One can well imagine what went on in the mother-houses, the communities and the schools which the decrees of suppression invaded, bringing ravage and desolation! What sad and heart-rending scenes! The odious perquisitions of procureurs and police commissaries goaded on by superior orders, or even perhaps—it looked that way sometimes—by the quality of the victims; the painful, insidious interrogatories wherein the simplicity and timidity of souls habituated to peace was violated; the alarm of the aged religious, of the sick and the infirm as they begged to know what it all meant; the returning religious hunted from their houses coming back to the mother-house to cast themselves weeping into the arms of their superiors, while the latter pointed out how the house was too small to receive them and too poor to afford them food; the uncertainty as to the morrow, the privations, the anguish, the moral tortures, the desperation of all; one should have seen such scenes near at hand to comprehend all that they meant. 'Ah!' cried M. Emile Olivier, 'all the cruelty, the tears, the consternation contained in those few words written by an official scribe upon the desk of a minister—On such a day, such a congregation of women will be dispersed.' They merited no regard, no commiseration those poor women so good to others, so delicate, so pure, that Taine could call them the pride of France.
The efforts of the enemy had thus far touched only unauthorized congregations. There were still many orders which lived in the possession of full authorization and which according to the existing laws had nothing to fear from the hatred of the anti-clericals. In this, however, they were very much deceived. A new bill directed at all religious teaching orders, of whatever kind or description, was introduced in the Chamber on February 29, 1904. Its first article, declaring the suppression, asserted "teaching of every order and of every nature is interdicted in France to the congregations." It was adopted by a majority of eighty-seven votes on March 14. The second article stated that from the date of the promulgation of the law the teaching congregations could not receive new members, and that their novitiates must be dissolved. This article also—with the exception in favor of congregations destined for foreign schools—was adopted. It was decided, moreover, in article fourth, that novitiates for foreign missions could not maintain any of the dissolved congregations. The law was carried before the Senate, towards the end of June. It became a law of the land, with the official signature of M. Loubet, on July 8, 1904.
The triumph of anti-Christianism was thus complete, and the death sentence had been pronounced against the very existence of the monastic life in France.
It might be of interest to introduce here some appreciations of the Premier who had done so much harm to France and who was soon to begin the first scenes in the last act of our sorrowful drama. M. Emile Faguet, though not a Catholic, nor inspired by any definite admiration for Catholic principles, thus characterizes M. Combes in his l'Anticlericalism:
M. Combes, considered unanimously as the protege and choice—no one knows with what secret designs of M. Waldeck-Rousseau; ... M. Combes taken up—no one knows by what weakness—by M. Loubet, who felt for him the very contrary of sympathy; M. Combes, a minister who was incapable according to the opinion and avowal of everyone, nevertheless maintained himself in office as long, and even longer than Waldeck-Rousseau, in spite of mistake after mistake, in spite of co-laborers as incapable as himself, despite the procrastination systematically employed as an instrument of his rule, only because he was a determined anti-clerical, headstrong and brutal, whom nothing could arrest in the pursuit of his design and precisely because, as he had said himself, 'he had accepted his office for that alone' and because he was absolutely incapable of seeing anything else in the government of France and in all modern history.
PRESIDENT FALLIÈRES.
L'Echo, (Lyons), with admirable brevity thus summarizes the salient points in the character of the Premier and his policy:
M. Combes is a sectary, a renegade seminarist given over to Freemasonry. His policy is the vigorous application of the anti-liberal law, the refusal of all authorizations asked by the Congregations, and the abrogation of the Falloux law.
M. F. Veuillot, writing in the Univers, pays his respects to the minister in no measured terms. He says M. Combes is "devoid of talent, virtue, honor—a brute unable to conceive a generous thought, to realize a great work, to produce anything useful, to show any effort of a patient and beneficial kind. The brute, however, has formidable fists, and he strikes out blindly before him. The man is without a breath of intelligence, a single sentiment of delicacy. He is but a commonplace mediocrity personified, rancid with hatred and puffed up with pride. As he cannot leave anything to make him famous, he will be notorious to posterity for his brutality alone."