M. Loubet called upon M. Léon Bourgeois, who had already been prime
minister under M. Félix Faure, to form a ministry, but he had been
nominated president of the new Chamber. The president of the Republic
then offered the post to M. Brisson, who had been twice prime minister
in 1885 and 1898, but he also refused. A third member of the Radical
party was then sent for, M. Emile Combes, and he accepted. The senator
of the Charente Inférieure, in his one short term of office in the
Bourgeois ministry, had made no mark. But he had attained a minor
prominence in the debates of the Senate by his ardent anti-clericalism.
He had been educated as a seminarist and had taken minor orders, without
proceeding to the priesthood, and had subsequently practised as a
country doctor before entering parliament. M. Combes retained two of the
most important members of the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet, M. Delcassé, who
had been at the foreign office for four years, and General André, who
had become war minister in 1900 on the resignation of General de
Galliffet. General André was an ardent Dreyfusard, strongly opposed to
clerical and reactionary influences in the army. Among the new ministers
was M. Rouvier, a colleague of Gambetta in the _grand ministère_ and
prime minister in 1887, whose participation in the Panama affair had
caused his retirement from official life. Being a moderate opportunist
and reputed the ablest financier among French politicians, his return to
the ministry of finance reassured those who feared the fiscal
experiments of an administration supported by the Socialists. The
nomination as minister of marine of M. Camille Pelletan (the son of
Eugène Pelletan, a notable adversary of the Second Empire), who had been
a Radical-Socialist deputy since 1881, though new to office, was less
reassuring. M. Combes reserved for himself the departments of the
interior and public worship, meaning that the centralized administration
of France should be in his own hands while he was keeping watch over the
Church. But in spite of the prime minister's extreme anti-clericalism
there was no hint made in his ministerial declaration, on the 10th of
June 1902, on taking office that there would be any question of the new
Chamber dealing with the Concordat or with the relations of Church and
state. M. Combes, however, warned the secular clergy not to make common
cause with the religious orders, against which he soon began vigorous
action. Before the end of June he directed the Préfets of the
departments to bring political pressure to bear on all branches of the
public service, and he obtained a presidential decree closing a hundred
and twenty-five schools, which had been recently opened in buildings
belonging to private individuals, on the ground that they were conducted
by members of religious associations and that this brought the schools
under the law of 1901. Such action seemed to be opposed to M.
Waldeck-Rousseau's interpretation of the law; but the Chamber having
supported M. Combes he ordered in July the closing of 2500 schools,
conducted by members of religious orders, for which authorization had
not been requested. This again seemed contrary to the assurances of M.
Waldeck-Rousseau, and it called forth vain protests in the name of
liberty from Radicals of the old school, such as M. Goblet, prime
minister in 1886, and from Liberal Protestants, such as M. Gabriel
Monod. The execution of the decrees closing the schools of the religious
orders caused some violent agitation in the provinces during the
parliamentary recess. But the majority of the departmental councils, at
their meetings in August, passed resolutions in favour of the
governmental policy, and a movement led by certain Nationalists,
including M. Drumont, editor of the anti-semitic _Libre Parole_, and M.
François Coppée, the Academician, to found a league having similar aims
to those of the "passive resisters" in our country, was a complete
failure. On the reassembling of parliament, both houses passed votes of
confidence in the ministry and also an act supplementary to the
Associations Law penalizing the opening of schools by members of
religious orders.
Humbert affair.
In spite of the ardour of parliamentary discussions the French public
was less moved in 1902 by the anti-clerical action of the government
than by a vulgar case of swindling known as the "Humbert affair." The
wife of a former deputy for Seine-et-Marne, who was the son of M.
