On New Year's Day 1906, the absence of the Nuncio from the presidential
reception of the diplomatic body marked conspicuously the rupture of the
Concordat; for hitherto the representative of the Holy See had ranked as
_doyen_ of the ambassadors to the Republic, whatever the relative
seniority of his colleagues, and in the name of all the foreign powers
had officially saluted the chief of the state. On the 20th of January
the inventories of the churches were commenced, under the 3rd clause of
the Separation Act, for the purpose of assessing the value of the
furniture and other objects which they contained. In Paris they
occasioned some disturbance; but as the protesting rioters were led by
persons whose hostility to the Republic was more notorious than their
love for religion, the demonstrations were regarded as political rather
than religious. In certain rural districts, where the church had
retained its influence and where its separation from the state was
unpopular, the taking of the inventories was impeded by the inhabitants,
and in some places, where the troops were called out to protect the
civil authorities, further feeling was aroused by the refusal of
officers to act. But, as a rule, this first manifest operation of the
Separation Law was received with indifference by the population. One
region where popular feeling was displayed in favour of the church was
Flanders, where, in March, at Boeschepe on the Belgian frontier, a man
was killed during the taking of an inventory. This accident caused the
fall of the ministry. The moderate Republicans in the Chamber, who had
helped to keep M. Rouvier in office, withheld their support in a debate
arising out of the incident, and the government was defeated by
thirty-three votes. M. Rouvier resigned, and the new president of the
Republic sent for M. Sarrien, a Radical of the old school from Burgundy,
who had been deputy for his native Saône-et-Loire from the foundation of
the Chamber in 1876 and had previously held office in four cabinets. In
M. Sarrien's ministry of the 14th of March 1906 the president of the
council was only a minor personage, its real conductor being M.
Clémenceau, who accepted the portfolio of the interior. Upon him,
therefore devolved the function of "making the elections" of 1906, as it
is the minister at the Place Beauvau, where all the wires of
administrative government are centralized, who gives the orders to the
prefectures at each general election. As in France ministers sit and
speak in both houses of parliament, M. Clémenceau, though a senator, now
returned, after an absence of thirteen years, to the Chamber of
Deputies, in which he had played a mighty part in the first seventeen
years of its existence. His political experience was unique. From an
early period after entering the Chamber in 1876 he had exercised there
an influence not exceeded by any deputy. Yet it was not until 1906,
thirty years after his first election to parliament, that he held
office--though in 1888 he just missed the presidency of the Chamber,
receiving the same number of votes as M. Méline, to whom the post was
allotted by right of seniority. He now returned to the tribune of the
Palais Bourbon, on which he had been a most formidable orator. During
his career as deputy his eloquence was chiefly destructive, and of the
nineteen ministries which fell between the election of M. Grévy to the
presidency of the Republic in 1879 and his own departure from
parliamentary life in 1893 there were few of which the fall had not been
expedited by his mordant criticism or denunciation. He now came back to
the scene of his former achievements not to attack but to defend a
ministry. Though his old occupation was gone, his re-entry excited the
keenest interest, for at sixty-five he remained the biggest political
figure in France. After M. Clémenceau the most interesting of the new
ministers was M. Briand, who was not nine years old when M. Clémenceau
had become conspicuous in political life as the mayor of Montmartre on
the eve of the Commune. M. Briand had entered the Chamber, as Socialist
deputy for Saint Etienne, only in 1902. The mark he had made as
"reporter" of the Separation Bill has been noted, and on that account he
became minister of education and public worship--the terms of the
Separation Law necessitating the continuation of a department for
ecclesiastical affairs. As he had been a militant Socialist of the
"unified" group of which M. Jaurès was the chief, and also a member of
the superior council of labour, his appointment indicated that the new
ministry courted the support of the extreme Left. It, however, contained
some moderate men, notably M. Poincaré, who had the repute of making the
largest income at the French bar after M. Waldeck-Rousseau gave up his
practice, and who became for the second time minister of finance. The
portfolios of the colonies and of public works were also given to old
ministers of moderate tendencies, M. Georges Leygues and M. Barthou. A
former prime minister, M. Léon Bourgeois, went to the foreign office,
over which he had already presided, besides having represented France at
the peace conference at the Hague; while MM. Étienne and Thomson
retained their portfolios of war and marine. The cabinet contained so
many men of tried ability that it was called the ministry of all the
talents. But the few who understood the origin of the name knew that it
would be even more ephemeral than was the British ministry of 1806; for
the fine show of names belonged to a transient combination which could
not survive the approaching elections long enough to leave any mark in
politics.
