The Dreyfus affair was severely judged by foreign critics as a miscarriage of justice resulting from race-prejudice. If that simple appreciation rightly describes its origin, it became in its development one of those scandals Real character of the Dreyfus agitation. symptomatic of the unhealthy political condition of France, which on a smaller scale had often recurred under the Third Republic, and which were made the pretext by the malcontents of all parties for gratifying their animosities. That in its later stages it was not a question of race-persecution was seen in the curious phenomenon of journals owned or edited by Jews leading the outcry against the Jewish officer and his defenders. That it was not a mere episode of the rivalry between Republicans and Monarchists, or between the advocates of parliamentarism and of military autocracy, was evident from the fact that the most formidable opponents of Dreyfus, without whose hostility that of the clericals and reactionaries would have been ineffective, were republican politicians. That it was not a phase of the anti-capitalist movement was shown by the zealous adherence of the socialist leaders and journalists to the cause of Dreyfus; indeed, one remarkable result of the affair was its diversion of the socialist party and press for several years from their normal campaign against property. The Dreyfus affair was utilized by the reactionaries against the Republic, by the clericals against the non-Catholics, by the anti-clericals against the Church, by the military party against the parliamentarians, and by the revolutionary socialists against the army. It was also conspicuously utilized by rival republican politicians against one another, and the chaos of political groups was further confused by it.
An epilogue to the Dreyfus affair was the trial for treason before the Senate, at the end of 1899, of a number of persons, mostly obscure followers either of M. Déroulède the poet, who advocated a plebiscitary republic, or of the duc The State trial of 1899. d’Orléans, the pretender of the constitutional monarchy. On the day of President Faure’s funeral M. Déroulède had vainly tried to entice General Roget, a zealous adversary of Dreyfus, who was on duty with his troops, to march on the Elysée in order to evict the newly-elected president of the Republic. Other demonstrations against M. Loubet ensued, the most offensive being a concerted assault upon him on the racecourse at Auteuil in June 1899. The subsequent resistance to the police of a band of anti-Semites threatened with arrest, who barricaded themselves in a house in the rue Chabrol, in the centre of Paris, and, with the marked approval of the populace, sustained a siege for several weeks, indicated that the capital was in a condition not far removed from anarchy. M. Déroulède, indicted at the assizes of the Seine for his misdemeanour on the day of President Faure’s funeral, had been triumphantly acquitted. It was evident that no jury would convict citizens prosecuted for political offences and the government therefore decided to make use of the article of the Law of 1875, which allowed the Senate to be constituted a high court for the trial of offences endangering the state. A respectable minority of the Senate, including M. Wallon, the venerable “Father of the Constitution” of 1875, vainly protested that the framers of the law intended to invest the upper legislative chamber with judicial power only for the trial of grave crimes of high treason, and not of petty political disorders which a well-organized government ought to be able to repress with the ordinary machinery of police and justice. The outvoted protest was justified by the proceedings before the High Court, which, undignified and disorderly, displayed both the fatuity of the so-called conspirators and the feebleness of the government which had to cope with them. The trial proved that the plebiscitary faction was destitute of its essential factor, a chief to put forward for the headship of the state, and that it was resolved, if it overturned the parliamentary system, not to accept under any conditions the duc d’Orléans, the only pretender before the public. It was shown that royalists and plebiscitary republicans alike had utilized as an organization of disorder the anti-Semitic propaganda which had won favour among the masses as a nationalist movement to protect the French from foreign competition. The evidence adduced before the high court revealed, moreover, the curious fact that certain Jewish royalists had given to the duc d’Orléans large sums of money to found anti-Semitic journals as the surest means of popularizing his cause.