Gustave Humbert, minister of justice in 1882, had for many years
maintained a luxurious establishment, which included a political salon,
on the strength of her assertion that she and her family had inherited
several millions sterling from one Crawford, an Englishman. Her story
being believed by certain bankers she had been enabled to borrow
colossal sums on the legend, and had almost married her daughter as a
great heiress to a Moderate Republican deputy who held a conspicuous
position in the Chamber. The flight of the Humberts, the exposure of the
fraud and their arrest in Spain excited the French nation more deeply
than the relative qualities of M. Waldeck-Rousseau and M. Combes or the
woes of the religious orders. A by-election to the Senate in the spring
of 1902 merits notice as it brought back to parliament M. Clémenceau,
who had lived in comparative retirement since 1893 when he lost his seat
as deputy for Draguignan, owing to a series of unusually bitter attacks
made against him by his political enemies. He had devoted his years of
retirement to journalism, taking a leading part in the Dreyfus affair on
the side of the accused. His election as senator for the Var, where he
had formerly been deputy, was an event of importance unanticipated at
the time.
Anti-clerical movement.
The year 1903 saw in progress a momentous development of the
anti-clerical movement in France, though little trace of this is found
in the statute-book. The chief act of parliament of that year was one
which interested the population much more than any law affecting the
Church. This was an act regulating the privileges of the _bouilleurs de
cru_, the peasant proprietors who, permitted to distil from their
produce an annual quantity of alcohol supposed to be sufficient for
their domestic needs, in practice fabricated and sold so large an amount
as to prejudice gravely the inland revenue. As there were a million of
these illicit distillers in the land they formed a powerful element in
the electorate. The crowded and excited debates affecting their
interests, in which Radicals and Royalists of the rural districts made
common cause against Socialists and Clericals of the towns, were in
striking contrast with the less animated discussions concerning the
Church. The prime minister, an anti-clerical zealot, bitterly hostile to
the Church of which he had been a minister, took advantage of the
relative indifference of parliament and of the nation in matters
ecclesiastical. The success of M. Combes in his campaign against the
Church was an example of what energy and pertinacity can do. There was
no great wave of popular feeling on the question, no mandate given to
the deputies at the general election or asked for by them. Neither was
M. Combes a popular leader or a man of genius. He was rather a trained
politician, with a fixed idea, who knew how to utilize to his ends the
ability and organization of the extreme anti-clerical element in the
Chamber, and the weakness of the extreme clerical party. The majority of
the Chamber did not share the prime minister's animosity towards the
Church, for which at the same time it had not the least enthusiasm, and
under the concordatory lead of M. Waldeck-Rousseau it would have been
content to curb clerical pretensions without having recourse to extreme
measures of repression. It was, however, equally content to follow the
less tolerant guidance of M. Combes. Thus, early in the session of 1903
it approved of his circular forbidding the priests of Brittany to make
use of the Breton language in their religious instruction under pain of
losing their salaries. It likewise followed him on the 26th of January
when he declined to accept, as being premature and unpractical, a
Socialist resolution in favour of suppressing the budget of public
worship, though the majority was indeed differently composed on those
two occasions. In the Senate on the 29th of January M. Waldeck-Rousseau
indicated what his policy would have been had he retained office, by
severely criticizing his successor's method of applying the Associations
Law. Instead of asking parliament to judge on its merits each several
demand for authorization made by a congregation, the government had
divided the religious orders into two chief categories, teaching orders
and preaching orders, and had recommended that all should be suppressed
by a general refusal of authorization. The Grande Chartreuse was put
into a category by itself as a trading association and was dissolved;
but Lourdes, which with its crowds of pilgrims enriched the Pyrenean
region and the railway companies serving it, was spared for
electioneering reasons. A dispute arose between the government and the
Vatican on the nomination of bishops to vacant sees. The Vatican
insisted on the words "_nobis nominavit_" in the papal bulls instituting
the bishops nominated by the chief of the executive in France under the
Concordat. M. Combes objected to the pronoun, and maintained that the
complete nomination belonged to the French government, the Holy See
having no choice in the matter, but only the power of canonical
institution. This produced a deadlock, with the consequence that no more
bishops were ever again appointed under the Concordat, which both before
and after the Easter recess M. Combes now threatened to repudiate. These
menaces derived an increased importance from the failing health of the
pope. Leo XIII. had attained the great age of ninety-three, and on the
choice of his successor grave issues depended. He died on the 20th of
July 1903. The conclave indicated as his successor his secretary of
state, Cardinal Rampolla, an able exponent of the late pope's diplomatic
methods and also a warm friend of France. It was said to be the latter
quality which induced Austria to exercise its ancient power of veto on
the choice of a conclave, and finally Cardinal Sarto, patriarch of
Venice, a pious prelate inexperienced in diplomacy, was elected and took
the title of Pius X. In September the inauguration of a statue of Renan
at Tréguier, his birthplace, was made the occasion of an anti-clerical
demonstration in Catholic and reactionary Brittany, at which the prime
minister made a militant speech in the name of the freethinkers of
France, though Renan was a Voltairian aristocrat who disliked the aims
and methods of modern Radical-Socialists. In the course of his speech M.
