We believe that these are sincere and honest words; and we shall have no difficulty at least in showing that Marshal MacMahon could not have acted otherwise than he did, unless he had been prepared to surrender the virtual government of the republic into the hands of men who are leagued together to destroy the rights of property; to degrade marriage; to enslave, if not wholly to overturn, the church; to cut her off from her connection with her earthly head; to reduce her prelates, if they were permitted to exist at all, to the condition of servants of the civil power; to exile her contemplative and teaching orders; to take from her the right of educating her children; and to drag France, ere long, into an alliance with the revolutionary associations in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Russia, which dream of establishing on the ruins of religion and of society a new confederation from which God shall be banished, and over which Satan shall rule supreme. Comparatively few of the constituents of the Gambetta party in the French Assembly are aware of the designs of the leaders of this faction; but enough light has within the past few weeks been thrown upon their machinations fully to justify the President in making a firm stand against their further progress.
M. Jules Simon refused to aid the President in executing this determination; and M. Simon was removed to give place to a minister who would co-operate with his chief. So powerful had the Gambetta faction become in the Assembly that the whole of the cabinet followed M. Simon in his enforced retirement from office, and the President was for the moment left alone. The men whom he called to his aid, however, and who, indeed, had encouraged him to dismiss M. Simon, were prompt in taking up the fallen reins of office, and the government, without a day’s delay, began its work of preserving France from her worst foes. The task before them is a most arduous one, and it has been begun none too soon. Let us show how it became necessary that it should be undertaken at all.
The French Assembly was re-convened at Versailles on the 1st of May after the usual Easter recess. During the vacation events had occurred which made it probable that the long-threatened rupture between the Gambetta faction, or Extreme Left of the Chamber, and the conservative elements in the executive department of the government, could not be delayed much longer. The administration had indeed gone to the very furthest point of concession in endeavoring to satisfy the demands of the Left. The consent of Marshal MacMahon had been given to these concessions, but it was known that this assent had been extorted from him with difficulty, and that he was personally of the opinion that the more was given to the Gambettists the more would they ask, and that the true and safe course was that of steady and uncompromising resistance to their unconstitutional and revolutionary demands. The Left, by skilful management of the press in its interest; by the manipulations of the local public functionaries who had from time to time been appointed at its request, or whom it had been able to purchase; by adroit misrepresentations and exaggerations of the policy of the conservative members of the Assembly; and by the not infrequent maladroit utterances and acts of certain of the imperialist and monarchical members, had contrived to make an imposing show of their strength in the country as well as in the Assembly. It is no doubt true that, all other things being equal, a large majority of the French people would prefer a republic to any other form of government. But the republic which would satisfy them is not at all the republic which would satisfy M. Gambetta and his friends. The republic which the majority of the French people desire is a republic in which property would be safe; in which law and order would reign; in which God would be respected; and in which the church would be free. The republic of Gambetta would possess none of these characteristics; but Gambetta and his lieutenants had been allowed to assume the attitude of the especial friends and defenders of republican institutions, and many of their members in the Assembly owed their election to the votes of good Catholics and sober citizens. They now felt themselves strong enough to advance further, and to wrest from the administration a still greater share of power.
Marshal MacMahon was himself irremovable for three years longer, only four years of his Septennate having expired. But it might be possible, in the opinion of the Gambettists, to force him to accept a cabinet which should be dictated by themselves, and which would hand over to them the virtual control of the government. One of the members of the then cabinet, they believed, would be useful to them, and their plans involved his retention. What was the nature of the communications which are said to have taken place in secret between MM. Gambetta and Simon cannot at present be known. Nor can we unveil the mysteries of the correspondence which has been kept up during the last few years between the controlling members of the French Extreme Left and the revolutionary leaders in England and throughout the Continent of Europe. The operations of the secret societies are seldom brought to light until after their work has been accomplished—and not always even then. The once famous “International Society of Working-men” has ceased to exist for all practical purposes; but it, at the best, was only an engine invented and put in motion by men who still are laboring in the secrecy of Masonic lodge-rooms and in the caucus-chambers of hidden political organizations to accomplish the destruction of Christian society and Christian government. It cannot be doubted that a certain solidarity unites the socialists of France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Portugal, and that they have the means of acting together. The Gambetta faction in France by no means stood alone in their recent attempt to gain the upper hand in the administration of the republic; they had the active sympathy and the moral support of their confrères throughout Europe.
