Children of the Revolution
Page 41
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
Th
e 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
THE TENACITY OF RELIGIOUS
PRACTICE
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 n
ot 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