Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE 1900-1906 _Nihil Obstat_: JOSEPH WILHELM, S. T. D., CENSOR DEPUTATUS. _Imprimi potest_ â GULIELMUS, EPISCOPUS ARINDELENSIS, VICARIUS GENERALIS. WESTMONASTERII, _Die 6 Aprilis, 1907_. THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE 1900-1906 BY J. NAPIER BRODHEAD AUTHOR OF âSLAV AND MOSLEMâ _LONDON_ KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÃBNER & CO., LTD. 43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO, W. 1907 PREFACE These Considerations, written during the last six yearsâ residence in France, have already appeared in the Press of the United States. They were written from year to year without any thought of republication, which seems justified to-day by the acuity of the conflict between the Church and the French atheocracy, a conflict which cannot but interest Christians everywhere. J. N. B. CONTENTS PAGE FIRST IMPRESSIONS 1 THE TWO CAMPS 7 THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL 13 THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL 18 ARBITRARY INCONSISTENCY 29 A PAGAN RENAISSANCE 33 INCONSISTENT JACOBINISM 40 UNAUTHORISED CONGREGATIONS 46 A COMBES _COUP DE MAIN_ 50 LEGALIZED DESPOTISM 57 DESPOTISM PLUS GUILE 63 UNCHANGING JACOBINISM 71 DEATH OF WALDECK ROUSSEAU 78 LIBERTY AND STATE SERVITUDE 82 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 91 A PAPAL NOTE 105 FREEMASONRY 112 FREEMASONRY 118 PART SECOND 125 ALCOHOLISM IN FRANCE 131 THE LAW OF SEPARATION 135 CATHOLICISM IN GERMANY 144 PSEUDO-SEPARATION 147 THE PROGRESS OF ANARCHY 160 THE ABOLITION OF THE CONCORDAT 170 THE INVENTORIES 177 DUC IN ALTUM 185 THE LATEST PHASE OF SEPARATION 197 LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY 211 CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 233 APPENDIX 249 THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE FIRST IMPRESSIONS LYON, _March 17th, 1900_. There seems to be considerable misapprehension in the United States as to the status of the Catholic Church in France. âOne iniquitous arrangement in France,â writes the _Central Baptist_, âis the support of the priesthood out of public funds.â In receiving stipends from the State the French clergy, however, are no more its debtors, nor its functionaries, than holders of French 3 per cents who receive the interest of their bonds. When that essentially satanic movement, known as the French Revolution, swept over this fair land, deluging it in blood, the wealth of the Church, the accumulation of centuries, was all confiscated by the hordes who pillaged and devastated, and killed in the name of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, until Napoleon restored order with an iron hand. A born ruler of men, this Corsican understood that the principal feature of the work of restoration must be the reorganization of the Catholic Church in France. Accordingly he concluded with the Pope the convention known as the Concordat. It was not possible in the dilapidated state of the country to restore the millions that had been stolen by those âchampions of liberty who,â according to Macaulay, âcompressed into twelve months more crimes than the kings of France had committed in twelve centuries.â Still less was it possible to rebuild many noble structures, and recover works of art sold by sordid harpies or destroyed by impious vandals. It was accordingly agreed (Arts. 13 and 14, Concordat) that in lieu of this restitution the State should henceforth pay to the Church, annually, the stipends of so many archbishops, bishops, curates, etc. The Concordat constitutes an organic law of the State. The clergy receive their stipends, not as a salary, but as the payment of a debt due to them by the State. It is in vain, therefore, that efforts are made now to represent the Catholic clergy as salaried functionaries of the State. The act by which Waldeck Rousseau recently decreed the suppression of the stipends of certain bishops was wholly arbitrary, and, moreover, the violation of an organic law. It was the partial repudiation of a public debt, quite as dishonourable as if the payment of interest of three per cent bonds were withheld from certain bondholders. The position of Protestant and Jewish ministers in France is entirely different. They do receive salaries which are purely gratuitous. The Revolutionists did not trouble them, and they had no part in the Concordat of 1801. We may say that the French Revolution was appeased, but it is not over by any means. No nation less well founded and grounded could have withstood as France has done the shocks and upheavals of a century. To this day France is still profoundly Catholic, in spite of the millions of public money expended in so-called non-sectarian primary schools and colleges. Travellers stroll into French churches, in summer, at High Mass on Sundays at 9.30 or 10.30 generally, and because they find a very small congregation at this service they report that the churches are deserted and religion fast dying out. They ignore the fact that in these churches low masses have been said hourly since 5 a.m., so that people may comply with their duty, and then go off on their outing. Lyon has many large beautiful old churches, and many handsome new ones. Yet not one of them could contain all their parishioners if they wished to attend the same service. For nearly twenty-five years the Government has been running its educational machine at immense cost, compelling the French to support schools they will not patronize, as well as those of their own choice. Nevertheless, State colleges and primary schools are so neglected that laws are being devised to compel parents to send their children to them. If all other means fail, the congregations of both sexes occupied in teaching will be suppressed. This is the Governmentâs programme. There is nothing so bad as the corruption of that which is best. France is still profoundly Catholic, and it is only natural that the struggle between good and evil should be sharp here. The forces of reaction and action are always proportionate. Hence it is that France has always been âthe centre of Masonic history,â and of the Goddess Reasonâs supreme efforts against Christianity. Her temperament, too, makes her a choice field for experiments. We can therefore understand M. Waldeck