Part 6

It was on one of these occasions that Mlle. de Lambert cried “Capon” to a justice of the peace because he had beaten a hasty retreat when he found, in a cloister, two or three hundred angry men instead of a few old monks. She was condemned to be imprisoned for eight days. On the expiration of her term some five thousand persons went to the prison to give her an ovation, but found that she had been removed.

At Nice there was a small community of Franciscans on the Boulevard Carabacel. Their chapel was very popular with the humbler classes of Niçois, as well as with visitors, and manifestations like those that occurred at the church of La Croix de Marbre, much frequented by American sailors, were expected. Several companies of infantry and cavalry were sent to surround the building at 3 a.m.; but hundreds of persons had spent all night on the premises, and the usual manifestations and arrests occurred. Even after the premises had been sealed up, police agents were detailed to guard them night and day. This was very amusing, considering that policemen are so scarce in Nice that people are robbed in broad daylight in the most-frequented quarters.

All these grotesque executions _manu militari_ represent one of the most recent violations of the law, wholly gratuitous in this instance, seeing that the Government had itself traced the method of procedure. On November 28th, 1902, M. Valle, Minister of Justice, said:--

“We have to examine if, after refusal of authorization and a decree closing an establishment, we should continue to have recourse to armed force, or whether it is not preferable to have recourse to the tribunals. M. Chamaillard himself recognizes that it is better to substitute judicial sanction to the sanction of force, always brutal. It is this substitution we ask you to vote” (_Officiel_, November 29th).

Again, December 2nd, the Minister said:--

“The Government abandons the right to have recourse to force, and asks you to substitute judicial for administrative sanction. This is the object of the proposed law” (_Officiel_, December 3rd, p. 1221, col. 2).

On December 4th this law was passed. Therefore all these executions _manu militari_, before the tribunals had pronounced, were another flagrant violation of law. But, as I said, these Jacobins seem to revel in illegality for its own sake. Meanwhile the tribunals, civil and military, have been kept busy condemning officers who refused to take part in these degrading, unsoldierlike expeditions, as well as men and women guilty of manifesting in favour of liberty.

The fate of the Congregations of women engaged in teaching is a foregone conclusion. Nay, M. Combes is closing many of these establishments even before the demands for authorization have been submitted to the Chambers to be refused _in globo_. I was in Lyons recently when two establishments of the Society of the Sacred Heart were dispersed in the middle of the school year, without the slightest regard to the convenience of the pupils or their teachers. More than three thousand persons invaded the railway station at 7 a.m. for the departure of the first group of exiles. An enthusiastic ovation was given them, in which all the passengers took part, and the bouquets were so numerous that they had to be piled into a vacant car. In the afternoon there was a second departure for Turin. This time the police took timely precautions. The avenues leading to the vast square were barricaded against all but travellers. These ladies have educated several generations of Lyonnaises, and were greatly esteemed.

It would be too long to relate the exploits of the Government’s henchmen, who have distinguished themselves at Paris and elsewhere. It is simply astounding that such things should happen in any civilized country and in a century so proud of its progress, liberty, and enlightenment. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an offence against liberty and justice, but it occurred two hundred and fifty years ago--almost in the Dark Ages. Some time ago, Mr. Bodley, in his excellent work on France, commented on the extraordinary phenomenon of a republic persecuting, in the name of liberty, a religion professed by more than two-thirds of the nation and officially represented in the State as the dominant religion of the country. To understand this phenomenon we must bear in mind that French republicanism is not a form of government, but merely the _modus operandi_ of a secret society. The Grand Orient has openly proclaimed that there would be no republic but for them. And all the laws have been elaborated at their convents since two decades.

Above all we must remember that France is in revolution since a hundred years and more. There have been intervals of calm which resembled convalescence, but these have been followed by new paroxysms, as in 1830, 1848, 1870, and to-day. Madame de Staël’s clever saying that Napoleon was “Robespierre à cheval” is by no means as flippant as might appear. The genius of the Jacobin Revolution was embodied in the Convention and the Comités de Salut Public, and the representative of this dictatorial tyranny was Robespierre. When Napoleon substituted himself for the Convention and the Directory he abated none of the pretensions of the Revolution. On the contrary, he consolidated them and enlarged immensely their field of operation by riding rough-shod, not over France alone, but over all Europe; hence the happy expression of Madame de Staël, “Robespierre à cheval.”

