Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
THE
RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
IN FRANCE
1900-1906
_Nihil Obstat_:
JOSEPH WILHELM, S. T. D.,
CENSOR DEPUTATUS.
_Imprimi potest_
✠ GULIELMUS,
EPISCOPUS ARINDELENSIS,
VICARIUS GENERALIS.
WESTMONASTERII,
_Die 6 Aprilis, 1907_.
THE RELIGIOUS
PERSECUTION
IN FRANCE
1900-1906
BY
J. NAPIER BRODHEAD
AUTHOR OF “SLAV AND MOSLEM”
_LONDON_
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.
43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO, W.
1907
PREFACE
These Considerations, written during the last six years’ residence in
France, have already appeared in the Press of the United States. They
were written from year to year without any thought of republication,
which seems justified to-day by the acuity of the conflict between the
Church and the French atheocracy, a conflict which cannot but interest
Christians everywhere.
J. N. B.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FIRST IMPRESSIONS 1
THE TWO CAMPS 7
THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL 13
THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL 18
ARBITRARY INCONSISTENCY 29
A PAGAN RENAISSANCE 33
INCONSISTENT JACOBINISM 40
UNAUTHORISED CONGREGATIONS 46
A COMBES _COUP DE MAIN_ 50
LEGALIZED DESPOTISM 57
DESPOTISM PLUS GUILE 63
UNCHANGING JACOBINISM 71
DEATH OF WALDECK ROUSSEAU 78
LIBERTY AND STATE SERVITUDE 82
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 91
A PAPAL NOTE 105
FREEMASONRY 112
FREEMASONRY 118
PART SECOND 125
ALCOHOLISM IN FRANCE 131
THE LAW OF SEPARATION 135
CATHOLICISM IN GERMANY 144
PSEUDO-SEPARATION 147
THE PROGRESS OF ANARCHY 160
THE ABOLITION OF THE CONCORDAT 170
THE INVENTORIES 177
DUC IN ALTUM 185
THE LATEST PHASE OF SEPARATION 197
LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY 211
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 233
APPENDIX 249
THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
LYON, _March 17th, 1900_.
There seems to be considerable misapprehension in the United States as
to the status of the Catholic Church in France. “One iniquitous
arrangement in France,” writes the _Central Baptist_, “is the support of
the priesthood out of public funds.” In receiving stipends from the
State the French clergy, however, are no more its debtors, nor its
functionaries, than holders of French 3 per cents who receive the
interest of their bonds. When that essentially satanic movement, known
as the French Revolution, swept over this fair land, deluging it in
blood, the wealth of the Church, the accumulation of centuries, was all
confiscated by the hordes who pillaged and devastated, and killed in the
name of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, until Napoleon restored order
with an iron hand. A born ruler of men, this Corsican understood that
the principal feature of the work of restoration must be the
reorganization of the Catholic Church in France. Accordingly he
concluded with the Pope the convention known as the Concordat. It was
not possible in the dilapidated state of the country to restore the
millions that had been stolen by those “champions of liberty who,”
according to Macaulay, “compressed into twelve months more crimes than
the kings of France had committed in twelve centuries.” Still less was
it possible to rebuild many noble structures, and recover works of art
sold by sordid harpies or destroyed by impious vandals. It was
accordingly agreed (Arts. 13 and 14, Concordat) that in lieu of this
restitution the State should henceforth pay to the Church, annually, the
stipends of so many archbishops, bishops, curates, etc.
The Concordat constitutes an organic law of the State. The clergy
receive their stipends, not as a salary, but as the payment of a debt
due to them by the State. It is in vain, therefore, that efforts are
made now to represent the Catholic clergy as salaried functionaries of
the State. The act by which Waldeck Rousseau recently decreed the
suppression of the stipends of certain bishops was wholly arbitrary,
and, moreover, the violation of an organic law. It was the partial
repudiation of a public debt, quite as dishonourable as if the payment
of interest of three per cent bonds were withheld from certain
bondholders.
The position of Protestant and Jewish ministers in France is entirely
different. They do receive salaries which are purely gratuitous. The
Revolutionists did not trouble them, and they had no part in the
Concordat of 1801. We may say that the French Revolution was appeased,
but it is not over by any means. No nation less well founded and
grounded could have withstood as France has done the shocks and
upheavals of a century.
To this day France is still profoundly Catholic, in spite of the
millions of public money expended in so-called non-sectarian primary
schools and colleges. Travellers stroll into French churches, in summer,
at High Mass on Sundays at 9.30 or 10.30 generally, and because they
find a very small congregation at this service they report that the
churches are deserted and religion fast dying out. They ignore the fact
that in these churches low masses have been said hourly since 5 a.m., so
that people may comply with their duty, and then go off on their outing.
Lyon has many large beautiful old churches, and many handsome new ones.
Yet not one of them could contain all their parishioners if they wished
to attend the same service.