The last year of the 19th century, though uneventful for France, was one of political unrest. This, however, did not take the form of ministerial crises, as, for the fourth time since responsible cabinets were introduced in 1873, French parties at the close of the 19th century. a whole year, from the 1st of January to the 31st of December, elapsed without a change of ministry. The prime minister, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, though his domestic policy exasperated a large section of the political world, including one half of the Progressive group which he had helped to found, displayed qualities of statesmanship always respected in France, but rarely exhibited under the Third Republic. He had proved himself to be what the French call un homme de gouvernement—that is to say, an authoritative administrator of unimpassioned temperament capable of governing with the arbitrary machinery of Napoleonic centralization. His alliance with the extreme Left and the admission into his cabinet of socialist deputies, showed that he understood which wing of the Chamber it was best to conciliate in order to keep the government in his hands for an abnormal term. The advent to office of Socialists disquieted the respectable and prosperous commercial classes, which in France take little part in politics, though they had small sympathy with the nationalists, who were the most violent opponents of the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry. The alarm caused by the handing over of important departments of the state to socialist politicians arose upon a danger which is not always understood beyond the borders of France. Socialism in France is a movement appealing to the revolutionary instincts of the French democracy, advocated in vague terms by the members of rival groups or sects. Thus the increasing number of socialist deputies in parliament had produced no legislative results, and their presence in the cabinet was not feared on that account. The fear which their office-holding inspired was due to the immense administrative patronage which the centralized system confides to each member of the government. French ministers are wont to bestow the places at their disposal on their political friends, so the prospect of administrative posts being filled all over the land by revolutionaries caused some uneasiness. Otherwise the presence of Socialists on the ministerial bench seemed to have no other effect than that of partially muzzling the socialist groups in the Chamber. The opposition to the government was heterogeneous. It included the few Monarchists left in the Chamber, the Nationalists, who resembled the Boulangists of twelve years before, and who had added anti-Semitism to the articles of the revisionist creed, and a number of republicans, chiefly of the old Opportunist group, which had renewed itself under the name of Progressist at the time when M. Waldeck-Rousseau was its most important member in the Senate.
The ablest leaders of this Opposition were all malcontent Republicans; and this fact seemed to show that if ever any form of monarchy were restored in France, political office would probably remain in the hands of men who were former ministers of the Third Republic. Thus the most conspicuous opponents of the cabinet were three ex-prime ministers, MM. Méline, Charles Dupuy and Ribot. Less distinguished republican “ministrables” had their normal appetite for office whetted in 1900 by the international exhibition at Paris. It brought the ministers of the day into unusual prominence, and endowed them with large subsidies voted by parliament for official entertainments. The exhibition was planned on too ambitious a scale to be a financial success. It also called forth the just regrets of those who deplored the tendency of Parisians under the Third Republic to turn their once brilliant city into an international casino. Its most satisfactory feature was the proof it displayed of the industrial inventiveness and the artistic instinct of the French. The political importance of the exhibition lay in the fact that it determined the majority in the Chamber not to permit the foreigners attracted by it to the capital to witness a ministerial crisis. Few strangers of distinction, however, came to it, and not one sovereign of the great powers visited Paris; but the ministry remained in office, and M. Waldeck-Rousseau had uninterrupted opportunity of showing his governmental ability. The only change in his cabinet took place when General de Galliffet resigned the portfolio of war to General André. The army, as represented by its officers, had shown symptoms of hostility to the ministry in consequence of the pardon of Dreyfus. The new minister of war repressed such demonstrations with proceedings of the same arbitrary character as those which had called forth criticism in England when used in the Dreyfus affair. In both cases the high-handed policy was regarded either with approval or with indifference by the great majority of the French nation, which ever since the Revolution has shown that its instincts are in favour of authoritative government. The emphatic support given by the radical groups to the autocratic policy of M. Waldeck-Rousseau and his ministers was not surprising to those who have studied the history of the French democracy. It has always had a taste for despotism since it first became a political power in the days of the Jacobins, to whose early protection General Bonaparte owed his career. On the other hand liberalism has always been repugnant to the masses, and the only period in which the Liberals governed the country was under the régime of limited suffrage—during the Restoration and the Monarchy of July.
