The Dreyfus Affair (4 page)

Édouard Drumont, in
La France juive
, called the suppression of the Commune an act ‘of savage iniquity’ and blamed it on the Catholic majority in the National Assembly. Unquestionably there were Catholics who saw in the mix of anarchists, socialists and feminists – women were prominent among the Communards – the heirs to the Jacobins who had slaughtered Catholics during the Terror less than a hundred years before; and the execution of the Archbishop and fifty priests confirmed that perception; but Thiers’s ruthless suppression of the Commune also reassured the men of property and the ‘wary French peasants’ that republican government could maintain order as well as an emperor or a king.
38

It also ensured that Thiers could deliver a national consensus when it came to agreeing terms with the Germans. On 10 May, eleven days before the start of the
semaine sanglante
, a treaty was finally signed in Frankfurt. The terms proposed by the Germans included an indemnity of five million francs and the annexation by Germany of Alsace and a large part of Lorraine. Thiers’s government had no option but to accept. It was a profound humiliation for the French and was seen as something that would be reversed as soon as France had regained its strength. France, said Victor Hugo, would one day ‘exact a terrible revenge’.
39

*
Idolater, ‘interpreted by later commentators, such as Rashi and Maimonides, as applicable to Christians’ (Jonathan Frankel,
The Damascus Affair
, p. 273).

*
The executive form of revolutionary government in France between 1795 and 1799.

*
Stay-at-home types, what we might now call couch potatoes: from
pantoufle
, slipper.

2

The Third Republic

1: Church and State

The National Assembly, elected in haste after the defeat at Sedan, was largely Catholic and royalist in its composition. The ‘notables’ who made up the majority wanted a monarchy but could not agree upon who should be king. The legitimist pretender was the Comte de Chambord, a childless old man living in Austria; the Orléanist pretender was the Comte de Paris. While the royalists bickered over the rival candidates, support for a royalist restoration dwindled. A number of by-elections in 1871 suggested that the peasants and bourgeoisie of
la France profonde
, reassured by Thiers’s ruthless reimposition of order and fiscal competence, were warming to the idea of a republic.

A delegation was sent to Austria to negotiate a return of the legitimist pretender, the Comte de Chambord, as King Henry V of France. The old Count was willing to accept the crown but only on his terms. A compromise, thought possible on constitutional matters, foundered on the question of a national flag. Chambord insisted that it should be the white banner with the fleur-de-lis of the Bourbon kings. This was unacceptable to the French Army whose famous victories had been won under the tricolour. The negotiations collapsed.

In 1875, with no prospect of a king, the Assembly passed a number of laws establishing a directly elected Chamber of Deputies, an indirectly elected Senate, a cabinet or Council of Ministers and a President elected by the National Assembly. By a single vote the state created by these constitutional provisions was given the name ‘republic’ – the third since the Revolution of 1789. By the time the first elections to the newly constituted Chamber of Deputies were held in 1876, the mood of the country had changed. The voters returned a republican majority led by Léon Gambetta, the patriotic Radical who had escaped from besieged Paris in a balloon. However, for Gambetta the enemy was no longer the Prussians: ‘Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi.’ The enemy of the Republic was now the Catholic Church.

The battle between left and right, anti-clericals and conservatives, was fought over education. For the secularist republicans, the establishment of a system of universal state education known collectively as ‘The University’ – the secondary schools, the lycées, the universities and the elite colleges of higher education (the Grandes Écoles) – was considered one of the greatest and most enduring achievements of the First Empire. However in 1850, under the then President, Louis-Napoleon, the Minister of Education Alfred Falloux had ended the state’s monopoly on educational provision, leading to a rapid expansion of Catholic schools ‘with relative freedom from official interference and hostile criticism’.
1

These Catholic schools were run by religious orders – above all the Jesuits and the Assumptionists, two orders that were to play important roles in the Dreyfus Affair. The Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola in the sixteenth century, had provided the shock-troops for the Catholic Counter-Reformation. With strict discipline and a long and rigorous training, and drawing recruits from the European nobility, it had sent missionaries to every corner of the world, and boasted of those who had been martyred by the enemies of the Church such as the Iroquois of North America and Queen Elizabeth I of England.

Taking vows of obedience to their General in Rome, who in turn swore to obey the Pope, the Jesuits were considered by their enemies to be unscrupulous in pursuit of what they termed ‘the greater glory of God’. They were the implacable adversaries of Protestants, atheists, secularists and free-thinkers. Those who were ‘of Hebrew or Saracen descent’
2
were ineligible to join the Society.
*
In 1773, under pressure from liberal European monarchs, Pope Clement XIV dissolved the order: it was reconstituted in 1814 by Pope Pius VII. The Jesuits’ celebrated dictum, ‘Give us a child until he is seven and he will be ours for life,’ led them to establish schools for those who would be influential as adults – the sons of the aristocracy and
haute bourgeoisie
.