Combes pointed out that the anti-clerical policy of the government had
not caused the Republic to lose prestige in the eyes of the monarchies
of Europe, which were then showing it unprecedented attentions. This
assertion was true, and had reference to the visit of the king of
England to the president of the Republic in May and the projected visit
of the king of Italy. That of Edward VII., which was the first state
visit of a British sovereign to France for nearly fifty years, was
returned by President Loubet in July, and was welcomed by all parties,
excepting some of the reactionaries. M. Millevoye, a Nationalist deputy
for Paris, in the _Patrie_ counselled the Parisians to remember Fashoda,
the Transvaal War, and the attitude of the English in the Dreyfus
affair, and to greet the British monarch with cries of "_Vivent les
Boers_." M. Déroulède, the most interesting member of the Nationalist
party, wrote from his exile at Saint-Sébastien protesting against the
folly of this proceeding, which merits to be put on record as an example
of the incorrigible ineptitude of the reactionaries in France. The
incident served only to prove their complete lack of influence on
popular feeling, while it damaged the cause of the Church at a most
critical moment by showing that the only persons in France willing to
insult a friendly monarch who was the guest of the nation, belonged to
the clerical party. Of the royal visits that of the king of Italy was
the more important in its immediate effects on the history of France, as
will be seen in the narration of the events of 1904.
The session of 1904 began with the election of a new president of the
Chamber, on the retirement of M. Bourgeois. The choice fell on M. Henri
Brisson, an old Radical, but not a Socialist, who had held that post in
1881 and had subsequently filled it on ten occasions, the election to
the office being annual. The narrow majority he obtained over M. Paul
Bertrand, a little-known moderate Republican, by secret ballot, followed
by the defeat of M. Jaurès, the Socialist leader, for one of the
vice-presidential chairs, showed that one half of the Chamber was of
moderate tendency. But, as events proved, the Moderates lacked energy
and leadership, so the influence of the Radical prime minister
prevailed. In a debate on the 22nd of January on the expulsion of an
Alsatian priest of French birth from a French frontier department by the
French police, M. Ribot, who set an example of activity to younger men
of the moderate groups, reproached M. Combes with reducing all questions
in which the French nation was interested to the single one of
anti-clericalism, and the prime minister retorted that it was solely for
that purpose that he took office. In pursuance of this policy a bill was
introduced, and was passed by the Chamber before Easter, interdicting
from teaching all members of religious orders, authorized or not
authorized. Among other results this law, which the Senate passed in the
summer, swept out of existence the schools of the Frères de la Doctrine
Chrétienne (Christian Brothers) and closed in all 2400 schools before
the end of the year.
Diplomatic crisis with Rome.
