Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  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 hier
archy 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

  RELIGIOUS REVIVAL AFTER THE

  SEPARATION

  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.

  13

  Feminism and its Frustrations

  MARRIAGE IN QUESTION

  In 1883 a new play, Around Marriage, opened in Paris. The heroine, Paulette d’Hautretan, aged twenty, is engaged to marry a thirty-six-year-old man, Monsieur d’Alaly. In the smoking room he tel
ls his friends, ‘I will mould her as I wish and assert an influence over her from the beginning that I shall keep.’ Her mother warns Paulette that ‘from tomorrow, you will have to obey him… Your husband will have every right over you… He could ask anything of you.’ But in response to the question suggested by this, ‘Would you like to have children, Paulette?’, Paulette blithely replies, ‘Not right away. You see, mother, I will tell you frankly, I am getting married to have fun.’1

  Paulette is at once naive and capricious, inclined less to flout convention than to see it as irrelevant to her. On honeymoon, she asks her husband to change his name – ‘Joseph is a ridiculous name’ – and tells him after their wedding night, ‘If I thought it was going to be worse, I also thought it would be more fun.’ When her husband reprimands her for reading Things of Love she ripostes, ‘I didn’t get married to read Walter Scott,’ and she antagonizes him by using slang, playing tennis, wearing swimming costumes that show off her legs, and going riding in male attire, all in the company of male admirers. ‘You are a terrible flirt [coquette],’ he complains, to which she replies,

  But it’s unconscious – unconscious!!… God knows, they did everything to make me an accomplished little lady, eyes cast down, sweet, submissive, banal and insignificant, with simple desires and an imperious need to meet a guide (or several) in life, absolutely unable to do anything thoughtless. But it didn’t work, as you see, and I don’t think that you will succeed where others failed.2