The Year in France
ENGLAND and France have as many reasons to be polite to each other as they have few reasons to love each other. Their commercial relations are so intimate and colossal that they can ill afford, prudentially speaking, to be at odds. Their natural and manufactured products seldom come into direct competition ; on the contrary, these products are complementary to a remarkable degree. England depends largely on the farms, dairies, and vineyards of France for the daily supplies of her market and table (for butter, eggs, vegetables, fruits, and wines), and on the industries of France for various highly prized articles of luxury ; while France, conversely, depends on the mines and factories of England for such staples as cotton, woolen, and rubber goods, iron, and coal. The trade between the two countries amounts in an average year to a round 2,000,000,000 francs, with a balance of upwards of 500,000,000 francs in France’s favor.
The interchange of visits, last summer, between Edward VII and President Loubet, and between members of the French and English parliaments and chambers of commerce, and the arbitration treaty resulting therefrom indicate that “the powers that be ” in politics and finance recognize this mutual economic dependence, and are disposed to prevent, by keeping the question of commercial advantage constantly to the fore, — alas, that no higher motive can be appealed to ! — gratuitous bickerings and useless displays of bad blood. They indicate further that these same powers have succeeded in rendering acceptable to a majority of their respective compatriots this eminently practical point of view. They do not indicate that either nation has experienced a radical change of mind or heart. The two peoples continue to misunderstand and misjudge each other as they have for centuries. They hate each other out of sheer atavism, naturally, normally, — I had almost said righteously, — and will continue to hate each other, in all human probability, to the end of time. They have merely acquiesced provisionally (in the absence of any immediate subject of disagreement) in the official attitude of politeness, without committing themselves to too close an intimacy thereby; very much as two clever and ambitious women of the world hold each other at a respectful distance, while reiterating the most amiable commonplaces and lavishing the most engaging smiles. Nothing has been pardoned or forgotten ; and it will take very little to engender a dangerous irritation, to stir the ancient rancors, and destroy an entente which is by no means an entente cordiale.
The warm reception accorded King Edward by Paris should be assigned no special political significance. It was an illustration of French good nature, first of all, and, even so, was intended less for Edward, King of England, than for Edward, “ the royal good fellow,”—who is a prodigious favorite with the Parisians because they know he is genuinely fond of Paris, and because they have the pleasantest recollections of the escapades of his much prolonged salad days. The bulk of the Nationalists held aloof from this reception ; indeed, one of the Nationalist organs went to the length of issuing just before his visit a special number devoted entirely to an indignant exposition of the reasons why this visit should be resented by the French people.
The arbitration treaty is a Platonic affair, full of loopholes, a sort of toy, child’s-play treaty, not to be mentioned in the same breath, for instance, with the arbitration treaties in force between certain South American states. Its adoption was disapproved in France by a number of eminent citizens, not chauvinists, on the ground that a treaty of so little binding force was calculated to create a feeling of false security in the public mind.
At a time when every great power is playing the bully in one part of the world or another; when Russia and Japan are at war in the Orient (for the possession — or control — of territory which belongs, in equity, to neither) ; and when their respective allies, France and England, are liable to be drawn into the fight at any moment, the temptation to dwell on the value of arbitration treaties in general, and of the Anglo - French arbitration treaty in particular, is not strong. Rather the temptation is to belittle both unduly. It is just possible, however, that the restriction thus far of the Eastern conflict to the two original belligerents has been directly due to the existence of this Anglo-French treaty, the courteous restraint it has entailed having just sufficed to check precipitate action and allow time for the sober second thought. If this is really the case, its adoption is an achievement not to be treated flippantly even though the war pressure ultimately becomes too strong for it. Certain it is that the immediate intervention of both France and England in a Russo-Japanese war would have been well-nigh unavoidable had such a war broken out six months before this interchange of courtesies had occurred.
The visit of the King and Queen of Italy to Paris in October, and the conclusion between Italy and France of an arbitration treaty identical with the Anglo-French treaty, were the culmination of a series of friendly acts extending over a term of years. For this reason, and because it is based on sentiment as well as business interest, and is rather an occasion for expansion than for restraint, the Franco-Italian reconciliation offers more serious guarantees of stability than the reconciliation between England and France. The French and Italian peoples were intended by nature to be friends. They are not constitutionally antipathetic, as are the French and English, and, unlike the French and English, they have more reasons (in spite of several definite past sins of omission and commission) to love than to hate each other.
