Twelve days later M. Waldeck-Rousseau died, having lived just long enough to see this unanticipated result of his policy. It was said that his resolve to regulate the religious associations arose from his feeling that whatever injustice had been committed in the Dreyfus case had been aggravated by the action of certain unauthorized orders. However that may be, his own utterances showed that he believed that his policy was one of finality. But he had not reckoned that his legislation, which needed hands as calm and impartial as his own to apply it, would be used in a manner he had not contemplated by sectarian politicians who would be further aided by the self-destructive policy of the highest authorities of the Church. When parliament assembled for the autumn session a general feeling was expressed, by moderate politicians as well as by supporters of the Combes ministry, that disestablishment was inevitable. The prime minister said that he had been long in favour of it, though the previous year he had intimated to M. Nisard, ambassador to the Vatican, that he had not a majority in parliament to vote it. But the papacy and the clergy had since done everything to change that situation. The Chamber did not move in the matter beyond appointing a committee to consider the general question, to which M. Combes submitted in his own name a bill for the separation of the churches from the State.
During the last three months of 1904 public opinion was diverted to the cognate question of the existence of masonic delation in the army. M. Guyot de Villeneuve, Nationalist deputy for Saint Denis, who had been War Office difficulties. dismissed from the army by General de Galliffet in connexion with the Dreyfus affair, brought before the Chamber a collection of documents which, it seemed, had been abstracted from the Grand Orient of France, the headquarters of French freemasonry, by an official of that order. These papers showed that an elaborate system of espionage and delation had been organized by the freemasons throughout France for the purpose of obtaining information as to the political opinions and religious practices of the officers of the army, and that this system was worked with the connivance of certain officials of the ministry of war. Its aim appeared to be to ascertain if officers went to mass or sent their children to convent schools or in any way were in sympathy with the Roman Catholic religion, the names of officers so secretly denounced being placed on a black-list at the War Office, whereby they were disqualified for promotion. There was no doubt about the authenticity of the documents or of the facts which they revealed. Radical ex-ministers joined with moderate Republicans and reactionaries in denouncing the system. Anti-clerical deputies declared that it was no use to cleanse the war office of the influence of the Jesuits, which was alleged to have prevailed there, if it were to be replaced by another occult power, more demoralizing because more widespread. Only the Socialists and a few of the Radical-Socialists in the Chamber supported the action of the freemasons. General André, minister of war, was so clearly implicated, with the evident approval of the prime minister, that a revulsion of feeling against the policy of the anti-clerical cabinet began to operate in the Chamber. Had the opposition been wisely guided there can be little doubt that a moderate ministry would have been called to office and the history of the Church in France might have been changed. But the reactionaries, with their accustomed folly, played into the hands of their adversaries. The minister of war had made a speech which produced a bad impression. As he stepped down from the tribune he was struck in the face by a Nationalist deputy for Paris, a much younger man than he. The cowardly assault did not save the minister, who was too deeply compromised in the delation scandal. But it saved the anti-clerical party, by rallying a number of waverers who, until this exhibition of reactionary policy, were prepared to go over to the Moderates, from the “bloc,” as the ministerial majority was called. The Nationalist deputy was committed to the assizes on the technical charge of assaulting a functionary while performing his official duties. Towards the end of the year, on the eve of his trial, he met with a violent death, and the circumstances which led to it, when made public, showed that this champion of the Church was a man of low morality. General André had previously resigned and was succeeded as minister of war by M. Berteaux, a wealthy stock-broker and a Socialist.
The Combes cabinet could not survive the delation scandal, in spite of the resignation of the minister of war and the ineptitude of the opposition. On the 8th of January 1905, two days before parliament met, an election took Fall of the Combes ministry. place in Paris to fill the vacancy caused by the death of the Nationalist deputy who had assaulted General André. The circumstances of his death, at that time partially revealed, did not deter the electors from choosing by a large majority a representative of the same party, Admiral Bienaimé, who the previous year had been removed for political reasons from the post of maritime prefect at Toulon, by M. Camille Pelletan, minister of marine. A more serious check to the Combes ministry was given by the refusal of the Chamber to re-elect as president M. Brisson, who was defeated by a majority of twenty-five by M. Doumer, ex-Governor-General of Indo-China, who, though he had entered politics as a Radical, was now supported by the anti-republican reactionaries as well as by the moderate Republicans. A violent debate arose on the question of expelling from the Legion of Honour certain members of that order, including a general officer, who had been involved in the delation scandal. M. Jaurès, the eloquent Socialist deputy for Albi, who played the part of Éminence grise to M. Combes in his anti-clerical campaign, observed that the party which was now demanding the purification of the order had been in no hurry to expel from it Esterhazy long after his crimes had been proved in connexion with the Dreyfus case. The debate was inconclusive, and the government on the 14th of January obtained a vote of confidence by a majority of six. But M. Combes, whose animosity towards the church was keener than his love of office, saw that his ministry would be constantly liable to be put in a minority, and that thus the consideration of separation might be postponed until after the general elections of 1906. So he announced his resignation in an unprecedented manifesto addressed to the president of the Republic on the 18th January.
