The events of 1870–71 dealt a triple blow to the Catholic Church. First, the few French forces protecting the pope in Rome since 1849 were withdrawn to fight the Prussians, and in September 1870 Rome was occupied by the Piedmontese army to complete the work of Italian unification. An elite of French Catholics such as the Vendean volunteers led by Athanase-Charles-Marie de Charette de la Contrie fought to defend the Holy City until instructed by Pius IX to lay down their arms, then returned to France where they fought in the Army of the Loire with volunteers of western France, taking part in the charge at Patay near Orléans on 3 December.1 Second, France, regarded by Catholics as the eldest daughter of the Church, was defeated by Prussia, which for Catholics was seen as the incarnation of both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, since Voltaire had been ‘trumpeter and adviser’ to Frederick the Great. It was divine justice, according to Louis Veuillot, writing in L’Univers, that France should be punished for its sins against God – the Enlightenment and the Revolution – by the power that represented ‘the sins of Europe’.2 Lastly, the Paris Commune, which sacked churches, murdered the archbishop of Paris and other clergy, and set fire to the city, was for Catholics such as Veuillot who remained in the capital until the end of April 1871 the apocalyptic culmination of the atheistic revolution that had shaken France since 1789. Only the restoration of the pope to his Temporal Power and the restoration of Henry V to the French throne could save the situation for Veuillot and his readers.3
Catholics argued that France had been punished for its revolt against God. The only way it could redeem itself and recover God’s protection was to undergo a process of reparation to expiate its sins. The period of so-called Moral Order in the early 1870s, when France indeed came within a whisker of royalist restoration, was a period of intense Catholic activity to bring France back to the fold. To begin with, there was a boom in the pilgrimage movement, sponsored by the Assumptionist fathers of the Père d’Alzon. A national pilgrimage movement was orchestrated by d’Alzon’s disciples, Père François Picard and Père Vincent de Paul Bailly, who had set up an Assumptionist house in Paris and had been hunted during the Commune. These harnessed the support of aristocratic ladies such as Madame de la Rochefoucauld, grouped in Notre-Dame de Salut, and of a new congregation of nuns, the Petites Soeurs de l’Assomption, who accompanied the pilgrim trains. In 1872 they organized a pilgrimage to La Salette in the French Alps, where a weeping Virgin prophesying disaster had appeared in 1847, followed by one to Lourdes in 1873. Other pilgrimages headed by the conservative nobility and royalist deputies went in June 1873 to Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy, where Marguerite-Marie Alacoque had received divine instruction in 1689 to have France put under the protection of the Sacred Heart, and to Chartres, where Mary’s veil was said to be kept and the cult was devoted to the pregnant Virgin.4 That same summer the royalist-dominated National Assembly approved a request from the archbishop of Paris that a site at Montmartre, high point of the Paris Commune, should be acquired in order to build a ‘church of the national vow to the Sacred Heart of Jesus’. A provisional chapel was blessed there in 1876, and 500,000–600,000 pilgrims per year over the next thirty years bought cartes du Sacré Coeur divided into bricks, a full card representing a donation of 127 francs, raising 60 per cent of the total of 40 million francs that the basilica of Sacré Coeur ultimately cost.5 An equestrian statue of Joan of Arc by the sculptor Frémiet was unveiled on the place des Pyramides off the rue de Rivoli in 1874, on the site where she had been wounded during the Anglo-Burgundian siege of Paris, marking a new stage in the cult of the heroine who was venerated for liberating French soil from foreign occupation and restoring France to the Church.6 During this period, finally, a huge effort was made by the Church to extend its grip on national education. The control of girls’ education by nuns reached a peak in 1878, when the number of those in female congregations, which had been 66,000 in 1850, rose to 135,000. In 1875 the National Assembly passed a law permitting Catholic universities, although their students still had to take their degrees in state faculties, and Catholic universities were opened in Angers and Lille, the former funded by the Catholic nobility, and the latter by the Catholic employers of the textile industry.7
The renewed grip of the Catholic Church on the education and social life of the country was seen by republicans as a massive threat. Loyalty to the Papacy, evidenced by campaigns in Catholic quarters to demand the restitution of the Papal States to the pope, was seen to undermine loyalty to France. The Syllabus of Errors published by Pius IX in 1864 delivered a frontal attack on modern ideas of liberalism, democracy and nationalism. The Church, moreover, was seen to have supported reactionary regimes, the monarchy or the Empire, and always to have attacked the Republic. The failure of the two previous republics was felt very much to have been the work of the Church. It was intolerable that religious congregations should be free to undermine the Republic, that schools maintained by municipalities, departments and the state should so often be staffed by teaching brothers and nuns, inculcating Catholic thought and prejudices. The education of citizens for the Republic required that state education should be dispensed by lay teachers and that religious education be eliminated from the classroom. The programme of the republicans, the generation of 1830 that acquired power in the late 1870s, was clear, but their rhetoric was always sharper than their bite. Republicans were fully aware that much of the French population was more likely to accept the Republic if it were allowed to practise its own faith; it was entirely possible to be both republican and Catholic. Therefore, while there were always republicans of anticlerical and freethinking disposition demanding more and more extreme measures against the Church, republicans in power were generally keen to maintain some kind of working relationship between Church and state in order to retain the loyalty of the Catholic majority.
In his Belleville manifesto of 1869 Gambetta committed himself to free, compulsory, lay education, and to the abolition of the Concordat, that is to the Separation of Church and state. Addressing a republican banquet at Saint-Quentin in November 1871 he said:
I desire from the bottom of my soul not only the separation of Church and state but the separation of the Church from schools. (Loud applause.) Because people have abandoned the Church and the Church has forfeited much of the respect that was once due to the clergy, we have seen the clergy cease to be apostles and become instruments of power under the most corrupt and conservative regimes. (Applause.) The message of the Syllabus… is the greatest threat to the society of 1789 of which we are the heirs and representatives. The main aim of the society of 1789 was to base the political and social system on reason instead of grace, to assert the superiority of the status of the citizen over that of the slave… For eighty years two world views have been present, dividing minds and fomenting conflict, a desperate war in the heart of society. The lack of unity in education means that we have been continually thrown from revolt to repression, from anarchy to dictatorship, without any chance of stability.8
The previous month the Ligue de l’Enseignement had launched a petition for free, compulsory education, to which lay education was later added under pressure from the republican press. In June 1872 and January 1873 successive versions of the petition were presented to the National Assembly, with 119,000 signatures in favour of compulsory education only, 410,00 for compulsory free education, and 388,000 for compulsory, free and lay education, 917,000 signatures in all. Unfortunately, after the fall of Thiers in May 1873 and the inauguration of the Moral Order regime, there was no chance of the petition being heard. However, when the republican but Catholic premier Jules Simon seemed unable to check a campaign by Catholic clergy and laity in favour of restoring the pope’s Temporal Power, Gambetta warned the Chamber on 3 May 1877 that ‘clericalism is the enemy,’ infiltrating the army, bureaucracy, education system and ruling class.9 President MacMahon, dismissing Jules Simon on 16 May 1877, provoked the crisis that forced him finally to accept a republican administration and with it an anticlerical programme.