For nearly twenty-five years the Government has been running its
educational machine at immense cost, compelling the French to support
schools they will not patronize, as well as those of their own choice.
Nevertheless, State colleges and primary schools are so neglected that
laws are being devised to compel parents to send their children to them.
If all other means fail, the congregations of both sexes occupied in
teaching will be suppressed. This is the Government’s programme. There
is nothing so bad as the corruption of that which is best. France is
still profoundly Catholic, and it is only natural that the struggle
between good and evil should be sharp here. The forces of reaction and
action are always proportionate. Hence it is that France has always been
“the centre of Masonic history,” and of the Goddess Reason’s supreme
efforts against Christianity. Her temperament, too, makes her a choice
field for experiments.
We can therefore understand M. Waldeck Rousseau’s indignation when so
many bishops openly expressed their sympathy with and admiration for the
Assumptionist Fathers who were condemned recently--and condemned for
what crime? For being an unauthorized association of more than twenty
persons, when there are hundreds of other similar associations at the
present moment.
Briefly stated, the present phase of the Church in France is simply the
nineteenth-century phase of the struggles of Investiture in the Middle
Ages; the secular power seeking to have and to dominate a national
Church, whose ministers are to be nothing but state functionaries,
bound to serve and to support the Government. This was the old pagan
ideal, and every portion of the Church that has renounced allegiance to
Rome has fallen into this condition. In England, in Russia, in the
Byzantine Empire, in Turkey, in Africa--wherever there is a national
Church--it is little better than a department of State. The Gallican
Church narrowly escaped a similar fate in the days of Louis XIV. The
Civil Constitution of the Clergy was another desperate and abortive
attempt to nationalize and secularize the Church in France. Gloriously,
too, her clergy expiated their momentary Gallican insubordination. All
over France they were guillotined, drowned, and exiled, and imprisoned,
_en masse_, rather than submit to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
There is nothing more admirable in the history of Christianity than the
conduct of the victims massacred in the convent of the Carmelites,
converted into a prison by the Jacobins. Martyrs and confessors were as
numerous as in the first centuries of the Church, and from their ashes
arose a new French Church purified by poverty and suffering.
Never have institutions of learning and charity under religious
direction been so numerous. No country has a clergy more zealous, more
learned, more united with the Holy See than that of France to-day. No
wonder then that the powers of darkness are devising means to destroy
the new structure, so zealously and so laboriously raised on the ruins
accumulated by the Revolution of 1790.
“Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.”
Violent measures would rouse French Catholics from their political
apathy. The Government cannot afford to do this. Religious liberty must
be destroyed by degrees--and herein lies the danger.
THE TWO CAMPS
_May 25th, 1900._
To the thoughtful and sympathetic observer, France presents a singular
spectacle of duality--two camps and two standards are confronting each
other, neo-paganism and Christianity. By Christianity I mean, of course,
Catholicism, for though there may be good Protestants, who adhere to
some of the truths of revealed religion, such a thing as a good pervert
French Protestant is a _lusus naturæ_, practically non-existent. It is a
notorious fact that Protestants in France as elsewhere in Europe are, as
a rule, absolutely indifferent in religious matters since they have
ceased to be persecuted, and in many cases they have become the enemies
of revealed religion.
All civilization, all redemption from barbarism, is fostered and
developed around a sanctuary. Consecrated hands have, in every instance,
laid the corner stone of the social edifice. The Church, the
school-house, the university, the courts of justice--these are the
normal steps by which societies, cities, and nations have advanced in
the Old World out of barbarism and chaos since the overthrow of the
Roman Empire. Of France this is pre-eminently true. Hundreds of
villages and towns bear the names of holy missionary monks who built
first a cell, and then a monastery around a chapel, which became the
centre of a village, that grew in time to be a city. We see the same
thing all over Europe and in the British Isles. Gibbon says that the
French bishops made the French monarchy as bees construct a honeycomb.
Like every institution that bears a religious imprint, this monarchy was
long-lived. Those who descant so volubly on the flightiness of the
French people, always overturning their government and never satisfied
with the one they have, would do well to reflect that the French
monarchy lasted some fourteen centuries. When this monarchy was
overthrown by the assassination of Louis XVI there was formed a vortex
in which were engulfed millions of human lives. Not that I consider a
monarchical or any special form of government indispensable to France’s
prosperity. There is, however, one essential condition. The generating
principle of the French nation was the Catholic Faith. Without it,
France would no longer be herself. She would disintegrate interiorly,
and dismemberment and decadence would follow. France is still profoundly
Catholic, in spite of the prodigious efforts made since the days of
Voltaire and Tom Paine by numerous native and alien religious vandals,
whose prostituted intellects were garnished from the storehouse of
centuries of Christian culture. She will always be this or nothing. For
any one who knows France, historically and psychologically, it is
preposterous to think of a substitute creed, corresponding to any of the
various shreds of Christianity, which do duty for religion under the
name of some one or other of the multitudinous Protestant sects.