Now, the great bulwark of the conservative republic in France is the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic faith, the Roman Catholic people. So long as the church is free and undisturbed in France—free to pursue her work of educating her children, preserving morality, and saving souls—the French people, of whom all but a small fraction belong to her, will remain tranquil and happy, and they would make short work of men who proposed to set up in France a communistic and atheistic republic. They are quite well contented with the republic as it at present exists, and are hopeful of its future; under it the church for the first time has been allowed full right of teaching; and the avidity with which Catholics availed themselves of the privileges conferred by the new university law sufficiently attests at once their intelligence and their zeal. Still, the Catholics in France, like the Catholics throughout the rest of the world, have a sorrow and a grievance; and French Catholics, like all other Catholics, claim the right to express this sorrow and to do what is in their power to redress this grievance. The earthly head of their church is a prisoner in his own city; he has been despoiled of his patrimony and plundered of his crown; his jailers threaten from time to time to deprive him of the little that is left to him; there is positive danger that the freedom of the election of his successor will be assailed, and that the church throughout the world may be subjected, through the malice of her foes at Rome, to the gravest perils. The French Catholics conceive that it is their right and their duty to protest unceasingly against this state of things, and to inspire their government to speak in their name—and, if occasion arises, to act in their name—for the purpose of protecting the Holy Father from further insults and oppression, and of seeking to bring about the peaceable restoration of his independence. In all this they are strictly within the limits of their constitutional rights as citizens of the French Republic.
Let us bring the matter home to ourselves. Suppose that a petition should be drawn up praying President Hayes to instruct our minister at Rome to represent to the government of Italy that nine millions of American Roman Catholics felt themselves deeply aggrieved and injured by certain acts of the Italian government towards the Pope, and that they considered these acts all the more unjustifiable because they were one and all in open and undisguised violation of the promises made by the Italian government to the whole Catholic world; suppose that this petition should be signed by every Catholic man and woman in the United States and sent to the President; would it be said, then, that we were exceeding our rights as citizens, and that we should be punished for our temerity? The President might do as he pleased with the petition; he might act upon it or cast it aside—that would be for him to decide; but could we, as citizens, be blamed and punished for exercising the right of petition in order to make known our feelings upon a matter which touches us so closely? Yet this is all that the French Catholics have done; and it is because of the solidarity of interests and of purpose, of hope and of fear, which exists between the revolutionists and socialists of Italy and of the other Continental nations that the Gambettists in France were spurred up to make this perfectly legitimate action of the French Catholics the pretext for a new and desperate assault upon the liberties of the church in France—an assault under cover of which, and aided by what seems to us very much like treachery on the part of M. Jules Simon, they hoped to compel Marshal MacMahon to capitulate to them.
The allocution of the Pope issued on the 12th of last March had moved to the very depths the hearts of Catholics in France, as it had moved the hearts of the Catholics of every other land. They felt that it was impossible for them to remain silent after hearing that most pathetic and powerful appeal; they wished that their reply should be as emphatic as possible, and that it should consist of acts as well as of words. They resolved to draw up addresses to the Holy Father; to organize pilgrimages to convey these addresses, with their gifts, to Rome; and to devise means whereby they could express to their own government their anxious wish that it would use its influence with the government of Italy in behalf of the restoration of the independence and freedom of the Pope. Each of these projects was entered into with commendable zeal; and early in April the Bishop of Nevers addressed a letter to Marshal MacMahon, asking him, in the name of his flock, to use the influence of France at the court of King Victor Emanuel and at other courts for the protection of the Pope and for the restoration of his rights. The marshal’s cabinet at this moment were greatly under the influence of M. Jules Simon, the President of the Council; they were imbued with the idea that it would not be safe for them to exasperate the Gambetta faction; and they persuaded the marshal to approve a letter addressed by the Minister of Public Worship to the bishop, in which entire disapproval of his appeal was expressed, with the remark that “the marshal, as a sincere friend of religion, saw with pain the clergy intervening in internal, and still more in foreign, politics.” The Gambettists were encouraged by this mark of weakness on the part of the government, and prepared to push their advantage. But the Catholics did not choose to take their views of duty from the dictates of a Council whereof M. Simon was the chief; and they continued to organize their pilgrimages and to draw up and circulate their addresses to the Pope. On the 19th of April the Bishop of Nevers, not at all disconcerted by the rebuke which he had received from the Cabinet, addressed a letter to the Mayor of the Nièvre, in which he explained to that official what, in his opinion, was the duty of all good Catholics occupying influential positions.
