to senior army commanders whom as a matter of honour this rather dense soldier was loth to see go. The republicans were to be in power for the next twenty years, largely because of their very human unwillingness to allow examination of their deepest assumptions regarding the past, present and future.
Republicans formed a broad and fractious movement that could be rallied around a few core beliefs derived from the republican phase of the Revolution, or at least a heavily mythologised version of it. These beliefs were regarded as synonymous with being ‘French’, a convenient way of insinuating that anyone who held other views was disloyal. Republicans believed in popular sovereignty, provided this was informed by the exercise of critical reason, which largely explains their obsession with education as the universal panacea for society’s ills. They thought that society and its institutions could be perfected in accordance with the principles of progress, science and rationality. They believed that the values of the Revolution were universally valid, and hence sought to impose them at home and export them abroad, increasingly through the medium of overseas imperialism since export opportunities were limited in a Europe where France had been eclipsed as a major power. Neither of these last two assumptions consorted altogether easily with their belief in individual liberty or other people’s sovereignty, for where did it leave their domestic opponents or those foreigners upon whom these values were imposed? They were intensely and militantly patriotic, since something had to fill the affective void left by the Revolution’s destruction of France’s historic institutions. Finally, they managed to convert the catastrophe of the Revolution into a stirring and soft-focused myth, largely by downplaying, editing out or explaining away its most sanguinary ‘episodes’, like the Terror, as deviations from the noble idea, a process in which the great historians of the Republic, some of whom achieved high office, were thoroughly collusive, and which has obvious echoes of subsequent events in Russia, although there historians tended to be shot.50
The different groupings within this movement were a reflection of the relative importance they ascribed to the talismanic words liberty, equality and fraternity. Some regarded liberty as being synonymous with the rule of law and ‘order’; others thought liberty meant guaranteeing equality of outcomes, although that rarely meant reducing social and economic inequalities. Further rifts opened up regarding the exercise of political power in a country where many people were hostile or sceptical towards the revolutionary tradition. Pragmatists, or, as their opponents had it, ‘opportunists’, thought that it was necessary to reassure people by acting with moderation, others were self-righteous purists who wished to forge ahead with anticlerical and secularising measures. These guardians of republican virtues were the barking dogs into whose jaws ‘opportunists’ were more than prepared to throw clerical bones, for they too were clear where the ultimate enemy of the Republic lay.51
Republicans focused on education as the battleground for their showdown with the Church. Successive nineteenth-century French regimes had been happy to leave primary education in clerical hands, because regular clergy were cheap and their main task was to discipline and moralise the poor who had grown accustomed to freedom in the turbulence of the revolutionary years. That priority gradually changed as economic diversification put a new emphasis upon more advanced skills. Control of secondary education was more contentious, because of its role in producing France’s elites. The dominance of the Napoleonic University meant that state secondary schools were characterised by Voltairean scepticism. Down to the 1850s, the Church managed to disguise a handful of secondary schools as minor seminaries, until the Falloux Law enabled them to open Catholic secondary schools for boys. Some of these were socially exclusive, with plenty of particules among the names of their pupils; all offered an education that combined academic excellence, especially in the classics, with manly games, all rather reminiscent of the regime in English public schools.
The very existence of Catholic educational establishments undermined national unity, which required a universal subscription to the values and verities of patriotism, progress and science. These values were gradually elaborated into a republican civil religion. The 14 July was adopted as a national holiday in 1880, with the storming of the Bastille being reinterpreted as deliverance from the stranglehold of superstition. The Marseillaise not only ceased to be prohibited, but became one of the world’s most evocative national anthems. As in Germany where Catholics tended to remain aloof from the noisy patriotism of Sedan Day, so French Catholics ostentatiously boycotted the 14 July celebrations.52 Although they lacked the legislative support that existed in Bismarck’s Germany, anticlerical local authorities harassed clergy as public nuisances or vagrants when they rang church bells or took collections, while encouraging secular festivities and processions, and above all ostentatiously secular public funerals. Notorious anticlericals, such as Hérold the prefect who had stripped schools of crucifixes, received civic obsequies, as did Léon Gambetta, when in 1882 he went with ‘not a priest, not a whisper of a prayer’ to his grave. At a cost to the Republic of twenty thousand francs, in 1885 Victor Hugo received extravagant interment in the Panthéon, which until recently had been the Church of Sainte-Geneviéve, patron saint of Paris. Hugo’s elaborate coffin spent the night on an immense catafalque under the Arc de Triomphe that was both illuminated and swathed in black. Catholic newspapers described the ‘Babylonian’ scenes that took place in the surrounding darkness as whores, with crêpe-draped pudenda signifying mourning, came out for the night shift. The following day, the funeral began with a twenty-one-gun salute. Two million people turned out to watch the passage of Hugo’s pauper’s hearse through the wide boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris, a nice touch by a man who left little of his fortune to the poor.53
Public spaces began to fill up with the republican equivalent of religious kitsch, as crucifixes and other Catholic symbols were removed. In July 1880 the Republic rescinded the law compelling observance of Sunday as a day of rest that had been introduced by the Bourbons in 1814, and military chaplainries were abolished. By contrast, places where irreligion allegedly flourished, such as bars, cafés and cabarets, no longer required official licences. In 1881 cemeteries were no longer obliged to set aside separate areas for Catholics, Protestants, suicides and Jews. Nuns were expelled from state hospitals in the capital, while seminarians had to do one year’s military service. In 1884 the Republic reinstituted civil divorce, which had been repealed during the Restoration, and did away with the public prayers prescribed for the opening of each parliamentary session. In 1889 the Eiffel Tower, the highpoint of the Universal Exhibition, appeared on the Paris skyline as the iron symbol of the progressive challenge to the ultramontanes’ Sacré Coeur. The road to the church was named in honour of fanaticism’s quondam victim the chevalier de la Barre.54
It is easy to see why the republican governments of the Third Republic in the late 1870s and early 1880s should have focused legislative laicisation on the nation’s schools. Some felt that the issue was a diversionary trick. Both Catholic polemicists and Marxist socialists claimed that this confrontation between Church and state over education was an attempt to deflect attention from the republicans’ unwillingness to engage in more fundamental social and economic reforms. Léon Gambetta once remarked that ‘to govern France you need violent words and moderate actions’: the trick was to pander to the myth of Revolution, while allaying fear of it among the propertied classes. Since he also averred that ‘there is no social question’, it is possible that anticlericalism was exploited to rally the radical left, while leaving their reforming socio-economic agenda aside. In such a climate everything and anything could be laid at the door of the Catholic Church, with military defeat being blamed upon Jesuit instructors who had reared a generation of feeble incompetents easily massacred by the efficiently patriotic products of steely Prussian schoolmasters, a charge that the Vichy authorities would repay with interest against the Republic’s own left-wing teachers in 1940.