M. Rouvier, minister of finance in the outgoing government, was called upon for the second time in his career to form a ministry. A moderate opportunist himself, he intended to form a coalition cabinet in which all groups of Republicans, Second Rouvier ministry. from the Centre to the extreme Left, would be represented. But he failed, and the ministry of the 24th of January 1905 contained no members of the Republican opposition which had combated M. Combes. The prime minister retained the portfolio of finance; M. Delcassé remained at the foreign office, which he had directed since 1898, and M. Berteaux at the war office; M. Etienne, member for Oran, went to the ministry of the interior; another Algerian deputy, M. Thomson, succeeded M. Camille Pelletan at the ministry of marine, which department was said to have fallen into inefficiency; public worship was separated from the department of the interior and joined with that of education under M. Bienvenu-Martin, Radical-Socialist deputy for Auxerre, who was new to official life. Although M. Rouvier, as befitted a politician of the school of Waldeck-Rousseau, disliked the separation of the churches from the state, he accepted that policy as inevitable. After the action of the Vatican in 1904, which had produced the rupture of diplomatic relations with France, many moderates who had been persistent in their opposition to the Combes ministry, and even certain Nationalists, accepted the principle of separation, but urged that it should be effected on liberal terms. So on the 27th of January, after the minister of education and public worship had announced that the government intended to introduce a separation bill, a vote of confidence was obtained by a majority of 373 to 99, half of the majority being opponents of the Combes ministry of various Republican and reactionary groups, while the minority was composed of 84 Radicals and Socialists and only 15 reactionaries.
On the 21st of March the debates on the separation of the churches from the state began. A commission had been appointed in 1904 to examine the subject. Its reporter was M. Aristide Briand, Socialist member for Saint Etienne. The Separation Law. According to French parliamentary procedure, the reporter of a commission, directed to draw up a great scheme of legislation, can make himself a more important person in conducting it through a house of legislature than the minister in charge of the bill. This is what M. Briand succeeded in doing. He produced with rapidity a “report” on the whole question, in which he traced with superficial haste the history of the Church in France from the baptism of Clovis, and upon this drafted a bill which was accepted by the government. He thus at one bound came from obscurity into the front rank of politicians, and in devising a revolutionary measure learned a lesson of moderate statesmanship. In conducting the debates he took the line of throwing the responsibility for the rupture of the Concordat on the pope. The leadership of the Opposition fell on M. Ribot, who had been twice prime minister of the Republic and was not a practising Catholic. He recognized that separation had become inevitable,; but argued that it could be accomplished as a permanent act only in concert with the Holy See. The clerical party in the Chamber did little in defence of the Church. The abbés Lemire and Gayraud, the only ecclesiastics in parliament, spoke with moderation, and M. Groussau, a Catholic jurist, attacked the measure with less temperate zeal; but the best serious defence of the interests of the Church came from the Republican centre. Few amendments from the extreme Left were accepted by M. Briand, whose general tone was moderate and not illiberal. One feature of the debates was the reluctance of the prime minister to take part in them, even when financial clauses were discussed in which his own office was particularly concerned. The bill finally passed the Chamber on the 3rd of July by 341 votes against 233, the majority containing a certain number of conservative Republicans and Nationalists. At the end the Radical-Socialists manifested considerable discontent at the liberal tendencies of M. Briand, and declared that the measure as it left the Chamber could be considered only provisional. In the Senate it underwent no amendment whatever, not a single word being altered. The prime minister, M. Rouvier, never once opened his lips during the lengthy debates, in the course of which M. Clémenceau, as a philosophical Radical who voted for the bill, criticized it as too concordatory, while M. Méline, as a moderate Republican, who voted against it, predicted that it would create such a state of things as would necessitate new negotiations with Rome a few years later. It was finally passed by a majority of 181 to 102, the complete number of senators being 300, and three days later, on the 9th of December 1905, it was promulgated as law by the president of the Republic.