Pressure for anticlerical legislation came from the radical wing of the republican party, to which Gambetta again appealed in his speech at Romans in September 1878 in which he attacked a spirit that was not only clerical but ‘Vaticanesque, monastic, congregational and Syllabist’.10 Anticlericalism was also closely linked to masonic lodges and to free-thought societies, the main function of the latter being to organize civic burials for their members, predominantly artisans, instituteurs and the owners of cafés where they tended to meet. In 1873 the prefect of the Rhône required civic burials in Lyon to be held at night, provoking student accusations that the council was being run by the Jesuits, and comments that ‘we need another ’93 to purge France of that black band.’ In 1882 a League for the Separation of Church and State was set up under the leadership of Jules Steeg, a former Protestant pastor and deputy of the Gironde, and Désiré Barodet, former mayor of Lyon and deputy of Paris, with ninety-six deputies or senators from the left of the republican party on its books.11 Anticlericals also had an influential presence on municipal councils which fell massively into republican hands in 1878 and 1881. Victory was often crowned by expelling the Christian Brothers or Marists from municipal schools. For example at Alès, a mining town in the Cévennes, the Christian Brothers rejected the prize-day books provided by the new republican municipality in 1879 as antireligious, provoking the municipality to expel them and appoint lay instituteurs. At Martigné-Ferchaud in Upper Brittany, the republican municipality expelled the Christian Brothers in 1878 as a small crowd demonstrated, crying ‘Long live the Republic! Down with the chouans, down with the monks!’12 On 30 May 1878 radicals on the Paris municipal council and the republican left linked up with intellectuals such as Émile Littré and Ernest Renan to organize a celebration of the centenary of the death of Voltaire, a riposte to a celebration of the death of Joan of Arc at Notre-Dame and a wreath-laying at the Frémiet statue.13 Since the government banned a public procession in honour of Voltaire, festivities took place in the Théâtre de la Gaïté, under the famous bust of the philosophe by Houdon. Victor Hugo, aged seventy-six, recalled Voltaire’s defence of the Protestant merchant Calas who was broken on the wheel in 1761 for allegedly killing his son who had converted to Catholicism, and his intervention on behalf of the Chevalier de la Barre, who had his tongue ripped out and hand cut off before he was burned at the stake in 1776 for insulting a church procession. With his pen, ‘he defeated the feudal lord, the Gothic judge, the Roman priest,’ declared Hugo. ‘He defeated violence with his smile, despotism by sarcasm, infallibility by irony, obstinacy by perseverance, ignorance by truth.’14
When the republicans took power they were in a position to enact their anticlerical programme, but also had to take the balance of power into account. Gambetta, as we have seen, was speaker of the Chamber, but the ministry of February 1879 was headed by the centre-left premier Waddington and was dominated by the centre-left finance minister Léon Say and minister of public works Freycinet, with the moderate republican Jules Ferry as minister of education. Five of the nine ministers, including Waddington, Say and Freycinet, were Protestants and Ferry was married to one, and while Protestants were keen to pin back the influence of the Catholic Church they also sought religious peace.15 Moreover, Waddington, Say and Freycinet were all senators, and the Senate was wedded to the middle ground. The first piece of anticlerical legislation was designed to prohibit religious congregations that had not been properly authorized to teach. This was rejected by the Senate and the measure was therefore executed by government decrees on 29 March 1880, one to dissolve the Jesuits, who had crept back to refound colleges in France after 1850, the other to dissolve a number of other congregations. Freycinet, who became premier in December 1879, opposed the extension of the decree to other congregations, and resigned. Ferry, who took over as premier (September 1880), exempted female congregations which were not regarded as a political threat and educated not future citizens but future wives and mothers, for whom piety and virginity were seen as essential even by republican fathers. No attack, it should be underlined, was planned on the secular clergy, the bishops or parish priests. Paul Bert, professor of physiology at the Sorbonne and deputy of the Yonne, one of the least practising of French departments, echoed the slogan of the French revolutionary armies, ‘peace to the cottages, war on the châteaux’, by proclaiming at a republican banquet in August 1880, ‘peace to the curé, war on the monk’.16
In power, the republicans legislated for free elementary education on 16 June 1881 and for compulsory lay education in state schools on 28 March 1882. Paul Bert was chair of the parliamentary commission that reported on lay education. The doctrine of laïcité dictated that the state school was a neutral space in which liberty of conscience prevailed and no religion was taught. Religious education would be provided by the curé, in the church or vicarage, and school time was set aside on Thursdays for this to take place. Protestants and Jewish children would have their religious education at the same time. This did not mean that no morality was taught in school, but it was an ‘independent’ morality that, rather than relying on religion for guidance or sanction, used such secular notions as fraternity and solidarity. Protestants such as Ferdinand Buisson, who had lived in exile in Switzerland during the Second Empire and published a Pedagogical Dictionary of 1878, were powerful inspirers of this new teaching, and Buisson oversaw its introduction as inspector-general of primary education.17 Alongside moral education would be taught civic education, the training of the future citizen in democratic principles. Naturally these were also republican principles, inspired by the Revolution of 1789. As Paul Bert said, ‘we want, the country wants, the millions of voters who gave us power to be educated to ensure that the principles of the Revolution triumph over their adversaries.’18
The Catholic Church could not of course accept these new provisions. Mgr Freppel, bishop of Angers and deputy for Finistère, denounced ‘the oppression of the majority by a minority’ and what he called ‘the atheistic school, the godless school’ that was now being hatched.19 In the Tarn, to give one example, the archbishop of Albi in 1883 ordered parish priests to refuse first communion to children attending lay schools and holy communion to their parents and teachers, in order to boost attendance at private schools where catechism could still be taught. The pretext was the putting on the Index, the Vatican list of banned books, of a number of new works of moral and civic instruction, including a 1880 textbook by Gabriel Compayré, a native of Albi who now taught at the ladies’ teacher-training college of Fontenay-aux-Roses and was republican deputy of the Tarn.20 Jules Ferry, education minister and premier, stood up to Mgr Freppel, saying that neutrality in school was ‘important for state security and future republican generations’. Republicans had a duty not to leave education to those like Mgr Freppel who had declared that ‘the principles of 1789 are the negation of original sin.’21 On the other hand he also wrote a letter to instituteurs in 1883 instructing them not to say anything in class that would offend the religious sensibilities of any family. Likewise when the stipends of fifty priests in the Tarn were suspended for their sanctions against families who patronized lay schools and the archbishop of Albi was condemned by the Conseil d’État, Ferry told the new pope, Leo XIII, via the French ambassador in Rome, that despite previous republican commitments the French government had no intention of dismantling the Concordat, of separating Church and state. As he put it,
