Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  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.

  A CATHOLIC OFFENSIVE

  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 Algie
rs 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 Nation
ale 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 DREYFUS AFFAIR AS A

  RELIGIOUS WAR

  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.