Rousseauâs indignation when so many bishops openly expressed their sympathy with and admiration for the Assumptionist Fathers who were condemned recently--and condemned for what crime? For being an unauthorized association of more than twenty persons, when there are hundreds of other similar associations at the present moment. Briefly stated, the present phase of the Church in France is simply the nineteenth-century phase of the struggles of Investiture in the Middle Ages; the secular power seeking to have and to dominate a national Church, whose ministers are to be nothing but state functionaries, bound to serve and to support the Government. This was the old pagan ideal, and every portion of the Church that has renounced allegiance to Rome has fallen into this condition. In England, in Russia, in the Byzantine Empire, in Turkey, in Africa--wherever there is a national Church--it is little better than a department of State. The Gallican Church narrowly escaped a similar fate in the days of Louis XIV. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was another desperate and abortive attempt to nationalize and secularize the Church in France. Gloriously, too, her clergy expiated their momentary Gallican insubordination. All over France they were guillotined, drowned, and exiled, and imprisoned, _en masse_, rather than submit to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. There is nothing more admirable in the history of Christianity than the conduct of the victims massacred in the convent of the Carmelites, converted into a prison by the Jacobins. Martyrs and confessors were as numerous as in the first centuries of the Church, and from their ashes arose a new French Church purified by poverty and suffering. Never have institutions of learning and charity under religious direction been so numerous. No country has a clergy more zealous, more learned, more united with the Holy See than that of France to-day. No wonder then that the powers of darkness are devising means to destroy the new structure, so zealously and so laboriously raised on the ruins accumulated by the Revolution of 1790. âNot on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.â Violent measures would rouse French Catholics from their political apathy. The Government cannot afford to do this. Religious liberty must be destroyed by degrees--and herein lies the danger. THE TWO CAMPS _May 25th, 1900._ To the thoughtful and sympathetic observer, France presents a singular spectacle of duality--two camps and two standards are confronting each other, neo-paganism and Christianity. By Christianity I mean, of course, Catholicism, for though there may be good Protestants, who adhere to some of the truths of revealed religion, such a thing as a good pervert French Protestant is a _lusus naturÃ¦_, practically non-existent. It is a notorious fact that Protestants in France as elsewhere in Europe are, as a rule, absolutely indifferent in religious matters since they have ceased to be persecuted, and in many cases they have become the enemies of revealed religion. All civilization, all redemption from barbarism, is fostered and developed around a sanctuary. Consecrated hands have, in every instance, laid the corner stone of the social edifice. The Church, the school-house, the university, the courts of justice--these are the normal steps by which societies, cities, and nations have advanced in the Old World out of barbarism and chaos since the overthrow of the Roman Empire. Of France this is pre-eminently true. Hundreds of villages and towns bear the names of holy missionary monks who built first a cell, and then a monastery around a chapel, which became the centre of a village, that grew in time to be a city. We see the same thing all over Europe and in the British Isles. Gibbon says that the French bishops made the French monarchy as bees construct a honeycomb. Like every institution that bears a religious imprint, this monarchy was long-lived. Those who descant so volubly on the flightiness of the French people, always overturning their government and never satisfied with the one they have, would do well to reflect that the French monarchy lasted some fourteen centuries. When this monarchy was overthrown by the assassination of Louis XVI there was formed a vortex in which were engulfed millions of human lives. Not that I consider a monarchical or any special form of government indispensable to Franceâs prosperity. There is, however, one essential condition. The generating principle of the French nation was the Catholic Faith. Without it, France would no longer be herself. She would disintegrate interiorly, and dismemberment and decadence would follow. France is still profoundly Catholic, in spite of the prodigious efforts made since the days of Voltaire and Tom Paine by numerous native and alien religious vandals, whose prostituted intellects were garnished from the storehouse of centuries of Christian culture. She will always be this or nothing. For any one who knows France, historically and psychologically, it is preposterous to think of a substitute creed, corresponding to any of the various shreds of Christianity, which do duty for religion under the name of some one or other of the multitudinous Protestant sects. France, I repeat, will always be Catholic or nothing. But the Government is on the verge of apostasy. For the first time in French history the usual religious observances on Good Friday were suppressed in all the naval ports. âWhat thou doest do quickly,â and on this occasion the order was sent by telegraph on Thursday evening. As I stated in my last letter, irreligious education is doing its work, and the increase of juvenile criminals is appalling.