ABSTRACT
Religion and citizenship in France remained two separate categories in nineteenth-century France, even though the Concordat of Napoleon I allowed for a more inclusive and instrumental definition of religion in French politics. Positivists could not reconcile the two concepts since they occupied the same spiritual space and each could only grow at the expense of the other.2 The republican definitions of citizenship dating from the 1790s or even 1848 were openly theist and philosophical. Over the period 1848-70, this theism had lost much ground and competed with anti-clericalism. Anti-clericalism, aimed mainly at the Catholic clergy and more particularly at the religious orders like the Jesuits or the teaching orders, carried within itself the seeds of materialistic atheism which germinated in revitalised forms of French socialism.3 Anti-clericalism embraced the notion that the state could not be sovereign if a large share of the population seemed to obey directives issued by a transnational entity such as the Catholic Church. This conflict between Roman Ultramontane churchmen and national sovereignty fed internal debates within the Church and among French theorists. At street level, Catholic organic and communal citizenship establishing duties attached to the fourth commandment, ‘thou shall honour thy father and thy mother’, was to a certain extent opposed to a rationalist but not necessarily individualistic republican balance of duties and rights.4 The religious debate became the great question of the first forty years of the Third Republic. In 1870 the debate had not yet been articulated in a definite manner, and this chapter investigates a number of dead ends, alternative concepts of citizenship and failed negotiations. In his speech of 24 May 1873, which signalled the end of his grasp on the republic,5 Adolphe Thiers described the monarchists as the followers of a political nostalgia. In his words, the monarchy had ‘for centuries, made the glory and prosperity of France; it would be strange if there should not be left in France some faithful followers of this political religion’.6 The historian and statesman thus signalled in one concise formula that the monarchy belonged to the past rather than the future, and that its fate was associated with religion, indeed that it had all the strength and weaknesses of a creed. This reflection came three years into a period of great reactionary reform of the Catholic faith in France, and at a time when the Catholic Church seemed to turn its back on the values of citizenship.