Unlike the upheaval known as the Reformation, the French Revolution was essentially a religious movement, a vast renaissance of paganism prepared by the atheistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, with which the ruling classes became so largely imbued. It is a great mistake to suppose that these philosophers were seeking the welfare of the masses or the reign of the people, whom no one so thoroughly despised as did Voltaire. The true object of the Revolution, prepared by the encyclopedists, was the destruction of Christianity and its noblest fruit, freedom, in order to establish on the ruins of both the reign of the Omnipotent Infallible State, the statue of gold before which all must fall down and worship or perish. “Sois mon frère, ou je te tue.” For it has always been a peculiarity of French free-thinkers that they could never tolerate any free-thinking but their own. If the revolutionists of 1793 inflamed the passions of the masses against the clergy and the nobles, it was merely to use the arms of this Briareus to batter down the monarchy and all the institutions of the ancient regime, just as the Jacobin Republicans of to-day are using the Socialists to accomplish the work begun by their predecessors a century ago. The final purpose of all is the destruction of Christianity.

We have but to turn the pages of any reputable French history (Taine, Capefigue, Guizot) to see that liberty was the last preoccupation of the Jacobin conquerors. One of the worst Roman emperors is said to have wished that the people had but one head that he might cut it off. This also seems to have been the idea of the Revolution, for by abolishing all social hierarchy, all intermediate classes, all guilds and associations, provincial parliaments, and local institutions, nothing was left standing but a defenceless people and the omnipotent State, which was a coterie composed sometimes of five hundred, sometimes of four, and finally of one, the first Consul and Emperor.

Never had the tyranny of the omnipotent State been more completely realized than by the Jacobins, and their heir-at-law, Napoleon. In the heyday of his power this great despot found but one opponent. There was but one force that measured itself with him and vanquished. When Holland, Prussia, Denmark, all Europe in fact, became tributary to Napoleon and entered into his continental scheme, in the blockade of all European seaports, Pius VII alone refused to close Ancona, Ostia, and Civita Vecchia against British commerce, and to prevent any Englishman from entering the Papal States. When cabinets and rulers all succumbed to “Robespierre on horseback,” and the inhabitants of every land became the prey of the victor, the Spanish people alone found, in their religious faith, the nobility and the energy of a free people, that rose in their weakness to shake off the octopus that was fastening itself on their vitals. Napoleon had seized, by guile and treachery, the persons of the Royal Family of Spain, and had nominated a new tributary king, his brother Joseph, to the throne of Spain, when the monks, the clergy, and the peasantry organized that wonderful guerilla war, which is so little known, and is, nevertheless, one of the most glorious episodes in the history of liberty. Two signal defeats of the French army destroyed the prestige of Napoleon and his motley armies, composed of conscripts from many vassal nations, who now began to ask themselves why they could not do what Spanish peasants had done in spite of Manuel Godin, the Prime Minister, who had sold them to the enemy.

After the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 it seemed as if the Revolution were over, but in 1830 it broke out anew. Charles X barely escaped with his life. The “Monarchy of July,” as the reign of Philippe d’Orléans is called, was merely a phase of the Revolution. In 1848 the revolutionary fever again seized the nation in an acute form and was not limited to France.

It was at this time, strange to say, that a group of resolute Catholics entered the political arena and fought the battle of liberty in educational matters against the monopoly of the University. Montalembert, Dupanloup, Berryer, Lacordaire conquered, inch by inch, a liberty inscribed in the Charter of 1830, but ineffective so far. La loi Falloux was not passed till 1850 but long before, Guizot, with unerring statesmanship, had proclaimed “liberty in teaching to be the only wise solution,” and declared that “the State must accept the free competition of its rivals, both lay and religious, individuals and corporations” (_Memoirs_, t. III, 102). St. Marc Girardin, reporter of the Educational Commission (1847), expressed himself thus:--

“Even before the Charter, experience and the interest of studies required and obtained liberty in teaching. Here certainly we may say that liberty was ancient and arbitrary despotism new. I do not need to defend the principle of this liberty, for it is in the Charter. I only wish to show that it has always existed in some form. Emulation is good for studies. Formerly the emulation was between the University and the Congregations, and studies were benefited. In 1763 Voltaire himself deplored the dispersion of the Jesuits because of the beneficial rivalry that existed between them and the University.... A monopoly of education given to priests would be an anachronism in our day. But to exclude them would be a not less deplorable anachronism.”

Thus spoke a representative Liberal fifty years ago. Napoleon had established a state monopoly of education in the hands of the University of Paris. Villemain and Cousin were educational Jacobins. There was a state rhetoric, a state history, and a state philosophy, which was, of course, Cousin’s eclecticism. Any professor with leanings to Kant or Comte was sent to Coventry. This state monopoly was abolished by the loi Falloux (1850), and its reestablishment is the true purpose of the law of 1901. During the last fifty years congregational schools multiplied in proportion to the great demand, i.e. to such an extent that government schools could not compete with them successfully. Hence the Trouillot Bill (Associations).