[1] If the projected law regarding religious associations is voted, it will be tantamount to the abolition of all religious teaching, as the existence of these congregations will be rendered impracticable. England and the United States will be the gainers, as they were when the Revolution dispersed the priesthood in 1790. The French Government is on the verge of apostasy, as I have said. Is this a cause, a presage, or a symptom of national decadence? All three, I fear. Nations stand or fall with their governments. They have the government they merit and they are punished for the evil doings of their rulers. âI gave them a king in my wrath,â it was written. Is there sufficient vitality left in the French constitution to reject the poison that is undermining it, and of which alcoholism, unknown in France fifty years ago, is but the outward and visible sign? The assertion I make that the greatness of the French people and their very national existence is bound up with the Christian Faith is unquestioned by every thinker in France, even by those who, for diverse reasons, do not practise their religion, though they all bank on the last sacraments and would be very sorry to see their wives and children neglect their religious duties. The governments which have succeeded each other since 1880 have flattered themselves that they could govern without the Church and against the Church. Bismarck tried it and failed. The Catholic party triumphed. It still holds the balance of power in Germany, and the nation is growing daily more powerful and prosperous. In France, alas! it is quite the contrary. In order to crush what they are pleased to call the âclericalâ party, the Government has allied itself with Socialists of the reddest streak. Indeed, we may say that anarchy and socialism, or collectivism as it is called, are sitting in high places. Any president or minister who dared to stem the tide would fall. They must temporize, resign, or die. Carnot was assassinated. Casimir-Perier resigned; Faure, who steadily opposed the revision of the Dreyfus case, was poisoned, I am told--at any rate, it is said that he died almost immediately after swallowing a cup of tea at a soirÃ©e. Though the public has no means of forming a correct judgment regarding the guilt of the notorious Dreyfus, the most important evidence having been secret, I have never doubted that he was justly condemned. At any rate, he accepted the Presidential pardon, and withdrew his appeal, a strange thing for an innocent man to do. This alone, it would seem, ought to estop him from a new trial. But unfortunately the whole thing is to be gone over again, though it is a perfect nightmare for four-fifths of the French nation. I know France intimately since thirty years, and it is with infinite sorrow that I diagnose her present condition and its perils. According to custom, the Imperial Court of Russia retired to Moscow for Holy Week, and while the Czar, laying aside court etiquette, was kneeling humbly on the bare floor among his peasant subjects, holding his lighted candle like them, his allies, the rulers of France, were desecrating Easter Vigil by inaugurating the Paris Exhibition with speeches, which seemed to have been compiled from those made by Robespierre and his companions on that very Champs de Mars a century ago, when they inaugurated their theo-philanthropy and the worship of the Goddess of Reason. I presume Holy Saturday was selected because it is a high festival among the Jews; otherwise Easter Monday would surely have been more appropriate in a country where there are thirty-five million Catholics. This was on the 9th April, and the Exposition they were in such a hurry to inaugurate on that particular day is far from ready even now. THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL _May 4th, 1901._ A year ago I wrote in these columns as follows: âFor twenty years the Government has been running its educational machine at immense loss, compelling the French to support their own schools as well as those they will not patronize. Nevertheless, State schools and colleges are so neglected that laws are being devised to compel parents to send their children to them. If all other means fail, the congregations of both sexes occupied in teaching will be suppressed.â Now this is the true object of the Associations Bill; all the rest is merely padding. Liberty of association for Freemasons, Socialists, and all friends of the Third Republic will be untrammelled as heretofore. The blow aimed at religious teachers is of peculiar interest at this hour, when Christians, all over the world, are recognizing the immense importance of the religious education of the young, if we would preserve the structure of Western civilization, so laboriously built up during 2000 years, and save its deep foundations from being sapped by the returning tide of barbarism and paganism. For the revolutionary spirit of to-day is simply another version of that renaissance of paganism which culminated in the Protestant revolt. As in the past, it will be met by a great Catholic revival like that of the sixteenth century, which Macaulay has so eloquently described in his Essay on Rankeâs _Papacy_. This is the counter-revolution against which the self-styled government of âDÃ©fense Republicaineâ is dressing its batteries. Already the effects of this revival are felt and, as Macaulay has pointed out, revivals of the religious spirit, this everlasting factor in the history of humanity which our pseudo-scientists so unscientifically ignore, always redound to the benefit of Catholicism. When men like BrunetiÃ¨re, Bourget, LemaÃ®tre, FranÃ§ois CoppÃ©e, become standard-bearers of truth, we are consoled for the vociferations of any number of Vivianis, Trouillots, etc., in and outside the French Chambers, for whom âthe eternal decalogueâ is but an antiquated superstition that must be swept away. The law against the Congregations has been opposed in the Chambers by many Republicans who have no religious scruples, and one may safely affirm that there is not a respectable Frenchman, outside the coterie in power, who does not condemn the Bill. A few days before its passage, a mass meeting of many trade unions, presided over by Leroy Beaulieu, was held in Paris to protest against the projected suppression of the Congregations. The eminent economist declared that the proposed legislation was one of ânational suicide.