The Dreyfus Affair (52 page)

The dispute over religious education, however,
long pre-dated the Affair
and had little as such to do with recent political events. Jules Ferry had secularised primary schools twenty years before but had left French parents free to choose between the state lycées and Catholic colleges for their children’s secondary education. The assumption by the republicans had been that free education in the secular lycées would cause the Catholic colleges to wither away. This had proved false: the number of pupils attending lycées had in fact declined from 56 per cent in 1887 to 51 per cent in 1899, whereas the number attending private schools, most of which were run by the religious orders, had risen from 44 per cent in 1887 to 49 per cent in 1899.
33

To Waldeck-Rousseau it was this fissure in French education which was responsible for the political division in the country. The two systems were teaching different curricula and, above all, different values: they were creating, he said – using the phrase coined by the historian Ernest Lavisse in the 1880s –
deux jeunesses
, two childhoods, that grew into two hostile camps within one nation.
34
New laws prohibited all associations that were not specifically authorised by the state. Henceforward rights enjoyed by Socialists and Freemasons did not apply to monks and nuns. The new law, wrote Denis Brogan, ‘created a new class of Frenchman with fewer rights than any other . . . Those French men or French women who wished to exercise this privilege to live in common for religious motives were only allowed to do so if a special law were passed.’
35

These anti-clerical statutes, designed to silence ‘propagandists for the Counter-Revolution’, were ‘the defining and only significant issue’ during the general election of 1902.
36
Economic and fiscal questions such as tariffs and income tax roused no passions; the cement of the left-wing coalition, said the Comte de Mun, was ‘religious war’.
37
If Waldeck-Rousseau, the bourgeois republican
par excellence
, had, as some suggested, promoted anti-clericalism to divert his Socialist allies in the Bloc des Gauches from their more revolutionary demands, he succeeded. Gambetta’s cry, ‘Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi,’
was as effective a rallying cry now as it had been twenty years before.

The French Catholics, chastened by the Affair, formed a new moderate party, Action Libérale, led by supporters of the
ralliement
, Jacques Piou and Albert de Mun; candidates were also put forward by the die-hard anti-Dreyfusard Ligue de la Patrie Française. The popular vote was close; in the first round of the elections, the right trailed the left by only 200,000 votes, but the second round returned a majority of between eighty and ninety in the Chamber of Deputies for the Bloc des Gauches.
38

If women had had the vote, the result might have been different. However, even without female suffrage, it is a paradox that a majority in a supposedly Catholic country should vote for the anti-clerical parties of the left. Roman Catholicism remained the faith of the majority of the French. There was a curé
in every village, and most of the French still used Catholic ceremonies for the rites of passage through life – birth, marriage and death. The philosophical differences between Christianity and the Enlightenment that exercised the intellectuals were of little interest to the peasants in rural France. The explanation lies rather in the fact that, at a time of increasing social discontents, Catholicism was seen as the party of the established social order and therefore the enemy of both the urban and rural poor. ‘The clergy of France has finally convinced everyone who believes in things popular and democratic’, said the Abbé Frémont, ‘that between the Church on the one hand and progress, the Republic and the future on the other, there is no possible relationship but the most deadly hatred.’
39

This deadly hatred of French Catholicism is skilfully depicted in the novels of Octave Mirbeau. The anti-clerical Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le noir
was a Bonapartist; the same class antagonism in Mirbeau’s
Sébastien Roch
,
Abbé Jules
and
The Diary of a Chambermaid
leads to a darker, embittered anarchism. Mirbeau was among the Dreyfusards who met at the Trois Marches during Dreyfus’s second court martial in Rennes. His depiction of Catholicism as the hypocritical ideology of a pretentious bourgeoisie, cold-hearted clergy and arrogant nobility is of more use in the understanding of the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair than Marcel Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
.

The dichotomy between the Catholic Church’s strict views on sexual morality and a growing eroticisation and permissiveness in French society was another cause of anti-clerical sentiment in the exclusively male electorate. Mirbeau’s portrayal of priests as sex-obsessed hypocrites is almost certainly a distortion: ‘the vast majority of the clergy in the nineteenth century’, wrote Ralph Gibson, ‘were pious and chaste and did their best to get on with their religious duties’.
40
However, among these duties was an attempt to enforce chastity through the confessional, and this undoubtedly contributed to the de-Christianisation of France.

First there were the clergy’s strictures about dancing. In the course of the nineteenth century, traditional dances in which there was little physical contact between the sexes had been replaced by the waltz and the polka which placed a man and woman in one another’s arms – effectively a lingering, perambulatory embrace. The moral dangers of such an ‘occasion of sin’ obsessed the nineteenth-century clergy. Girls were made to sign pledges not to dance, which alienated the young, ‘particularly young men in the countryside who deeply resented the curé’s role in cutting off the supply of girls for the village
bal
’.
41

Secondly, among married Frenchmen, there was widespread resentment against the Church’s teaching on birth control. The principal method employed by married couples to avoid conception was withdrawal prior to ejaculation
– the sin of Onan
42
– a practice which was confessed by women but blamed on men.
*
Many French husbands deeply resented not just the Church’s ruling but also the prying of the curé into the intimate details of their conjugal life. They themselves refused to submit to such an interrogation and abandoned the sacrament of confession; they were therefore barred from Easter communion and so effectively excluded from the Church. The Bishop of Le Mans, Jean-Baptiste Bouvier, in a letter to Pope Pius IX, asserted ‘without hesitation that the prying by confessors into sexual habits and their prohibition of birth control was producing protests and driving people away from the Church’.
43

It was, then, not so much the indifference to justice shown by so many French Catholics during the Dreyfus Affair that had made the Church unpopular as the widespread perception that it was the ally of the rich, the enemy of progress and a prurient killjoy when it came to sex. A majority of Frenchmen voted for the anti-clerical agenda of the Bloc des Gauches
in the general election of 1902; Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau’s strategy was vindicated. But, in his moment of triumph, he resigned on grounds of ill-health, exhausted after running the government for three momentous years – a longer period than any other in the history of the Third Republic. He was replaced as Prime Minister by Émile Combes.