I believe strongly that the practising Catholic population of this country is not a party, that the majority of it voted for republican candidates, that it is attached to its traditional religion but is also impregnated by the principles and laws of the French Republic, that while it is faithful it is not clerical, as some say, and in case of conflict between the civil and spiritual powers it would oppose those who took it upon themselves to denounce the Concordat.22
For Ferry, the Concordat which had governed the church of the majority of French people since 1802, and in particular its relationship with bishops and priests, was a fixed point. Separation, he declared to a republican meeting in 1888, would be ‘absolutely contrary not only to the beliefs of a great number of French people but to something much stronger than beliefs, to the habits and traditions of the French people, to popular instinct itself. Separation, Messieurs, would mean religious war.’23
After the elections of October 1885 moderate republicans around Ferry lost their dominance and were forced to bring radicals into the cabinet to defend against a powerful showing by the Union of the Right. There was a new burst of anticlerical legislation, in particular a law of 30 October 1886 which required all teaching congregations to leave municipal schools within five years in the case of boys’ schools, without time limit in the case of girls’ schools. Nothing decisive could be attempted for girls for a number of reasons. While communes tended to own the boys’ school and could dispose of it as they wished, they were often reluctant or too poor to build an additional girls’ school, so these were often owned by the Church or a private benefactor, and the commune would have to build a new girls’ school to compete with the nuns. Lay female teachers were also in short supply, because although teacher-training colleges for instituteurs had been mandatory in every department under the Guizot law of 1833, similar colleges for institutrices were not required till 1879 and were only just beginning to turn out teachers. Many communities in any case disliked the prospect of single, educated lay women in their midst and preferred to entrust the education of girls to nuns. Between 1880 and 1900 the proportion of girls educated by nuns was reduced in the departments of the Gard and the Nord from 62 per cent to 46 and 45 per cent respectively, but in the Upper Breton department of Ille-et-Vilaine virtually no impression was made at all, and the proportion was squeezed from 86 to 80 per cent.24
Jules Ferry was correct that a great many of the French population were practising Catholics, but this was not a uniform pattern. One of the main stimuli of religious practice was the coexistence of faiths, Catholic and Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, although areas that were almost totally Catholic, such as Brittany, could also be extremely pious. Other factors worked against organized religion, notably the revolutionary tradition and growing urbanization and industrialization, which were seen to detach the popular classes from the grip of the Church. However, these factors did not play as straight forwardly as might be imagined.
In the company town of Montceau-les-Mines, near Le Creusot, the biggest employer, Léonce Chagot, was also the mayor, and he believed in disciplining his workforce by entrusting the local schools to the Marists and the nuns. In 1882 Chagot lost control of the town hall to a republican, but responded by tightening clerical control, obliging miners’ families to attend mass and sacking troublesome miners who were denounced by the Marists and nuns. The miners responded by celebrating the feast of the Assumption, 15 August 1882, by setting fire to the nuns’ school and chapel and blowing up a statue of the Virgin Mary. This suggests that the working class were essentially irreligious, not because they were abandoned by the Church but because they felt that the Church had allied with political reaction and capitalist exploitation.25
Industrial workers were certainly parting company with organized religion, although the pattern was not uniform. In the Nord the glassmakers of Anor were described by one cleric in 1899 as ‘a sad, sad, sad population for the Nord, which is a country addicted to pleasure, dancing and onanism’. In the mining basin around Anzin a quarter of children were not baptized and 41 per cent of burials in 1911 were civic, refusing the intercession of the priest. In the north of the department, in the textile conurbation of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, where much of the workforce was French Flemish or Belgian Flemish, religious practice was much higher, up to 75 per cent of the population taking Easter communion.26 This was, however, also a stronghold of Guesdist socialism which, once it took control of local town halls, worked hard to build a counter-culture of trade unions, co-operatives and support for the children, the old and the sick of working-class families. Despite Guesde’s strictures that anticlericalism was a waste of time, since the Church as an ally of capitalism would disappear with it, the sentiments of the Guesdists of the Nord were clearly expressed when in February 1899 the body of a pupil of the Christian Brothers was found dead in their school complex in Lille and traces of blood and sperm were discovered in the bed of the Flemish Christian Brother Flamidien. Although Flamidien turned out to be innocent, the anticlerical backlash involved students as well as workers, moderate republicans as well as socialists. Socialist militant Paule Minck addressed a huge audience on the use of the confessional by clergy to persuade women to denounce the revolutionary activities of their husbands, and the refrain of a song popular with the workers of Roubaix ran ‘The social Republic / Is that of humanity / It will give us back our liberty / In spite of the clerical plague.’27