This drastic act of anti-clerical policy, which was a total repudiation
by parliament of the principle of liberty of education, should have
warned the authorities of the Church of the relentless attitude of the
government. The most superficial observation ought to have shown them
that the indifference of the nation would permit the prime minister to
go to any length, and common prudence should have prevented them from
affording him any pretext for more damaging measures. The President of
the Republic accepted an invitation to return the visit of the king of
Italy. When it was submitted to the Chamber on March 25th, 1904, a
reactionary deputy moved the rejection of the vote for the expenses of
the journey on the ground that the chief of the French executive ought
not to visit the representative of the dynasty which had plundered the
papacy. The amendment was rejected by a majority of 502 votes to 12,
which showed that at a time of bitter controversy on ecclesiastical
questions French opinion was unanimous in approving the visit of the
president of the Republic to Rome as the guest of the king of Italy.
Nothing could be more gratifying to the entire French nation, both on
racial and on traditional grounds, than such a testimony of a complete
revival of friendship with Italy, of late years obscured by the Triple
Alliance. Yet the Holy See saw fit to advance pretensions inevitably
certain to serve the ends of the extreme anti-clericals, whose most
intolerant acts at that moment, such as the removal of the crucifixes
from the law-courts, were followed by new electoral successes. Thus the
reactionary majority on the Paris municipal council was displaced by the
Radical-Socialists on the 1st of May, the day that M. Loubet returned
from his visit to Rome. On the 16th of May M. Jaurès' Socialist organ,
_L'Humanité_, published the text of a protest, addressed by the pope to
the powers having diplomatic relations with the Vatican, against the
visit of the president of the Republic to the King of Italy. This
document, dated the 28th of April, was offensive in tone both to France
and to Italy. It intimated that while Catholic sovereigns refrained from
visiting the person who, contrary to right, exercised civil sovereignty
in Rome, that "duty" was even more "imperious" for the ruler of France
by reason of the "privileges" enjoyed by that country from the
Concordat; that the journey of M. Loubet to "pay homage" within the
pontifical see to that person was an insult to the sovereign pontiff;
and that only for reasons of special gravity was the nuncio permitted to
remain in Paris. The publication of this document caused some joy among
the extreme clericals, but this was nothing to the exultation of the
extreme anti-clericals, who saw that the prudent diplomacy of Leo XIII.,
which had risen superior to many a provocation of the French government,
was succeeded by a papal policy which would facilitate their designs in
a manner unhoped for. Moderate men were dismayed, seeing that the
Concordat was now in instant danger; but the majority of the French
nation remained entirely indifferent to its fate. Within a week France
took the initiative by recalling the ambassador to the Vatican, M.
Nisard, leaving a third-secretary in charge. In the debate in the
Chamber upon the incident, the foreign minister, M. Delcassé, said that
the ambassador was recalled, not because the Vatican had protested
against the visit of the president to the king of Italy, but because it
had communicated this protest, in terms offensive to France, to foreign
powers. The Chamber on the 27th of May approved the recall of the
ambassador by the large majority of 420 to 90. By a much smaller
majority it rejected a Socialist motion that the Nuncio should be given
his passports. The action of the Holy See was not actually an
infringement of the Concordat; so the government, satisfied with the
effect produced on public opinion, which was now quite prepared for a
rupture with the Vatican, was willing to wait for a new pretext, which
was not long in coming. Two bishops, Mgr. Geay of Laval and Mgr. Le
Nordez of Dijon, were on bad terms with the clerical reactionaries in
their dioceses. The friends of the prelates, including some of their
episcopal brethren, thought that their chief offence was their loyalty
to the Republic, and it was an unfortunate coincidence that these
bishops, subjected to proceedings which had been unknown under the long
pontificate of Leo XIII., should have been two who had incurred the
animosity of anti-republicans. Their enemies accused Mgr. Geay of
immorality and Mgr. Le Nordez of being in league with the freemasons.