France, I repeat, will always be Catholic or nothing. But the Government
is on the verge of apostasy. For the first time in French history the
usual religious observances on Good Friday were suppressed in all the
naval ports. “What thou doest do quickly,” and on this occasion the
order was sent by telegraph on Thursday evening. As I stated in my last
letter, irreligious education is doing its work, and the increase of
juvenile criminals is appalling.[1]
If the projected law regarding religious associations is voted, it will
be tantamount to the abolition of all religious teaching, as the
existence of these congregations will be rendered impracticable. England
and the United States will be the gainers, as they were when the
Revolution dispersed the priesthood in 1790.
The French Government is on the verge of apostasy, as I have said. Is
this a cause, a presage, or a symptom of national decadence? All three,
I fear. Nations stand or fall with their governments. They have the
government they merit and they are punished for the evil doings of their
rulers. “I gave them a king in my wrath,” it was written. Is there
sufficient vitality left in the French constitution to reject the poison
that is undermining it, and of which alcoholism, unknown in France fifty
years ago, is but the outward and visible sign? The assertion I make
that the greatness of the French people and their very national
existence is bound up with the Christian Faith is unquestioned by every
thinker in France, even by those who, for diverse reasons, do not
practise their religion, though they all bank on the last sacraments and
would be very sorry to see their wives and children neglect their
religious duties.
The governments which have succeeded each other since 1880 have
flattered themselves that they could govern without the Church and
against the Church. Bismarck tried it and failed. The Catholic party
triumphed. It still holds the balance of power in Germany, and the
nation is growing daily more powerful and prosperous. In France, alas!
it is quite the contrary. In order to crush what they are pleased to
call the “clerical” party, the Government has allied itself with
Socialists of the reddest streak. Indeed, we may say that anarchy and
socialism, or collectivism as it is called, are sitting in high places.
Any president or minister who dared to stem the tide would fall. They
must temporize, resign, or die. Carnot was assassinated. Casimir-Perier
resigned; Faure, who steadily opposed the revision of the Dreyfus case,
was poisoned, I am told--at any rate, it is said that he died almost
immediately after swallowing a cup of tea at a soirée. Though the public
has no means of forming a correct judgment regarding the guilt of the
notorious Dreyfus, the most important evidence having been secret, I
have never doubted that he was justly condemned. At any rate, he
accepted the Presidential pardon, and withdrew his appeal, a strange
thing for an innocent man to do. This alone, it would seem, ought to
estop him from a new trial. But unfortunately the whole thing is to be
gone over again, though it is a perfect nightmare for four-fifths of the
French nation.
I know France intimately since thirty years, and it is with infinite
sorrow that I diagnose her present condition and its perils.
According to custom, the Imperial Court of Russia retired to Moscow for
Holy Week, and while the Czar, laying aside court etiquette, was
kneeling humbly on the bare floor among his peasant subjects, holding
his lighted candle like them, his allies, the rulers of France, were
desecrating Easter Vigil by inaugurating the Paris Exhibition with
speeches, which seemed to have been compiled from those made by
Robespierre and his companions on that very Champs de Mars a century
ago, when they inaugurated their theo-philanthropy and the worship of
the Goddess of Reason.
I presume Holy Saturday was selected because it is a high festival among
the Jews; otherwise Easter Monday would surely have been more
appropriate in a country where there are thirty-five million Catholics.
This was on the 9th April, and the Exposition they were in such a hurry
to inaugurate on that particular day is far from ready even now.
THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL
_May 4th, 1901._
A year ago I wrote in these columns as follows: “For twenty years the
Government has been running its educational machine at immense loss,
compelling the French to support their own schools as well as those they
will not patronize. Nevertheless, State schools and colleges are so
neglected that laws are being devised to compel parents to send their
children to them. If all other means fail, the congregations of both
sexes occupied in teaching will be suppressed.”
Now this is the true object of the Associations Bill; all the rest is
merely padding. Liberty of association for Freemasons, Socialists, and
all friends of the Third Republic will be untrammelled as heretofore.
The blow aimed at religious teachers is of peculiar interest at this
hour, when Christians, all over the world, are recognizing the immense
importance of the religious education of the young, if we would preserve
the structure of Western civilization, so laboriously built up during
2000 years, and save its deep foundations from being sapped by the
returning tide of barbarism and paganism. For the revolutionary spirit
of to-day is simply another version of that renaissance of paganism
which culminated in the Protestant revolt. As in the past, it will be
met by a great Catholic revival like that of the sixteenth century,
which Macaulay has so eloquently described in his Essay on Ranke’s
_Papacy_. This is the counter-revolution against which the self-styled
government of “Défense Republicaine” is dressing its batteries. Already
the effects of this revival are felt and, as Macaulay has pointed out,
revivals of the religious spirit, this everlasting factor in the history
of humanity which our pseudo-scientists so unscientifically ignore,
always redound to the benefit of Catholicism. When men like Brunetière,
Bourget, Lemaître, François Coppée, become standard-bearers of truth, we
are consoled for the vociferations of any number of Vivianis,
Trouillots, etc., in and outside the French Chambers, for whom “the
eternal decalogue” is but an antiquated superstition that must be swept
away.
