ABSTRACT
The Catholic Church had been the the ancien régime’s most important ideological and institutional support. Tithes, and ecclesiastical corruption, had made it deeply unpopular by the time of the Revolution, at least in the less devout parts of France. It is thus not surprising that the Revolution called into question not only the Church’s privileges, but its very existence. In the most extreme, Jacobin, phase of the Revolution, Church property was confiscated, abbeys turned into prisons or arsenals, Christian services replaced by Festivals of the Supreme Being, and the Christian calendar abolished. The biggest domestic military challenge to the First Republic, the rebellion in the Catholic Vendée area, was put down with extreme savagery. These events left a legacy of enmity between Catholics and the Republic that was to last well into the twentieth century. ‘Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!’ declaimed the Republican politician Léon Gambetta, at the outset of his final confrontation with President MacMahon in 1877 – his argument reinforced by Pope Pius IX’s ex cathedra condemnation of all forms of republicanism and liberalism as incompatible with the Christian faith. Anti-clericalism (a hostility towards the Church as an institution, though not necessarily to Christianity itself) became as much a badge of the Left as republicanism. The form it took might be instrumental (believing in a secular society) or picturesquely expressive (public orgies of sausage-eating on Fridays). By the late nineteenth century the debate had centred on two main issues: the Church’s position as the established religion of France, and its control over the education system. One of the founding acts of the Third Republic after its consolidation was to give France a universal system of State education – ‘free, secular, and compulsory’. The separation of Church and State followed in 1905, after the hostility of the Church – or of its most vocal ‘defenders’ – to the Republic had been confirmed during the Dreyfus Affair. Thereafter, Church-State relations turned essentially on the issue of public subsidies to Catholic schools, an apparently limited policy question which nevertheless aroused fierce passions on both sides for half a century. The Debré Law of 1959 settled the principle of subsidy, and its main mechanisms. It did not prevent the issues of the volume of subsidies, and the degree of State control that should go with them, from mobilising impressive street demonstrations by the partisans of both secularism and of Catholic education, as late as 1994. Indeed, both survey data and electoral geography show that practising Catholics still vote on the Right by a proportion of three or four to one – a much better correlation than that offered by class, the other major sociological variable.