In 1870 the Revolution again triumphed. This time it was not “Robespierre on horseback,” but Robespierre draped in toga and ermine; the reign of despotism in the name of law and liberty; prætors and quæstors dilapidating public funds, and giving and promising largesses. At one time it seemed as if the Republic would be overthrown. It was then that M. Grévy appealed to Rome, and Leo XIII, while reproving certain laws, advised the clergy and the Catholics to rally to the Republic in the interest of peace. They did so. But no sooner did the Republic feel secure than it began to enact a series of laws offensive to Catholics. I refer to the divorce and scholar laws, and unjust fiscal laws against Congregations.

Foreigners wonder why thirty million French Catholics allow themselves to be thus tyrannized over by a handful of Freemasons. I fear it is a hopeless case of atavism, which will prove the undoing of France, under the representative system. In 418 the Emperor Honorius wished to establish this system of government in Southern Gaul, but, writes Guizot, “the provinces and towns refused the benefit; no one would nominate representatives, no one would go to Arles” (_History of Civilization_). This same tendency is operating the ruin of France to-day. Honest, laborious Frenchmen have an invincible repugnance to politics and this periodical electioneering scramble. Moreover, it would mean ruin and famine for hundreds of thousands of functionaries if they dared to vote against the Government.

Meanwhile the anti-clericals or lodges of the Grand Orient, largely composed of Jews, Protestants, and naturalized foreigners, have been hard at work these twenty years preparing the election of their candidates and abusing the minds of the working classes by immoral, irreligious printed stuff, and above all by the multiplication of drinking-places where adulterated strong drinks are sold for the merest trifle. The number of these licensed places is simply appalling. Nearly every grocery, every little vegetable store, and even many tobacco stores where stamps are sold, have a drinking stand. It is needless to say that neither Chartreuse nor any decent liqueur is ever sold at such places. These drink stands supplement the innumerable cabarets and cafés, in town and country, where elections are engineered.

Leroy Beaulieu recently related the following incident of his encounter with one of the habitués of these political institutions.

In Easter week I was coming out of the chapel of the Barnabites one morning when I met a workman somewhat the worse for liquor, shaking his fist against the grated convent window. “Ah! you haven’t skedaddled yet, you dirty skunks.”

And when I asked him why he was so anxious to see them expelled, he drew himself up proudly and replied: “Because they are not up to the level of our century!” (“Ils ne sont pas à la hauteur de notre siècle!”)

Meanwhile a crime has been committed against liberty, humanity, and justice, and it seems to move the world no more than the passing of a summer cloud, because no blood has been shed. The right which men and women have to dress and dispose of their lives as they choose is a most sacred part of personal freedom.

“Liberalism,” says Taine, “is the respect of others. If the State exists it is to prevent all intrusions into private life, the beliefs, the conscience, the property.... When the State does this it is the greatest of benefactors. When it commits these intrusions itself it is the greatest of malefactors.” The young and the strong can begin life anew elsewhere, in the cloister or out of it, but what shall we say of those tens of thousands aged and infirm, who, after having passed thirty to fifty years in teaching or in other good works, find themselves suddenly thrown into the streets, homeless and penniless? The Associations Bill entitles them “to apply” for indemnity. But this is merely illusory. Years will elapse before “the liquidation” is accomplished, and there will be no assets except for the Government and its friends. Public subscriptions are being opened all over France for these victims of Jacobin tyranny.

Moreover, the right which parents have to give their children teachers of their own choice is also an inalienable right. The Lacedæmonian State imposed physical training on all its sons. The Turks for centuries levied a tax of so many boys and girls a year on the Spaniards and the Venetians, but no Government has yet called on every parent to “stand and deliver,” not the purse, but the souls of their children, that it may sow therein, from tenderest infancy, the tares of a hideous state materialism. With cynical hypocrisy this Government protests that liberty of teaching is intact, while parents see all the teachers of their own choice proscribed. The rich can send their sons to be educated across the border, but the law of _stage scolaire_ is intended to meet this alternative. Those who have not frequented state schools are to be made pariahs, ineligible for the army, the navy, or any civil function--truly a singular application of the words “Compel them to come in,” which should be inscribed on all the scholar institutions of France to-day.

A PAPAL NOTE

_13th June, 1904._

The storm of words aroused the world over by a Papal diplomatic Note is another proof that the Papacy has lost none of its power and prestige, and is still, on this threshold of the twentieth century, the incarnation of moral power opposed to mere brute force, the right of the strongest. In reading the many silly comments on this Note in different parts of the globe, we are reminded of the brick thrown into the frog-pond and the emotion it caused.

Long before M. Loubet went to Rome it was well known that he would not be received by the Vatican, and the Papal Note is practically the same as the one drawn up by Leo XIII on a previous occasion, when it was sought to obtain a deviation from the policy of the Vatican in favour of a predecessor of M. Loubet. The protest itself contained nothing new, and was merely a reiteration of Papal claims to sovereignty in Rome, and a notice to rulers of other Catholic countries that there was no change in the policy of the Vatican, that declined to receive the visit of any such ruler who came to Rome as the guest of Victor Emmanuel.