Not all industrial areas were in large towns and not all cities were industrial, so whether urbanization had an impact on religious practice has to be examined in its own right. In Paris in 1909–14 Sunday mass was well attended in the posh bourgeois arrondissements – 46 per cent in the 7th and 31 per cent in the 16th, but in the working-class and lower-middle-class arrondissements of eastern Paris mass attendance fell to 6 per cent in the 20th and 4 per cent in the 11th.28 Similarly civic burials in Paris accounted for 20 per cent of burials in 1903 but rose to 39 per cent in the popular 20th arrondissement.29 That said, immigrant populations from regions with high religious practice kept up their religion in order to preserve their identity in the large city. A club founded in 1897 for Bretons at Montparnasse, the Paris terminal for trains from Brittany, and run by Abbé Caduc, had 15,000 members by 1907.30 Low levels of religious practice, meanwhile, were not confined to large cities. The largely rural dioceses of the Paris basin were among the most dechristianized in France, especially in the case of men. The proportion of those who took their Easter communion was under 4 per cent of men and 20–21 per cent of women in the dioceses of Soissons (1905) and Châlons-sur-Marne (1911–13), 2.6 per cent of men and 17 per cent of women in the diocese of Sens (1912) and a mere 1.5 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women in the diocese of Chartres in 1909.31 In the Limousin, the industrial town of Limoges has been described as the ‘regional capital of free thought’, under the influence of Émile Noël, founder of Le Libre Penseur du Centre. Religious processions in the town were banned in 1880, the number of civic burials rose from 6 per cent in 1899 to 28 per cent in 1910, and in 1911 and 1913 Noël’s daughters were married civilly in red dresses, red cockades on the breast and crowns of red eglantines. Yet these practices were not confined to Limoges itself. A quarter of rural communes in the Haute-Vienne banned religious processions after 1900 and there were eight or nine free-thought societies in the small towns of the Haute-Vienne and up to fifty in the Creuse, recruiting a counter-priesthood that would preside over civic burials. ‘The peasant, long credulous, no longer wants to be duped,’ it was reported from Beissat (Creuse) in 1907. ‘Honour be to those who cleave to reason instead of the enigmatic revelation of which the men in black wish to guard the secret. Let us shake off the monastic and clerical yoke and thus become free men again.’32
More intense religious practice was often stimulated by the rivalry between two different religions. This was certainly the case at the other extreme of the Massif Central from the Limousin, in the Cévennes, where Catholic and Protestant had struggled since the sixteenth century. In 1887 a monolith was raised in memory of the Camisard revolt at Fontfroide, near Florac in the Lozère, the site of a Camisard battle. Addressing a crowd of 4,000 Pastor Vigié of the Paris Theology Faculty paid tribute to ‘the heroism of our martyrs’ but declared that ‘on the very site of fratricidal conflict we wish to lay a stone like a seal of peace to close for ever the cursed era of hatred and civil war.’33 This area of mixed faith certainly stimulated healthy religious rivalry. A group of cantons bordering the Ardèche, Haute-Loire and Lozère supplied ‘a larger contingent to the regular and secular clergy than some French provinces’, reported Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé in 1893. ‘Large families, almost all from the mountains, send some of their boys and girls to Le Puy, the ecclesiastical capital of the region. These children divide between the noviciates, seminaries and convents which make Le Puy a little mountain Rome. The boys are taught Latin and prepared for the priesthood, while others are sent to the Christian Brothers. The girls take the veil with the Sisters of Charity or join congregations of béates, which are so numerous on the soil of the Vélay.’34 Indeed, despite the wishes of Pastor Vigié, the rivalry could sometimes degenerate into violence. For the elections of 1902 the mixed canton of Saint-Agrève (Ardèche) was moved from one Tournon constituency to another to deliver its Protestant votes to the anticlerical government candidate, who won. This provoked accusations of electoral fraud and fears of ‘a St Bartholomew’, as the local press indicated:
Protestants of the plateau of Saint-Agrève saw, exhibited in their honour, old instruments of torture used against their ancestors. The tocsin of religious war was rung in several communes. At Rochepaule more than two hundred people armed with guns, axes and knives went to the curé to receive the order to massacre heretics. For two days the gendarmerie of Saint-Agrève had to stay put to safeguard Protestants from a crowd of fanatics drunk with rage and hatred… We thought that the wars of religion were over, and that people today shrank in horror from deeds done in the past for the same reason, but it seems that some individuals want to bring back those terrible times and revert to barbarism.35
By the end of the nineteenth century rivalry between Catholic and Protestant had almost, although not entirely, been overtaken by the rivalry between Christian and Jew. After the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the Reich, Alsatian Jews, like other Alsatians, had to decide whether to keep their property and remain under German rule, or abandon their property and move to France. Some families like the Dreyfuses, as we have seen, had it both ways, Jacques staying in Mulhouse to manage the family textile business, Alfred going to Paris where in 1890 he entered the École de Guerre as an artillery captain. Alfred married Lucie Hadamard, civilly in the mairie of the 9th arrondissement, then in the synagogue of the rue de la Victoire, where Grand Rabbi Zadoc Kahn officiated.36 Alfred Dreyfus thus joined the elite of assimilated French Jews commonly called Israélites who often practised their religion in private but partook fully in French culture and made a mark for themselves not only in business but in the professions, civil service and even the army. Among the most successful at the turn of the century were Joseph Reinach, a protégé of Gambetta on La République Française and deputy of Digne (Basses-Alpes), Arthur Meyer, editor of the Gaulois, who in fact converted to Christianity, the publisher Calmann Lévy, the Natanson brothers of La Revue Blanche, the lawyer and critic Léon Blum, who became prime minister of the Popular Front government of 1936, Émile Durkheim, professor of sociology at Bordeaux, and Henri Bergson, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. From the 1880s, however, these assimilated Jews were joined by Russian and east European Jews fleeing pogrom and persecution, about half of them settling in Paris before the First World War. There they formed only 17 per cent of the total Jewish population of 50,000 – the Jewish population of France being 80,000 at the turn of the century – but they had a distinctive profile, living in their own neighbourhoods like the Pletzel in the Marais, Belleville and Montmartre, mostly artisans in the garment business, jewellers and cabinet-makers, speaking Yiddish, with their own Yiddish newspapers, theatres and clubs.37 These ‘Juifs’ were perceived as very different, even by the assimilated Israélites. Bernard-Lazare, a Sephardic Jew of Nîmes, the son of a cloth merchant who was educated in the French system and became a literary critic in Paris, gave a public lecture in Paris in 1890 on ‘Jews and Israelites’ in which he asked, ‘What have I in common with those descendants of Huns?’, and attacked the philanthropic Alliance Israélite Universelle for ‘bringing these despicable people into a country that is not theirs and cannot feed them and assisting their conquest of it’.38 At this point nothing separated Bernard-Lazare from an anti-Semite, but the development of anti-Semitism would encompass not only immigrant but also assimilated French Jews and cause the likes of Bernard-Lazare to engage with this new barbarism.