The salient fact of the past year in French domestic politics has been the persistence of the Combes ministry in the Anti-clerical campaign inaugurated by the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry, its predecessor.
The avowed ultimate aim of the Anticlerical party led by M. Combes is nothing less than a complete monopoly of education by the state, — a condition which would make it as illegal for any other agency than the government to fabricate scholars as it is for any other agency than the government to fabricate matches and coins.
The Anti-clerical party proposes to create, by the “ laicization ” of all instruction, “a laical spirit,” “ a laical conscience,” —to borrow some of its pet catchwords, — that will “restore the intellectual and moral unity of France.” To this end, it classes the monastic orders as “ pure anachronisms,” and holds the monks up to abhorrence or ridicule because they have “ deliberately repudiated their social obligations and the responsibilities of marriage, thereby cutting themselves off from the family and society.” It represents the Catholic Church as necessarily “incompatible with progress,” as an intolerant and fanatical “ adversary of liberty, of democracy, and of civilization ; ” refers deprecatingly to its “gross superstitions” and ominously to its “ dark conspiracies ; ” characterizes its doctrines as “ corrupting and pernicious, calculated to deform the intelligence of youth and pervert the French spirit; ” and accuses it of being, in France, a troublesome and dangerous foreign substance in the body politic, “a state within a state,” “a Roman state in the French state,” “ a theocratic state in the democratic state.”
In contradistinction, the Anti-clerical party presents itself as “ an evangelist of enlightenment,” “ a defender of philosophic truth,” “ a liberator of intelligence,” “ an emancipator from the slavery of superstition and from the murk of obscurantism,” “ a protector of the child and of the people,” “ a savior of the rising generation ” from “ the contagion of error,” “ the inaugurator of the reign of Reason and Humanity ” (capital R and capital H) ; as “ the lineal descendant and vindicator of the Revolution,” “ the sole conservator of the true national tradition,” “the sole guardian of the national interest,” “ the only sure friend of the Republic,” “ the bulwark of the cause of liberty, justice, and the Patrie against the clerical domination,” “the champion predestined to set France free from the yoke of Rome,” and “ the sponsor of the France of the future.”
All this is very tine in leading articles and parliamentary eloquence. The theory of the “ Laical State ” (l’État Laïque) is not without a certain grandeur as a theory of political and social unity. It is one of those large “ general ideas ” which have always possessed a peculiar fascination for Frenchmen, and which have been from time immemorial at once the glory and the bane of France; a fresh illustration of that French passion for unity and system which has produced a Louis XI, a Richelieu, a Mazarin, a Napoleon, a Revolution, a Commune, a Calvin, and an Auguste Comte. But, unfortunately for the practical application of this theory, and unfortunately for the public peace, unity, on one basis or another, is also the ideal of the most antagonistic elements in French politics, superstitious veneration for abstract ideas being common to them all. All the aggressive political groups (the Royalists, the Imperialists, the Radicals, the Socialists, and the Nationalists) clamor for unity in the name of, and along the lines of, their mutually exclusive creeds, and are straining toward it in the measure of their respective forces. All expound their claims to superiority as a unifying agency with similar, almost identical, high-sounding phrases, and support their positions with similar, almost identical, arguments. All pretend to be the only representatives of the genuine French tradition and the saviors of the Patrie. All would run the minds of all their compatriots in their own particular moulds, and all, if they could have their way, would expel or disfranchise, in the name of their particular unity, all those who proved recalcitrant to the moulding process.
Carried away by their excessive desire to make the heterogeneous homogeneous, the Anti-clericals show themselves curiously blind to the facts of French history and contemporary life, as well as curiously lacking in the sense of proportion, in asserting that modern France is the daughter of Free Thought and the Revolution, and has no kinship whatever with the church and the ancient régime ; curiously wanting in discrimination in not distinguishing more carefully than they do between unity and uniformity, between hostility to a ministry and hostility to the Republic, and between Clericalism that endeavors to undermine the state and the religious devotion that occupies itself logically and legitimately with the training of Christian citizens; curiously obtuse in not sensing the humor of making a parliament a judge of philosophic truth and error; curiously narrow, not to say naïve, in assuming that the work of religion is done in the world, and that the era of pure reason has arrived; in considering the moral unity of a people dependent on its religious unity ; above all, in fancying that, in our complex and groping modern civilization, any moral unity is possible — or desirable — which does not admit diversity of intellect and temperament, and which does not make ample allowance for the relativity, the vanity even, of knowledge. And were such a doctrinaire moral unity possible, — and desirable, — a thousand times possible and desirable, — the Anti-clerical party, or any other party, would still be embarking in a dubious adventure in undertaking to establish it by force. The Procrustean method of securing conformity succeeds only by mutilating or destroying life.