The Republic’s laicising laws, already prefigured in a programmatic speech at Romans by Gambetta in 1878, reflected the combined influences of freethinkers, freemasons, Positivists and Protestants in the governing class that alternated in cabinets that came and went with bewildering speed. They were not introduced to guarantee equality between denominations, nor indeed aggressively to return, as in Bismarck’s Germany, to some hypothetical status quo ante, although they shared Bismarck’s obsessive concern with national unity. Rather laicisation meant the state actively seeking to diminish the role of religion, while it promoted a rival worldview.55
The prime mover of the Republic’s educational reforms was Jules Ferry, who was minister of public instruction in three ministries before heading a government of his own. Ferry and his principal lieutenants, the Protestant pastors Henri Buisson and Félix Pécaut and the teacher Jules Steeg, saw education as a means of creating national unity through a ‘religion of the fatherland’ so as to reverse the national humiliation of Sedan.56 Ferry was a freemason and Positivist from the lost province of Lorraine: the men in his family were Voltairean freethinkers, his sister a pious cripple who prayed for his salvation, and his wife’s family wealthy Protestants. Something of this schizophrenic background was reflected in his high-minded espousal of the Comtean religion of Progress and Humanity:
When humanity appears to us, no longer as a fallen race, stricken with Original Sin…but as an endless procession striding on towards the light; then, we feel ourselves part of the great Being which cannot perish, Humanity, continually redeemed. Developing, improving; then we have won our liberty, for we are free from the fear of death.
Ferry’s lieutenants had a high regard for Protestantism, not simply for its own sake, but as a halfway house to ‘a religious, scientific and liberal spirit’, or to a secular religion divorced from traditional Christianity. Having dispensed with all dogma and religious hierarchy, they were liable to slip into a hazy humanist faith while discovering God at work in social and political movements in which they were involved.57 Ferry appointed Buisson director of elementary education, Steeg inspector general of schools and Pécaut director of the teachers’ training college for women at Sévres.58
Education was seen as the great cure-all, a fallacy single-mindedly pursued by politicians reluctant to address less populist causes. It would forge the unity of will necessary to recover the territories annexed by the German Reich. It would give women equality with men and enable the poor to progress. Schools run by religious orders were divisive, and raised the spectre of two ‘youths’–the ‘deux jeunesses’ as the historian Lavisse called them in 1880–one of which was a hatchery for a Catholic counter-elite, ready and waiting to supplant the Republic from its bastions in the army and professions. Since religious orders were heavily involved in teaching, as a way of living down the Enlightenment lie that they were contemplative layabouts, republican animosities focused on them. There was more.
Religious orders were international, a fact that could be used to question their ultimate loyalties by a regime that was bent on creating a homogeneous nation state. As Gambetta had it, they were ‘a multicoloured militia without a fatherland’. Moreover, their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience implicitly questioned a society whose dominant concerns were with making money, leaving it to one’s offspring and all the while employing the faculty of critical reasoning.59 Religious orders wanted to control and suppress individual personality, whereas republicans were wedded to the idea of freeing its potentialities. The former ‘tend to annihilate the individual, to destroy his will and initiative, to bend him under an absolute authority in the face of which the human personality itself is effaced’, claimed one of the architects of the laicising laws, who had himself been educated by religious.60
Finally, although republicans were keen on the rights of individuals, they were hostile to those of intermediary corporations, especially if they were venerable, which seemed to obstruct expansion of the state’s power. One of the reasons for allowing religious orders to run schools was that they were cheap at the price. While the state was prepared to leave religious orders running many of France’s hospitals, the importance republicans attached to education meant that they were prepared to fund an education budget that rose from forty-six million francs in the late 1870s to three hundred million on the eve of the First World War.
Ferry’s 1879 education law prevented members of unauthorised religious orders from teaching in either state or private schools despite their having been tolerated in this capacity for several decades. Not only did this measure extrude clergy from teaching in state schools, but it also threatened to close schools run exclusively by the Church. Although this measure had passed through the cabinet–half of whose members were Protestants–it encountered difficulties in the Senate. The Chamber retaliated by calling upon the government to dissolve the hated Jesuits, who were told to quit their houses within three months, while the other named orders were given six months to seek government authorisation. To Ferry Jesuithouses were ‘schools of counter-revolution’; to his colleague Paul Bert all religious orders were akin to the phylloxera that was ravaging the nation’s vines. Attempts by president Freycinet, pope Leo XIII and cardinal Lavigerie to find a compromise formula, under which the orders could stay, in return for a declaration of non-hostility towards the Republic, failed once the legitimist press had made these negotiations public.61
Since two thousand barristers protested that the authorities were acting illegally by avoiding the courts, a view shared by over four hundred magistrates who resigned rather than enforce these expulsions, the Jesuits and members of other proscribed orders decided to stay put. This shifted the onus on to the authorities, who were reduced to dawn raids and picking locks in order to get at the defiant religious and their lay supporters. Near Tarascon, it required an infantry regiment assisted by artillery and dragoons to break into the monastery of Frigolet, boldly defended by thirty-seven Premonstratensian fathers. Government agents, equipped with the paraphernalia of burglars, simultaneously raided eleven religious houses in the capital. Across France, some ten thousand monks were summarily evicted from 261 houses.