French Catholics at the end of the nineteenth century faced a double challenge. On the one hand they needed to respond to the republican attack which eliminated teaching congregations and religious instruction from the state and municipal school system. This tended to provoke a high level of rhetoric against the godless school and masonic Republic. On the other hand, Catholics had to respond to the alienation of the mass of industrial workers and much of the urban population from organized religion. This alienation was to some extent a reaction against the perceived alliance between the Church and the dominant landed and capitalist class and provoked a searching in some Catholic circles for a more ‘social Catholicism’ or even Christian democracy, rekindling attempts to reconcile the Church to the modern world begun by Lamennais, Montalembert and Ozanam. This challenge suggested to some Catholics that their energies might best be concentrated on social issues rather than on attacking the Republic and indeed that working within and even with the Republic to achieve their ends might be the best way forward.
The career of Comte Albert de Mun provides one illustration of this change in Catholic thinking. De Mun was an aristocratic, Jesuit-educated and Legitimist army officer who had served in Algeria, was taken prisoner at Metz by the Prussians in 1870 and as a prisoner at Aachen heard of the work done among the Rhineland working classes by Bishop Ketteler of Mainz. He fought with the Versailles forces under General Gallifet to suppress the Paris Commune but believed that the Commune had been provoked in part by ‘the apathy of the bourgeois class’, led by Thiers, which wanted only to exploit workers.39 In 1872 he launched a scheme of Catholic workers’ circles to attract a working-class elite away from socialism back into the Catholic fold, founding circles in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Toulouse. His vision was of a monarchical and Christian social order. Laying down his commission, he was elected as a royalist deputy for Pontivy in Brittany in 1876 and 1877. He fell in with the Vendean leader Charette who wanted to use 40,000 members of workers’ circles to restore the monarchy and de Mun announced at a pilgrimage of workers’ circles to Chartres in 1878, ‘we are the irreconcilable counter-revolution.’40 The death of the Comte de Chambord in 1883 was a sharp blow to de Mun, as he had no love for the Orleanists. He lobbied the republican government to legislate to permit associations of employers and workers and to protect the workforce from undue exploitation and began to think in terms of making use of republican legislation on trade unions to further his Catholic goals.41
Permission for Catholics to accept the Republic came from Pope Leo XIII who, at loggerheads with the anticlerical government of a united Italy, was looking to another European power to save him from diplomatic isolation. Exploiting the fact that for the French republican government anticlericalism was not for export but the French Church abroad was a pillar of its colonial enterprise, the Papacy primed Cardinal Lavigerie, archbishop of Algiers since 1866, founder of the missionary White Fathers, apostolic administrator of Tunis, where the French established a protectorate in 1881, and from 1884 primate of Africa, to offer a toast to the Republic at a dinner for French naval officers of the Mediterranean fleet in Algiers on 12 November 1890.42 This opened the way to the Ralliement of Catholics and royalists such as de Mun to the Republic, although they remained a minority. De Mun was one of an international Catholic lobby including Bishop Ketteler and Cardinal Manning which obtained the encyclical Rerum novarum from Pope Leo XIII in 1891, urging the ruling classes to charitable action and governments to social measures in order to combat atheistic socialism, and in parliament he supported the law of 2 November 1892 limiting the working day of women and children to eleven hours. After the Union des Droites burned its fingers supporting Boulanger and the republican leadership was disgraced by the Panama scandal, de Mun and Jacques Piou, deputy for the Haute-Garonne, saw an opportunity to build a new majority of moderate republicans and conservatives who accepted the Republic, displacing the radical republicans and their socialist fellow travellers. In 1893 Piou announced the formation of the Republican Right, ‘a Tory party bringing together under the constitution all men of goodwill who are tired of the abuses and excesses of the party in power’ and working for ‘an open, tolerant and honest republic’.43 The Republican Right needed moderate republican partners, but these were all too few as the moderate and radical republicans again fought the 1893 elections together under the banner of ‘republican concentration’. In 1894, after the new socialist municipality of Saint-Denis banned religious processions and an anarchist bomb was thrown into the Chamber of Deputies, minister of education Eugène Spuller, once a confidant of Gambetta, proposed a ‘new spirit’ in republican relations with the Church. The announcement by Leo XIII that year that Joan of Arc was ‘venerable’, the first step on the road to sainthood, encouraged Joseph Fabre, republican senator of the Catholic Aveyron department, to table a bill to establish a national Joan of Arc day in May to commemorate the liberation of Orléans. This initiative was nevertheless unable to reconcile the Catholic version of Joan’s story, that she had heard angels, restored France to her divine mission and been burned by the English, with the republican version that Joan was a popular national heroine betrayed by the king and burned by the Church. The bill was passed by the Senate but rejected by the Chamber, confirming the narrowness of the middle ground that still existed between Catholic conservatives unhappy with the Republic and anticlerical republicans still suspicious of Catholic conspiracy.44
Much more powerful than social reform as a way to building a bridge between Catholic conservatism and a popular base was anti-Semitism. Édouard Drumont, whose father had been an official at the Hôtel de Ville and early in the Second Empire the boss of Henri Rochefort, was a journalist who was increasingly unhappy with the opportunist Republic and with the influence over it of the Rothschilds and Reinachs. In 1886 he published La France juive, which sold over 100,000 copies in its first year alone and made his fortune. Singlehandedly, he transformed anti-Semitism from a socialist ideology that had been peddled by Proudhon and certain Blanquists, which attacked the Jews as usurers and capitalists, into an all-embracing condemnation of Jews for the evils of the modern world. They were said to embody parasitic finance capital, promoting large department stores at the expense of small shopkeepers and lending to peasants at extortionate rates. They were exposed as the power behind the republican political class, as bankers, newspaper magnates, publishers, members of the Académie Française, the theatre, schools and universities, who were increasingly divorced from and shamelessly exploited and deceived real, popular, eternal France. Ever since they crucified Christ they had ceaselessly attacked the Catholic Church, hatching freemasonry to launch the French Revolution. The divorce law of 1884 was the work of one Jew, Naquet, the law of 1880 introducing lay education for young women that of another, Camille Sée. Most of Drumont’s ideas were entirely ridiculous – the defeat of 1870 was said to be a conspiracy of German Jews to take over France, Gambetta was a Jew from Genoa, Protestants were half Jewish – but the idea of a Jewish plot behind all contemporary misfortunes was highly seductive. Reviewing La France juive the socialist Benoît Malon pointed out that ‘the proletariat and petite bourgeoisie suffer from capitalism as a whole, whether it is Jewish or non-Jewish.’45 And yet La Croix argued in 1894 that ‘the social question is, fundamentally, the Jewish question.’46