â If the law is so repugnant to the French in general, how is it that the Government always obtains a majority? it may be asked. The explanation lies in the fact that while honest Frenchmen have been attending to their business and leaving politics strictly alone, this anti-religious campaign has been carefully prepared since many years by the enemies of Christianity. Like all notable persecutions, it is the work of secret societies. The Boxers of China are a congeries of these societies. In the days of Julian the chief instigators and abettors of persecution were the secret societies of Mithra, whom Renan declared to have been âveritable Masonic lodges with their initiations, passwords,â etc. Since 1875 the âGrand Orient,â in which the Jewish element predominates, has gradually been gathering into its hands all the reins of government; not a very difficult task, seeing that as a rule respectable, industrious Frenchmen will not touch politics, while the emissaries of the lodges go out into the slums of mining and industrial centres, and organize primaries and Socialist clubs that defeat any respectable candidate who dares to enter the lists against the candidate of the Government. Jules LemaÃ®tre, in the _Echo de Paris_, states that there are 400 deputies and 10 ministers who are Freemasons. As these latter number about 25,000 in France, it follows that there is one representative in Parliament for every 50 Freemason electors, whereas there is only one representative for every 1800 votes who are not affiliated to the âGrand Orient.â With a house packed in this way, any legislation is possible. Madame Sorgues, lately sub-editor of JaurÃ¨sâ Socialist organ, _La Petite Republique_, has published some interesting revelations, showing how the Judeo Freemasons have made tools of the Socialists in order to seize the reins of government. âIn combating the combats of Dreyfus,â she writes, âJaurÃ¨s and his friends brought about a singular _rapprochement_ of the two most irreconcilable camps ... the presents of the kings of capital were accepted. The first service rendered was to restore the tottering Socialist Press.... All the advanced [meaning anti-clerical Socialist] dailies have passed into the hands of the great barons of finance; they are _their_ journals now, not the journals of the workers.... Then they cast their eyes on Waldeck Rousseau, the clever rescuer of the Panamists.... The agent of the Dreyfus politics had the happy thought of introducing into the Cabinet, Millerand, the Socialist leader, with the consent of his party. Socialism become ministerial would be _domestiquÃ©_, and rendered inoffensive against capital,â etc. Last fall, the President, Loubet, when at Lyons, dared to be the guest of the Chamber of Commerce, in spite of the Socialist mayor, Augagneur, and his gang. Immediately, the _Aurore_, a Socialist organ of Paris, clamoured for his suppression in these terms: âAs he is not subject to the same accidents as Felix Faure, we must defend ourselves without waiting for the good offices of Judith.â M. Faure, M. Loubetâs predecessor, it will be remembered, is said to have died suddenly after a cup of tea at a soirÃ©e given by a rich Jewess, and the present ministry of the Dreyfus revision, to which he had been steadfastly opposed, came into power almost before the country knew what had happened, bringing in their political wallet another Dreyfus trial and this notorious Associations Bill. If I insist, it is because I wish that it may be clearly understood that the French people are not guilty of the criminal legislation of which they are the victims, owing to their incurable reluctance to touch the mire of politics, left, as a rule, to the most unworthy and unscrupulous. M. Waldeck Rousseau is a smart, wily politician; so was Camille Desmoulins, an obscure, ambitious lawyer, who saw in the Revolution of 1790 a grand opportunity of reaching a proud eminence. This accomplished, he had no further use for Revolutionists. âThe Revolution is over,â he said; but it went on and on, until his own head rolled into the fatal basket. How long will all this last? How long will the mad dogs of Socialist anarchy be held in leash? THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL _3rd April,_ 1901. Few persons in the United States have the leisure or the means of following the debates of the French Chambers, and appreciating the Law on Associations, of which many garbled and falsified versions appear in metropolitan and other dailies. It is pre-eminently a project of tyranny and religious persecution. The sympathy of sectarian antagonism with anti-Catholic measures, in any part of the world, is always a foregone conclusion. It does not concern itself with the arbitrary tyranny involved, alleging, perhaps, that now the tables are turned, and thirty-five millions of Catholics are being treated as were the Huguenots from 1685 to 1790. But when former governments strove to maintain national unity, founded on âOne Lord, one Faith, one Baptism,â their position was that of a man defending his own house against assailants, while the position of this Government is that of a small armed band who have taken forcible possession, and mean to coerce and outlaw the owners by imprescriptible right. But neither Elizabeth nor Louis XIV ever invoked liberty to palliate their coercive policy in order to establish, or maintain unity or uniformity. As Bodley says in his excellent work on France (1898): âThe intolerant system under the Third Republic differs from all persecutions known to history in that it is not only practised in the name of liberty, but is aimed against an established religionâ--in possession since fifteen centuries. It is a curious fact that the Huguenots, so clamorous for toleration and the rights of conscience in the past, have during a century of absolute liberty and equality, 1793-1900, dwindled from 2,000,000 in a population of 27,000,000 to 600,000 in a population of 38,000,000. They have evolved, in the usual process of Protestant disintegration, into the deistical and atheistical minority who, with the Jews, are now so determined to restore national unity in national infidelity. For it is a notorious fact that France is ruled and oppressed by a small coalition of Freemasons, chiefly Protestants and Jews, who are using the Socialists as catsâ paws. Waldeck Rousseau clearly stated the Governmentâs programme in his political speech at Toulouse, and its scope is unmistakable, no matter what affectation of tolerance and amity for the secular clergy may accompany it. He is an astute lawyer, and his unruly band of Socialist henchmen in the Chambers often try his patience sorely by calling a spade a spade. The suppression of religious orders and the confiscation of their property is no new thing. St. Paul reminds the Hebrews of their neophyte fervour, and how they accepted being despoiled with joy. _Rapinam_ is the word used in the Vulgate; modern euphemism eschews the unsavoury word robbery, and says â_secularization_,â â_liquidation_.