At the other end of the social scale, schools for the sons of peasants and artisans were started by the Augustinians of the Assumption – the Assumptionists – an order founded by Emmanuel d’Alzon only in 1850 ‘to combat the spirit of irreligion in Europe and the spread of schism in the east’. The Assumptionists built the first Catholic church in Istanbul since the fall of the city to the Turks in 1452 and equipped a hospital ship to be sent to the coast of Newfoundland so that French Catholic fishermen should not have to depend ‘upon the hospital ships of Protestant nations which go to the aid of these unfortunate men and, while ministering to their material needs, draw their souls to heresy’.
3

In France the Assumptionists published books, pamphlets and periodicals to disseminate the Catholic faith. Their newspaper,
La Croix
, overtly and crudely anti-Semitic, was sold outside every parish church on a Sunday morning and, at the peak of its success, achieved a circulation of four million copies. The Assumptionists also took advantage of the development of the railways under Napoleon III to organise mass pilgrimages to Lourdes, the village in the Pyrenees where, in 1858, Bernadette Soubirous had visions of the Virgin Mary. Miracles of healing ascribed to water from the spring in the grotto where the Virgin had appeared drew large numbers of pilgrims from all over France. With these manifestations of mass piety, the Assumptionists meant to confront secular republicanism. ‘Pilgrimage was a way of proclaiming Christian values in public, and this often self-conscious attempt to return to the religious pageantry of the Middle Ages was one of the defining features of the movement.’
4

The idea of miraculous cures at Lourdes was an affront to the scientific spirit of the age, and was dismissed most vigorously by the medical profession; but while French doctors trained in science were likely to be atheists, most of the nurses in French hospitals were Catholic nuns. With the idea of a welfare state still a pipe dream, the care of the old, the poor, the sick, the orphaned, the insane, the imprisoned, was largely undertaken by Catholic agencies funded by charitable donations. ‘In the 1870s, the wards of almost all of France’s 1,500 hospitals were run by about 11,000 members of active religious congregations.’
5
This provision of cheap labour by the Catholic nuns for social care raised no objections among the bourgeois republicans who, time and again, turned down the idea of an income tax to increase the government’s resources. It was tacitly understood by successive republican governments that, as the political commentator André Siegfried put it, ‘a Frenchman’s heart is on the Left but his purse is on the Right’.
6

It was a different matter when it came to education.
‘Against the Catholic myth of a Christian France had arisen the counter-myth of a revolutionary France, the standard bearer of Liberty.’
7
Pope Pius IX’s
Syllabus of Errors
,
issued in 1864, had condemned ‘progress, liberalism and modern civilisation’, confirming in the minds of the secular republicans that the Catholic Church was the source of bigotry and reaction. Catholics became subject to a political discrimination that was inconsistent with those Rights of Man supposedly established by the French Revolution. After the elections of 1877, the republican victors unseated seventy-two deputies for supposed electoral irregularities, and ‘for many years to come’, observed the wry historian Denis Brogan, ‘France was faced with the odd political phenomenon that corruption always came from the Right’.
8
However, the pre-eminent struggle between conservatives and republicans was not over electoral irregularities but over the formation of the minds of the young. Zealous republicans found it intolerable to have two rival systems of education teaching two different views of the French nation ‘with different political beliefs and different attitudes towards progress’. They believed that the French peasantry was being indoctrinated by the fanatical Assumptionists and the bourgeoisie by the urbane and sophisticated Jesuits, whose schools were favoured by many non-Catholic parents because it was here that their children ‘would learn good manners and form useful friendships’.
9

In 1879 a government led by Jules Ferry, with a cabinet in which six out of the ten members were Protestants,
10
passed laws banning Catholic clergy from teaching in either state or private schools and dissolving unauthorised religious orders. As a result 261 religious houses were closed and 5,643 monks were expelled; they were only permitted to return ten years later, in 1889. Two hundred magistrates resigned their posts rather than take part in the expulsions, and their names were inscribed by the Catholics in a ‘Golden Book’.
11
These anti-clerical laws were not directed against religious education as such: Jewish and Protestant children in Parisian primary schools continued to receive instruction in their faiths. The faculties of Catholic theology in French universities were finally abolished in 1884, but the Protestant faculties were encouraged.
12

Catholics from families who had traditionally served in the French administration were now debarred. The higher strata of the old bourgeoisie were excluded from power in this generation, as far as it was Catholic or royalist, and on the whole it was both. The gap they left was filled by Protestants, to a lesser degree by Jews.
13
‘French Jews,’ wrote Albert S. Lindemann,

like German Jews, were among the most ardent and articulate supporters of the notion of removing public education from the control of the Catholic Church. It is also beyond question that Catholics had good reason to feel pushed aside by a new political class, within which there were many Jews . . . The Republican purging of the administration of justice . . . resulted in the prominence in the courts of Jews and Protestants, and the anti-clerical policy of the Ferry government meant that the decrees had often had to be enforced on Catholics by Jewish and Protestant officials.
14

A Jewish prefect could, with impunity, observe Passover, but a prefect who was openly zealous in observance of Easter might find himself under violent attack. ‘Taking Easter communion under the Third Republic was a much more affirmative, even courageous, act than it had been in (say) the 1850s: government employees who did so were unlikely to be promoted . . .’
15

2: The Freemasons

For France’s Catholics, those who were conspiring to destroy the Church in France – the atheists, Protestants and Jews – came to be subsumed in a single group: the Freemasons. Although Freemasonry claims an exotic pedigree, dating back to antiquity, it first appears in a way susceptible to historical examination in eighteenth-century England as a fraternity of high-minded men from the aristocracy and upper classes intent on the betterment of mankind. Freemasons are found among the American revolutionaries and played a significant role in the French Enlightenment and its political child, the French Revolution. It was not atheist in its inception but nor was it Christian: the Supreme Being recognised by the Freemasons was not the God of Israel, let alone the Trinitarian God of the Christian religion, but a philosophical notion, and in France it was the
philosophes
– those writers whose sceptical attitude towards feudal institutions and revealed religion paved the way for the Revolution – who became its apostles. On 7 February 1778, Voltaire was solemnly initiated in Masonic garb by ‘Brother’ Helvetius, who was in fact an atheist; uniquely in France, atheists were admitted as Freemasons. They did not have to subscribe to a belief in a Supreme Being.