Drumont gave focus to anti-Semitism in his slogan ‘La France aux Français’ and in the arguments which were broadcast even more widely by the paper he founded in 1892, La Libre Parole. His ideas were taken up by other movements, not least by Catholics seeking to broaden their appeal and to find new weapons against the Republic. La Croix, founded by the Assumptionists in 1880 and edited by Vincent de Paul Bailly, became a daily in 1883 and by 1895 had eighty-six departmental editions, most of them weeklies. It was aimed not at the bourgeoisie but at the lower clergy and a popular clientele; La Croix du Nord had a circulation of 23,000 in 1899 and was read among others by textile workers, miners, small tradesmen and peasants. It embraced anti-Semitism in 1889 and the following year proclaimed itself ‘the most anti-Jewish paper in France, because it is emblazoned by Christ, mark of horror for the Jew’. Sales rose from 60,000 in 1888 to 160,000 in 1892 and 200,000 in 1899. Echoing La France juive, it blamed Jews for the capitalism that was destroying hard-working, traditional France, the liberalism that eased them into positions of power, and the Jewish press and education system that was undermining religion. In order to structure their support in the regions the Assumptionists set up Comités Justice-Égalité after 1896. When Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 it came as no surprise to the Assumptionists: Vincent de Paul Bailly described him as ‘the Jewish enemy betraying France’.47
Attempts to bridge the gap between Church and people became more common and more committed in the 1890s as socialism increased its hold on the working class and republican politicians showed no sign of relaxing anticlericalism. One such initiative was undertaken by the so-called abbés démocrates, local clergy who drew their populist ideas in part from Rerum novarum, in part also from the anti-Semitic press. They were democratic in that they wished to free the Catholic Church from its association with the rich and political reaction and inspired by the gospel took the side of ordinary people – peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, industrial workers – recognizing their right to form trade unions and even to strike, and sometimes coming into conflict with their bishops. They were democratic in that they endorsed popular sovereignty and developed a popular press or popular movements or ran in elections against not only republican anticlericals but also Catholic con servatives. Here they were particularly successful in fervently Catholic areas where peasant democracy was strong and landowners weak. The Abbé Lemire, born into a Flemish peasant family and teaching at the seminary at Hazebrouck, was inspired by Rerum novarum and decided to ‘embrace modern society to bring it back to the Church’.48 In 1893 he was elected deputy for Hazebrouck against General de Freschville, a conservative ally of Jacques Piou who was also supported by the archbishop of Cambrai. The Abbé Gayraud, a former Dominican, was elected in 1897 at Brest against the royalist Comte Louis de Blois and opposed by the bishop of Quimper.49 These abbés were, however, populist rather than democratic in their espousal of anti-Semitic ideas as a way to cultivate their popular base. Significantly the Abbé Naudet, who founded La Justice Sociale in 1893, appealed to those who wanted to ‘free our country from freemasonry and Jewry’ and set ‘Religion, Family and Property at the head of our manifesto’.50 The Abbé Garnier, of Norman peasant stock and a former papal zouave, worked on La Croix until he left it to found Le Peuple Français in 1893. In this he argued that the aim of Jews was ‘not only to ruin France but to destroy the Church of which France is the strongest support… The Jewish question arises because we have chased Jesus Christ from our midst: it is a punishment for our impiety.’ Garnier founded a Union Nationale which had committees in thirty-five departments, mainly in Lyon and the south-east, whose task was to rechristianize France by fighting socialism, freemasonry and Jews. It used Drumont’s slogan ‘La France aux Français’ and supported Drumont’s Anti-Semitic League in Paris in the elections of 1898; and in 1910 Le Peuple Français merged with La Libre Parole.51
The clamour from the end of 1897 that Captain Dreyfus had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice and that his case should be reopened was a direct challenge to those Catholics who believed that France could be saved only by eliminating the influence of Jews, Protestants and freemasons. At the head of those fighting for a judicial review were Dreyfus’ brother Mathieu and Joseph Reinach, former associate of Gambetta and deputy of Digne, Bernard-Lazare and Léon Blum, which gave some substance to the Catholic accusation that the campaign was led by a ‘Jewish syndicate’. Zola, if not a Jew, was denounced by Barrès as a ‘deracinated Venetian’.52 The involvement of leading Protestants such as the Alsatian Auguste Scheurer-Kestner provoked parallel attacks on Protestants who were considered half-Jews by Drumont – rich, clever, cosmopolitan and therefore traitors to the national interest. Polemics such as Pierre Froment’s Protestant Betrayal and Ernest Renauld’s Protestant Peril in 1899 argued that Protestantism had stood for ‘continuous revolution’ in France since 1789, that Protestants had conquered all the top posts in state and society, that the godless school was an instrument of ‘Protestant dechristianization’ and that Protestants supported Germany and Great Britain as Protestant powers against Catholic France.53 Charles Maurras launched an attack against the Monod family of formerly Swiss Protestant pastors and professors, a ‘state within a state’ who were corrupting French universities with their Germanic science and had thrown themselves into ‘the hystero-epilepsy of dreyfusism’.54 Freemasons too were subjected to attacks, since the whole masonic enterprise was thought to be a Jewish invention, notably by Jules Lemaître of the Ligue de la Patrie Française in his 1899 Franc-maçonnerie.
To begin with, the big blows were struck by the antidreyfusard camp. Émile Zola was put on trial for libel and found guilty. Outside the courtroom Jules Guérin’s Anti-Semitic League fomented trouble and beat up Joseph Reinach. In the elections of 1898 Reinach failed to get re-elected at Digne whereas Drumont was returned at Algiers and twenty-two anti-Semitic deputies took their place in the Chamber. At a prize-giving at the Dominican college of Arcueil Père Didon defended the army as ‘the guardian of law, the spotless knight of justice’.55 Six weeks later, when Colonel Henry slit his throat in Mont-Valérien prison and Joseph Reinach suggested that he had framed Dreyfus, Drumont’s La Libre Parole opened a subscription ‘For the widow and orphan of Colonel Henry against the Jew Reinach’, to pay for her widowhood and for libel proceedings against Reinach.56 The Dreyfus case was finally reopened in 1899, sitting out of the way in Rennes. Attending it, Maurice Barrès visited the nearby château of Combourg, where Chateaubriand had been raised, and observed, ‘that Dreyfus is capable of treachery, I know from his race.’57 Dreyfus was again found guilty, albeit with ‘extenuating circumstances’.
