of Embrun remained suppressed, and its title was transferred to the Archdiocese of Aix. The archbishop of Aix-Embrun was metropolitan of the dioceses of Fréjus, Digne, and Gap. The Concordat, however, was never ratified by the French National Assembly, which had the reputation of being more royalist than the King, and therefore, ironically, Napoleonic legislation was never removed from the legal code (as agreed in the Concordat of 1817) and the terms of the Concordat of 1817 never became state law. In 1881 and 1882, Jules Ferry was responsible for the enactment of the Jules Ferry Laws, establishing free primary education throughout France, and mandatory secular education. The five faculties of theology (at Paris, Bordeaux, Aix, Rouen, and Lyon), which had been supported financially by the State, were suppressed. In the 1890s the archbishop of Aix, François Xavier Gouthe-Soulard, came into increasing disrepute, both with Paris and with the Vatican, because of his support for the extreme right-wing anti-republican Congregation of the Assumption (Assumptionists). A letter of support for their newspaper, La Croix, in which Gouthe-Soulard wrote, "We are not living under a Republic, we are living under Freemasonry," brought the Archbishop a penal condemnation from the French courts in 1892. He was fined 3000 francs and had his salary suspended. In 1896, La Croix founded an electoral committee, the Comité Justice-Égalité, with a view to opposing Jews, Masons, and Socialists at all levels in the electoral process. Pope Leo XIII and his Secretary of State Mariano Rampolla, who did not want to offend the republicans, while still supporting the Catholic faithful, tried to moderate the views of the Assumptionists, even to the point of sending messengers to the bishops of France to explain the Pope's electoral policy. For the election cycle of 1898, Senator Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, who was a Catholic and a conservative, but a republican and far from being an anti-Semite, formed an electoral alliance between the Opportunists and the Rallié as he ran for President of the Republic. The Assumptionists and La Croix did everything they could to disrupt this conservative-moderate alliance, and in the superheated atmosphere following the Dreyfus Affair did considerable damage. Waldeck-Rousseau never forgave them, and began legal processes against the Assumptionists as an unauthorized congregation. When they were convicted in January 1900, Archbishop-Gouthe-Soulard and five other bishops published letters in La Croix, sympathizing with the plight of the Assumptionists. Nonetheless they were ordered