â Julian the Apostate, like the Rousseaus and the Trouillots of to-day, was also of opinion that the âClericalsâ must be impoverished and discredited in order to crush out Christianity. Henry VIII robbed and suppressed English monasteries simply because he saw no other means of replenishing the empty treasury he had inherited. Moreover the religious orders were not likely to sustain him in his new character of supreme head of the Anglican Church. Suffering, crime, and ignorance reached unprecedented proportions in the century that followed, as we learn from Strypeâs _Chronicles_. Lecky asserts that 75,000 vagrant beggars were hanged in Henryâs reign. Suppressions and confiscations have always been a prominent feature in all revolutions, and they have been numerous in the nineteenth century. The reason is twofold. Everything that has a religious stamp is essentially and very properly conservative. It requires infinite pains, patience, and wisdom to build up or to reconstruct. Any fool or madman can tear down. _Quieta non movere._ The religious congregations, therefore, were always the last to abandon the mother country or the regime under which they had existed for centuries. On the other hand, revolutionists always have a crying need for money to furnish the sinews of rebellion, and also, incidentally, to feather the nests of patriots. What can be more handy, too, than church property, and the untold wealth of the religious orders! It is true that these gold mines are sometimes found to be âsalted,â as they are in the fantastical statistics put forth by the Rousseau ministry.[2] They seldom justify the brilliant expectations of the populace lured by the perspective of rich spoils, as they are to-day--pensions for the veterans of toil, etc. These spoliations have always been followed by an immense recrudescence of popular misery. It was so in France, in Italy, in Spain--everywhere. The twofold motive that instigated these spoliations does not excuse them, but it explains and perhaps palliates to some extent. In France, to-day, there is no extenuating circumstance. The Holy See loyally lent its support to the Third Republic when the second president, M. GrÃ©vy, humbly solicited it at a precarious moment. Leo XIII distinctly requested the clergy and the faithful to rally to the Republic in the interest of peace. With very few exceptions the regular and the secular clergy have strictly abstained from politics. The inquisition of which the Assumption Fathers were recently the object only succeeded in incriminating two or three members of the order. Of course the regular and secular clergy cannot urge their flocks and their pupils to embrace the atheistical and pagan ideals of the coalition in power. If this be disloyalty they are all disloyal. Considering that since 1888 not less than 20,000,000 have been added every year to the public expenditure, one might suppose that the Government would think twice before depriving itself of this army of some 180,000 self-sacrificing men and women who minister to the poor, the sick, the maimed, the blind, the insane, the orphan, and the outcast. Recently the Prefect of the Department of Bouches du Rhone was summoned by the anti-clericals to secularize all the hospitals. He refused to accede to their request, alleging that the budget of charity was totally inadequate already, and that many indigent sufferers were turned away from lack of accommodation. This is only one item; what will it be when the Government has to pay an army of hirelings to minister to the poor all over the land? But the Congregations do not concern themselves with bodily wants only. Many of them are devoted to the education of all classes. This is the head and front of their offending, and the true reason of their taking off. Every one knows that the godless scholastic institutions devised by Paul Bert, Ferry, and Jules Simon are repugnant to the nation, and have been a complete failure. In spite of the millions of public money lavished upon them, they have never been able to hold their own against the religious schools of the Congregations, which are supported entirely by private initiative, and at the cost of great pecuniary sacrifices on the part of Catholic parents, who support two sets of schools--those they patronize and those for which they have no use. Not content with imposing these sacrifices, as in the United States, the Third Republic now proposes to crush out all competition by suppressing the teaching congregations, and indeed all congregations, with the proviso of retaining for the present such as shall be deemed of public utility--meaning, of course, those who bring surcease to the straining budget by rendering gratuitous service to thousands, who would be a burden to the State, in a country already taxed to its utmost capacity. The tyrannical and arbitrary character of a measure which declares all conventual institutions âagainst public orderâ on account of their vows, which are likened to âpersonal servitude,â and yet utilizing some of them, does not trouble these modern Dracos. Still less are they concerned with the iniquity of depriving thousands of citizens of the right to dispose of their lives as they see fit, and of preventing millions of parents from educating their children as they choose. About the middle of the last century, representative men like Montalembert, Lacordaire, Berryer, Dupanloup, entered the political arena to fight the battle of free education against the tyranny of the State University. They won the day, and freedom in educational matters seemed henceforth the inalienable appanage of France and of all communities boasting of Western civilization. The aim of the projected Law of Associations is to crush out this liberty. It is no question of Church and State, but of Christianity and liberty against atheism and tyranny. All the rest is mere padding. It is a reversion to LacedÃ¦monian state tyranny and an odious anachronism. No wonder, then, that the present Dreyfus-Rousseau ministry should seek to throw dust in the eyes of the public, even subsidizing