‘Writers, scholars, artists, professors!… this penetration of “intelligence” filled us with joy,’ Léon Blum later wrote of the Affair, which for many historians saw the birth of the French intellectual, committed to a public cause.58 More powerful at the time, however, was the dreyfusards’ sense of being a small group of apostles, persecuted for their commitment to truth and justice, ready if necessary to sacrifice themselves as martyrs to the cause. ‘I hope that from my first article’, wrote Zola, ‘I became one of the band.’ ‘Whoever suffers for truth and justice’, he told the jury at his trial, ‘becomes august and sacred.’59 They saw themselves fighting against both pre judice and lies, called by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu ‘the doctrines of hatred’, and against the arbitrary power of the army and for many months the state.60 They were refighting the battles of the French Revolution, setting up the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme at the time of the Zola trial, but they also identified with Voltaire’s battles against the intolerant Catholic Church, the single religion of the absolutist state before 1789. Raoul Allier, professor at the Protestant Theology Faculty of Paris, revisited the Calas affair as a previous miscarriage of justice in a study of 1898.61 A statue of Chevalier de la Barre, hero of freethinkers, was provocatively erected in front of the basilica of Sacré Coeur, which had been completed in 1891, during a convention of the national congress of freethinking societies in Paris in 1903.62 Other dreyfusards went back to medieval times to find parallels of religious persecution. Camille Pelletan denounced the Dominican Père Didon as ‘truly the heir of those ferocious dévots whose order was founded to massacre heretics and in the Middle Ages put the south of France to fire and sword’, adding that he had forged ‘a holy alliance between habit and plume, between sabre and holy-water sprinkler’.63 Going back to Biblical times the Protestant Ferdinand Buisson, one of the founders of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, condemned ‘Phariseeism, which is worse than anti-Semitism… the clerical, military, judicial or political Phariseeism that says: there is no Dreyfus Affair’.64
Eventually the republican state stepped in to deal with the Catholic and anti-Semitic assault that was deemed to threaten not only Jews, Protestants and freemasons but the Republic itself. The Waldeck-Rousseau ministry was formed under the banner of ‘republican defence’ and Waldeck had recourse to law to impose restrictions on the Catholic Church. Since the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1880 the Assumptionists were considered the most powerfully organized, influential congregation, the engine behind the antidreyfusard attack. Waldeck denounced ‘ligueur monks and business monks’ and the Assumptionist order was dissolved in 1900.65 The Associations Law of 1 July 1901 was used not only to authorize trade unions but to regularize the position of religious congregations that had been set up during the nineteenth century without formally requesting permission under the Concordat. As a republican from Nantes and former deputy for Rennes, Waldeck-Rousseau understood that Catholic populations like the Bretons would vote republican so long as their religion was safeguarded. He therefore intended to apply the Associations Law discriminately, and to ask the advice of communes in which teaching congregations had schools before giving or refusing permission.
Feeling among anticlericals was nevertheless running high. Masonic lodges and freethinking societies were among those organizations which set up the Radical Party in 1901, and this party emerged as the dominant force in the 1902 elections. Waldeck-Rousseau was obliged to resign and Émile Combes, who had been rapporteur of the Associations Law in the Senate, was invited to form a government. Combes decided to apply the law in a completely different way, rejecting requests for authorization from congregations as a whole, female congregations included, without regard to how popular they were in individual towns and villages. While teaching brothers ran only a minority of boys’ schools and enjoyed little popularity, les bonnes soeurs as they were known ran most girls’ schools and provided a range of services including nursing, crèches and nurseries, and were very popular in many areas. The people of Finistère, for example, set great store by the Filles du Saint-Esprit, often local girls who would otherwise have migrated as maids to Paris, who instead provided childcare for women working in the sardine factories and free medical care in a region where doctors were scarce. Demonstrations were organized and the local Radical deputy Georges Le Bail, whose windows were broken, intervened on their behalf, but to no avail, and he almost lost his seat in the 1906 election.66
In Catholic circles Combes was regarded as a Jacobin, sectarian and political freemason. He regarded himself as a ‘spiritualist philosophe’ who thought that all congregations, ‘under a veil of piety and charity… cultivate a hatred of modern society, its institutions and its laws’.67 As a former teacher in the Assumptionist College of Nîmes he clearly had views on the subject and one of his models was Ernest Renan, another man of religion turned freethinker, a statue to whom he unveiled in 1903 in Renan’s home town of Tréguier in Brittany. Combes himself was from the southwest, and Waldeck’s former chef de cabinet, Joseph Paul-Boncour, saw him as a heretic taking revenge on the Catholic Church for the crusades against the Albigensians.68
Combes not only closed down the teaching congregations, he also terminated diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1904 after Pope Pius X protested against the state visit of President Loubet to Italy. He had plans to revise the Concordat in ways that would have tightened state control over the Church but he fell from power before he could impose them. The parliamentary commission charged with redefining Church–state relations was chaired by a Protestant, Ferdinand Buisson, and included Paul Grunebaum-Ballin, the Jewish chef de cabinet of Aristide Briand who, as secretary of the commission and representative of the new political generation born around 1860, wished to stake out a reputation as the architect of religious peace. The commission proposed to separate Church and state, or rather Churches and state, since the Protestant Church was also regulated under the Concordat and would recover its freedom, and this became law on 9 December 1905. Separation meant that clergy would no longer be paid by the state, but in return the state would no longer appoint bishops or control their relations with Rome, and bishops would be allowed to have their own assembly, which had not been permitted under the Concordat. The main stumbling block was the ownership of churches, seminaries and vicarages which, under the Concordat, were publicly owned. The law provided for lay associations which would take possession of church property, and this solution was initially welcomed by French bishops. However, visitations by public authorities to undertake inventories of the furniture and sacred vessels held in churches was regarded in some communities as a prelude to confiscation, and in Catholic areas such as the west of France, Massif Central, Brittany and Flanders the faithful barricaded themselves into churches to stop inventories taking place. Moreover the pope regarded the lay associations set up to manage church property as an attack on the hierarchy and, just as his predecessor condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, so he rejected the Separation in 1906. Deadlock ensued until in 1907 the government ruled that the clergy could use churches albeit ‘without legal title’, a makeshift situation that persisted until the pope authorized diocesan associations in 1924.69