In setting up an “ orthodoxy of the state ” and an official standard of progress, in utilizing the finances and the functionaries of the state for the propagation of its dogmas, and in appealing to the authority of the law to silence its antagonists, Anti-clericalism renders itself guilty of the very sins which it lays to the charge of Clericalism. Employed to-day by the Anti-clericals against the Catholics, such a procedure may logically be employed by others, to-morrow, against the Socialists, against the Jews, against trade-unions, against benefit orders and coöperative groups, against the Freemasons, against social settlements, against literary, philanthropic, and charitable societies, against women’s clubs (imagine it!), against any race or sect, group or coterie whatsoever, no matter how colorless, that is suspected (with or without reason) of taking the slightest interest in public affairs.
The Combes ministry, which came into power in June, 1902, has so far outdone the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry in radicalism and sectarianism, — and this is saying a great deal, — that the latter appears a ministry of conservatism and tolerance in comparison. M. Combes has been so arbitrary in the interpretation, and so needlessly harsh and hasty in the execution, of the Waldeck-Rousseau law of 1901 against the Congregations, that M. Waldeck-Rousseau himself — here we should have the height of the humorous if the situation were not an extremely grave one — has felt obliged to protest. M. Waldeck-Rousseau openly accuses his successor of “ seeking to obtain from the law of 1901 results for which it was in no way intended,” and of transforming, without warrant, what was designed simply as “ a law of control ” into a “ law of exclusion ; ” and he entreats him to be more respectful of legal forms if he would not compromise hopelessly the results already obtained.
M. Combes and his lieutenants have, in truth, shown scant respect for legality in their enterprise of laicization. They have resorted to summary arrests, to the violation of property rights, to encroachments on the prerogatives of the communes, to the invalidation of elections, to dictatorial decrees and ordinances, to the stifling of free parliamentary examination and discussion, to the distorting of texts, and to the exhumation of obsolete statutes dating from the imperial régime. They have stooped to unworthy subterfuges, undignified quibbles, discourteous personalities, and petty persecutions. They have been guilty of bad faith. They have proposed and, when possible, passed retroactive laws and laws of exception, laws of confiscation and proscription, and laws putting outside the pale of the common law whole classes of citizens, by the creation of civil and political disabilities and personal incapacities. They have exerted official pressure amounting to intimidation on the employees of the civil service and even on the magistracy.
Three extraordinary things are to be noted in this connection : —
1. That concrete liberties — all the so-called fundamental liberties, in fact, with the possible exception of that of the press — are violated in the name of Liberty in the abstract; as if absolutism were any less absolutism when exercised in the interests of “ moral unity ” than when exercised in the interests of a sovereign, and as if persecution were any less persecution when practiced in the name of Infallible Reason than when practiced in the name of an Infallible Church!
2. That tolerance is abrogated in the name of “ the modern spirit,” when, in reality, tolerance is the very essence of the modern spirit. The theory upon which French Anti-clericalism proceeds, that error has no rights which truth is bound to respect, is not a modern doctrine, but a doctrine of the autocratic régimes of the past, which never hesitated, “ ‘ for the good of their souls and the good of the Kingdom,’ to tear the children of Protestants and Jews away from their parents, to be educated in the faith of the monarch,” or to exclude the professors of “ the so-called Reformed Religion ” from office - holding privileges.
3. That the sentiments of a vast majority of the people are outraged, and their wishes overruled, by the vigorous and united action of a perfervid minority. “ Neither art nor science is needed,” says La Bruyère, “ to practice tyranny.” Had the author of the Caractères known M. Combes and the Third Republic, he would have modified his dictum, for the tyranny of M. Combes presupposes a phenomenal quantity and quality of both “ art and science.” Should M. Combes ever retire from office, — a supposition which seems at the present moment highly improbable, — he will make no mistake in devoting his hard-earned leisure to writing his confessions. The volume, which might well take for its title-page
M. COMBES, THE PERFECT TYRANT
or
THE CURIOUS APATHY OF A GREAT PEOPLE
An Autobiographical Study
Treating of the
TYRANNY OF DEMOCRACY
by an
EX-TYRANT
would be an invaluable contribution to the literature of democracy, and would stand every chance of becoming in good time as much of a classic, in its kind, as Machiavelli’s Prince.