press syndicates to mislead public opinion abroad. In a nutshell, the Trouillot Bill amounts to just this: No association can exist without government authorization, which will never be given to any religious congregation formed for educational purposes. None need apply but those who work with the Government. âWe will give our money only to those who please us,â said the Socialist mayor of Lyons recently. âOur money,â forsooth--considering that the taxpaying portion of the community of Lyons is strongly Catholic and Conservative. Yet this municipal autocrat declared that destitute children, who went to any but state schools, should not be assisted by civic funds. It is the true Jacobin spirit that permeates this Republican organism. The stamping out of religious education is itself but a means to an end. That arch-traitor Renan declared âthat religion would die hard; primary education and the substitution of scientific for literary studies were the only means of killing it.â The final purpose of this Republic is to establish national unity in national atheism, with perhaps a creedless church administered by servile state functionaries--a modified form of the worship of the Goddess of Reason. In saying this I do not calumniate the Republic, as Waldeck Rousseau himself clearly stated the governmental programme at Toulouse. A small coalition of Jews, Protestants, and other Freemasons have gained control of the country by capturing the Socialist vote. The latter do not yet see that they are being used as catsâ paws. For what fellowship can there be between Jew capitalists and collectivists? All honest, industrious Frenchmen despise politics as a rule. The great mining and industrial centres and the slums of large cities furnish practically all the voters, and this proletariat is lured on by brilliant prospects of the collectivist Utopia that is coming, when the Congregations and the Church have been abolished. Respectable Frenchmen, who do try to serve their country by taking a hand in politics, usually withdraw in disgust, and thus the scum comes to the top and is utilized by unscrupulous ambition. If any one wants to enjoy a clever, graphic pen-picture of French politics, let him read _Les morts qui parlent_, by M. de VoguÃ©. The purpose of those in power is, I repeat, to break away completely and for ever from the Catholic religion, with which the French nation is so bound up that its fibres can only be torn out with the last palpitating remnants of national life. âFew greater calamities can befall a nation,â wrote Lecky, âthan to cut herself off as France has done from her own past in her great Revolution.â To consummate this calamity is the avowed purpose of this Government. A hue and cry is raised by its Socialist henchmen at papal _ingÃ©rence_ in French affairs, though the Concordat surely gives the Pope a right to protest against the ostracism and proposed suppression of the Congregations, as being a violation of Article I of the Concordat, which guarantees the âfree exercise of the Catholic religion in France.â Meanwhile â_The Jewish Alliance_â and the â_Internationale_â operate freely and openly, causing strikes in every direction, and disorganizing the industrial conditions here for the benefit of other countries. During the last few months immense sums are being taken out of the country, not by the Congregations only by any means. The boom in the New York Stock Market, which redounds to the credit of the McKinley administration, may be connected with this migration of personal property from France. It has been Franceâs glory and misfortune to be a great purveyor of ideas, ideals, and fashions. She is essentially missionary, and was in the vanguard of Christianity from the beginning. In the early centuries of the Church, her monastic missionaries peopled the islands that lie around this beautiful Riviera. St. Vincent de Lerins, St. Tropez, St. Aygulf, St. Maxim, have left indelible footprints in these regions. In her terrible Revolution France was an object-lesson to the nations, whose intervention saved her from self-extermination. Foreign war was a boon and a safety-valve. The Commune of 1870 was another warning to the nations. Again to-day she is being made a spectacle to men and angels--to men who are, with secret rejoicing, applauding the Waldeck Rousseau ministry, and all for which it stands. They known full well that decadence and doom are near. There will be another Sedan, another Commune. The colonies, Indo-China in particular, will be the first to fall away in the general dismemberment. I know France intimately since more than thirty years, and it is with infinite sorrow that I diagnose her condition. Her recuperative powers are very great. I fear, however, that they will prove inadequate after the next great shock. But Franceâs admirable gift of apostleship, her lofty idealism, which no number of Voltaires could abase or abate, will not perish with her territorial integrity, nor even with her national life. Like the deathless masterpieces of Greece and Rome, her immortal genius will inform and inspire countless unborn generations, long after France herself shall have become a mere geographical reminiscence. âI will move thy candlestick,â it is written--not extinguish. ARBITRARY INCONSISTENCY _16th February, 1901._ The attitude of the Jacobin government in France towards the religion professed by nine-tenths of the inhabitants is truly instructive. After prating about liberty, fraternity, and equality, and the rights of man for a hundred years, the successors of the revolutionary _Constituante_ are preparing to deal a deathblow at the most sacred rights of the individual, to overstep the most arbitrary acts of any regime, nay of the Inquisition itself. These, at least, only concerned themselves with outward manifestations of personal idiosyncrasies tending to disturb the social order. But the successors of the Jacobins of the _Constituante_, so proud of their blood-stained origin, direct their attacks, to-day, against that most intangible thing the Vow, which has no existence except in the inner conscience of the individual, seeing that monastic vows which involved âcivil deathâ were abolished by law in 1790, and all religious are, to-day, free to exercise the rights of citizens--to buy, sell, contract, or vote. The vow cannot even be considered a convention or a contract binding together the members of a religious association. The ground on which it is proposed to declare religious congregations illegal without interfering with Masonic and other associations is, said Waldeck Rousseau, that âour public right [_droit public_] and that of other States proscribes all that constitutes an abdication of the rights of the individual, right to marry, to possess, all, in fact, that resembles personal servitude.