“The Pope being no longer free in Rome,” wrote the bishop to the mayor, “the result is that we ourselves are no longer free in our consciences, and we consequently should use all our influence to obtain a change in such an abnormal state of things, and the restoration to the sovereign of our souls of the independence which he absolutely requires in order to guide us. We must first instil these views in the minds of the population whose interests are confided to us. We must then concert together to cause similar convictions to prevail in the various councils of the country.”
On the 20th, at a cabinet council, the general petitions of the Catholics addressed to the government were taken into consideration, and it was proposed that, in order to silence the complaints of the Gambettists, who were declaiming violently that the circulation and presentation of such memorials would embroil France in a difficulty with Italy, the bishops should be ordered to forbid the further exposure of these petitions in their churches for signature. But the marshal on this occasion displayed a little more firmness and the matter was passed over without action. A few days before this an event had occurred in Italy that served to increase the distrust with which Marshal MacMahon already regarded the secret intentions of the leaders of the Left. In Benevento, near Letino, and again near Rome, the government had arrested a number of socialists who, it appears, were engaged in a conspiracy for the establishment of a Red Republic. The papers found on the persons of the arrested men were of the usual inflammatory character, and set forth, among other things, that “man ought not to be subjected to any tyranny, human or divine; that the principle of private property is the climax of infamy, because it creates inequality between men; that the union between men and women ought to be free; and that the state is the denial of the most sacred principles.” The chief leader of the band, who was arrested with about fifty of his adherents, was a young Milanese named Caffiero, a man of wealth and position; and an examination of his papers disclosed the fact that his association was only one of a large number of others spread throughout Europe, and that the names of some of the leading radical republicans of France appeared upon a list which was believed to enumerate the advisers and real leaders of the conspirators. On the 28th of April, however, the cabinet again induced the marshal to make another effort to conciliate the Gambettists, who had redoubled their agitation against the Catholic movement, which had by this time become very general throughout the whole country. On that day the Minister of the Interior issued a circular to all prefects, directing them to discourage the signature of the Catholic protests and petitions by not allowing them to be publicly circulated within their respective jurisdictions. The circular—to which Marshal MacMahon assented after much pressure—instructed the prefects to regard these petitions and protests as “an unjustifiable and illegal interference in the legislative and domestic affairs of a friendly foreign state,” and to do all in their power to suppress them. Gambetta himself could scarcely have said more; but the marshal was quite correct in his opinion that Gambetta would still ask for more. Meanwhile, the mot d’ordre to the Gambettists had gone forth to strike terror into the hearts of their opponents by public manifestations. The students of the Sorbonne were instigated into making violent assaults upon the Catholic universities; on the 1st of May five hundred students assembled in front of the Catholic university in the Rue de Vaugirard, where they insulted the Catholic students and professors by indecent harangues and by singing blasphemous parodies of a hymn to the Sacred Heart; dispersed by the police, they separated only to assemble again before the Jesuit school in the Rue de Shomond, where the same disorderly and disgraceful scenes were repeated until the police arrived and arrested the ringleaders of the mob. In all the cities where the Gambettists were sufficiently numerous manifestations against the church and her liberties were organized; and in some cases the zeal of the disciples so far outran the directions of the leaders that it was with difficulty the latter prevented the former from outrages which would have alarmed and disgusted the whole country.
Affairs were in this condition when the Chambers reassembled on the 1st of May. The Left lost no time in bringing forward their guns and forcing the fighting. M. Leblond was put up by them in the Chamber of Deputies to give notice of a question addressed to the government “as to the measures which it proposed to take to repress Ultramontane intrigues.” M. Jules Simon, hastening to comply with the demands of the men with whom, as it now appears, he was secretly in accord, at once replied that the debate on the proposed question could take place on the next day. The Catholic members of the Chamber seem to have already distrusted the sincerity of M. Simon. One of them—the eloquent and fearless Count de Mun—announced that he and those who acted with him insisted upon a clear understanding of the position of the government.