The immediate consequences of the Draconian régime of M. Combes (whatever fine and fair thing the ultimate result may prove to be) are nearly all deplorable.
It has provoked scenes of disorder in the Chamber of Deputies that would incline a person unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of French politicians to believe that the end of all things had come ; and rioting accompanied by a certain amount of bloodshed in Paris and in a number of the Departments. It has equipped the Anti-Semites, the AntiProtestants, and the Nationalists with new and formidable weapons by furnishing them with real grievances, and fulfilling their gloomiest forebodings and prophecies. It has exasperated the devout Catholics to the last degree, and has produced in many of the hitherto lukewarm Catholics the very devoutness which it deplores and aims to destroy. It has impelled the more far-seeing Protestants to make common cause with the Catholics against the Free Thought which would allow no freedom to religion if left unopposed. It has weakened the authority of France in several of her colonies, and complicated her diplomacy with European and Asiatic countries and with the Vatican by reason of her rôle of protector of the Catholic missions in the Orient, and has put her in an unfavorable light with Catholic populations all over the world. It has diminished the national wealth, and will involve, unavoidably, increased taxation.
But the worst result is the discrediting of the Republic, as such, in the very quarters where it is the most important it should retain or conciliate respect.
Royalist Brittany, which was just ceasing to sulk, after years of picturesque allegiance to its “ lost cause ” of royalty, and was just beginning to feel itself an organic part of Republican France, has been thrown violently back to where it was a generation ago — or nearly that — by the fussiness, sacrilegiousness, and ferocity of the ministerial persecution to which it has been subjected during the past three years ; and the same is true in a greater or less degree of other half-reconciled provinces with royalist leanings. Alsace-Lorraine (by whose secret loyalty to France Frenchmen set such store), at any rate the Catholic part of it, has been given good cause at last to congratulate itself on its forcible separation from the mother country, since it escapes thereby an irritating religious oppression. The neutrals in French politics, who are indifferent as to whether the government is republican or monarchic in form, so that it governs liberally and well, are being rapidly alienated from the present republican government by reason of the cavalier fashion in which it has latterly conducted itself. Finally, not a few veteran Republicans to whom the Republic represented at its founding “ the reign of virtue, of justice, of liberty, of equality, of fraternity,” have been sadly disillusionized by the turn events have taken, and are beginning to query whether a republic that, after thirty years of existence, can only be maintained by the destruction of the liberties for which a republic is supposed to stand, is really worth maintaining.
If the upshot of it all should be the complete separation of church and state in France, as some predict, the unlovely mediæval intolerance of the present hour would almost have redeemed itself. “ Separation ” alone seems capable of putting an end to the “bloodless civil war ” (la guerre civile morale) that is sapping the vitality and dissipating the energy of the nation. Permanent religious and social peace can never be had under the present hybrid system of subsidized churches (Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish) subject to partial state control, and the only remaining alternatives of a State Religion and a State Irreligion are alike abominable and despotic, and are not to be considered.
The separation idea was given a more than respectable vote in the Chamber, last June, and several separation projects are now in the hands of a special parliamentary commission. The Catholic bishops are almost unanimously opposed to separation because they fear that without the protection afforded by the Concordat, the regular clergy would be dealt with in the same high-handed fashion as the members of the religious orders, and because it would take from the church its principal financial support; and, for the latter reason, a majority of the Protestant consistories likewise disapprove it. A goodly number of the Anti-clericals regard it askance because it would deprive them, at one and the same time, of an exquisite pleasure (that of bullying and disciplining the clergy) and of their principal political capital. The moderates are inclined to distrust it as they do every measure of bold initiative. Nevertheless, the separatist movement is making rapid headway in all the political camps. There are signs that M. Combes, who, though favorable to separation in principle, has so far scrupulously avoided taking an irrevocable position on the question as a ministerial policy, has a separation project up his sleeve, so to speak, and will one of these days annex it to his official programme. In this case, since M. Combes succeeds (by hook or by crook) in doing what he sets out to do, separation will be assured.