The deputies who voted the Separation law were returned en masse in May 1906. Catholics were unable to make political capital out of the dissolution of the teaching congregations or the Separation of Church and state. Albert de Mun claimed that the mantle of liberalism now fell on those who wanted to ‘defend religion persecuted by sectarians and the country threatened by cosmopolitans’, but the Action Libérale Party he set up won only seventy-eight seats in the 1902 Chamber elections and, rechristened the Action Libérale Populaire, sixty-four in the elections of 1906.70 There was a great exodus of teaching brothers and especially nuns from France, to countries such as Belgium or Canada where they would be welcome. Catholic schools could survive only if former brothers or nuns discarded the habit and acquired ‘letters of secularization’ from their superior, and moved to a different school. Increasingly Catholic schools fell back on curates or a lay staff, usually women, for whom financial prospects were precarious indeed. While state schools were free, school fees had to be charged in Catholic schools but covered only a fraction of the cost. In order to populate Catholic schools at the expense of state schools, bishops launched a new offensive against ‘godless schools’ in 1909, targeting not manuals of moral and civic education, as in 1882, but history textbooks placed on the Index which praised the Reformation and Revolution and denigrated France as the eldest daughter of the Church. This had some success in heavily practising areas such as the Côtes-du-Nord, where the Catholic school population rose by 29 per cent in 1908–12.71 Young priests threw their energies into the foundation of youth clubs or patronages aimed at those who had just left school, providing hobbies, amateur dramatics, gymnastics and football alongside religious education.72 In 1908 a congress of young women’s clubs under diocesan supervision which federated in 1904 sang ‘Despite the hell, we wish that France / Returns by thee Jesus, to thy law,’ and the beatification of Joan of Arc in 1909 gave a great boost to young female religiosity.73 Pilgrimages to Lourdes reached a peak in 1908, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bernadette’s visions, with over a million pilgrims travelling there.74 All these efforts had little effect, however, on the anticlerical majority in parliament. Just before the third elections after the Separation the archbishop of Rennes regretted that ‘those who are Christians in their private life contradict themselves lamentably in public life. They attend church, claim to be good parishioners, and would not willingly defy divine teaching. Yet when the elections come they lose all idea of things Catholic and sometimes leave mass to vote for the worst enemies of religion.’75
One effect of the Separation was to involve the laity much more closely in the work of the Church, and here youth movements were particularly important. Albert de Mun had set up the Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française (ACJF) in 1886, to group former college students of the Jesuits and other expelled congregations; it was somewhat conservative, and closely supervised by bishops. Rather different was the Sillon, founded in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair by Marc Sangnier, a graduate of the Catholic Collège Stanislas in Paris and the École Polytechnique. Rather than constantly sniping at the Republic and seeking to inoculate the converted against its evil influence, he accepted that republican democracy was here to stay but argued that the Republic did not have to be sectarian, that ‘democracy has a thirst for Christianity.’76 In March 1905 he engaged in debate with the Marxist Jules Guesde at Roubaix, arguing that the Church was not the capitalists’ gendarme and that the working classes had to be emancipated spiritually as well as economically.77 His enemies on the right were even more intractable. At Easter 1905 challenges passed between the ACJF congress meeting in Quimper and the Sillon congress meeting in Saint-Brieuc. Although the Sillon had 640 groups and 10,000 militants Sangnier accused the ACJF of using the hierarchy to seek to monopolize Catholic youth.78 In 1906 Charles Maurras accused him of being a ‘Christian anarchist’ and in 1910 Pope Pius condemned the Sillon.79 The comment was made at the time that like Lamennais he had gone too far from the Church, and like Lamennais had been condemned.80
Although progressive Catholics found it difficult to take the Church with them, much less stood in the way of young people who had been brought up in the lay republican system converting on an individual basis. The Separation of Church and state dissipated the shadow of the state Church with pretensions to impose some uniformity of belief in France, while the policy of Combes and his ilk suggested that persecution was now the style of the Republic. The period before the war indeed saw the conversion of a number of high-profile, educated young people who were advised by influential Catholic writers.81 The writer Léon Bloy suffered a spiritual crisis after his father’s death in 1877 and began to visit La Salette, becoming obsessed with the Virgin crowned with thorns and weeping for humanity. He and his family lived a life of pious poverty on Montmartre, values which he exalted in La Femme pauvre (1897). He had a huge influence on a group of Sorbonne students who came from prominent republican families. These included Jacques Maritain, grandson of Jules Favre, Ernest Psichari, grandson of Ernest Renan, who both frequented the Bellais bookshop of Charles Péguy in the Latin Quarter, and together with Péguy attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, which celebrated intuition over analytical reason, at the Collège de France. In 1904 Maritain married Raïssa, a Jewish girl whose family had fled the pogroms in Russia, who read La Femme pauvre and made contact with Bloy. Two years later, under the guidance of Bloy, who became their godfather, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain were baptized, had their marriage blessed, and went on pilgrimage to La Salette.82 Ernest Psichari, rejected by Maritain’s sister Jeanne and fearing that his grades would not be good enough for the academic career to which his family had destined him, had a breakdown in 1903. He became a soldier, serving in Africa, and converted under the guidance of Maritain in 1913, a model for the new generation of muscular Christian youth celebrated by another contemporary, Henri Massis, who co-wrote Les Jeunes Gens d’aujourd’hui under the pen-name Agathon.83
More difficult was the trajectory of Charles Péguy, who sought to reconcile Catholicism with his dreyfusard and even socialist roots but was not fully accepted by Catholic converts. Péguy broke with the left in 1903 when he saw socialists like Jaurès using the dreyfusard cause, to which he had been devoted, for purely political reasons, to legitimate the Bloc des Gauches. He denounced the radical republicans for seeking to impose an irreligous state philosophy. In 1908 he announced, ‘I have recovered my faith, I am Catholic,’ and in 1910 published La Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc.84 For this he was claimed for the Catholic right by a chorus of Barrès, Maurras and Drumont, who regarded this as a political coup, and he was forced to reply in Notre Jeunesse that while antidreyfusards like them had sought only the temporal salvation of France, dreyfusards like him had sought its eternal salvation, refusing to leave it in a state of mortal sin.85 Catholics like Maritain, whom Péguy had long considered a younger brother, were not so convinced. Maritain argued that Péguy’s Joan was too wilful, too ambitious, instead of being the passive vessel of God’s grace, and was concerned that Péguy refused to have his marriage solemnized or his children baptized. ‘You still have far to go,’ Maritain told him, ‘in order to become a faithful Christian.’86 The division between anticlerical republicans and Catholics remained clear, and would require another factor to bridge it: patriotism.