The law against the Congregations has been opposed in the Chambers by
many Republicans who have no religious scruples, and one may safely
affirm that there is not a respectable Frenchman, outside the coterie in
power, who does not condemn the Bill.
A few days before its passage, a mass meeting of many trade unions,
presided over by Leroy Beaulieu, was held in Paris to protest against
the projected suppression of the Congregations. The eminent economist
declared that the proposed legislation was one of “national suicide.”
If the law is so repugnant to the French in general, how is it that the
Government always obtains a majority? it may be asked.
The explanation lies in the fact that while honest Frenchmen have been
attending to their business and leaving politics strictly alone, this
anti-religious campaign has been carefully prepared since many years by
the enemies of Christianity. Like all notable persecutions, it is the
work of secret societies. The Boxers of China are a congeries of these
societies. In the days of Julian the chief instigators and abettors of
persecution were the secret societies of Mithra, whom Renan declared to
have been “veritable Masonic lodges with their initiations, passwords,”
etc.
Since 1875 the “Grand Orient,” in which the Jewish element predominates,
has gradually been gathering into its hands all the reins of government;
not a very difficult task, seeing that as a rule respectable,
industrious Frenchmen will not touch politics, while the emissaries of
the lodges go out into the slums of mining and industrial centres, and
organize primaries and Socialist clubs that defeat any respectable
candidate who dares to enter the lists against the candidate of the
Government. Jules Lemaître, in the _Echo de Paris_, states that there
are 400 deputies and 10 ministers who are Freemasons. As these latter
number about 25,000 in France, it follows that there is one
representative in Parliament for every 50 Freemason electors, whereas
there is only one representative for every 1800 votes who are not
affiliated to the “Grand Orient.” With a house packed in this way, any
legislation is possible. Madame Sorgues, lately sub-editor of Jaurès’
Socialist organ, _La Petite Republique_, has published some interesting
revelations, showing how the Judeo Freemasons have made tools of the
Socialists in order to seize the reins of government. “In combating the
combats of Dreyfus,” she writes, “Jaurès and his friends brought about a
singular _rapprochement_ of the two most irreconcilable camps ... the
presents of the kings of capital were accepted. The first service
rendered was to restore the tottering Socialist Press.... All the
advanced [meaning anti-clerical Socialist] dailies have passed into the
hands of the great barons of finance; they are _their_ journals now, not
the journals of the workers.... Then they cast their eyes on Waldeck
Rousseau, the clever rescuer of the Panamists.... The agent of the
Dreyfus politics had the happy thought of introducing into the Cabinet,
Millerand, the Socialist leader, with the consent of his party.
Socialism become ministerial would be _domestiqué_, and rendered
inoffensive against capital,” etc. Last fall, the President, Loubet,
when at Lyons, dared to be the guest of the Chamber of Commerce, in
spite of the Socialist mayor, Augagneur, and his gang. Immediately, the
_Aurore_, a Socialist organ of Paris, clamoured for his suppression in
these terms: “As he is not subject to the same accidents as Felix
Faure, we must defend ourselves without waiting for the good offices of
Judith.” M. Faure, M. Loubet’s predecessor, it will be remembered, is
said to have died suddenly after a cup of tea at a soirée given by a
rich Jewess, and the present ministry of the Dreyfus revision, to which
he had been steadfastly opposed, came into power almost before the
country knew what had happened, bringing in their political wallet
another Dreyfus trial and this notorious Associations Bill.
If I insist, it is because I wish that it may be clearly understood that
the French people are not guilty of the criminal legislation of which
they are the victims, owing to their incurable reluctance to touch the
mire of politics, left, as a rule, to the most unworthy and
unscrupulous.
M. Waldeck Rousseau is a smart, wily politician; so was Camille
Desmoulins, an obscure, ambitious lawyer, who saw in the Revolution of
1790 a grand opportunity of reaching a proud eminence. This
accomplished, he had no further use for Revolutionists. “The Revolution
is over,” he said; but it went on and on, until his own head rolled into
the fatal basket.
How long will all this last? How long will the mad dogs of Socialist
anarchy be held in leash?
THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL
_3rd April,_ 1901.
Few persons in the United States have the leisure or the means of
following the debates of the French Chambers, and appreciating the Law
on Associations, of which many garbled and falsified versions appear in
metropolitan and other dailies.