We shall see what we shall see, but time must be reckoned with; for, as M. Combes himself has more than once sagaciously pointed out, the severance of the church from the state in a country as old as France is too gigantic an undertaking to be accomplished in a day.
It should be explained in fairness (and the writer has not the shadow of a motive to be other than fair) that the Anti-clericalism of the period is not entirely gratuitous, not absolutely without provocation. Unquestionably the Anticlerical lends too ready an ear to calumnies against the church, and exaggerates, by giving his fancy too free a rein, the machinations of the clergy; but he is not fighting a purely imaginary adversary, a simple man of straw. Clericalism, that is to say a movement “that trespasses, in the name of the Christian faith, on the domain of politics, and that, under the cover of religion, menaces the tranquillity of the state,” does exist. It is not a myth. Monks, priests, and prelates are to be found in every part of France who have cast in their lot, in spite of the sage counsels of Leo XIII, with reactionary policies and politics.
It is quite possible that the monastic orders, especially the commercial ones, have been acquiring a disproportionate part of the national fortune, — though the figures adduced to prove it are not very convincing, — and that their riches have been turned systematically into the election coffers of the Reaction. It is quite possible, also, that unworthy priests, who have taken shameful advantage of their pious garb and their confidential offices to commit gross immoralities and even common law crimes, have escaped punishment through their affiliations with reactionary politicians.
It is probably true that the army officers who received their early education in the church schools have been advanced more rapidly than those who received their early education elsewhere, while the flat refusal of at least two of them to participate in the execution of the Congregations’ Law lends color to the current charges of collusion between the church and the army.
It is certain that a portion of the clergy engaged more actively in the AntiDreyfus agitation than was strictly consistent with their priestly obligations and functions; that a number of journals, Catholic at least in name (notably La Croix, one of the yellowest of yellow sheets), have been aggressively AntiRepublican, and that so many zealous Catholics have either participated in or condoned the excesses of Anti-Semitism, Anti - Protestantism, and Nationalism, that these disturbing crusades have come to be classed as, primarily, Catholic movements.
Furthermore, an ill-advised minority of the unauthorized Congregations refused to apply for the legal authorization which, for the matter of that, the ministry had determined in advance should not be granted. A relatively small proportion of the monks and nuns resisted the application of the law of 1901 and the decrees and ordinances issued to supplement it; others, there is much reason to believe, evaded it by fraudulent secularizations. A few prelates, indignant at the high - handed fashion in which this law was enforced, manifested publicly their hostility to the ministerial policy, and exhorted the priests and laymen of their jurisdictions to throw themselves into anti-ministerial politics, — which they did in a highly offensive manner during the campaign preceding the last general election. The Bishop of La Rochelle counseled a boycott of the traders friendly to the ministry, and the Bishop of Tréguier made a narrow and stupid protest against the erection of a statue to Renan in his diocese. A few priests joined the nonresistance movement of Edouard Drumont, to the extent of urging their parishioners to refuse to pay their taxes, and the priests of Brittany paid none too much heed to the extraordinary order forbidding them to teach the Catechism in the Breton language. The secularized monks who preached the Lenten courses last spring, in defiance of a ministerial prohibition, were, in many cases, more intent on berating the ministry than on inculcating the observance of the Lenten season.
Do such facts seriously threaten the Republic ? It hardly seems so to the unprejudiced observer, especially as most of them can be traced directly to a natural, if unphilosophic, anger under the stress of persecution. The Anti-clericals, however, believe (or pretend to believe) that they do threaten it. One more candid than his fellows will occasionally be found who confesses that the conduct of the Anti-clerical ministry has been arbitrary and despotic, but even he justifies it on the ground that the very existence of the Republic is at stake. According to him the ministerial persecution, socalled, is a gesture not of aggression, but of simple defense. It is a life-and-death matter, he swears, and summary procedure is absolutely necessary to save the state. The law of self-defense overrides every other consideration, of course, in public as in private matters, and to such an asseveration no answer can be made.