Progress of socialism.
Before the elections took place grave labour troubles showed that social
and economical questions were more likely to give anxiety to the
government than any public movement resulting from the disestablishment
of the church. Almost the first ministerial act of M. Clémenceau was to
visit the coal basin of the Pas de Calais, where an accident causing
great loss of life was followed by an uprising of the working population
of the region, which spread into the adjacent department of the Nord and
caused the minister of the interior to take unusual precautions to
prevent violent demonstrations in Paris on Labour Day, the 1st of May.
The activity of the Socialist leaders in encouraging anti-capitalist
agitation did not seem to alarm the electorate. Nor did it show any
sympathy with the appeal of the pope, who in his encyclical letter,
_Vehementer nos_, addressed to the French cardinals on the 11th of
February, denounced the Separation Law. So the result of the elections
of May 1906 was a decisive victory for the anti-clericals and
Socialists.
A brief analysis of the composition of the Chamber of Deputies is always
impossible, the limits of the numerous groups being ill-defined. But in
general terms the majority supporting the radical policy of the _bloc_
in the last parliament, which had usually mustered about 340 votes, now
numbered more than 400, including 230 Radical-Socialists and Socialists.
The gains of the extreme Left were chiefly at the expense of the
moderate or progressist republicans, who, about 120 strong in the old
Chamber, now came back little more than half that number. The
anti-republican Right, comprising Royalists, Bonapartists and
Nationalists, had maintained their former position and were about 130
all told. The general result of the polls of the 6th and 20th of May was
thus an electoral vindication of the advanced policy adopted by the old
Chamber and a repudiation of moderate Republicanism; while the
stationary condition of the reactionary groups showed that the
tribulations inflicted by the last parliament on the church had not
provoked the electorate to increase its support of clerical politicians.
The Vatican, however, declined to recognize this unmistakable
demonstration. The bishops, taking advantage of their release from the
concordatory restrictions which had withheld from them the faculty of
meeting in assembly, had met at a preliminary conference to consider
their plan of action under the Separation Law. They had adjourned for
further instructions from the Holy See, which were published on the 10th
of August 1906, in a new encyclical _Gravissimo officii_, wherein, to
the consternation of many members of the episcopate, the pope
interdicted the _associations cultuelles_, the bodies which, under the
Separation Law, were to be established in each parish, to hold and to
organize the church property and finances, and were essential to the
working of the act. On the 4th of September the bishops met again and
passed a resolution of submission to the Holy See. In spite of their
loyalty they could not but deplore an injunction which inevitably would
cause distress to the large majority of the clergy after the act came
into operation on the 12th of December 1906. They knew only too well how
hopeless was the idea that the distress of the clergy would call forth
any revulsion of popular feeling in France. The excitement of the public
that summer over a painful clerical scandal in the diocese of Chartres
showed that the interest taken by the mass of the population in church
matters was not of a kind which would aid the clergy in their difficult
situation.
The Clémenceau ministry.
At the close of the parliamentary recess M. Sarrien resigned the
premiership on the pretext of ill-health, and by a presidential decree
of the 25th of October 1906 M. Clémenceau, who had been called to fill
the vacancy, took office. MM. Bourgeois, Poincaré, Etienne and Leygues
retired with M. Sarrien. The new prime minister placed at the foreign
office M. Pichon, who had learned politics on the staff of the
_Justice_, the organ of M. Clémenceau, by whose influence he had entered
the diplomatic service in 1893, after eight years in the chamber of
deputies. He had been minister at Pekin during the Boxer rebellion and
resident at Tunis, and he was now radical senator for the Jura. M.