It is pre-eminently a project of tyranny and religious persecution. The
sympathy of sectarian antagonism with anti-Catholic measures, in any
part of the world, is always a foregone conclusion. It does not concern
itself with the arbitrary tyranny involved, alleging, perhaps, that now
the tables are turned, and thirty-five millions of Catholics are being
treated as were the Huguenots from 1685 to 1790. But when former
governments strove to maintain national unity, founded on “One Lord, one
Faith, one Baptism,” their position was that of a man defending his own
house against assailants, while the position of this Government is that
of a small armed band who have taken forcible possession, and mean to
coerce and outlaw the owners by imprescriptible right. But neither
Elizabeth nor Louis XIV ever invoked liberty to palliate their coercive
policy in order to establish, or maintain unity or uniformity.
As Bodley says in his excellent work on France (1898): “The intolerant
system under the Third Republic differs from all persecutions known to
history in that it is not only practised in the name of liberty, but is
aimed against an established religion”--in possession since fifteen
centuries.
It is a curious fact that the Huguenots, so clamorous for toleration and
the rights of conscience in the past, have during a century of absolute
liberty and equality, 1793-1900, dwindled from 2,000,000 in a population
of 27,000,000 to 600,000 in a population of 38,000,000. They have
evolved, in the usual process of Protestant disintegration, into the
deistical and atheistical minority who, with the Jews, are now so
determined to restore national unity in national infidelity. For it is a
notorious fact that France is ruled and oppressed by a small coalition
of Freemasons, chiefly Protestants and Jews, who are using the
Socialists as cats’ paws.
Waldeck Rousseau clearly stated the Government’s programme in his
political speech at Toulouse, and its scope is unmistakable, no matter
what affectation of tolerance and amity for the secular clergy may
accompany it. He is an astute lawyer, and his unruly band of Socialist
henchmen in the Chambers often try his patience sorely by calling a
spade a spade.
The suppression of religious orders and the confiscation of their
property is no new thing. St. Paul reminds the Hebrews of their
neophyte fervour, and how they accepted being despoiled with joy.
_Rapinam_ is the word used in the Vulgate; modern euphemism eschews the
unsavoury word robbery, and says “_secularization_,” “_liquidation_.”
Julian the Apostate, like the Rousseaus and the Trouillots of to-day,
was also of opinion that the “Clericals” must be impoverished and
discredited in order to crush out Christianity. Henry VIII robbed and
suppressed English monasteries simply because he saw no other means of
replenishing the empty treasury he had inherited. Moreover the religious
orders were not likely to sustain him in his new character of supreme
head of the Anglican Church. Suffering, crime, and ignorance reached
unprecedented proportions in the century that followed, as we learn from
Strype’s _Chronicles_. Lecky asserts that 75,000 vagrant beggars were
hanged in Henry’s reign.
Suppressions and confiscations have always been a prominent feature in
all revolutions, and they have been numerous in the nineteenth century.
The reason is twofold. Everything that has a religious stamp is
essentially and very properly conservative. It requires infinite pains,
patience, and wisdom to build up or to reconstruct. Any fool or madman
can tear down. _Quieta non movere._ The religious congregations,
therefore, were always the last to abandon the mother country or the
regime under which they had existed for centuries. On the other hand,
revolutionists always have a crying need for money to furnish the
sinews of rebellion, and also, incidentally, to feather the nests of
patriots. What can be more handy, too, than church property, and the
untold wealth of the religious orders! It is true that these gold mines
are sometimes found to be ‘salted,’ as they are in the fantastical
statistics put forth by the Rousseau ministry.[2] They seldom justify
the brilliant expectations of the populace lured by the perspective of
rich spoils, as they are to-day--pensions for the veterans of toil, etc.
These spoliations have always been followed by an immense recrudescence
of popular misery. It was so in France, in Italy, in Spain--everywhere.
The twofold motive that instigated these spoliations does not excuse
them, but it explains and perhaps palliates to some extent. In France,
to-day, there is no extenuating circumstance. The Holy See loyally lent
its support to the Third Republic when the second president, M. Grévy,
humbly solicited it at a precarious moment. Leo XIII distinctly
requested the clergy and the faithful to rally to the Republic in the
interest of peace. With very few exceptions the regular and the secular
clergy have strictly abstained from politics. The inquisition of which
the Assumption Fathers were recently the object only succeeded in
incriminating two or three members of the order.
Of course the regular and secular clergy cannot urge their flocks and
their pupils to embrace the atheistical and pagan ideals of the
coalition in power. If this be disloyalty they are all disloyal.