In this lofty character of defender of the Public Safety the Anti-clerical is unassailable, no doubt. Still, it is difficult to repress a smile when one counts up the number of times within the last thirty-five years the Republic has been “ saved ” (the incorrigible back-slider!) by different parties and coalitions of parties, if their own word is to be taken. It is impossible to forget that this law of Public Safety has often been made political capital of (by at least two highly dissimilar ministries, for instance, during the course of the Dreyfus Affair), that it has been invoked again and again to pass a pet measure, to keep a ministry in power, or to banish or imprison troublesome political adversaries about whose essential patriotism there was not the shadow of a doubt; and that it is in the name of this same Public Safety, to put the case even more strongly, that most of the great public crimes of French history have been committed.
The present fierce outburst of Anticlericalism is, in one sense, a reprisal for an antecedent Clericalism that participated in the fanatical violence of Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Protestantism ; but this antecedent Clericalism was also, in one sense, a reprisal for a still earlier Anti-clericalism, and so on, back to the Revolution and beyond. No one can say with certainty which of the two hostile forces now face to face committed the first wrong. Nor does it much matter. In this respect, the situation is as broad as it is long. If it is probable that, without the Clericalism of yesterday, France would not be suffering to-day from the insolent triumph of Anti-clericalism, it is equally probable that, without the Anti - clericalism of day before yesterday, she would not have suffered yesterday from the extreme manifestations of clerical Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Protestantism.
Clericalism and Jacobinism are, alas, perennial in France, and those who see in the war against the Congregations a simple corollary to the Dreyfus Affair have read history to little purpose. The passions roused by that affair may be the immediate occasion of the dramatic out-cropping of Jacobinism at this particular time. But the Dreyfus Affair itself was only a phase of the venerable and irrepressible conflict between intolerant religion and equally intolerant Free Thought, between Clericalism and Jacobinism, between the dogmatically reactionary and the dogmatically radical elements of the nation, each determined to impose an artificial unity by making society over in its own image. The phenomenal virulence of the Dreyfus Affair was the sum of the rancors accumulated in ancestral struggles.
“We are an old nation,” said M. Waldeck-Rousseau in his all too tardy plea for patience and moderation ; “ we have a long history; we are attached to the past by the deepest roots, and even those roots which we have reason to suppose dried up still retain a sensibility which the slightest wound revives, and which communicates itself to the entire organism.” This should be constantly borne in mind by every student of the Anticlerical agitation, and had M. WaldeckRousseau himself not temporarily forgotten it, it is doubtful whether he would have assumed the awful responsibility of inflicting a “ wound.” It is only in the light of the history of many centuries that the renascence of Jacobinism in the France of the twentieth century can be even approximately comprehended, and it is in the light of history yet to be made that it must be finally judged.
Under almost any other circumstances than those created by the application and perfection of the Congregations’ legislation, two such sensational, if grotesque, events as the trial of the Humberts and the filibustering expedition of Jacques I, Emperor of the Sahara, would have created no small public commotion ; thanks to the aggressiveness of Anti-clericalism, they passed relatively unnoticed. Thanks to it, also (as well as to a sort of apathy in the public Dreyfus-ward, induced by extreme fatigue), the reopening and second revision of the Dreyfus Affair have caused scarcely a ripple of excitement; nor are they likely to if the Affair can be kept in the courts, — where it always belonged,— and out of the Chamber,— where it should never have been allowed to enter.
Under other circumstances, likewise, the public would have shown more interest than it has in the expulsion from the Socialist organization of the Socialist leader, Millerand, because of his impenitent opportunism ; in the introduction into the Chamber of a resolution in favor of disarmament; and in the discussions of the projects of law for the pensioning of old age, for the reduction of the term of military service from three years to two years, and for the purchase of the railways by the state.
The Anti-clerical legislation has not only overshadowed all other legislation, but it has served in more than one instance—wherein lies its true subtlety, perhaps — to prevent it or delay it, to “head it off,” as we say in New England ; and for this it is entitled to the gratitude of some of its bitterest adversaries. “ It is a sure and ancient policy,” says La Bruyère, “ to let the people fall asleep in fêtes, in spectacles, in luxury, in pomps, in pleasures, in vanity ; to let it fill itself with emptiness and savor bagatelles.” The modern policy as practiced by M. Combes (and M. WaldeckRousseau before him) toward the Socialists, upon whom his tenure of office depends, is analogous to this ancient one. It consists in keeping them so gorged — and drowsy — with Anti-clericalism, which is one of their casual prejudices rather than one of their essential principles, that they neglect to insist on the application of these essential principles. M. Combes has practiced this policy with such consummate cunning that he has succeeded not only in refusing them with impunity the measures called for by their doctrines, but also in forcing them to vote more than one measure in direct violation of their doctrines. In the absence of proof to the contrary, he should be given credit for sincerity in his work of reform ; but if his motives were purely political, and he had no higher ambition than to maintain himself in power, he could not have adopted a surer method. And just as long as the supply of Anticlerical sops holds out the method is bound to work.