Caillaux, a more adventurous financier than M. Rouvier or M. Poincaré,
who had been Waldeck-Rousseau's minister of finance, resumed that
office. The most significant appointment was that of General Picquart to
the war office. The new minister when a colonel had been willing to
sacrifice his career, although he was an anti-Semite, to redressing the
injustice which he believed had been inflicted on a Jewish
officer--whose second condemnation, it may be noted, had been quashed
earlier in 1906. M. Viviani became the first minister of labour
(_Travail et Prévoyance sociale_). The creation of the office and the
appointment of a socialist lawyer and journalist to fill it showed that
M. Clémenceau recognized the increasing prominence of social and
industrial questions and the growing power of the trade-unions.
The acts and policy of the Clémenceau ministry and the events which took
place during the years that it held office are too near the present time
to be appraised historically. It seems not unlikely that the first
advent to power, after thirty-five years of strenuous political life, of
one who must be ranked among the ablest of the twenty-seven prime
ministers of the Third Republic will be seen to have been coincident
with an important evolution in the history of the French nation. The
separation of the Roman Catholic Church from the state, by the law of
December 1905, had deprived the Socialists, the now most powerful party
of the extreme Left, of the chief outlet for their activity, which
hitherto had chiefly found its scope in anti-clericalism. Having no
longer the church to attack they turned their attention to economical
questions, the solution of which had always been their theoretical aim.
At the same period the law relating to the Contract of Association of
1901, by removing the restrictions (save in the case of religious
communities) which previously had prevented French citizens from forming
association without the authorization of the government, had formally
abrogated the individualistic doctrine of the Revolution, which in all
its phases was intolerant of associations. The law of June 1791 declared
the destruction of all corporations of persons engaged in the same trade
or profession to be a fundamental article of the French constitution,
and it was only in the last six years of the Second Empire that some
tolerance was granted to trade-unions, which was extended by the Third
Republic only in 1884. In that year the prohibition of 1791 was
repealed. Not quite 70 unions existed at the end of 1884. In 1890 they
had increased to about 1000, in 1894 to 2000, and in 1901, when the law
relating to the Contract of Association was passed, they numbered 3287
with 588,832 members. The law of 1901 did not specially affect them; but
this general act, completely emancipating all associations formed for
secular purposes, was a definitive break with the individualism of the
Revolution which had formed the basis of all legislation in France for
nearly a century after the fall of the ancient monarchy. It was an
encouragement and at the same time a symptom of the spread of
anti-individualistic doctrine. This was seen in the accelerated increase
of syndicated workmen during the years succeeding the passing of the
Associations Law, who in 1909 were over a million strong. The power
exercised by the trade-unions moved the functionaries of the government,
a vast army under the centralized system of administration, numbering
not less than 800,000 persons, to demand equal freedom of association
for the purpose of regulating their salaries paid by the state and their
conditions of labour. This movement brought into new relief the
long-recognized incompatibility of parliamentary government with
administrative centralization as organized by Napoleon.
In another direction the increased activity in the rural districts of
the Socialists, who hitherto had chiefly worked in the industrial
centres, indicated that they looked for support from the peasant
proprietors, whose ownership in the soil had hitherto opposed them to
the practice of collectivist doctrine. In the summer of 1907 an economic
crisis in the wine-growing districts of the South created a general
discontent which spread to other rural regions. The Clémenceau ministry,
while opposing the excesses of revolutionary socialism and while
incurring the strenuous hostility of M. Jaurès, the Socialist leader,
adopted a programme which was more socialistic than that of any previous
government of the republic. Under its direction a bill for the
imposition of a graduated income tax was passed by the lower house,
involving a scheme of direct taxation which would transform the interior
fiscal system of France. But the income tax was still only a project of
law when M. Clémenceau unexpectedly fell in July 1909, being succeeded
as prime minister by his colleague M. Briand. His ministry had, however,
passed one important measure which individualists regarded as an act of
state-socialism. It took a long step towards the nationalization of
railways by purchasing the important Western line and adding it to the
relatively small system of state railways. Previously a more generally
criticized act of the representatives of the people was not of a nature
to augment the popularity of parliamentary institutions at a period of
economic crisis, when senators and deputies increased their own annual
salary, or indemnity as it is officially called, to 15,000 francs.
(J. E. C. B.)
(Continued in volume X slice VIII.)