The main features of the act were as follows. The first clauses guaranteed liberty of conscience and the free practice of public worship, and declared that henceforth the Republic neither recognized nor remunerated any form of religion, except in the case of chaplains to public schools, hospitals and prisons. It provided that after inventories had been taken of the real and personal property in the hands of religious bodies, hitherto remunerated by the state, to ascertain whether such property belonged to the state, the department, or the commune, all such property should be transferred to associations of public worship (associations cultuelles) established in each commune in accordance with the rules of the religion which they represented, for the purpose of carrying on the practices of that religion. As the Vatican subsequently refused to permit Catholics to take part in these associations, the important clauses relating to their organization and powers became a dead letter, except in the case of the Protestant and Jewish associations, which affected only a minute proportion of the religious establishments under the act. Nothing, therefore, need be said about them except that the chief discussions in the Chamber took place with regard to their constitution, which was so amended, contrary to the wishes of the extreme anti-clericals, that many moderate critics of the original bill thought that thereby the regular practice of the Catholic religion, under episcopal control, had been safeguarded. A system of pensions for ministers of religion hitherto paid by the state was provided, according to the age and the length of service of the ecclesiastics interested, while in small communes of under a thousand inhabitants the clergy were to receive in any case their full pay for eight years. The bishops’ palaces were to be left gratuitously at the disposal of the occupiers for two years, and the presbyteries and seminaries for five years. This provision too became a dead letter, owing to the orders given by the Holy See to the clergy. Other provisions enacted that the churches should not be used for political meetings, while the services held in them were protected by the law from the acts of disturbers. As the plenary operation of the law depended on the associations cultuelles, the subsequent failure to create those bodies makes it useless to give a complete exposition of a statute of which they were an essential feature.
The passing of the Separation Law was the chief act of the last year of the presidency of M. Loubet. One other important measure has to be noted, the law reducing compulsory military service to two years. The law of 1889 had provided a general service of three years, with an extensive system of dispensations accorded to persons for domestic reasons, or because they belonged to certain categories of students, such citizens being let off with one year’s service with the colours or being entirely exempted. The new law exacted two years’ service from every Frenchman, no one being exempted save for physical incapacity. Under the act of 1905 even the cadets of the military college of Saint Cyr and of the Polytechnic had to serve in the ranks before entering those schools. Anti-military doctrines continued to be encouraged by the Socialist party, M. Hervé, the professor who had been revoked in 1901 for his suggestion of a military strike in case of war and for other unpatriotic utterances, being elected a member of the administrative committee of the Unified Socialist party, of which M. Jaurès was one of the chiefs. At a congress of elementary schoolmasters at Lille in August, anti-military resolutions were passed and a general adherence was given to the doctrines of M. Hervé. At Longwy, in the Eastern coal-field, a strike took place in September, during which the military was called out to keep order and a workman was killed in a cavalry charge. The minister of war, M. Berteaux, visited the scene of the disturbance, and was reported to have saluted the red revolutionary flag which was borne by a procession of strikers singing the “Internationale.”
During the autumn session in November M. Berteaux suddenly resigned the portfolio of war during a sitting of the Chamber, and was succeeded by M. Etienne, minister of the interior, a moderate politician who inspired greater confidence. Earlier in the year other industrial strikes of great gravity had taken place, notably at Limoges, among the potters, where several deaths took place in a conflict with the troops and a factory was burnt. Even more serious were the strikes in the government arsenals in November. At Cherbourg and Brest only a small proportion of the workmen went out, but at Lorient, Rochefort and especially at Toulon the strikes were on a much larger scale. In 1905 solemn warnings were given in the Chamber of the coming crisis in the wine-growing regions of the South. Radical-Socialists such as M. Doumergue, the deputy for Nîmes and a member of the Combes ministry, joined with monarchists such as M. Lasies, deputy of the Gers, in calling attention to the distress of the populations dependent on the vine. They argued that the wines of the South found no market, not because of the alleged over-production, but because of the competition of artificial wines; that formerly only twenty departments of France were classed in the atlas as wine-producing, but that thanks to the progress of chemistry seventy departments were now so described. The deputies of the north of France and of Paris, irrespective of party, opposed these arguments, and the government, while promising to punish fraud, did not seem to take very seriously the legitimate warnings of the representatives of the South.
The Republic continued to extend its friendly relations with foreign powers, and the end of M. Loubet’s term of office was signalized by a procession of royal visits to Paris, some of which the president returned. At the end of May the king of Spain came and narrowly escaped assassination from a bomb which was thrown at him by a Spaniard as he was returning with the president from the opera. In October M. Loubet returned this visit at Madrid and went on to Lisbon to see the king of Portugal, being received by the queen, who was the daughter of the comte de Paris and the sister of the duc d’Orléans, both exiled by the Republic. In November the king of Portugal came to Paris, and the president of the Republic also received during the year less formal visits from the kings of England and of Greece.
One untoward international event affecting the French ministry occurred in June 1905. M. Delcassé (see section on Exterior Policy), who had been foreign minister longer than any holder of that office under the Republic, Resignation of M. Delcassé. resigned, and it was believed that he had been sacrificed by the prime minister to the exigencies of Germany, which power was said to be disquieted at his having, in connexion with the Morocco question, isolated Germany by promoting the friendly relations of France with England, Spain and Italy. Whether it be true or not that the French government was really in alarm at the possibility of a declaration of war by Germany, the impression given was unfavourable, nor was it removed when M. Rouvier himself took the portfolio of foreign affairs.