Nearly every department of the community life has been more or less influenced by the general preoccupation with the issues of Anti-clericalism, as it was a few years ago by the general preoccupation with the issues of the Dreyfus Affair. In the field of letters this influence has been especially pronounced. Jules Lemaître and Anatole Franee, both masters of gentle irony, amiable mockery, and polite skepticism, the two most typical dilettanti authors of their time, perhaps, have both abjured this distinguished dilettanteism (the former in the interests of Nationalism, the latter in the interests of Anti-clericalism) for vulgar political polemics and pamphleteering, François Coppée’s naïve, unctuous participation in Edouard Drumont’s anti-tax-paying crusade a couple of seasons back made him the laughing-stock of France. Coppée has not counted in a literary way, has been a very literary zero without a rim, in fact, since he has taken to haranguing the multitude in the name of the church.
Paul Bourget, having exhausted the psychology of the alcove, has also become an apostle of the church — with not altogether unhappy results. Maurice Barrès has found in Nationalism a new domain for his shadowy ego to cavort in, and in the cult of “ the soil and the dead” (la terre et les morts) the new formula which he must have periodically, or perish. His sombre, foggy talent could hardly, for the moment, be better employed. Charles Maurras, who promised to become one of the virile, creative artists of his generation, has dropped into the category of the incisive pamphleteers since he went over body and soul to the Reaction. Laurent Tailhade, who used to delight in chiseling exquisite verses, now finds his chief delight in insulting the brave souls of Brittany. Henri Bérenger and Victor Charbonnel, both able scholars and thinkers, and both leaders in the movement for the establishment of Universités Populaires, seem to have lost their heads completely. Not content with exerting themselves against Clericalism through the columns of their journals, La Raison and L’Action, they have led Anti-clerical mobs in assaults upon religious processions and in the invasion and desecration of churches during the celebration of the mass.
The unveiling of the statue of Renan at Tréguier, which should have been a purely literary event, was made to serve the politics of persecution, whereby unpardonable violence was done to the memory of the sweet-tempered philosopher who was nothing if not an apostle of tolerance.
The election to the Academy of René Bazin, author of a number of strong and pure romances of provincial life, was generally sneered at by the Anti-clerical press, because Bazin chances to be a professor in a Catholic university ; and the proposed appointment of Ferdinand Brunetière to the chair of literature at the Collège de France, as successor of Emile Deschanel, is being fiercely opposed because, forsooth, M. Brunetière is an apologist of the church.
The books of the year which have caused the most talk are books not proper to literature that have some bearing, direct or indirect, on the political situation. Such are M. Combes’ Campagne Laïque (Introduction by Anatole France) and Jules Payot’s Cours de Morale, announced as “ a handbook of laical morality, containing a system of morals solidly based on the general results of contemporary science, and indispensable to a purely rational moral education.” The political situation has inspired a number of calm, dignified, and scholarly works on the relations of modern science to morality, the most notable of which is M. Gabriel Seailles’ Les Affirmations de la Conscience Moderne ; also several scholarly studies of ecclesiastical history and temperate considerations of the problems involved in the separation of church and state.
Fiction, contrary to the general impression outside of France, forms a much smaller proportion of the publishing output of France than of England or America. In history and the philosophy of history, in philosophy, in ethics, in biography, in æsthetics, in archæology, in anthropology, in sociology and social geography, in political economy, in philology, in criticism, and in the specialized sciences, many works have appeared the past year, as every year, that would deserve extended notice did the scope of this article permit. In poetry and in fiction, also, the year has been, all things considered, an average one.
A curious tendency of the literary year has been the widespread interest taken in the French translations of the works of President Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie, and in several other books on America by Americans and Frenchmen. French curiosity regarding American life is almost limitless at the present moment. America is distinctly the mode to-day, as England was at the time when Edmond Demolins published his Anglo-Saxon Superiority. This admiration for the American way of doing things, particularly in industry and commerce, corresponds with an effort for the rehabilitation of France commercially and industrially. Evidently the campaign carried on these latter years by the so-called Professors of Energy in France has accomplished something.