The most important event in France during the last year of the century, not from its political result, but from the lessons it taught, was perhaps the Paris municipal election. The quadrennial renewal of all the municipal councils of France took place in May 1900. The municipality of the capital had been for many years in the hands of the extreme Radicals and the revolutionary Socialists. The Parisian electors now sent to the Hôtel de Ville a council in which the majority were Nationalists, in general sympathy with the anti-Semitic and plebiscitary movements. The nationalist councillors did not, however, form one solid party, but were divided into five or six groups, representing every shade of political discontent, from monarchism to revisionist-socialism. While the electorate of Paris thus pronounced for the revision of the Constitution, the provincial elections, as far as they had a political bearing, were favourable to the ministry and to the Republic. M. Waldeck-Rousseau accepted the challenge of the capital, and dealt with its representatives with the arbitrary weapons of centralization which the Republic had inherited from the Napoleonic settlement of the Revolution. Municipal autonomy is unknown in France, and the town council of Paris has to submit to special restrictions on its liberty of action. The prefect of the Seine is always present at its meetings as agent of the government and the minister of the interior can veto any of its resolutions. The Socialists, when their party ruled the municipality, clamoured in parliament for Paris and the provinces. the removal of this administrative control. But now being in a minority they supported the government in its anti-autonomic rigours. The majority of the municipal council authorized its president to invite to a banquet, in honour of the international exhibition, the provincial mayors and a number of foreign municipal magnates, including the lord mayor of London. The ministers were not invited, and the prefect of the Seine thereupon informed the president of the municipality that he had no right, without consulting the agent of the government, to offer a banquet to the provincial mayors; and they, with the deference which French officials instinctively show to the central authority, almost all refused the invitation to the Hôtel de Ville. The municipal banquet was therefore abandoned, but the government gave one in the Tuileries gardens, at which no fewer than 22,000 mayors paid their respects to the chief of the state. These events showed that, as in the Terror, as at the coup d’état of 1851, and as in the insurrection of the Commune, the French provinces were never disposed to follow the political lead of the capital, whether the opinions prevailing there were Jacobin or reactionary. These incidents displayed the tendency of the French democracy, in Paris and in the country alike, to submit to and even to encourage the arbitrary working of administrative centralization. The elected mayors of the provincial communes, urban and rural, quitted themselves like well-drilled functionaries of the state, respectful of their hierarchical superiors, just as in the days when they were the nominees of the government; while the population of Paris, in spite of its perennial proneness to revolution, accepted the rebuff inflicted on its chosen representatives without any hostile demonstration. The municipal elections in Paris afforded fresh proof of the unchanging political ineptitude of the reactionaries. The dissatisfaction of the great capital with the government of the Republic might, in spite of the reluctance of the provinces to follow the lead of Paris, have had grave results if skilfully organized. But the anti-republican groups, instead of putting forward men of high ability or reputation to take possession of the Hôtel de Ville, chose their candidates among the same inferior class of professional politicians as the Radicals and the Socialists whom they replaced on the municipal council.
The beginning of a century of the common era is a purely artificial division of time. Yet it has often marked a turning-point in the history of nations. This was notably the case in France in 1800. The violent and anarchical France at the opening of the 20th century. phases of the Revolution of 1789 came to an end with the 18th century; and the dawn of the 19th was coincident with the administrative reconstruction of France by Napoleon, on lines which endured with little modification till the end of that century, surviving seven revolutions of the executive power. The opening years of the 20th century saw no similar changes in the government of the country. The Third Republic, which was about to attain an age double that reached by any other regime since the Revolution, continued to live on the basis of the Constitution enacted in 1875, before it was five years old. Yet it seems not unlikely that historians of the future may take the date 1900 as a landmark between two distinct periods in the evolution of the French nation.
With the close of the 19th century the Dreyfus affair came practically to an end. Whatever the political and moral causes of the agitation which attended it, its practical result was to strengthen the Radical and Socialist parties in Results of the Dreyfus affair. the Republic, and to reduce to unprecedented impotence the forces of reaction. This was due more to the maladroitness of the Reactionaries than to the virtues or the prescience of the extreme Left, as the imprisonment of the Jewish captain, which agitated and divided the nation, could not have been inflicted without the ardent approval of Republicans of all shades of opinion. But when the majority at last realized that a mistake had been committed, the Reactionaries, in great measure through their own unwise policy, got the chief credit for it. Consequently, as the clericals formed the militant section of the anti-Republican parties, and as the Radical-Socialists were at that time keener in their hostility to the Church than in their zeal for social or economic reform, the issue of the Dreyfus affair brought about an anti-clerical movement, which, though initiated and organized by a small minority, met with nothing to resist it in the country, the reactionary forces being effete and the vast majority of the population indifferent. The main and absorbing feature therefore of political life in France in the first years of the 20th century was a campaign against the Roman Catholic Church, unparalleled in energy since the Revolution. Its most striking result was the rupture of the Concordat between France and the Vatican. This act was additionally important as being the first considerable breach made in the administrative structure reared by Napoleon, which had hitherto survived all the vicissitudes of the 19th century. Concurrently with this the influence of the Socialist party in French policy largely increased. A primary principle professed by the Socialists throughout Europe is pacificism, and its dissemination in France acted in two very different ways. It encouraged in the French people a growth of anti-military spirit, which showed some sign of infecting the national army, and it impelled the government of the Republic to be zealous in cultivating friendly relations with other powers. The result of the latter phase of pacificism was that France, under the Radical-Socialist administrations of the early years of the 20th century, enjoyed a measure of international prestige of that superficial kind which is expressed by the state visits of crowned heads to the chief of the executive power, greater than at any period since the Second Empire.