The dissolution of unauthorised congregations was followed by the removal of the title of university from the Catholic faculties that had won this right in 1875 and the closure of theology faculties at the state universities. Bishops were removed from the Higher Council of Education, which they had been able to join under the 1850 Falloux Law. Ferry and his associates subscribed to the view that the Church exercised a malign and mysterious influence over the ‘weaker’ sex: ‘He who holds the female holds everything. She can make life intolerable for the husband, if he flouts a religion in which she believes. That is why the Catholic Church is so zealous in keeping her for itself. And it is precisely for this reason that democracy must wean women from Religion.’62 A new law in December 1880 established the first state lycées for girls, together with a college to train their female teachers. This was followed a year later by the introduction of free compulsory state education for all those aged between six and thirteen. Catholics argued that they would effectively be paying twice for these state schools and their separate confessional arrangements, and that liberals who otherwise espoused the notion of free competition were conspicuously illiberal when it came to competition in this field. They were also vociferous in opposing Ferry’s plan for ‘moral and civic instruction’ to usurp the place of ‘moral and religious instruction’. As this weaved its way back and forth between the Chamber and Senate, Catholics pointed to the inconsistency of a liberal minority seeking to exclude the views of the majority, for they would not permit socialists to use schools to propagate the necessity of abolishing private property. When fresh elections increased republican representation in the Senate, even the compromise formula of teaching ‘duties to God and towards the fatherland’ was expunged from a law that permitted teaching of ‘duties towards God’ provided children were taught that God had multiple deistic identities. Apart from being hotly debated, each of these innovations churned up fresh controversy. Moral and civic instruction required new textbooks that would replace the catechism. One attempted to inculcate respect for the institution of marriage, with the aid of an illustration of a marriage bed with a portrait of the president of the Republic where the crucifix had traditionally been. Four of these manuals were immediately put on the Index, with the sacraments withheld from teachers, parents and pupils if they failed to destroy them. Bishops and priests who refused to obey a government ban on reading the Index found payment of their state stipends suspended. Finally in 1886 a law introduced the total laicisation of elementary teaching, on the ground that religious could not be expected to suspend their convictions in order to teach whatever the state required. Reasonable though that superficially sounds–not that liberal secular teachers have often been without convictions of their own–it signified the end of a venerable tradition based on the unity of religion, knowledge and moral instruction, with the attendant danger that ‘God’, ‘nation’, ‘society’, ‘morality’ and so forth would be taught as mutually exclusive entities with no sense in which they might be used to blunt one another’s harder edges.63
As with the Prusso-German Kulturkampf, there were several reasons why the anticlerical campaign abated in France. Firstly, the advent of Leo XIII signified a pope prepared to abandon untenable positions, whether that of the legitimist comte de Chambord or the Jesuit presence in France. His nuncio to France from 1879 to 1882, Wladimir Czacki, immediately signalled to prominent republicans that the Church was not bound to any political party, nor automatically opposed to any authority that did not interfere with its freedoms. By contrast, he baldly informed the legitimists that their cause was lost. The Jesuits were thrown to the wolves when the unauthorised orders came under government attack. After the death of Chambord in 1883, Leo XIII promulgated the encyclical Nobilissima Gallorum Gens (1884), which while condemning attacks on the Church simultaneously enjoined the French bishops to avoid expressions of hostility towards the established government. He actively discouraged the army officer and social reformer Albert de Mun from forming a conservative Catholic party, on the Belgian, Dutch or German model, while discreetly encouraging the efforts of Jacques Piou to create a conservative bloc that would broadly accept the Republic. In elections in late 1885 conservative candidates did well. In May 1887 they took part in a government, in return for a promise to halt the programme of laicisation. Détente between the Church and the Republic was interrupted by the hiatus of the Boulanger affair. Mounting frustration with the Republic on both the right and the radical and socialist left led both separately to collaborate with the clownish figure of former war minister general Boulanger, who opportunistically exchanged his earlier anticlericalism for a promise not to persecute the Church in order to win support. He promised to repudiate the entire Jacobin heritage. Boulanger presented himself as a candidate in several constituencies on the platform ‘Dissolution of the Chambers and Revision of the Constitution’ and won large majorities. A Catholic newspaper observed: ‘Boulangism is ceasing to be a farce and is becoming a force.’ Deft alterations to electoral procedures and the general’s reluctance to launch a coup put paid to his career, and the government was quick to remind Boulanger’s clerical supporters of who was in charge, but the episode also impressed upon even Jules Ferry the political pitfalls of gratuitously alienating a sizeable part of the population through laicising policies at a time when anarchists and socialists were becoming a tangible threat.
The ‘Ralliement’ was a term first used by a cleric in 1886 to describe his readiness to rally to the Republic following Chambord’s death. It became common currency in French journalism, before being adopted by a pope who was an avid reader of the French press. Although many senior clerics remained implacably opposed to the Republic, a significant minority adopted a more realistic approach to the republican regime. Some of them were opportunists, others pragmatic reactionaries. The major figure among them, cardinal Lavigerie, archbishop of Algiers, embodied the broader truth that, regardless of his personal political hinter-land, overseas the Church and the Republic had common interests, for wherever foreigners went in the French Empire habits and surplices were as ubiquitous as képis and military uniforms. Of six thousand Catholic overseas missionaries in 1875, some 4,500 were French. French diplomats had pride of place in Constantinople or Jerusalem, because France was the power that protected Christians and the Holy Places. France had rights to appoint Catholic bishops in Alexandria and Baghdad, and its missionaries were active mapping and prospecting as well as preaching in faraway China.64 Since the 1882 Triple Alliance of Austria, Germany and Italy had checked French prospects in Europe, at a time when neither England nor Russia were well disposed, imperial expansion became the sole means of French self-assertion, and for that it needed the co-operation of the Catholic Church. That was what informed Gambetta’s famous dictum that ‘anticlericalism was not for export’.65
Since French bishops were forbidden to assemble formally, the involvement of the pope proved crucial as a constant stimulus to the process of rallying Catholics to the Republic. In two encyclicals in 1885 and 1888, Leo XIII subtly distanced himself from the intransigent positions of his predecessor towards modern liberty and science. He gradually revealed his sophisticated understanding of relations between Church and state and his realisation that democracy was a force that had to be reckoned with. Although the Church was inherently superior by virtue of its transcendental goals, it had no right to interfere in temporal affairs, least of all at the prompting of self-important ecclesiastical journalists or lay activists who had no authority to speak for the Church. The Church should be neutral regarding forms of government, including those where the people decide. Leo and Lavigerie met three times in the Vatican in October 1890 to determine the strategy to be adopted towards the Republic. Towards the end of the month Lavigerie wrote to president Freycinet urging him to avoid any provocative actions that might undermine the imminent ‘explicit adhesion of the French episcopate to the Republican form’. On 12 November 1890, Lavigerie hosted a banquet for officers of the Mediterranean fleet who were received to the blood-drenched choruses of the Marseillaise sung by children from a school run by the White Fathers. In the course of his toast, Lavigerie read a speech in which he said that when a people had expressed a preference for a form of government which in no way contradicted the life of civilised and Christian nations, then that government deserved to be obeyed. He added that ‘In speaking thus, I am convinced I shall not be repudiated by the voice of anyone in authority.’ The assembled company were so stunned that they failed to applaud. The archbishop invited the admiral to respond, which he did with a simple: ‘I drink to his Eminence the Cardinal and to the clergy of Algiers.’
