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:—