The bishop of Laval was summoned by the Holy Office, without any
communication with the French government, to resign his see, and he
submitted the citation forthwith to the minister of public worship. The
French chargé d'affaires at the Vatican was instructed to protest
against this grave infringement of an article of the Concordat, and,
soon after, against another violation of the Concordat committed by the
Nuncio, who had written to the bishop of Dijon ordering him to suspend
his ordinations, the Nuncio being limited, like all other ambassadors,
to communicating the instructions of his government through the
intermediary of the minister for foreign affairs. The Vatican declined
to give any satisfaction to the French government and summoned the two
bishops to Rome under pain of suspension. So the French chargé
d'affaires was directed to leave Rome, after having informed the Holy
See that the government of the Republic considered that the mission of
the apostolic Nuncio in Paris was terminated. Thus came to an end on the
30th of July 1904 the diplomatic relations which under the Concordat had
subsisted between France and the Vatican for more than a hundred years.
Twelve days later M. Waldeck-Rousseau died, having lived just long
enough to see this unanticipated result of his policy. It was said that
his resolve to regulate the religious associations arose from his
feeling that whatever injustice had been committed in the Dreyfus case
had been aggravated by the action of certain unauthorized orders.
However that may be, his own utterances showed that he believed that his
policy was one of finality. But he had not reckoned that his
legislation, which needed hands as calm and impartial as his own to
apply it, would be used in a manner he had not contemplated by sectarian
politicians who would be further aided by the self-destructive policy of
the highest authorities of the Church. When parliament assembled for the
autumn session a general feeling was expressed, by moderate politicians
as well as by supporters of the Combes ministry, that disestablishment
was inevitable. The prime minister said that he had been long in favour
of it, though the previous year he had intimated to M. Nisard,
ambassador to the Vatican, that he had not a majority in parliament to
vote it. But the papacy and the clergy had since done everything to
change that situation. The Chamber did not move in the matter beyond
appointing a committee to consider the general question, to which M.
Combes submitted in his own name a bill for the separation of the
churches from the State.
War Office difficulties.
During the last three months of 1904 public opinion was diverted to the
cognate question of the existence of masonic delation in the army. M.
Guyot de Villeneuve, Nationalist deputy for Saint Denis, who had been
dismissed from the army by General de Galliffet in connexion with the
Dreyfus affair, brought before the Chamber a collection of documents
which, it seemed, had been abstracted from the Grand Orient of France,
the headquarters of French freemasonry, by an official of that order.
These papers showed that an elaborate system of espionage and delation
had been organized by the freemasons throughout France for the purpose
of obtaining information as to the political opinions and religious
practices of the officers of the army, and that this system was worked
with the connivance of certain officials of the ministry of war. Its aim
appeared to be to ascertain if officers went to mass or sent their
children to convent schools or in any way were in sympathy with the
Roman Catholic religion, the names of officers so secretly denounced
being placed on a black-list at the War Office, whereby they were
disqualified for promotion. There was no doubt about the authenticity of
the documents or of the facts which they revealed. Radical ex-ministers
joined with moderate Republicans and reactionaries in denouncing the
system. Anti-clerical deputies declared that it was no use to cleanse
the war office of the influence of the Jesuits, which was alleged to
have prevailed there, if it were to be replaced by another occult power,
more demoralizing because more widespread. Only the Socialists and a few
of the Radical-Socialists in the Chamber supported the action of the
freemasons. General André, minister of war, was so clearly implicated,
with the evident approval of the prime minister, that a revulsion of
feeling against the policy of the anti-clerical cabinet began to operate
in the Chamber. Had the opposition been wisely guided there can be
little doubt that a moderate ministry would have been called to office
and the history of the Church in France might have been changed. But the
reactionaries, with their accustomed folly, played into the hands of
their adversaries. The minister of war had made a speech which produced
a bad impression. As he stepped down from the tribune he was struck in
the face by a Nationalist deputy for Paris, a much younger man than he.
The cowardly assault did not save the minister, who was too deeply
compromised in the delation scandal. But it saved the anti-clerical
party, by rallying a number of waverers who, until this exhibition of
reactionary policy, were prepared to go over to the Moderates, from the
"bloc," as the ministerial majority was called. The Nationalist deputy
was committed to the assizes on the technical charge of assaulting a
functionary while performing his official duties. Towards the end of the
year, on the eve of his trial, he met with a violent death, and the
circumstances which led to it, when made public, showed that this
champion of the Church was a man of low morality. General André had
previously resigned and was succeeded as minister of war by M. Berteaux,
a wealthy stock-broker and a Socialist.