The most noteworthy feature of the theatrical year (in the regrettable absence of any new dramatic form or transcendent drama) has been a sudden and striking acceleration of the movement for giving French and foreign classics and the successes of the fashionable theatres to the dwellers in the working districts. The announcements of an average week of the busy season in Paris show fourteen theatres giving twentyfour pieces that may be rated without over-indulgence as literature. The number of working-faubourg theatres giving high-class literary drama has increased amazingly within a single twelvemonth ; while various organizations have devoted themselves assiduously to the work of carrying dramatic art to the people. Through the agency of the Trente Ans de Théâtre, for example, the company of the Comédie Française has given performances of Racine, Molière, etc. (accompanied by explanatory lectures), to wildly enthusiastic houses in all the industrial quarters of Paris, and the annual report of the society reveals the significant fact that the attendance on the classic performances of the troupe in the home theatre has been increased thereby instead of diminished, as it was feared would be the case.
The opening of an Autumn Salon, Le Salon d’Automne, was the distinguishing event of the year 1903 in art. This Salon, which has been long needed and long promised, is designed to create a second art season in the year; in other words, to do for the art work of the summer what the spring Salons do for that of the winter. It is a logical and necessary result of the increase of the habit of painting pictures to their finish in the open air, as distinguished from the old studio method of painting. It will welcome for a time, probably, a good many of the younger and more daring men who have been prevented from exposing in either of the spring Salons by the extreme academicism of the one and the close-corporation spirit of the other. It is not, however, a salon of revolt in the sense in which the Champ de Mars and the Salon des Indépendants were salons of revolt in their origins. Most of its charter members have been in the habit of exhibiting, and will continue to exhibit, in the old Salons which the new Salon is intended to supplement rather than antagonize. The art colony of Paris is forced to seek incessantly fresh outlets for its enormous overproduction, much as the crowded nations of Europe are forced to seek incessantly fresh outlets for the surplus products of their workshops. Such an outlet the artists of Paris find in the Autumn Salon. Since it comes at a season when there is a distinct dearth of art events in Paris, the public seems inclined to take kindly to it. Its first exhibition (judged as a first exhibition) was highly creditable in almost every respect.
The splendid scientific activity of France has been more than ordinarily fruitful the past year in tangible results. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in physics to M. and Mme. Curie and M. Becquerel (for their researches regarding radium) called attention to a series of discoveries which seem destined to revolutionize what have been considered the fundamental laws of matter up to the present. The entire civilized world was dazzled thereby, and in France for a few short days every other public interest, even Anti-clericalism, was thrust into the background. Latterly, M. Curie has proved that helium can be produced from radium, M. d’Arsonval has recorded a number of interesting observations regarding radio - activity, and M. Darier has presented to the Academy of Medicine a suggestive if inconclusive report upon radium as an alleviator of pain.
M. Blondlot of Nancy has announced to the Academy of Sciences the discovery of a new species of radio-activity, to the manifestations of which he has given the name of N-rays (les Rayons N), and M. Charpentier, also of Nancy, claims to have established that these N-rays are emitted by man and by animals.
The original work of M. Edouard Branly in connection with wireless telegraphy is none the less valuable intrinsically for being eclipsed by that of Signor Marconi upon the same subject, and this fact has been fittingly recognized by dividing between him and Mme. Curie the Osiris Prize.
In applied science the year has been marked by a decided increase in the industrial utilization of alcohol and acetylene, and by sensible advances, along the lines of the three principal theories of aerostation, toward the solution of the problem of aerial navigation, M. Lebaudy in particular, with his famous airship Le Jaune, having proven himself a worthy rival of M. Santos-Dumont.
The brilliant achievements of the remarkable group of bacteriologists at the Pasteur Institute have been materially increased, particularly by the demonstrations of MM. Roux and Metchnikoff. M. Marmorek (the discoverer — in 1893 — of a valuable anti-streptococcic serum) has conducted experiments that have revealed important new facts regarding the nature and action of the germ of tuberculosis, and has succeeded in preparing an anti-tuberculosis serum from which he has obtained positive if not as yet absolutely decisive results.
Alvan F. Sanborn.