This ‘toast of Algiers’ infuriated French monarchists, some of whom were committed Gallicans, who argued that ‘Ultramontanism exerting itself in favour of a Republic is no less dangerous than ultramontanism directed against it.’ Very few French bishops endorsed this radical departure, leading Lavigerie to dismiss them as ‘mitred rabbits’. The archbishop of Paris managed an ambiguous letter offering neutrality towards the Republic that was supported by sixty of his colleagues. That old hatreds died hard was evident when in September 1891 twenty thousand French working-class pilgrims descended upon Rome to celebrate the promulgation of Leo XIII’s social encyclical Rerum novarum, an event that coincided with the anniversary of the Italian seizure of the capital. Three French youths who scribbled ‘Long Live the Pope’ in the visitors’ book near the tomb of Victor Emmanuel II in the Pantheon were beaten up by outraged Italians and imprisoned. Ugly incidents took place at the French embassy, and the worker–pilgrims had to leave Rome by the night train. When France’s minister for education and religious affairs warned the French bishops to dissociate themselves from these pilgrimages, one of their more intemperate number responded: ‘We know how to behave. You speak of peace but your actions testify to a spirit of hate and persecution because freemasonry, that elder daughter of Satan, is in command.’ This resulted in the bishop being tried for insulting a public official, and a fine of three thousand francs, which was immediately defrayed by a subscription organised by the right-wing press. With radicals calling for the separation of Church and state, and the majority of the French bishops adhering to their suspicions of the Republic, the pope took the unusual step of granting an interview to a cheap popular newspaper in which he said: ‘I hold that all citizens should join in respect for the legally constituted authority. Each individual has the right to his personal preferences, but when it comes to acting, he can deal only with the government France has given herself. The republican is as legitimate a form of government as others.’ He had admiring words for arrangements in the United States:
I am of the opinion that all French citizens should unite in supporting the government France has given herself. A republic is as legitimate a form of government as any other. Look at the United States of America! There you have a Republic which grows stronger every day–and that in spite of unbridled liberty. And the Catholic Church there? It develops and flourishes. It has no quarrel with the State. What is good for the United States can be good for France too.66
This was immediately followed with an important French-language encyclical, Au milieu des sollicitudes (16 February 1892), in which Leo noted:
The wisdom of the Church explains itself in the maintenance of her relations with the numerous governments which have succeeded one another in France in less than a century, each change causing violent shocks. Such a line of conduct would be the surest and most salutary for all Frenchmen in their civil relations with the republic, which is the actual government of their nation. Far be it for them to encourage the political dissensions which divide them; all their efforts should be combined to preserve and elevate the moral greatness of their native land.
He urged upon them the crucial distinction between governments ‘excellent in form’ and legislation that could be ‘detestable’. He enjoined Catholics to accept legally constituted power, while contesting all too human legislation. In passing he spoke glancingly of ‘idolatry of the State’, a concept that would figure mightily in the era of totalitarianism. In subsequent responses to anxious French churchmen (some of whom had suppressed the pope’s encyclical) Leo indicated that the Church’s cause was being actively harmed by its identification with the defunct monarchist right and by the involvement of priests in politics. According to the pope, French Catholics should extricate themselves from the defunct monarchist cause, and avoid forming a separate political party for that would only excite their anticlerical opponents. Rather, they should seek common ground with moderate republicans in a broad-based party that would marginalise the rabidly anticlerical left.
In the long term, Leo XIII’s explicit acceptance of various political forms was a highly significant contribution to the Church’s reconciliation with democracy, although he remained studiedly agnostic regarding other available forms of government too. But in the literally short-term politics of France in the 1890s, where ministries came and went at high velocity, the pope failed to achieve his probable goals. The uncertain status of his political pronouncements, involving his indirect moral authority, contributed to their grudging reception on the French Catholic right. There were zealots who welcomed persecution by the state, not only as a test of their faith, but because it further discredited the regime they hoped would fall. Those of a more conspiratorial cast of mind convinced themselves that the pope must have been ill advised by figures in his entourage who had responded to the siren calls of moderate republicans. Some interpreted his words to mean that they should not seek to overthrow the Republic, which was a very minimal reading of his meaning. Others found it dishonourable and incomprehensible that they should be expected to abandon a hard-fought position, as if they were amoral politicians or journalists who could change their views at the drop of a hat. Some ruefully admitted that the shepherds were often financially dependent on the fatter sheep. A Catholic journalist summed up the dilemma of those bishops who were faced with obedience to the pope or ostracism and ruin:
Do you think my diocese is made up of so many parishes? If so, you are mistaken. It is made up of 150 manors that provide the money for my various Church enterprises. The rest of the diocese is nothing more than a financial burden. When I visit twenty-five of these manors, I find a portrait of Prince Victor, which I salute. In twenty-five others, I find photographs of the Prince Imperial and the Comte de Paris, set in a single frame. I bow to them twice over. In a hundred others, the family of Orléans holds undisputed allegiance and I bow three times. In all these houses, I find a help for my schools and for the poor that I find nowhere else.
Instead of reconciling Catholics to the Republic, the Ralliement deeply divided Catholic opinion, creating antagonistic factions and a proliferation of rival newspapers, without sinking deep roots among either Catholics or republicans outside the charmed circle at the top.67 Attempts to translate the spirit of Ralliement into an enduring political presence failed, not least because the three most significant Catholic politicians failed to campaign on a common platform. Lack of a coherent message in these circles meant that the opportunist republicans triumphed at the polls in 1893, although there were signs that their anticlerical enthusiasm was abating. In March 1894 the minister of education and religious affairs, Spuller, condemned the socialist mayor of Saint-Denis who had banned Christian symbols from a funeral procession, remarking that ‘it is time to fight all fanaticisms and all sectaries’. When a Radical anticlerical asked the minister to explain himself, he responded with a courageous declaration that times had changed:
When the Republic had to struggle against a coalition of the old parties, when the Church constituted a link between those parties, I myself supported the policy the circumstances demanded…Where religion is concerned the country is no longer in the position it was ten or fifteen years ago…I maintain that the Church itself has changed and is evolving in spite of its pretension to infallibility. I believe that now, instead of acting as a link between the various monarchist parties, we can see the Church hurriedly striving to lead democracy…That is why…I think democracy should be animated by a new spirit…In place of a mean, pettifogging, irritating struggle (protests from the extreme left and applause from the centre), what is needed is a generous spirit of tolerance and an intellectual and moral reform (signs of approval from the centre and noises on the left).68
In Catholic eyes, this ‘new spirit’ was soon undermined when the Ribot cabinet imposed a 0.3 per cent tax upon the net proceeds of religious congregations that immediately antagonised Catholics. The cabinet of Méline between April 1896 and June 1898 saw the complete cessation of anticlerical measures, so much so that when in 1898 it came under threat from Radicals and Socialists at the elections, Leo XIII tried to galvanise Catholic support for the existing cabinet. He enjoined Catholics to vote tactically for moderate republicans wherever their own candidates stood slight chance of success. This strategy proved a spectacular failure, partly because more intransigent Catholic opinion failed to support it. In the end, the idea of integrating Catholics into a conservative bloc that would undo the Republic’s anticlerical legislation–like, as an indiscreet cleric put it, boarding a train to hijack the locomotive–proved chimerical. A relatively quiet decade in relations between Church and state gave way to the venomous hatreds of the Dreyfus Affair.
