In 1901 the Associations Bill was, according to Waldeck Rousseau, intended to give legal standing and liberty to the unauthorized as well as to the authorized Congregations. We all know, to-day, how twenty-seven thousand of their schools have been closed, and how the Congregations, simple enough to fall into the Government’s trap by asking for authorization and furnishing inventories of their property, have been robbed of everything and turned adrift.
The inventories now being made in the churches, amid scenes of violence and bloodshed, with the cooperation of the regular army, represent the first step on the road to wholesale spoliation and strangulation. If only the victims would be docile and resigned there would be no trouble whatever. Resistance will compel the operators to be drastic, when they would rather go slowly and surely. The French voters should be consistent. After giving themselves such law-makers, they ought at least not to wince when the laws made by them are put into execution. But this is an incurable idiosyncrasy of the French; they are clear-sighted, energetic, and practical in the administration of their private affairs, but when it comes to politics and government, they are absolutely apathetic and purblind. Any pothouse politician can wheedle them out of their votes, who would find it difficult to coax a sou out of their pockets. All they ask is to be left in peace to attend to their business and pleasures. It is only when the unpleasant practical sides of laws like those of 1902, 1904, and 1905 are brought home to them that the peasant seizes his pitchfork, and the bourgeois his cane, and bloody manifestations occur all over France, as in 1902, 1904, and to-day (1906).
Generally speaking, inventories are made only when property is about to change hands, as in cases of death and bankruptcy. Now the adherents of the Catholic Church in France are numerous and very much alive, and they cannot see why their ecclesiastical furniture and property should be inventoried, quite forgetting that they gave carte blanche to the “bloc” of Briands, Brissons, Combes, etc., who made the law they are now resisting.
If Associations cultuelles are formed, a consummation most devoutly to be deprecated by every friend of Catholic France, evidently they will be composed by bishops, curés, and their present conseils de fabrique, and there will not be any transmission of property.
If there were no animus furtandi, no malevolent projects of strangulation in the background, the Government would have contented itself with denouncing the Concordat, and repudiating that portion of the National Debt represented by the Budget of cults, instituted by the Jacobins themselves, in 1790, when they appropriated Church property and assumed the charge of maintaining Catholic worship in France. Neither Protestant nor Jewish worship was included, originally, in the Budget de Cults, seeing that their Church property had not been touched, and they had no part in the Concordat.
When the Anglican Church was disestablished or separated from the State in Ireland, it surely never occurred to Mr. Gladstone and his Government to order inventories to be made in the churches.
To understand this revolt of the French people just now, we must recall their past experience with inventories. In 1790 a decree obliged all cathedral chapters and titulars of benefices to furnish complete inventories of all their holdings, and in March, 1791, about four hundred millions of Church property was seized and sold by the State. In 1901 the Congregations were invited to furnish ample inventories with their demands for authorization; no authorizations were given, but the inventories were very useful for the wholesale spoliations which followed, spoliations which still masquerade under the pseudonym of “liquidations.”
Moreover, the State makes these inventories to-day as proprietor, though by no sleight of language can its ownership be proven, even as regards churches existing before the Revolution, while many costly structures have been erected and endowed since then by private initiative.[15]
Fierce riots occurred over one of these churches built on private grounds. The proprietor produced his title deeds, proving that the commune had not contributed one cent and that he was absolute owner, but this made no difference.
The law Mirabeau of 1789 distinctly recognized that all ecclesiastical property then existing had been “irrevocably given to the Roman Catholic Church for public worship and charity.” The Jacobins of to-day apparently base their claims (Art. 12 de Separation) on this loi Mirabeau, which declares, forthwith, that all this Church property is “placed at the disposal of the nation,” (“mise à la disposition de la nation”). But Art. 12 of the Concordat uses exactly the same words in speaking of what was left, in 1801, of Church property, edifices, etc.—“sont mises à la disposition des évêques”—all was “placed at the disposal of the bishops”; and the faithful, moreover, were invited to reconstitute the stolen patrimony by gifts and legacies, which are now to be confiscated.