Considering that since 1888 not less than 20,000,000 have been added
every year to the public expenditure, one might suppose that the
Government would think twice before depriving itself of this army of
some 180,000 self-sacrificing men and women who minister to the poor,
the sick, the maimed, the blind, the insane, the orphan, and the
outcast. Recently the Prefect of the Department of Bouches du Rhone was
summoned by the anti-clericals to secularize all the hospitals. He
refused to accede to their request, alleging that the budget of charity
was totally inadequate already, and that many indigent sufferers were
turned away from lack of accommodation. This is only one item; what will
it be when the Government has to pay an army of hirelings to minister to
the poor all over the land? But the Congregations do not concern
themselves with bodily wants only. Many of them are devoted to the
education of all classes. This is the head and front of their offending,
and the true reason of their taking off. Every one knows that the
godless scholastic institutions devised by Paul Bert, Ferry, and Jules
Simon are repugnant to the nation, and have been a complete failure. In
spite of the millions of public money lavished upon them, they have
never been able to hold their own against the religious schools of the
Congregations, which are supported entirely by private initiative, and
at the cost of great pecuniary sacrifices on the part of Catholic
parents, who support two sets of schools--those they patronize and those
for which they have no use. Not content with imposing these sacrifices,
as in the United States, the Third Republic now proposes to crush out
all competition by suppressing the teaching congregations, and indeed
all congregations, with the proviso of retaining for the present such as
shall be deemed of public utility--meaning, of course, those who bring
surcease to the straining budget by rendering gratuitous service to
thousands, who would be a burden to the State, in a country already
taxed to its utmost capacity. The tyrannical and arbitrary character of
a measure which declares all conventual institutions “against public
order” on account of their vows, which are likened to “personal
servitude,” and yet utilizing some of them, does not trouble these
modern Dracos. Still less are they concerned with the iniquity of
depriving thousands of citizens of the right to dispose of their lives
as they see fit, and of preventing millions of parents from educating
their children as they choose.
About the middle of the last century, representative men like
Montalembert, Lacordaire, Berryer, Dupanloup, entered the political
arena to fight the battle of free education against the tyranny of the
State University. They won the day, and freedom in educational matters
seemed henceforth the inalienable appanage of France and of all
communities boasting of Western civilization.
The aim of the projected Law of Associations is to crush out this
liberty. It is no question of Church and State, but of Christianity and
liberty against atheism and tyranny. All the rest is mere padding. It is
a reversion to Lacedæmonian state tyranny and an odious anachronism. No
wonder, then, that the present Dreyfus-Rousseau ministry should seek to
throw dust in the eyes of the public, even subsidizing press syndicates
to mislead public opinion abroad.
In a nutshell, the Trouillot Bill amounts to just this: No association
can exist without government authorization, which will never be given to
any religious congregation formed for educational purposes. None need
apply but those who work with the Government. “We will give our money
only to those who please us,” said the Socialist mayor of Lyons
recently. “Our money,” forsooth--considering that the taxpaying portion
of the community of Lyons is strongly Catholic and Conservative. Yet
this municipal autocrat declared that destitute children, who went to
any but state schools, should not be assisted by civic funds.
It is the true Jacobin spirit that permeates this Republican organism.
The stamping out of religious education is itself but a means to an end.
That arch-traitor Renan declared “that religion would die hard; primary
education and the substitution of scientific for literary studies were
the only means of killing it.”
The final purpose of this Republic is to establish national unity in
national atheism, with perhaps a creedless church administered by
servile state functionaries--a modified form of the worship of the
Goddess of Reason. In saying this I do not calumniate the Republic, as
Waldeck Rousseau himself clearly stated the governmental programme at
Toulouse. A small coalition of Jews, Protestants, and other Freemasons
have gained control of the country by capturing the Socialist vote. The
latter do not yet see that they are being used as cats’ paws. For what
fellowship can there be between Jew capitalists and collectivists? All
honest, industrious Frenchmen despise politics as a rule. The great
mining and industrial centres and the slums of large cities furnish
practically all the voters, and this proletariat is lured on by
brilliant prospects of the collectivist Utopia that is coming, when the
Congregations and the Church have been abolished. Respectable Frenchmen,
who do try to serve their country by taking a hand in politics, usually
withdraw in disgust, and thus the scum comes to the top and is utilized
by unscrupulous ambition. If any one wants to enjoy a clever, graphic
pen-picture of French politics, let him read _Les morts qui parlent_, by
M. de Vogué.
The purpose of those in power is, I repeat, to break away completely and
for ever from the Catholic religion, with which the French nation is so
bound up that its fibres can only be torn out with the last palpitating
remnants of national life. “Few greater calamities can befall a nation,”
wrote Lecky, “than to cut herself off as France has done from her own
past in her great Revolution.” To consummate this calamity is the avowed
purpose of this Government. A hue and cry is raised by its Socialist
henchmen at papal _ingérence_ in French affairs, though the Concordat
surely gives the Pope a right to protest against the ostracism and
proposed suppression of the Congregations, as being a violation of
Article I of the Concordat, which guarantees the “free exercise of the
Catholic religion in France.”
Meanwhile “_The Jewish Alliance_” and the “_Internationale_” operate
freely and openly, causing strikes in every direction, and disorganizing
the industrial conditions here for the benefit of other countries.
During the last few months immense sums are being taken out of the
country, not by the Congregations only by any means. The boom in the New
York Stock Market, which redounds to the credit of the McKinley
administration, may be connected with this migration of personal
property from France.
It has been France’s glory and misfortune to be a great purveyor of
ideas, ideals, and fashions. She is essentially missionary, and was in
the vanguard of Christianity from the beginning. In the early centuries
of the Church, her monastic missionaries peopled the islands that lie
around this beautiful Riviera. St. Vincent de Lerins, St. Tropez, St.