â Thus in the name of liberty and the famous rights of man, I am denied the right to exercise my freewill by electing to remain single, because not to marry would be an abdication of one of the rights of the individual, and resemble âpersonal servitude.â Anything more grotesquely inconsistent cannot well be imagined, and this project of law has been in process of elaboration in the lodges since twenty years! In 1880, when the decree against the Jesuits and all congregations of men was promulgated, it was declared illicit and unconstitutional by 1500 jurists, and 400 of the higher magistrates, who refused their connivence, were removed from office. One of my best friends was among these victims. The decree was enforced _manu militari_, but the current of public opinion was so strong that, ere long, these establishments were reopened and continued their good works unmolested. It was next proposed to crush out the Congregations by fiscal measures. This also has proved inadequate, and the present project of law is the supreme effort of a most paternal and absolute Republic to secure the liberty of thousands of unappreciative subjects, by preventing them from exercising it in the choice of a mode of life. Truly a strange aberration of liberty, equality, and fraternity! Of course it is an open secret that what is aimed at is the destruction of the Catholic Church in France, and the establishment, if possible, of a national church with a âcivil constitution of the clergyâ as was attempted in 1792. Before attacking the citadel it is proposed to demolish the two great ramparts of the Church, Christian education and Christian charity, by disbanding the noble men and women who man these ramparts. It is a notorious fact, well established by Taine, that the French Revolution, with all its saturnalia of carnage and nameless tyranny, was the work of a handful, some ten thousand in all, and even many of these were foreigners. They carried all before them, and I fear that history will repeat itself. The moral unity of France was destroyed for ever by the Huguenots in the seventeenth century. Louis XIV sought in vain to restore it by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Revolution also tried to enforce moral unity by the unlimited practice of the â_Sois mon frÃ¨re ou je te tue_.â It is in the name of this lost moral unity that the coalition in power now propose to crush out all educational and religious liberty. French Protestantism can hardly be said to exist any longer. In 1799, when their religious and civil liberties were restored, Rabaut de St. Etienne, then president of the _Constituante_, stated their number to be 2,000,000 in a population of 26,000,000. After a century of complete liberty and equality, the _Agenda Protestant_ of Lyons states their number to be 650,000 in a population of 37,000,000. In the usual process of Protestant disintegration, the Huguenots, erstwhile so zealous for Calvinistic purity of doctrine, have evolved into the freethinking materialists, who form an important contingent in the anti-religious Masonic coalition I referred to some months ago. The situation in France painfully recalls that of Constantinople some forty years before the fall of the Eastern Empire. A house divided against itself cannot stand. A PAGAN RENAISSANCE _10th August, 1901._ In a previous article I asserted that the revolutionary spirit so rampant to-day is a new version of that renaissance of Paganism in the fourteenth century which culminated in the Protestant revolt. I find the same view expressed in Goldwin Smithâs recently published work on the United Kingdom. In a chapter on the Renaissance he writes as follows: âOur generation may look upon this period with interest, since it is itself threatened with an interregnum between Christian morality and the morality of science.â âMuch learning maketh thee madâ might be said to our generation, that seems to be science mad and blissfully unconscious of the paradoxes of its programme. We are promised a scientific religion or a religion of science, meaning probably a religion worthy of men of science, unmindful of the fact that men of the highest attainments have been nurtured in the Church in every century, and that the supernatural must always be an indispensable element of religion. Now Mr. Goldwin Smith raises our expectations to a future era in which âthe morality of scienceâ is to succeed to the hiatus or interregnum with which we are threatened to-day, as in the fifteenth century, when the Church was âdrugged,â he says. In his excellent work on _Social Evolution_, Kidd accentuates the fact that our Western civilization, the highest yet attained, has been wholly religious and not scientific; that in intellectual capacity and attainments we are, even now, far below the average Greek mind of centuries ago. This civilization of ours, marvellous in spite of all its shortcomings and blots, is founded on abnegation and self-sacrifice which are wholly irrational, scientifically speaking. It is indeed scientifically impossible for science to have any other morality than the law of brute force and the survival of the strongest, whether it be on the battlefield, the mart, or on âchange. The law of supply and demand is a corollary of this law. Complacency for the weak and the lowly, that characterized Christianity from the beginning, and found expression in the legend of the Holy Grail, is all folly, the sublime folly of the Cross. The equality and brotherhood of man is also part of this âfoolishness,â so repulsive to the cultured Greek mind. Nay, all our much-vaunted âfree institutionsâ have grown out of this mustard seed, to which our Lord compared His kingdom on earth. âWhen the tree falls the shadow will depart,â as Tennyson wrote in another connexion. Nothing will be left to our poor science-ridden humanity but the cruel glare of human egoisms, passions, and ambitions. In one of those sonorous paradoxes which his soul loved, J. J. Rousseau assures us that âall men are born free, and everywhere they are in chains.