With the end of the century there has come in France a great revival of the struggle between religion and free thought which has so long been waged there; and the stupendous effort put forth by the Roman Catholic Church to annihilate the Third Republic has placed the country in a condition of unrest such as it has only known on the eve of its chief Revolutions. Behind the notorious Dreyfus case, behind the shouts of 'Long live the army!' and 'Death to the Jews!' behind all the so-called Nationalism and Militarism, the Church has been steadily, incessantly working, ever fanning the flames of discord, ever promoting and fostering coalitions of malcontents, by whose help it hopes to recover its old-time paramountcy. Time alone can reveal the outcome of this great effort, this 'forlorn hope' assault upon institutions which have hitherto kept Catholicism in check and tended so largely to the diffusion of free thought; but personally I am inclined to think, with all due allowance for partial successes achieved here and there, that this Clerical movement, however skilfully engineered under the cloak of patriotism, and however lavishly financed by the bulk of the money derived from the Lourdes 'miracles,' over which the Assumptionist Fathers preside, and the offerings of zealots throughout the country, will ultimately result in failure, for France is not at heart a religious country, and when faith has departed from a nation can it be restored?

The meaning of the Clerical movement to which I have referred is twofold. In the first place there is the perfectly natural and legitimate desire of the French Catholics to recover lost ascendancy; and in the second place there is the conviction of the Vatican and the French episcopate generally that France is the only country which under favourable circumstances might be in a position to restore the temporal power of the Holy See. In that respect the Pope can hope for nothing from Spain or Austria or the Catholic States of Germany. In France rests the sole hope of the Papacy; and thus on political as well as religious grounds the establishment of a Catholic régime in place of the present-day free-thought Republic is the one great dream of those who direct the fortunes of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church.

All who know anything of modern history are aware that in 1849 a French army overthrew the Roman Republic and reinstated Pius IX. in possession of the so-called patrimony of St. Peter, and that in after years, until France indeed was vanquished at Sedan, the presence of French forces alone enabled the Pope to continue in the exercise of his territorial sway. Both the Royalist reactionaries who sat in the National Assembly of the Second Republic, and the Prince-President of that time, afterwards Napoleon III., lent support to Pius IX., and in return expected to receive the countenance and help of the French clergy in their various designs upon France. But the clergy always seeks its own ends, and more than once its policy varied, now being in favour of the Royalists and now in favour of Louis Napoleon, according as it seemed likely to secure greater benefits from one or the other.

Even when the contest for supremacy was over, when the Republic had been murdered at the Coup d'État, and the hopes of the Count de Chambord had been destroyed by the triumph of Napoleon the Little, the clergy did not give unqualified support to the new government. True, on the 1st of January, 1852, Monseigneur Sibour, Archbishop of Paris, officiated at a solemn 'Te Deum' at Notre Dame in honour of the triumph of a bribed and drunken soldiery over the defenders of the Constitution; but Louis Napoleon had scarcely become Emperor before a large section of the clergy began to protest that the new régime was by no means sufficiently Clerical. The course adopted in these circumstances was very characteristic and significant. An education law had been passed in 1850, giving many privileges and advantages to the clergy, such indeed as they had not possessed since the downfall of Charles X. But comparative liberty in educational matters was more than the French episcopate, eager for domination as the price of its adhesion to imperialism, could willingly allow, and before long a celebrated and remarkably well written newspaper, 'L'Univers,' initiated a campaign against the Empire, taking as its standpoint that the Pope was the virtual sovereign of the world, and that everything must be subservient to the interests of the Roman Church. Half the French episcopate actively supported the view which followed, i.e. that the education of the young ought to be entirely under priestly control, the priests being the vicars of the Pope, even as he (the Pope) was the vicar of the Deity. There were some curious and even amusing incidents in the course of that now forgotten campaign. For instance, it was actually proposed to abolish the study of the Greek and Latin classics in France, a suggestion which many of the Bishops vigorously upheld, though others of a scholarly turn pleaded plaintively in favour of Horace and a few others, whose writings, if edited in a Christian

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The Conquest of Plassans (La Conquête de Plassans)

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION