Catholicism resisted the humanitarianism of 1848 and strengthened its power after the coup d’état. The Church and the Vatican became more staunch in their opposition to all doctrines of modern thought. The French clergy profited by the alliance with the aristocracy, while religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, increased in number and in power. Veuillot proclaimed the virtues of Catholicism in his writings. Meanwhile the Pope’s temporal power decreased, but his spiritual power was increasing in extent and in intensity. Centralisation went on within the Church, and Rome (i.e., the Pope and the Vatican) became all-powerful.
Just after the half-century opens the Pope (Pius IX.), in 1854, proclaimed his authority in announcing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.[[4]] As France had heard the sentence, L’Etat, c’est moi, from the lips of one of its greatest monarchs, it now heard from another quarter a similar principle enunciated, L’Eglise, c’est moi. As democracy and freedom cried out against the one, they did so against the other. Undaunted, the Vatican continued in its absolutism, even although it must have seen that in some quarters revolt would be the result. Ten years later the Pope attacked the whole of modern thought, to which he was diametrically opposed, in his encyclical Quanta Cura and in his famous Syllabus, which constituted a catalogue of the modern errors and heresies which he condemned. This famous challenge was quite clear and uncompromising in its attitude, concluding with a curse upon “him who should maintain that the Roman Pontiff can, and must, be reconciled and compromise with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation!” To the doctrine of L’Eglise, c’est moi had now been added that of La Science, aussi, c’est moi. This was not all. In 1870 the dogma of Papal Infallibility was proclaimed. By a strange irony of history, however, this declaration of spiritual absolutism was followed by an entire loss of temporal power. The outbreak of the war in that same year between France and Prussia led to the hasty withdrawal of French troops from the Papal Domain and the Eternal City fell to the secular power of the Italian national army under Victor Emmanuel.
[4] This new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin must not, of course, be confused, as it often is by those outside the Catholic Church, with the quite different and more ancient proposition which asserts the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
The defeat of France at the hands of Prussia in 1871 issued in a revival of religious sentiment, frequently seen in defeated nations. A special mission or crusade of national repentance gathered in large subscriptions which built the enormous Church of the Sacré Coeur overlooking Paris from the heights of Montmartre.[[5]]
[5] The anti-Catholic element, however, have had the audacity, and evidently the legal right, to place a statue to a man who, some centuries back, was burned at the stake for failing to salute a religious procession, in such a position immediately in front of this great church that the plan for the large staircase cannot be carried out.
Seeking for religious consolation, the French people found a Catholicism which had become embittered and centralised for warfare upon liberal religion and humanitarianism. They found that the only organised religion they knew was dominated by the might of Rome and the powers of the clergy. These even wished France, demoralised as she was for the moment, to undertake the restoration of the Pope’s temporal power in Italy. Further, they were definitely in favour of monarchy: “the altar and the throne” were intimately associated in the ecclesiastical mind.
It was the realisation of this which prompted Gambetta to cry out to the Third Republic with stern warning, “Clericalism is your enemy.” Thus began the political fight for which Rome had been strengthening herself. With the defeat of the clerical-monarchy party in 1877 the safety of the Republic was assured. From then until 1905 the Republic and the Church fought each other. Educational questions were bitterly contested (1880). The power of the Jesuits, especially, was regarded as a constant menace to the State. The Dreyfus affair (1894- 1899) did not improve relations, with its intense anti-semitism and anti-clericalism. The battle was only concluded by the legislation of Waldeck-Rousseau in 1901 and Combes in 1903, expelling religious orders. Combes himself had studied for the priesthood and was violently anti-clerical. The culmination came in the Separation Law of 1905 carried by Briand, in the Pope’s protest against this, followed by the Republic’s confiscation of much Church property, a step which might have been avoided if the French Catholics had been allowed to have their way in an arrangement with the State regarding their churches. This was prevented by the severance of diplomatic relations between France and the Vatican and by the Pope’s disagreement with the French Catholics whose wishes he ignored in his policy of definite hostility to the French Government.[[6]]
[6] Relations with the Vatican, which were seen to be desirable during the Great European War, have since been resumed (in 1921) by the Republic.
During our period a popular semi-nationalist and semi-religious cult of Jeanne d’Arc, “the Maid of Orleans,” appeared in France. The clergy expressly encouraged this, with the definite object of enlisting sentiments of nationality and patriotism on the side of the Church. Ecclesiastical diplomacy at headquarters quickly realised the use which might be made of this patriotic figure whom, centuries before, the Church had thought fit to burn as a witch. The Vatican saw a possibility of blending French patriotism with devotion to Catholicism and thus possibly strengthening, in the eyes of the populace at least, the waning cause of the Church.
The adoration of Jeanne d’Arc was approved as early as 1894, but when the Church found itself in a worse plight with its relation to the State, it made preparations in 1903 for her enrolment among the saints.[[7]] She was honoured the following year with the title of “Venerable,” but in 1908, after the break of Church and State, she was accorded the full status of a saint, and her statue, symbolic of patriotism militant, stands in most French churches as conspicuous often as that of the Virgin, who, in curious contrast, fondles the young child, and expresses the supreme loveliness of motherhood.[[8]] The cult of Jeanne d’Arc flourished particularly in 1914 on the sentiments of patriotism, militarism and religiosity then current. This was natural because it is for these very sentiments that she stands as a symbol. She is evidently a worthy goddess whose worship is worth while, for we are assured that it was through her beneficent efforts that the German Army retired from Paris in 1914 and again in 1918. The saintly maid of Orleans reappeared and beat them back! Such is the power of the “culte” which the Church eagerly fosters. The Sacré Coeur also has its patriotic and military uses, figuring as it did as an emblem on some regimental flags on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the celebrations of Napoleon’s centenary (1921) give rise to the conjecture that he, too, will in time rank with Joan of Arc as a saint. His canonisation would achieve absolutely that union of patriotic and religious sentimentality to which the Church in France directs its activities.