Fall of the Combes ministry.
The Combes cabinet could not survive the delation scandal, in spite of
the resignation of the minister of war and the ineptitude of the
opposition. On the 8th of January 1905, two days before parliament met,
an election took place in Paris to fill the vacancy caused by the death
of the Nationalist deputy who had assaulted General André. The
circumstances of his death, at that time partially revealed, did not
deter the electors from choosing by a large majority a representative of
the same party, Admiral Bienaimé, who the previous year had been removed
for political reasons from the post of maritime prefect at Toulon, by M.
Camille Pelletan, minister of marine. A more serious check to the Combes
ministry was given by the refusal of the Chamber to re-elect as
president M. Brisson, who was defeated by a majority of twenty-five by
M. Doumer, ex-Governor-General of Indo-China, who, though he had entered
politics as a Radical, was now supported by the anti-republican
reactionaries as well as by the moderate Republicans. A violent debate
arose on the question of expelling from the Legion of Honour certain
members of that order, including a general officer, who had been
involved in the delation scandal. M. Jaurès, the eloquent Socialist
deputy for Albi, who played the part of _Éminence grise_ to M. Combes in
his anti-clerical campaign, observed that the party which was now
demanding the purification of the order had been in no hurry to expel
from it Esterhazy long after his crimes had been proved in connexion
with the Dreyfus case. The debate was inconclusive, and the government
on the 14th of January obtained a vote of confidence by a majority of
six. But M. Combes, whose animosity towards the church was keener than
his love of office, saw that his ministry would be constantly liable to
be put in a minority, and that thus the consideration of separation
might be postponed until after the general elections of 1906. So he
announced his resignation in an unprecedented manifesto addressed to the
president of the Republic on the 18th January.
Second Rouvier ministry.
M. Rouvier, minister of finance in the outgoing government, was called
upon for the second time in his career to form a ministry. A moderate
opportunist himself, he intended to form a coalition cabinet in which
all groups of Republicans, from the Centre to the extreme Left, would be
represented. But he failed, and the ministry of the 24th of January 1905
contained no members of the Republican opposition which had combated M.
Combes. The prime minister retained the portfolio of finance; M.
Delcassé remained at the foreign office, which he had directed since
1898, and M. Berteaux at the war office; M. Etienne, member for Oran,
went to the ministry of the interior; another Algerian deputy, M.
Thomson, succeeded M. Camille Pelletan at the ministry of marine, which
department was said to have fallen into inefficiency; public worship was
separated from the department of the interior and joined with that of
education under M. Bienvenu-Martin, Radical-Socialist deputy for
Auxerre, who was new to official life. Although M. Rouvier, as befitted
a politician of the school of Waldeck-Rousseau, disliked the separation
of the churches from the state, he accepted that policy as inevitable.
After the action of the Vatican in 1904, which had produced the rupture
of diplomatic relations with France, many moderates who had been
persistent in their opposition to the Combes ministry, and even certain
Nationalists, accepted the principle of separation, but urged that it
should be effected on liberal terms. So on the 27th of January, after
the minister of education and public worship had announced that the
government intended to introduce a separation bill, a vote of confidence
was obtained by a majority of 373 to 99, half of the majority being
opponents of the Combes ministry of various Republican and reactionary
groups, while the minority was composed of 84 Radicals and Socialists
and only 15 reactionaries.
The Separation Law.
On the 21st of March the debates on the separation of the churches from
the state began. A commission had been appointed in 1904 to examine the
subject. Its reporter was M. Aristide Briand, Socialist member for Saint
Etienne. According to French parliamentary procedure, the reporter of a
commission, directed to draw up a great scheme of legislation, can make
himself a more important person in conducting it through a house of
legislature than the minister in charge of the bill. This is what M.