â That all men are born free is as false as that all men are born upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both assertions. It is an incontrovertible fact that before Christ slavery was the normal status of the masses in every age and clime, and Lucanus only expressed an universally accepted axiom when he cynically declared that the human race only existed for a few: _Humanum paucis vivit genus_. The doom of slavery was sealed when Peter began his memorable discourse, saying âMen and brethrenâ to circumcised and uncircumcised alike. On that day the Church began her mission of liberation by subjugation to the Christian law. But so ancient and deeply-rooted an institution as slavery could not wisely nor safely be felled suddenly. It was not till 1167 that Pope Alexander III published the charter of Christian liberty. âThis law alone,â writes Voltaire (_Essai sur les mÅurs_, chap. LXXXIII), âshould render his memory precious to all people, as his efforts on behalf of liberty for Italy should endear him to Italians.â Wherever Christianity permeates, even in an emaciated form, slavery must disappear, and wherever Christianity has not penetrated slavery is and always will be a standing institution, with its concomitant degradation of women. Another proposition, a corollary of the first, is equally true. If, and when, and where Christianity disappears, liberty, which is bound up with and inseparable from the Christian law, will also diminish and disappear, _tantum quantum_. The world, in my opinion, has never adequately laid to heart the terrible lessons taught by the French Revolution. They are not laid bare in their naked hideousness. The glamour of those much-violated principles of 1789, and the catchwords of liberty, equality, and fraternity are used to cover up the dire significance of that event. In a moment of wild delirium, the most illustrious of nations allowed its government to pass into the hands of a band of atheists prepared by Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured in the name of the whole nation, and the worship of Reason inaugurated with all the paraphernalia of ritual and the pomp of worship. What was the immediate result? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. Terror reigned supreme. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men could no longer call their lives their own under the law of _Suspects_. From my window at Lyons, I could see the monument to the victims of 1793. This city had at first submitted to the Revolutionary government, but the Lyonnais revolted when they found themselves deprived of civil and municipal liberties they had enjoyed under the most despotic kings. Lyons was besieged by those singular champions of liberty who, according to Macaulay, âcrowded into a few months more crimes than had been committed by the French kings in as many centuries.â Lyons succumbed after a gallant resistance of ten months. This quarter, where stands the monument to the victims, was then swampy ground, and it was literally soaked that year, not with the overflow of the RhÃ´ne, but with human gore. On the beautiful Place Bellecour two guillotines functioned day and night, but they were inadequate to the bloody task, and the citizens were mown down in batches on the Place des Jacobins. The successors of these Freemason Jacobins control the destinies of France to-day, by means of a Socialist parliamentary majority, obtained by the means I described in a previous article. They lost no time in ostracising tens of thousands of Franceâs noblest sons and daughters, who may not live as they see fit, nor exercise a profession which is open to all by law. The law Falloux of 1852 confers on all citizens duly qualified the right to teach or open schools, and it is still unrepealed. Millions of parents are deprived of the right to educate their children as they see fit in their native land. Exile is the price of liberty. This is the beginning of that diminution of liberty which must always accompany the elimination of the Christian principle on which our civilization reposes. With stupendous cynicism Waldeck Rousseau calls the Associations Bill a âlaw of liberty and of appeasement.â One or two passages will exemplify the character of this infamous Act. ART. I All associations can be formed freely and without authorization. ART. XIII No religious association can be formed without authorization given by a law which will determine how it is to function. One of M. Waldeck Rousseauâs henchmen stated the truth squarely, a few days ago, when he said âthe enemy is God,â improving on Gambettaâs maxim, âLe clericalisme voilÃ lâennemi.â Already there are symptoms that the Premier is being carried away by his Socialist advance guard. When they now demand the suppression of the Concordat he no longer protests as earnestly as he did, affirming his devotion to the secular clergy, whose interests, he used to declare, were the main object of the Trouillot or Associations Bill. The trial of Comte Lur Saluce by a so-called âHigh Court,â composed of senators, was a most peculiar episode. Accused of plotting to restore the monarchy, his defence was one long, incisive, itemized arraignment of the Third Republic and all its works and ways. His judges listened with much interest, fascinated, no doubt, by the truth of his statements, after which they found him guilty with extenuating circumstances--a tacit admission apparently that his enmity to the Third Republic was justified. Meanwhile, poor France is threatened with all the horrors of another revolution, if the same elements compose the next parliament, as they most certainly will, if opposition candidates are not even allowed to hold meetings unmolested, as at Toulouse and Lyons recently. Religious liberty has however found a new home in a most unexpected quarter, none other than the realm of the Grand Llama of Tibet, who is sending a special embassy
{'title': 'The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906 by J. Napier Brodhead', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}