The details of the Dreyfus Affair do not require much retelling; and if the tale had a villain, it was surely the French army rather than the Catholic Church. The original insinuations, regarding an Alsatian Jewish officer called captain Alfred Dreyfus, appeared in the antisemitic daily Libre Parole, founded in 1892 by Edouard Drumont. Earlier, this paper had damaged the Republic with revelations about the squalid connections between leading political figures and Jewish financiers in the Panama Affair. In December 1894 Dreyfus was falsely convicted of betraying military secrets to the Germans, degraded and banished for life to the penal colony on Devil’s Island. His family discovered that a secret file, rather than the evidence produced in court, had been used to convict him, a conclusion that independently dawned on colonel Picquart, the antisemitic and Catholic head of Military Intelligence. He noticed that, despite Dreyfus’ conviction, the flow of intelligence to the Germans was continuing, and deduced that a commandant Esterhazy was the guilty man. The army authorities refused to authorise a retrial and Picquart was transferred elsewhere. His replacement, colonel Henry, began doctoring the original evidence so as to prove Dreyfus’ guilt. Mounting pressure resulted in a travesty of a trial of Esterhazy, in which he was acquitted in three minutes.
The novelist Emile Zola published a famous open letter in which he denounced the army’s crime against Dreyfus, and warned that a conspiracy was abroad to destroy the Republic. Rival groups of intellectuals arrayed themselves in the pro-Dreyfusard League of the Rights of Man (1898) and the anti-Dreyfusard League for the French Fatherland (1899). Membership of the former climbed from 269 in 1898 to 82,619 in 1907. One by-product of the affair was that the socialist left split between a reformist camp, led by Jaurés, which joined the progressive bourgeoisie in recognising the importance of defending individual human rights, and Marxists, identified with Guesde, who thought that the fate of an individual who was not even a worker was a distracting sideshow from the larger class struggle. This in turn conditioned the preparedness of these respective factions to collaborate with anticlerical republicans.69 The army persisted in its cover-up, citing reasons of national security for denying Dreyfus’ supporters access to the evidence. When in 1898 it became public that some of the prosecution evidence had been forged, the culprit Henry committed suicide and the war minister resigned. As a suicide, Henry was denied Christian interment, although many Catholics subscribed to a monument to his memory.70 After a change of president and prime minister, the unfortunate Dreyfus was brought back to France for a retrial whose verdict reaffirmed his guilt, but on a reduced majority of judges, one of the dissenters being a Catholic, and with extenuating circumstances. Eventually, Dreyfus was given a presidential pardon, although it was not until 1906 that the second guilty verdict was quashed.
This bald recitation of the basic facts requires finer elaboration. First, several larger issues were superimposed on the unfortunate Dreyfus, and indeed upon the collateral casualties of the affair. The attack and defence of Dreyfus was part of a wider war of revenge, waged between right-wingers who sought to damage the Republic and its supporters who wished to discredit its opponents, real and imagined. The affair was also politically opportune, in that it rallied the broad republican movements to its core values, temporarily liberating the Opportunists from a tactical alliance with the Catholic ralliés, and from dependence upon the Socialist left with their more fundamentalist interpretation of equality. Since the affair revolved around great issues of principle, it reinvigorated a republican regime that was corrupt and tired, allowing its less than upright spokesmen to strike moral postures vis-à-vis a monolithic and sinister opponent. For a militarist plot to cover up the unfair conviction of Dreyfus quickly mutated into a clerical–militarist plot against the Republic, the tenuous link in this republican conspiracy theory being that many army officers had allegedly come under the malign influence of pére Stanislas du Lac, chair of the governors of a Catholic school in the Rue des Postes. Now since nearly half the annual cadet intake to the military academy at St Cyr hailed from this school and others like it, minds began to connect the Jesuit du Lac with organised Catholic–nationalist disaffection in the army. After an interview with du Lac, a Dreyfusard dramatically announced: ‘In this cell, there is a crucifix on the wall and, permanently open on the writing table, an annotated copy of the Army list.’ The fact that Catholics were being systematically disbarred from other areas of government service, other than the army and Foreign Ministry, went unmentioned.71
There was no consolidated Catholic position on the Dreyfus Affair. Leo XIII clearly had reservations about Dreyfus’ conviction, telling a correspondent of Le Figaro in March 1899: ‘Happy the victim whom God recognises as just enough to join with His own Son in sacrifice.’ He was well placed to know the truth of Dreyfus’ innocence since the Germans, for whom Dreyfus was allegedly spying, had told him. Colonel Picquart, who took a number of risks on Dreyfus’ behalf, was both an antisemite and Catholic, without whose investigations Dreyfus’ lawyers would never have been able to undermine the prosecution case. Catholic abbés were among those who wrote pamphlets defending Dreyfus, and a prominent Catholic historian founded a Committee for the Defence of Right.
The French Catholic hierarchy, often not slow to vent strong opinions, adopted the line that the affair solely concerned the nation’s courts, an uncharacteristic fastidiousness that could be interpreted as tacit support for the duplicity of the army authorities. A minority of clergy made no pretence of neutrality. Given that a third of antisemitic books published in France from 1870 to 1894 were written by Catholic priests, it was a small mercy that only three hundred (of France’s fifty-five thousand) priests subscribed to a monument to the discredited forger and suicide Henry, as did impoverished female garment workers who considered the Jews harsh employers. The hundred-strong Assumptionist order had already blotted their copybook in republican eyes by meddling in the elections of 1898. Their daily and weekly newspapers–notably La Croix–had a readership of perhaps half a million. This was unfortunate since the Assumptionists openly described La Croix as ‘the most anti-Jewish newspaper in France, the one that bears the [symbol] of Christ, a sign of horror to the Jews’, and which simply reprinted cartoons and verse from La Libre Parole.72 Again, it is important to note that when Leo XIII received its editor [whose by-line was ‘The Monk’], he reproved him: ‘Dreyfus, Dreyfus, all the time…and you might occasionally say some nice things about [president] Loubet.’ Whatever the Assumptionists had to say, it was not said with the pope’s approval. Claims that the Jesuits were at the dark core of the ‘clerico-militarist’ plot, rested on one inflammatory article in the Italian Jesuit organ Civiltà Cattolica claiming that the real judicial error was the 1791 emancipation of the Jews, and the self-aggrandising claims of father du Lac, for the reality of Jesuit influence in the army was that nine or ten of the 140 General Staff officers were former pupils of the Society, while only its chief, Raoul de Boisdeffre, had du Lac as his spiritual adviser. This was thin stuff for a clerical–militarist conspiracy.