Briand succeeded in doing. He produced with rapidity a "report" on the
whole question, in which he traced with superficial haste the history of
the Church in France from the baptism of Clovis, and upon this drafted a
bill which was accepted by the government. He thus at one bound came
from obscurity into the front rank of politicians, and in devising a
revolutionary measure learned a lesson of moderate statesmanship. In
conducting the debates he took the line of throwing the responsibility
for the rupture of the Concordat on the pope. The leadership of the
Opposition fell on M. Ribot, who had been twice prime minister of the
Republic and was not a practising Catholic. He recognized that
separation had become inevitable,; but argued that it could be
accomplished as a permanent act only in concert with the Holy See. The
clerical party in the Chamber did little in defence of the Church. The
abbés Lemire and Gayraud, the only ecclesiastics in parliament, spoke
with moderation, and M. Groussau, a Catholic jurist, attacked the
measure with less temperate zeal; but the best serious defence of the
interests of the Church came from the Republican centre. Few amendments
from the extreme Left were accepted by M. Briand, whose general tone was
moderate and not illiberal. One feature of the debates was the
reluctance of the prime minister to take part in them, even when
financial clauses were discussed in which his own office was
particularly concerned. The bill finally passed the Chamber on the 3rd
of July by 341 votes against 233, the majority containing a certain
number of conservative Republicans and Nationalists. At the end the
Radical-Socialists manifested considerable discontent at the liberal
tendencies of M. Briand, and declared that the measure as it left the
Chamber could be considered only provisional. In the Senate it underwent
no amendment whatever, not a single word being altered. The prime
minister, M. Rouvier, never once opened his lips during the lengthy
debates, in the course of which M. Clémenceau, as a philosophical
Radical who voted for the bill, criticized it as too concordatory, while
M. Méline, as a moderate Republican, who voted against it, predicted
that it would create such a state of things as would necessitate new
negotiations with Rome a few years later. It was finally passed by a
majority of 181 to 102, the complete number of senators being 300, and
three days later, on the 9th of December 1905, it was promulgated as law
by the president of the Republic.
The main features of the act were as follows. The first clauses
guaranteed liberty of conscience and the free practice of public
worship, and declared that henceforth the Republic neither recognized
nor remunerated any form of religion, except in the case of chaplains to
public schools, hospitals and prisons. It provided that after
inventories had been taken of the real and personal property in the
hands of religious bodies, hitherto remunerated by the state, to
ascertain whether such property belonged to the state, the department,
or the commune, all such property should be transferred to associations
of public worship (_associations cultuelles_) established in each
commune in accordance with the rules of the religion which they
represented, for the purpose of carrying on the practices of that
religion. As the Vatican subsequently refused to permit Catholics to
take part in these associations, the important clauses relating to their
organization and powers became a dead letter, except in the case of the
Protestant and Jewish associations, which affected only a minute
proportion of the religious establishments under the act. Nothing,
therefore, need be said about them except that the chief discussions in
the Chamber took place with regard to their constitution, which was so
amended, contrary to the wishes of the extreme anti-clericals, that many
moderate critics of the original bill thought that thereby the regular
practice of the Catholic religion, under episcopal control, had been
safeguarded. A system of pensions for ministers of religion hitherto
paid by the state was provided, according to the age and the length of
service of the ecclesiastics interested, while in small communes of
under a thousand inhabitants the clergy were to receive in any case
their full pay for eight years. The bishops' palaces were to be left
gratuitously at the disposal of the occupiers for two years, and the
presbyteries and seminaries for five years. This provision too became a
dead letter, owing to the orders given by the Holy See to the clergy.
Other provisions enacted that the churches should not be used for
political meetings, while the services held in them were protected by
the law from the acts of disturbers. As the plenary operation of the law
depended on the _associations cultuelles_, the subsequent failure to
create those bodies makes it useless to give a complete exposition of a
statute of which they were an essential feature.
