istence of the Catholic Church, which had been annulled by the Revolution. The ecclesiastical property confiscated by the republican government was not restored, and the Pope and his successors were bound not to move to disturb the purchasers of such property. Provision was made for state support of bishops and clergy in lieu of their appropriated property. The Government was given the right to nominate bishops. The Church, therefore, has naturally and inevitably been deeply interested and constantly an important factor in French politics. When the present republic came into being, a republic without republicanism, as it was called on the assembling of the first Chamber, the Republicans would have been in a hopeless minority had it not been for the discord between royalists and Bonapartists. The Clerical party was distinctly anti-republican, and by its political activity and bitterness that party well earned Gambetta’s denunciation as an enemy of the republic. His “Le cléricalisme, voila l’enneme” has for thirty years been a political war cry.
Those who stand for the republic have come naturally to count the Clericals as the enemies of the state. The Clericals have left no lack of reason that this should be so. However vigorously the Republicans might fight the Clericals at the polls or denounce them in the Chamber, they felt always the quicksand in the ground on which the enemies of clericalism were standing, because the next generation of voters was growing up in the clerical schools and was under instruction that if it hardly warranted the charge of being directly seditious and threatening to the life of the state, was certainly not calculated to make these youths republicans.
This state of affairs resulted in a platform which was larger than any single party, a so-called Programme of Republican Defense, on which there has been room not only for Republicans to stand, but breadth enough for Radicals and Socialists as well. It has furnished the basis for the coalition of parties which forms the present Government and has made the common ground on which these groups, holding in some respects most divers political faiths, could be united into what is known as the Republican “Bloc.”
The first change in the law as made by Waldeck-Rousseau in 1901 only went so far as to compel the orders to obtain authorization from the Government for their legal continuation. After Waldeck-Rousseau gave way to Combes, the Government went at the subject in the most thorough-going manner, its aim being so effectually to disband the orders that there should be no possibility of their return to instil into the minds of the French youth doubts and questions as to the republic.
The struggle is one of the sort in which there can be drawn no straight line of right and wrong. It is undoubtedly true that the traditional attitude of the Church and of the Clerical party has been reactionary and generally unfriendly to the republic, that the character of the teaching by the orders has been open to most reasonable and vigorous objection by those who hold firm faith in the principles of republicanism. It is true that the Church has been active in public affairs, perhaps fairly earning the charge that clericalism is a movement “that trespasses, in the name of the Christian faith, on the domain of politics, and that, under the cover of religion, menaces the tranquillity of the state.” There has been ground for objection to the growth of the wealth of the monastic orders, especially when they were directly engaged in commercial affairs. Particularly has there been room for objection when they used their wealth to influence elections. The more rapid advance of those army officers who were educated in the clerical schools, compared with those who received their education elsewhere, has been an annoying evidence of the solidarity of clerical influence. There has been bigotry and narrowness, overzealousness and defiance of law, priestly exhortation better fitted to the stump than the pulpit, and even counselling toward resistance and defiance of law that was well fitted to neither.
It must he remembered, however, that there has been a great and respectable minority holding the most sincere belief in the unwisdom of this restrictive legislation. The programme of the Government has struck at the deepest sensibilities of this minority. There has seemed to be undue haste and needless harshness. The subject touched many interests and appealed to many sentiments and prejudices. It had taken the Republican party thirty years to