Religious orders received further unwanted publicity in 1897 in the aftermath of the great Charity Bazaar fire. Each summer Catholic charities held a collective bazaar that became one of the highlights in the aristocratic social calendar. In May 1897 the bazaar was held on the Rue Jean-Goujon, which with the aid of cardboard had been converted into a mock-medieval street beneath a capacious awning. Apart from paying to give a pretty baroness a kiss, visitors also queued to watch films shown by a movie projector. A fire broke out, with the burning cardboard and the fiery awning collapsing and trapping people in the already narrowed street. One hundred and ten of the 116 dead turned out to be women, whose elaborate dresses had blazed instantaneously. The left made much of the fact that survivors had been dragged out by heroic former Communards, while aristocratic men with canes had jabbed and slashed their way to safety past burning women. Faure, the freemason president of the Republic, and other dignitaries attended the funeral in Notre Dame.
A Dominican preacher, Ollivier, took the opportunity to blame the fire not only upon hubristic Promethean ‘science’–he claimed that the fire began with the over-heated projector–but on a France whose crimes had been punished by an ‘exterminating angel’. God had wanted, he said, ‘to give a terrible lesson to the pridefulness of this century, when man talks endlessly of his victory over God’. Although the press left little room for greater tastelessness in how this ‘women’s Agincourt’ had been covered, Ollivier almost matched them when he declared: ‘By the dead bodies strewn along the way, ye shall know that I am the Lord.’ Anticlericals furiously denounced him, as well as Faure and other atheists and freemasons, for mingling in Notre Dame with aristocratic women ‘who could not pronounce their names without making the sign of the cross’ while the Dominican spat out his anti-republican poison. A year later, another Dominican took the opportunity of a college prize-giving day to call for condign measures against anyone who denigrated the army, in clear reference to the ongoing Dreyfus Affair. Each intemperate individual outburst was attributed first to entire orders and then to clergy in general.73
These lone fulminations were a convenient pretext for striking at the religious congregations, rather than the officer corps, which was responsible for the injustices Dreyfus had suffered. The new premier, Waldeck-Rousseau, who came to power in July 1899 in a ministry of ‘republican defence’, authorised a limited purge of the army, for its involvement in the nationalist Dérouléde’s 1898 failed coup, but then having obliterated the ‘physical conspiracy’ he turned on the ‘moral conspiracy’ that allegedly underpinned it. Coldly forbidding in appearance–he reminded contemporaries of a dead fish or an English statesman–Waldeck-Rousseau had mentally stored all those instances where the Church appeared to side with enemies of the Republic, and as a first-rate lawyer he knew best how to make them pay for this. His principal targets were the religious orders, which he thought had grown uncontrollably since the Second Empire, eclipsing the secular clergy, and pitching their black tents in ever wider swathes of education. Their international connections and Roman allegiances made them especially suspect, just as Dreyfus’ ‘cosmopolitan’ background had convicted him of treason in the minds of the anti-republican right.
Waldeck-Rousseau immediately struck at the Assumptionists, whose journalistic and political representatives were arrested and charged with illegal association. On 24 January 1900 the order was dissolved, possibly with the tacit approval of the pope. Next, Waldeck-Rousseau prohibited bishops from relying upon members of orders either as preachers or as seminary instructors, using intra-clerical animosities to suggest that the bishops secretly supported this measure. Under a new law, which came into force on 1 July 1901, religious corporations were obliged to apply to Parliament for authorisation; if this was denied, their corporate property would be sold, and their members dispersed, in return for state pensions derived from the proceeds of the sales.
In elections in the spring of 1902, the left won a crushing second ballot against the right, winning 350 seats to 230, although on the first ballot the margin had been a mere two hundred thousand votes. Worried about his health, and positioning himself as a future president of the Republic, Waldeck-Rousseau resigned, nominating the sixty-seven-year-old radical deputy Emile Combes as his successor in an office he had not yet formally occupied after the elections. Combes was a typical provincial republican, whose advancement from municipality to department and then to the Senate was paralleled by his rise in the masonic rankings. Born in the Tarn in 1835, he was the sixth of ten children born to the wife of a tailor of religious habits. He studied theology at seminaries in Castres and Albi; his doctoral thesis was on St Thomas Aquinas. By the late 1860s Combes had abandoned any thoughts of ordination, turning to medicine and spiritualism, those alternative creeds of the scientific century. He became a freemason in June 1869, rising to a masonic ‘mastership’ a year later. He was attracted to freemasonry because it was both a voluntary family of the likeminded and an optimistic ‘rational’ religion. By contrast, he hated the Catholic Church for its arrogant claim to the sole truth and exclusive virtue. After a period as a local politician, in which he became mayor of Pons in 1876, Combes was elected to the Senate in 1885, bringing the certainty of a provincial, and the tortured mentality of a lapsed seminarian, into the complex world of national politics. He was briefly minister of education and religious affairs in a cabinet of Léon Bourgeois. He disliked materialism and Positivism, but quite what his own beliefs were is difficult to infer from his own obscure epitaph: ‘In death as in life, our hearts tell us there is no eternal separation.’ Bizarrely, at the age of sixty-eight Combes developed a platonic fixation with Jeanne Bibesco, a very wealthy thirty-four-year-old aristocratic Carmelite nun of Romanian extraction, with whom he maintained a long, and partially encoded, correspondence. When intelligence of this bizarre relationship reached Pius X, ‘the Holy Father fell silent for the whole of two minutes, his look transfixed with a stupefied air’.74
Despite the fact that in 1902 the left lacked a clear mandate for radical change, Combes responded to the rebuke that his policy was obsessively focused on the destruction of the religious orders with ‘I took office solely for that purpose.’ At a stroke he implemented the letter of the law, closing three thousand non-authorised schools founded before 1901 and a further eleven thousand hospitals and educational establishments two years later. Waldeck-Rousseau had intended that the application for authorisation of each religious congregation should be scrutinised by both the Chamber and Senate so as to guarantee fairness as well as thoroughness. Some orders simply packed up and left, including the Jesuits and Assumptionists. The Trappists, who did not speak, received rapid authorisation.
By contrast, Combes gave either house of parliament the power to consider batches of applications, without the possibility of appeal, a procedure that reminded some of tumbrils carting groups of condemned to the guillotine. As a result of this cavalier procedure, in which Combes sometimes intervened to destroy orders he disliked, thousands of houses were closed and their occupants dispersed. The ‘billions’ that their liquidation would allegedly yield to fund clerical pensions proved to be mythical. By 1906 the sale of the century had yielded thirty-two million francs gross revenue, of which seventeen million stuck to the hands of the usual cast of greedy lawyers. The Grande Chartreuse was sold to a liqueur manufacturer after he had paid the liquidator an eighty-thousand-francs bribe.75 Many former religious found themselves in dire straits since they were also prohibited from entering such alternative vocations as teaching. Fresh legislation in 1904 enabled Combes to attack the teaching role of authorised orders, so that between then and 1911 a further 1,843 schools were closed. Centuries of involvement by monastic orders in teaching had been wiped out.
Wilier anticlerical regimes conventionally sought to divide and rule by adopting a different strategy towards the Vatican, the bishops, religious orders and lower clergy. Combes managed to alienate the bishops by suspending their salaries when they protested against the demise of the religious orders, as well as by such gestures as removing crucifixes from courtrooms, or naming a battleship Ernest Renan after that distinguished sceptic. The investiture of bishops enabled Combes to take on the papacy. Ever since the Concordat, the French government and the papacy had waged a semantic war over the Latin formulas used in the presentation of candidates for canonical investiture, who by custom had already been vetted by the papal nuncio in Paris. The system worked well under the Third Republic since there were realists on both sides. Possessed of no corresponding subtlety, Combes dispensed with this consultative process and simply invited the pope to endorse his government’s nominees. There were further provocations, such as nominating a seventy-six-year-old to the mountainous diocese of Ajaccio, doubtless mindful of the septuagenarian cleric wheezing up and down his inclined see. The pope refused to comply with this fait accompli.
Leo XIII died on 20 July 1903 at the age of ninety-three. In the ensuing conclave, the candidacy of Rampolla, his secretary of state, was blocked by informal Austrian government veto on the ground that he was regarded as too sympathetic to the French, although his close association with Leo XIII would probably have had him eliminated in the conclave’s course. Despite Austria–Hungary’s anachronistic but effective intervention, pressure to elect a temporal leader had waned since the popes now governed a territory the size of London’s St James’s Park.
Opting for a comparatively obscure figure, whose relations with the Italian state were untroubled, the cardinals’ choice eventually fell upon the Venetian patriarch, Giuseppe Sarto, who took the name Pius X, pronouncing prospective excommunication upon anyone who sought to exercise the political veto in future. This was a simple and saintly man, whose brother was a postman and who lacked the reserve of his remarkable predecessor. Sarto had rarely left northern Italy. He was an anti-intellectual ecclesiastical disciplinarian, whose language skills (except for Italian and Latin) extended only to a little French. To compensate for this deficiency, he appointed the young Merry del Val, half Spanish, half English, as his polyglot secretary of state. Although elected chiefly because of his spiritual qualities, Pius X was aware that it was impossible clearly to delimit the spiritual from the temporal:
We do not seek to hide from you that We expect to shock some people when We assert that We shall necessarily engage in politics. But anybody anxious to judge fairly must see that the Sovereign Pontiff, invested by Almighty God with the supreme magistrature, has no right to remove political affairs from the sphere of faith and morals.
Apart from the continued vexations over investiture rights, further trouble arose over the proposed visit of the French president Loubet to Rome, part of a French attempt to woo the Italian government away from the Triple Alliance with Austria–Hungary and Germany. French foreign policy collided with the Vatican’s desire to maintain a united stance among Catholic nations regarding the Italian state’s illegal seizure of Rome. When the visit took place in April 1904, the Italian government exploited it by making a number of anti-papal provocations, while the crowds cried: ‘Viva Loubet! Viva la Francia anticlericale!’ and indeed ‘Evviva Combes!’
Merry del Val wrote to the Powers, dilating upon France’s ingratitude for the custody of the Holy Places, and its generous representation in the College of Cardinals. He also unwisely added a sentence that suggested the papal nuncio was staying in Paris only because of the imminent fall of the Combes cabinet. Once leaked to the press, this letter was a gift to Combes, who sent the French ambassador in Rome on leave. That summer French bishops once more became the object of contention. Conservative clergy and laity in two dioceses protested the conduct of two bishops who were regarded as friends of the republican government. One was a drug addict, who had allegedly conducted an improper correspondence with the mother superior of a Carmelite convent; the other had been photographed wearing a masonic apron in a procession, and had gone on to expel seminarians who refused to be ordained by such a compromised figure. When Rome summoned both bishops to investigate these charges, the French government stopped their salaries for having illegally left the country and protested Rome’s technical breach of the Organic Articles. Receiving no satisfactory response, France broke off relations with the Holy See.
As we have seen, quarrels between successive French regimes, whether monarchical, imperial or republican, and the pope or French bishops punctuated the nineteenth century. The clash with the likes of Combes was fundamentally different since there was no common ground.76 The idea of formally separating Church and state took time to diffuse since many republicans felt that the Concordat and Organic Articles enabled the state to control the Church whereas separation would not. This Erastian control would vanish with separation, the effect being, as one official had so graphically put it, akin to unleashing hungry lions and wolves on to the Place de la Concorde. There was also the piety of women, who though they could not vote could make life intolerable for their anticlerical fathers and husbands. The Socialist leader Jaurés was once bitterly attacked by his colleagues because his daughter had made her first communion. He responded, ‘My friend, no doubt you can do what you like with your wife. I can’t.’ Another comrade shouted out: ‘I would have strangled her!’ In a volte-face characteristic of a left that was succumbing to embourgeoisement, many aspirant deputies, and their wives, recognised that a clerical education was good for their children’s careers and marriage prospects, or at least a good deal better than what was on offer in the sometimes indifferent state schools.77
The Church was not keen on the notion of separation either. Its deep and recent history had revolved around the establishment, loss and restoration of the alliance of throne and altar, a shadow of which had limped along in the regime established by the Concordat. Separation would increase ecclesiastical dependence upon local notables, who would be expected to pay clerical stipends and maintain costly as well as glorious buildings in the absence of a state religious budget of some thirty-five million francs. That near unanimity of ecclesiastical opinion encouraged fervid anticlericals in the view that separation would shatter the fragile unity of the Church, which would break up into inimical sects once state tutelage had been removed. Parliamentary support for such a step increased throughout the decade we have been considering, culminating in October 1902 in the appointment of a twenty-three-man Commission to examine the proposition. The momentum behind this development came from Radicals, who in 1901 included separation in their electoral manifesto, and from the Socialists, who having regarded the issue as a distraction from the class struggle, decided to fall in line with their more rabidly anticlerical footsoldiers, and also finally to close a long-running saga that seemed to be preventing fundamental socio-economic reform.