The voting of the law which separated the Church from the Church policy. state will probably mark a capital date in French history; so, as the ecclesiastical policy of successive ministries filled almost entirely the interior chronicles of France for the first five years of the new century, it will be convenient to set forth in order the events which during that period led up to the passing of the Separation Act.
The French legislature during the first session of the 20th century was chiefly occupied with the passing of the Associations Law. That measure, though it entirely changed the legal position of all associations in France, was primarily directed against the religious associations of the Roman Catholic Church. Their influence in the land, according to the anti-clericals, had been proved by the Dreyfus affair to be excessive. The Jesuits were alleged, on their own showing, to exercise considerable power over the officers of the army, and in this way to have been largely responsible for the blunders of the Dreyfus case. Another less celebrated order, which took an active part against Dreyfus, the Assumptionists, had achieved notoriety by its journalistic enterprise, its cheap newspapers of wide circulation being remarkable for the violence of their attacks on the institutions and men of the Republic. The mutual antagonism between the French government and religious congregations is a tradition which dates from the ancient monarchy and was continued by Napoleon I. long before the Third Republic adopted it in the legislation associated with the names of Jules Ferry and Paul Bert. The prime minister, under whose administration the 20th century succeeded the 19th, was M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who had been the colleague of Paul Bert in Gambetta’s grand ministère, and in 1883 had served under Jules Ferry in his second ministry. He had retired from political life, though he remained a member of the Senate, and was making a large fortune at the bar, when in June 1899, at pecuniary sacrifice, he consented to form a ministry for the purpose of “liquidating” the Dreyfus affair. In 1900, the year after the second condemnation of Dreyfus and his immediate pardon by the government, M. Waldeck-Rousseau in a speech at Toulouse announced that legislation was about to be undertaken on the subject of associations.
At that period the hostility of the Revolution to the principle of associations of all kinds, civil as well as religious, was still enforced by the law. With the exception of certain commercial societies subject to special legislation, no association composed of more than twenty persons could be formed without governmental authorization which was always revocable, the restriction applying equally to political and social clubs and to religious communities. The law was the same for all, but was differently applied. Authorization was rarely refused to political or social societies, though any club was liable to have its authorization withdrawn and to be shut up or dissolved. But to religious orders new authorization was practically never granted. Only four of them, the orders of Saint Lazare, of the Saint Esprit, of the Missions Étrangères and of Saint Sulpice, were authorized under the Third Republic—their authorization dating from the First Empire and the Restoration. The Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne were also recognized, not, however, as a religious congregation under the jurisdiction of the minister of public worship, but as a teaching body under that of the minister of education. All the great historical orders, preaching, teaching or contemplative, were “unauthorized”; they led a precarious life on sufferance, having as corporations no civil existence, and being subject to dissolution at a moment’s notice by the administrative authority. In spite of this disability and of the decrees of 1880 directed against unauthorized monastic orders they had so increased under the anti-clerical Republic, that the religious of both sexes were more numerous in France at the beginning of the 20th century than at the end of the ancient monarchy. Moreover, in the twenty years during which unauthorized Orders had been supposed to be suppressed under the Ferry Decrees, their numbers had become six times more numerous than before, while it was the authorized Congregations which had diminished. The bare catalogue of the religious houses in the land, with the value of their properties (estimated by M. Waldeck-Rousseau at a milliard—£40,000,000) filled two White Books of two thousand pages, presented to parliament on the 4th of December 1900. The hostility to the Congregations was not confined to the anti-clericals. The secular clergy were suffering materially from the enterprising competition of their old rivals the regulars. Had the legislation for defining the legal situation of the religious orders been undertaken with the sole intention of limiting their excessive growth, such a measure would have been welcome to the parochial clergy. But they saw that the attack upon the congregations was only preliminary to a general attack upon the Church, in spite of the sincere assurances of the prime minister, a statesman of conservative temperament, that no harm would accrue to the secular clergy from the passing of the Associations Law.