The long session devoted to the discussion of the incident was merely a little anti-clerical diversion to kill time; otherwise the Papal Note would have remained pigeon-holed in M. Delcassé’s desk, where it had lain unheeded for weeks, when suddenly, at the psychical moment, M. Jaurès’ new Ministerial organ, _l’Humanité_ (_commanditée_ by the Jews), published the copy of the Note which had been addressed, it is said, to the King of Portugal. Then the little comedy was enacted at the Palais Bourbon, and the whole Socialist Ministerial Press clamoured, hysterically, for condign punishment of the Vatican and the vindication of the national honour. But nothing was done. M. Delcassé declined to state clearly if the ambassador to the Vatican, M. Nisard, had really been recalled, while M. Combes loftily sneered at “the superannuated claims of a sovereignty dispossessed since thirty-five years.” Yet he must have learned at the Seminary that the Papacy was exiled from Rome for eighty years once upon a time.[5] But all these ferocious Radicals declined to take advantage of this opportunity to denounce the Concordat, and M. Combes’ best friend, _The Lantern_, is now denouncing him as a traitor and a fraud. History is repeating itself: _La Montagne_ (the Extreme Left of 1793) is getting ready to execute the _Girondins_ called Radicals to-day. No efforts of opportunism will save them from the _guillotine sèche_ which awaits them.

The silly talk of some of the great dailies who represent the Pope as “greatly worried” and confronted with the necessity of making an apology, can only be excused on the ground of ignorance of the whole situation. Personally I desire to see the Concordat denounced. The letter and the spirit of its first and most important article, which provided for liberty and the free exercise of the Catholic religion, have been flagrantly violated by the laws of 1901 and 1904, and by the illegalities committed by the executors of these laws.

All that remains of the Concordat is the indemnity paid yearly to the Catholic Church, as a very slight compensation for the millions stolen by the revolutionary government of 1792, known as the First Republic. Though it must be said to the credit of those Jacobins that when they instituted the budget of cults they recognized that they had taken the property of the Church, and that the payment of these yearly subsidies was part of the National Debt.

The Jacobins of to-day, less scrupulous than their forefathers of 1790, are craving for the repudiation of this portion of the National Debt.

The untold wealth of the Congregations, the billions held out as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900 as a nest-egg for _retraîtes ouvrières_, having melted into thin air “the bloc” or Ministerial majority must be held together by the prospect of some new quarry. Those, who for years past made a fine distinction between the secular clergy and the regular or _congréganist_ clergy are now convinced that there is no distinction to be made between them. When New York dailies kindly advise the French clergy and Catholics to give up what their editors are pleased to call “their salaries” and adopt the American system, they merely proclaim their ignorance of the situation.

The French would gladly sacrifice everything, even to the noble church edifices built and endowed by their ancestors during long centuries, if thereby they could secure liberty and separation from the State, as they are understood in the United States. But all the alleged projects of “Separation” are merely projects of strangulation. The articles of all these projects of law are as unacceptable as were those of the Trouillot Associations Bill, even if it had not been superseded by the _table rase_ of the law of 1904 suppressing all teaching orders whatsoever.

The carrying into execution of any of these projects of “Separation,” even the least Jacobin, would render the normal existence of the Catholic Church in France impossible. This has been the aim and purpose of the Third Republic ever since its advent. For, once again, I repeat that Republicanism in France is not a form of government; it is the _modus operandi_ of a secret society, of the same secret society which established a monarchy in Italy, in order to have a pretext for seizing Rome and destroying, if possible, the prestige of the Papacy. In both cases the object was the same, the weakening and the destruction of the Church.

The Freemasons in France openly proclaim that they founded the Republic. The scholar and anti-clerical laws since twenty-five years, all the laws, in fact, have been prepared in the lodges. Of this, too, they make no secret. To suppose that the Chambers in any way represent the French nation is an egregious mistake. The lodges prepare the elections; their candidates people both Houses. In my first letter to the _Review_ in 1900 I showed how the abstention of honest laborious Frenchmen from politics had thrown the power into the hands of the Freemasons, who are chiefly Jews, Protestants, and infidels. To-day this coterie of about twenty-five thousand reigns supreme.

A few resolute, capable, bigoted Freemasons are the master minds of the coterie; the others, “the bloc,” just follow suit. If a current of reaction set in to-morrow they would glide with it most gracefully.

It is simply impossible to retrieve the situation in France to-day by any ordinary legal means. To suppose that the people are in sympathy with the Government because they do not overthrow it implies total ignorance of the situation. The voting machinery of the country is falsified, and can no more be relied on than a clock out of gear, which rings out the hours haphazard. Even if every Frenchman inscribed as a voter did his duty and went to the polls, which they do not, it would make no difference to-day.