The Commission, in which eighteen anticlericals were in the majority, considered a series of proposals on the separation of Church and state against a background dominated by increasingly fraught relations with the Vatican. Prime minister Combes’ own proposed legislation revealed his extraordinary reluctance to relinquish the state’s powers, since he included regular state authorisation of the local associations that were to administer ecclesiastical property and punitive controls on what priests could and could not do. By October, however, what Combes wanted was largely academic.
One of the most enduring features of the left is its unselfconscious projection of its own conspiratorial imaginings and corrupt modus operandi. An anticlerical Chamber hitherto much exercised by the jiggery-pokery that a lone Jesuit allegedly practised in promotions within the General Staff learned that in reality army promotions were subject to secret vetting, not by the military, but by the Grand Orient masonic lodge to which Combes belonged. Candidates for promotion were entered under two lists dubbed ‘Corinth’ and ‘Carthage’. Those whose wives went to mass or whose children attended religious schools found themselves on the side of Carthage, and therefore languished as captains or majors in bleak provincial barracks. Those categorised as ‘Corinthians’ acquired ever fancier epaulettes and plum postings overseas or in Paris. Unmindful of the ironies in his choice of simile, the Radical Clemenceau denounced an ‘inverted form of Jesuitism’. There were further revelations regarding how Combes’ son, a senior civil servant, had rigged appointments and honours within the patronage of the Ministry of the Interior, whether these involved academic distinctions or the Légion d’Honneur. He had also prevented a secularised nun from visiting her own mother who was a postmistress and hence a state servant. In the wake of these scandalous revelations, Combes’ cabinet resigned in January 1905; the only policy offered by the Rouvier cabinet that replaced it was separation of Church and state.
Following a three-month debate, on 3 July 1905 the Law was voted through the Chamber with a majority of 314 votes to 233, although only 130 deputies had included separation in their manifestos so the popular mandate to implement this vast change was slight. So too was its legality. Apart from its unilateral breach of the 1801 Concordat, which was a solemn international treaty, it also abrogated arrangements that had been intended to compensate the Church for its losses during the Revolution. Apart from the state laying hands on centuries of pious bequests from laymen, it was now taking what property the Church had legally acquired since 1801. Under the Separation Law, church buildings and property were expropriated by the state, but the buildings and seminaries were to be administered by religious associations, or ‘associations cultuelles’, for two to five years. If the Church refused to co-operate in forming these associations it would forfeit property whose gross value was 331 million francs. Breaking with Combes’ desire to atomise the Church into myriad disconnected sects, these associations could federate together, and they would have to respect the wishes of the Church hierarchy. The state would cease paying clerical salaries, after a transition period of four years, but existing pension rights would be respected. The sticking point here was clearly the religious associations, which in the Church’s optic raised the unwelcome prospect of laymen able to cut off clerical salaries or appointing only those clerics whose views corresponded with their own. What was to stop anticlericals employing priests who had broken with the Church, or demanding that such persons had a right to church buildings whose more orthodox incumbents would be put on the street? To counter this prospect, a clause in the law insisted that the religious associations should conform to the organisational norms of the Church to which they belonged, although all disputes were to be referred to the Council of State where republican lawyers were in the majority. Any impression that the republican authorities were sensitive to clerical sensibilities was dispelled in early 1906, when detailed instructions on making inventories of clerical property led to riots in staunchly Catholic areas as people took exception to government officials snooping in every cranny. In Paris, these protests provided a welcome pretext for violence on the part of royalist and nationalist groups who sought the downfall of the Republic.
Without waiting to learn what the French hierarchy thought, on 11 February 1906 Pius X promulgated the encyclical Vehementer which condemned separation of Church and state. By hiving off the Church as just one civil association among many, the new law denied that the state existed for other than material goals. The Church was being subjected to the state, in the form of the Council of State, in arbitrating disputes. Pius also had other legitimate grievances. If the French state could unilaterally abrogate an international treaty, what was to stop other governments following suit, which would not only send the entire edifice of Vatican diplomacy crashing down, but open the floodgates to anarchy in international affairs? Moreover, Pius correctly noted the frenetic succession of French cabinets, Combes’ two years in office being what passed for longevity. What was to stop a future French regime unilaterally altering the terms of separation, just as Napoleon I had tacked on the Organic Articles to the Concordat? In August 1906 Pius promulgated a further encyclical, Gravissimo, which categorically rejected the religious associations as being a ‘violation of the sacred rights that are indispensable to the very existence of the Church’. Sheep do not traditionally lead the shepherd and his dog. This ignored the wish of the French bishops to find a compromise formula with the state. They knew that roughly similar arrangements introduced in Prussia in 1875 had worked; the formula they sought was for the religious associations to be explicitly called ‘canonico-legal associations’. The pope failed to acknowledge their wishes, issuing a further condemnatory encyclical. The clock was ticking as the time for forming religious associations was running out–after that the state could dispose of ecclesiastical property as it chose. The state, or rather its point-man in these matters, Aristide Briand, offered to extend the deadline by a year, and gave the clergy the option of making an annual declaration that they wished to hold services in church buildings. The government also expelled the papal nuncio, publishing his private papers, which included such embarrassing revelations as ‘Clemenceau is a very bad man but he is bribable.’ A law was passed in January 1907 that enabled the state to take over bishops’ palaces, seminaries and presbyteries ‘definitively’. Pius X responded with a further encyclical, appropriately entitled Une Fois encore, condemning the requirement of annual registration of prospective services, as if the clergy were like squatters dependent upon the goodwill of local authorities.
The Church that emerged from the separation was considerably poorer than its predecessor. The chinking sound from passing collection bags assumed real urgency since it was all the money the clergy received. Bishops no longer occupied imposing palaces–if they did not like these arrangements, Pius X offered to appoint Franciscans–and priests had uncertain tenure of their parishes, which in turn made the status of bequests and donations uncertain. Maintenance of churches of aesthetic or historical importance was taken over by bodies charged with the upkeep of monuments, the choice that resulted being between a ruin and a museum. Some communes were assiduous in maintaining church buildings; others allowed them to decay. A delinquent mayor who used tombstones to furnish a belltower with latrines–men could urinate on a stone engraved with ‘Here rests the widow Doré, died 1900 aged 85, pray for her soul’–caused a national scandal. It took several decades for a body of customs to accrete as to how relations between Church and state would function in these novel circumstances.78
We can now leave events that coincided in time with the music of Debussy and Massenet, the paintings of Monet and Picasso, and the scholarship and science of Durkheim and Marie Curie. These struggles between Church and state, and the ‘culture wars’ that accompanied them, took place on a continent that had undergone huge transformations stemming from industrialisation and urbanisation. That process engendered an entirely new series of problems that the Churches had to confront too. To these we turn in the following chapter, beginning with Britain, the epicentre of the Industrial Revolution.