The way in which the laicisation is carried out by the subaltern authorities seems to be admirably calculated also to inflame the religious zeal of the people. A very intelligent and liberal ecclesiastic, living here, tells me that, while M. Ferry is professing in the Chamber his great anxiety to co-operate with the Conservatives in modifying the decrees of 1791, in regard to religious associations, and talking about a more liberal treatment of the clergy and the Christian free schools, the local functionaries here, in Artois, lose no opportunity of irritating and annoying the Christian population. In the village of Moislains near Péronne, for example, he tells me the funeral took place the other day of the Abbé Sallier, for many years the curé of that parish; a man so much respected and beloved by the whole community that, notwithstanding an express request made by him in his will, that no discourse might be pronounced at his interment, and that it might be made as simple as possible, the people insisted on escorting the remains to the cemetery in a long procession headed by the mayor, the municipal council, and all the notabilities of the country round about. Naturally the people wished that their children, most of whom had been baptized by the abbé, might join in this procession; to prevent which an express order was issued by the school authorities, that the children should not be allowed to leave the school for that purpose. It is difficult to see how a petty persecution of this sort can be expected to promote the 'religious peace' about which M. Ferry perorates at Paris. The rural Artesians, my friend tells me, resent these proceedings very bitterly, and show their feelings in the most practical fashion, by subscribing freely to carry on the religious primary schools, and refusing to let their children attend the lay schools, which are kept up by the Government out of the taxes paid by themselves. This, with a thrifty and rather parsimonious population, like that which increases and multiplies so steadily in Artois, is a most significant fact.
The Marist Brethren, who have their headquarter at the Ecole de Notre Dame in Albert, a town of some 4,000 inhabitants, about half-way between Arras and Amiens, are carrying on these religious schools most successfully. Albert itself is a very curious and interesting place. There are remains here of Roman fortifications which show that it was a point of importance under the Empire, and subterranean excavations of a most remarkable character, one of them extending for more than two miles. Down to the time of Henry IV. Albert was known as Ancre. Concini, the Florentine favourite of Mary de' Medici, bought the lordship of Ancre with the title of marquis. With the help of his clever Florentine wife, Leonora Galigai, he completely subjugated the queen and her weak son, Louis XIII.; and, without so much as drawing his sword in battle, made himself a marshal of France, How all this led him on to his ruin I need not recite. He was stabbed to death in the precincts of the Louvre by Vitry; his wife, arraigned as a sorceress, was strangled and burned; and their unfortunate little son was degraded. The marquisate and lordship of Ancre were bought, oddly enough, by another and very different Florentine race, the Alberti, who had come into France and established themselves in the Venaissin a hundred years before. So intense was the general hatred of the Concinis, that, upon acquiring Ancre, the Alberti unbaptized the place and gave it their own French name of Albert, which is still most honourably borne by their representatives, the ducal houses of Luynes and of Chaulnes. It is common enough in France, as it is in England, to find the names of families perpetuated in conjunction with those of places once their property—Kingston-Lacy, Stanton-Harcourt, Bagot's Bromley, Melton Mowbray are English cases in point. But this displacement of an old territorial designation by a family name is unusual. Some thing like it has taken place in our own times and in a remote south-western corner of France, where the people of Arles-les-Bains changed the name of their pleasant little town of orange groves and olives to Amélie, to commemorate their respect and affection for the excellent queen of Louis Philippe.
There are factories at Albert; and a modern church is building there, not to the unmixed delight of architects and archæologists. But my concern now is with the work of the Marist Brothers who have made Albert their headquarters.
This work is carried on with the direct and active co-operation of the people. At one little hamlet, for example, called, I think, Brébières, nearly a hundred children now attend the Marist school, whose parents pay for each child a subscription of three francs a month. There, not long ago, it was found that in one poor family of peasants a family council had been called to raise this modest sum in order that one of the children now of an age to attend the school might be sent to it. The two elder children settled the question by insisting that they would give up their own daily ration of milk to meet the expense.
Will France be a nobler and stronger country when the priests who train the children of her peasantry into this spirit are driven out of the land?
This is the real question which must be met and answered by the advocates of compulsory lay education in the public schools.
The next step to be taken in the 'laicisation' of the schools has been already revealed in the famous 'Article 7' of M. Ferry. M. Ferry is the true, though more or less occult, head of the present Administration in France. 'M. Ferry,' said a caustic French Radical to me in Paris, 'ought to be the mask of M. Carnot. Nature gave him a Carnival nose for that purpose. Everything is topsy-turvy now in France, and so M. Carnot is the mask of M. Ferry. But the nose will come through before long.'
Many years ago the public conscience of Philadelphia, then as now one of the most Protestant of American Protestant cities, was scandalised by the will of a French merchant, Stephen Girard; who, after acquiring a large fortune in that city, left it to found a college, within the precincts of which no minister of religion was, on any pretext whatever, to be allowed to appear. The stupid bigotry of this ignorant millionaire was the high-water mark of French Republican liberality during the dismal orgie of the First Republic. It is still the high-water mark of French Republican liberality under the Third Republic. The dream and desire of M. Ferry and his friends are to prohibit ministers of religion from taking any part whatever in the education of the French people. Already the municipal council of Paris has undertaken to 'bowdlerise' the literature of the world in order to prevent the minds of the young from being perverted by coming into contact with the name of God. These good butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers of the Seine really believe, like certain more academical persons of higher social pretensions in England and America, that the ineffable simpletons and scoundrels who for three or four years during the last decade of the last century made ducks and drakes at Paris of the public fortune and the private rights of the French people, were inspired harbingers of a new era. Outside of France it may be hard to suppose this possible, but nothing can be more certain than that the educational legislation of France since 1882 has been aimed steadily and directly at the abolition, not of Christianity alone, but of all religion.
It is curious to see the common school system of New England, which in the beginning was the device of a theocracy bent on usurping the authority of parents over their children, taken up after more than two hundred years, and readjusted to the purposes of a set of men whom the Puritans would have unhesitatingly whipped to death at the cart's tail as blasphemers.
Only the other day, in the Chamber, an ardent Republican member, M. Pichon, made a speech in which he openly avowed the object of laicising the schools to be the destruction of religion. 'Between you, the Catholics,' he exclaimed, 'and us, who are Republicans, there is a great abyss. The interests of the Church are incompatible with those of the Republican Government.' That the Republicans in the Assembly should have applauded this declaration is rather astonishing, since it was in substance an admission that the interests of the 'Republican Government' are inconsistent with those of an admittedly immense majority of the French people. But they did applaud it, and not long before M. Pichon made the speech a solid Republican vote of 232 members had been recorded for the suppression of the French Embassy to the Vatican. Is it surprising that the Catholics of France should be asking themselves all over the country whether it is possible for them to accept the Republic without abjuring their religion?