Combes, born in the Tarn, had studied in a Catholic seminary for the priesthood but had been rejected because he was judged ‘too proud’.
44
Spurned by the Church, Combes lost his faith, joined the Freemasons, studied medicine and practised as a doctor in the country town of Pons in the Charente-Inférieure. Here he espoused ‘all the ideas, prejudices, hates, and principles of the small town anticlerical’.
45
He was typical of those in the French provinces who worked to ensure that the village priest was ‘banished from the school, excluded from the committee directing official charities, regarded with malicious distrust or jealous hatred by the mayor and the school-master, kept at arm’s length as a compromising neighbour by all the minor officials employed by the commune or the state, spied on by the innkeeper, exposed to the anonymous denunciations of the local newspaper’ and left to spending ‘his mornings reciting prayers to empty pews and his afternoons planting cabbages and pruning roses’.
46

What had been done on a small scale in a provincial town, Combes now enacted for the whole nation. He formed a cabinet which included ten fellow Freemasons, and in his first days in office signed decrees closing down more than a hundred Catholic schools.
47
His provincial roots, and his disdain for the moderating blandishments of the metropolis such as a seat in the Académie Française, endeared this ‘obstinate and self-satisfied little man’
48
to his admiring disciples, who called him the ‘little father’. One of his few excursions into society was to attend the soirées
of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, where other regulars were Joseph Reinach and Alfred Dreyfus.
49

On 1 July 1901, a new Law on Associations was passed which obliged every religious order to obtain ‘a legislative authorising’ act which would determine its function. All but five of the religious orders that applied for authorisation were refused.
*
The unauthorised orders were either dissolved or forced to move abroad. There were in France at that time 159,628 members of religious orders living in 19,424 establishments of one kind or another. Of these 3,126 were run by men, 16,298 by women. There were 30,136 members of male religious orders, of whom 23,327 taught in schools and colleges.
50

However, it was women who were particularly affected by the new laws. As Katrin Schultheiss observed, ‘membership in an active religious congregation afforded single women of all classes the opportunity to perform a vast array of social services, including nursing and teaching’.
51
As many as 100,000 girls and single women were employed in enterprises in the silk and clothing industries run by religious orders; these were now closed down. In Catholic Brittany, there was popular resistance to the closures: 1,500 colonial troops were sent to deal with three convents in the province, and 3,000 laid siege to a monastery near Tarascon.
52
Expelling the nursing orders from French hospitals was particularly unpopular. The extraordinary expansion of active rather than contemplative religious orders in France in the nineteenth century – the
congrégations
– had met a growing demand for social services that the penny-pinching republican politicians had been unwilling to satisfy.

The
congrégations hospitalières 
. . . rapidly developed their own paramedical establishments (pharmacies, sanatoria, home nursing, etc.) and then moved into a bewildering variety of social services: old people’s homes, orphanages, homes for the blind and deaf-mutes, lunatic asylums, homes for ex-prostitutes, prison services, soup kitchens, job placements for domestic servants and so on, almost
ad infinitum 
. . . They were prepared to take on the repulsive, the incurable, and the financially unrewarding in a way that doctors were often not.
53

Now anti-clerical zeal overrode republican parsimony. ‘It is the strict duty of every republican’, said the Parisian doctor and politician Désiré Bourneville, ‘to remove from the priests and nuns every means of action accorded them in civil society of which they are the implacable adversaries.’ Bourneville led a protracted campaign to replace nuns with lay nurses in French hospitals and succeeded thanks to the anti-clerical majority on Paris’s Municipal Council. Katrin Schultheiss estimates that there were, at the turn of the century, approximately 20,000 Catholic nuns providing nursing care in French hospitals. Sacking them was not popular. In both Paris and Lyon, ‘anti-clerical doctors, hospital administrators and politicians – many of whom unequivocally supported the laicization of the nation’s schools – rallied in the defence of the congregational nurses’.
54
On 15 January 1908, several thousand Parisians, among them doctors, councillors and politicians, assembled outside the historic Hôtel-Dieu hospital to take leave of the Augustine Sisters who had served there as nurses for more than a hundred years.
55

However, the prime target of the anti-clerical legislation was the Catholic schools. By a law of 7 July 1904, members of religious orders were prohibited from the ‘teaching of every grade and every kind in France’. The members of the few authorised congregations came under this ban. Every religious, man or woman, who wanted to continue to teach children had to renounce their religious calling, and it was left to the courts to decide whether such a renunciation was sincere. Henri de Gaulle, the father of Charles de Gaulle, lost his job as the lay headmaster of the Jesuit school in Paris and sent his son Charles to be educated by the Jesuits in Belgium.
56

Here, for French Catholics, was the persecution which they had feared: it might not be as cruel and sanguinary as that of the Jacobins, but it was, all the same, a determined effort by a government of atheists and Freemasons to prevent the education of French children in a faith that had flourished in France since the baptism of Clovis 1,400 years before, and to root out significant aspects of Catholic practice from the life of the French nation. Many devout customs were now criminalised. Monastic life was unlawful and religious processions, dating from the Middle Ages, were banned by anti-clerical local authorities.
57