The passing of the Separation Law was the chief act of the last year of
the presidency of M. Loubet. One other important measure has to be
noted, the law reducing compulsory military service to two years. The
law of 1889 had provided a general service of three years, with an
extensive system of dispensations accorded to persons for domestic
reasons, or because they belonged to certain categories of students,
such citizens being let off with one year's service with the colours or
being entirely exempted. The new law exacted two years' service from
every Frenchman, no one being exempted save for physical incapacity.
Under the act of 1905 even the cadets of the military college of Saint
Cyr and of the Polytechnic had to serve in the ranks before entering
those schools. Anti-military doctrines continued to be encouraged by the
Socialist party, M. Hervé, the professor who had been revoked in 1901
for his suggestion of a military strike in case of war and for other
unpatriotic utterances, being elected a member of the administrative
committee of the Unified Socialist party, of which M. Jaurès was one of
the chiefs. At a congress of elementary schoolmasters at Lille in
August, anti-military resolutions were passed and a general adherence
was given to the doctrines of M. Hervé. At Longwy, in the Eastern
coal-field, a strike took place in September, during which the military
was called out to keep order and a workman was killed in a cavalry
charge. The minister of war, M. Berteaux, visited the scene of the
disturbance, and was reported to have saluted the red revolutionary flag
which was borne by a procession of strikers singing the
"Internationale."
During the autumn session in November M. Berteaux suddenly resigned the
portfolio of war during a sitting of the Chamber, and was succeeded by
M. Etienne, minister of the interior, a moderate politician who inspired
greater confidence. Earlier in the year other industrial strikes of
great gravity had taken place, notably at Limoges, among the potters,
where several deaths took place in a conflict with the troops and a
factory was burnt. Even more serious were the strikes in the government
arsenals in November. At Cherbourg and Brest only a small proportion of
the workmen went out, but at Lorient, Rochefort and especially at Toulon
the strikes were on a much larger scale. In 1905 solemn warnings were
given in the Chamber of the coming crisis in the wine-growing regions of
the South. Radical-Socialists such as M. Doumergue, the deputy for Nîmes
and a member of the Combes ministry, joined with monarchists such as M.
Lasies, deputy of the Gers, in calling attention to the distress of the
populations dependent on the vine. They argued that the wines of the
South found no market, not because of the alleged over-production, but
because of the competition of artificial wines; that formerly only
twenty departments of France were classed in the atlas as
wine-producing, but that thanks to the progress of chemistry seventy
departments were now so described. The deputies of the north of France
and of Paris, irrespective of party, opposed these arguments, and the
government, while promising to punish fraud, did not seem to take very
seriously the legitimate warnings of the representatives of the South.
The Republic continued to extend its friendly relations with foreign
powers, and the end of M. Loubet's term of office was signalized by a
procession of royal visits to Paris, some of which the president
returned. At the end of May the king of Spain came and narrowly escaped
assassination from a bomb which was thrown at him by a Spaniard as he
was returning with the president from the opera. In October M. Loubet
returned this visit at Madrid and went on to Lisbon to see the king of
Portugal, being received by the queen, who was the daughter of the comte
de Paris and the sister of the duc d'Orléans, both exiled by the
Republic. In November the king of Portugal came to Paris, and the
president of the Republic also received during the year less formal
visits from the kings of England and of Greece.
Resignation of M. Delcassé.
One untoward international event affecting the French ministry occurred
in June 1905. M. Delcassé (see section on _Exterior Policy_), who had
been foreign minister longer than any holder of that office under the
Republic, resigned, and it was believed that he had been sacrificed by
the prime minister to the exigencies of Germany, which power was said to
be disquieted at his having, in connexion with the Morocco question,
isolated Germany by promoting the friendly relations of France with
England, Spain and Italy. Whether it be true or not that the French
government was really in alarm at the possibility of a declaration of
war by Germany, the impression given was unfavourable, nor was it
removed when M. Rouvier himself took the portfolio of foreign affairs.