Aygulf, St. Maxim, have left indelible footprints in these regions. In
her terrible Revolution France was an object-lesson to the nations,
whose intervention saved her from self-extermination. Foreign war was a
boon and a safety-valve. The Commune of 1870 was another warning to the
nations. Again to-day she is being made a spectacle to men and
angels--to men who are, with secret rejoicing, applauding the Waldeck
Rousseau ministry, and all for which it stands. They known full well
that decadence and doom are near. There will be another Sedan, another
Commune. The colonies, Indo-China in particular, will be the first to
fall away in the general dismemberment.
I know France intimately since more than thirty years, and it is with
infinite sorrow that I diagnose her condition. Her recuperative powers
are very great. I fear, however, that they will prove inadequate after
the next great shock.
But France’s admirable gift of apostleship, her lofty idealism, which no
number of Voltaires could abase or abate, will not perish with her
territorial integrity, nor even with her national life. Like the
deathless masterpieces of Greece and Rome, her immortal genius will
inform and inspire countless unborn generations, long after France
herself shall have become a mere geographical reminiscence. “I will move
thy candlestick,” it is written--not extinguish.
ARBITRARY INCONSISTENCY
_16th February, 1901._
The attitude of the Jacobin government in France towards the religion
professed by nine-tenths of the inhabitants is truly instructive. After
prating about liberty, fraternity, and equality, and the rights of man
for a hundred years, the successors of the revolutionary _Constituante_
are preparing to deal a deathblow at the most sacred rights of the
individual, to overstep the most arbitrary acts of any regime, nay of
the Inquisition itself. These, at least, only concerned themselves with
outward manifestations of personal idiosyncrasies tending to disturb the
social order. But the successors of the Jacobins of the _Constituante_,
so proud of their blood-stained origin, direct their attacks, to-day,
against that most intangible thing the Vow, which has no existence
except in the inner conscience of the individual, seeing that monastic
vows which involved “civil death” were abolished by law in 1790, and all
religious are, to-day, free to exercise the rights of citizens--to buy,
sell, contract, or vote. The vow cannot even be considered a convention
or a contract binding together the members of a religious association.
The ground on which it is proposed to declare religious congregations
illegal without interfering with Masonic and other associations is, said
Waldeck Rousseau, that “our public right [_droit public_] and that of
other States proscribes all that constitutes an abdication of the rights
of the individual, right to marry, to possess, all, in fact, that
resembles personal servitude.”
Thus in the name of liberty and the famous rights of man, I am denied
the right to exercise my freewill by electing to remain single, because
not to marry would be an abdication of one of the rights of the
individual, and resemble “personal servitude.” Anything more grotesquely
inconsistent cannot well be imagined, and this project of law has been
in process of elaboration in the lodges since twenty years! In 1880,
when the decree against the Jesuits and all congregations of men was
promulgated, it was declared illicit and unconstitutional by 1500
jurists, and 400 of the higher magistrates, who refused their
connivence, were removed from office. One of my best friends was among
these victims. The decree was enforced _manu militari_, but the current
of public opinion was so strong that, ere long, these establishments
were reopened and continued their good works unmolested.
It was next proposed to crush out the Congregations by fiscal measures.
This also has proved inadequate, and the present project of law is the
supreme effort of a most paternal and absolute Republic to secure the
liberty of thousands of unappreciative subjects, by preventing them from
exercising it in the choice of a mode of life. Truly a strange
aberration of liberty, equality, and fraternity!
Of course it is an open secret that what is aimed at is the destruction
of the Catholic Church in France, and the establishment, if possible, of
a national church with a “civil constitution of the clergy” as was
attempted in 1792.
Before attacking the citadel it is proposed to demolish the two great
ramparts of the Church, Christian education and Christian charity, by
disbanding the noble men and women who man these ramparts.
It is a notorious fact, well established by Taine, that the French
Revolution, with all its saturnalia of carnage and nameless tyranny, was
the work of a handful, some ten thousand in all, and even many of these
were foreigners. They carried all before them, and I fear that history
will repeat itself.
The moral unity of France was destroyed for ever by the Huguenots in the
seventeenth century. Louis XIV sought in vain to restore it by the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Revolution also tried to
enforce moral unity by the unlimited practice of the “_Sois mon frère ou
je te tue_.” It is in the name of this lost moral unity that the
coalition in power now propose to crush out all educational and
religious liberty. French Protestantism can hardly be said to exist any
longer. In 1799, when their religious and civil liberties were restored,
Rabaut de St. Etienne, then president of the _Constituante_, stated
their number to be 2,000,000 in a population of 26,000,000. After a
century of complete liberty and equality, the _Agenda Protestant_ of
Lyons states their number to be 650,000 in a population of 37,000,000.
In the usual process of Protestant disintegration, the Huguenots,
erstwhile so zealous for Calvinistic purity of doctrine, have evolved
into the freethinking materialists, who form an important contingent in
the anti-religious Masonic coalition I referred to some months ago.
The situation in France painfully recalls that of Constantinople some
forty years before the fall of the Eastern Empire. A house divided
against itself cannot stand.
A PAGAN RENAISSANCE
_10th August, 1901._
In a previous article I asserted that the revolutionary spirit so
rampant to-day is a new version of that renaissance of Paganism in the
fourteenth century which culminated in the Protestant revolt. I find the
same view expressed in Goldwin Smith’s recently published work on the
United Kingdom. In a chapter on the Renaissance he writes as follows:
“Our generation may look upon this period with interest, since it is
itself threatened with an interregnum between Christian morality and the
morality of science.”
“Much learning maketh thee mad” might be said to our generation, that
seems to be science mad and blissfully unconscious of the paradoxes of
its programme. We are promised a scientific religion or a religion of
science, meaning probably a religion worthy of men of science, unmindful
of the fact that men of the highest attainments have been nurtured in
the Church in every century, and that the supernatural must always be an
indispensable element of religion.
Now Mr. Goldwin Smith raises our expectations to a future era in which
“the morality of science” is to succeed to the hiatus or interregnum
with which we are threatened to-day, as in the fifteenth century, when
the Church was “drugged,” he says.
In his excellent work on _Social Evolution_, Kidd accentuates the fact
that our Western civilization, the highest yet attained, has been wholly
religious and not scientific; that in intellectual capacity and
attainments we are, even now, far below the average Greek mind of
centuries ago. This civilization of ours, marvellous in spite of all its
shortcomings and blots, is founded on abnegation and self-sacrifice
which are wholly irrational, scientifically speaking. It is indeed
scientifically impossible for science to have any other morality than
the law of brute force and the survival of the strongest, whether it be
on the battlefield, the mart, or on ’change. The law of supply and
demand is a corollary of this law.
Complacency for the weak and the lowly, that characterized Christianity
from the beginning, and found expression in the legend of the Holy
Grail, is all folly, the sublime folly of the Cross. The equality and
brotherhood of man is also part of this “foolishness,” so repulsive to
the cultured Greek mind. Nay, all our much-vaunted “free institutions”
have grown out of this mustard seed, to which our Lord compared His
kingdom on earth. “When the tree falls the shadow will depart,” as
Tennyson wrote in another connexion. Nothing will be left to our poor
science-ridden humanity but the cruel glare of human egoisms, passions,
and ambitions.
In one of those sonorous paradoxes which his soul loved, J. J. Rousseau
assures us that “all men are born free, and everywhere they are in
chains.” That all men are born free is as false as that all men are born
upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both
assertions. It is an incontrovertible fact that before Christ slavery
was the normal status of the masses in every age and clime, and Lucanus
only expressed an universally accepted axiom when he cynically declared
that the human race only existed for a few: _Humanum paucis vivit
genus_.
The doom of slavery was sealed when Peter began his memorable discourse,
saying “Men and brethren” to circumcised and uncircumcised alike. On
that day the Church began her mission of liberation by subjugation to
the Christian law.
But so ancient and deeply-rooted an institution as slavery could not
wisely nor safely be felled suddenly. It was not till 1167 that Pope
Alexander III published the charter of Christian liberty. “This law
alone,” writes Voltaire (_Essai sur les mœurs_, chap. LXXXIII),
“should render his memory precious to all people, as his efforts on
behalf of liberty for Italy should endear him to Italians.”
Wherever Christianity permeates, even in an emaciated form, slavery must
disappear, and wherever Christianity has not penetrated slavery is and
always will be a standing institution, with its concomitant degradation
of women.
Another proposition, a corollary of the first, is equally true. If, and
when, and where Christianity disappears, liberty, which is bound up with
and inseparable from the Christian law, will also diminish and
disappear, _tantum quantum_.
The world, in my opinion, has never adequately laid to heart the
terrible lessons taught by the French Revolution. They are not laid bare
in their naked hideousness. The glamour of those much-violated
principles of 1789, and the catchwords of liberty, equality, and
fraternity are used to cover up the dire significance of that event. In
a moment of wild delirium, the most illustrious of nations allowed its
government to pass into the hands of a band of atheists prepared by
Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured in the name of
the whole nation, and the worship of Reason inaugurated with all the
paraphernalia of ritual and the pomp of worship. What was the immediate
result? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. Terror reigned
supreme. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men
could no longer call their lives their own under the law of _Suspects_.
From my window at Lyons, I could see the monument to the victims of
1793. This city had at first submitted to the Revolutionary government,
but the Lyonnais revolted when they found themselves deprived of civil
and municipal liberties they had enjoyed under the most despotic kings.
Lyons was besieged by those singular champions of liberty who, according
to Macaulay, “crowded into a few months more crimes than had been
committed by the French kings in as many centuries.”