THE FRENCH PEOPLE AND THE la U UCH.
W.ALDECK-ROUSSEATS Bill on Associations -11ViL, has become law, and all the unauthorised religious Associations of France, with their immense wealth and their strong hold over education, lie at the mercy of the Executive Government. It can refuse to authorise any one of them, and having refused can demand the surrender of its property, and, subject always to an annuity to necessitous members of the dissolved Order, can expend the money it seizes at its own discretion. That Government, it is true, will wish to be very merciful, and to make compromises with the Church, whose assistance or neutrality it desires both at home and in many directions abroad ; but still it has supporters who are fiercely anti- religious, and whom it cannot afford to offend. It will have to move, even in its own despite, especially against Jesuits and their affiliated societies. The alarm and indignation of the Clerical party is therefore very great, and it becomes a matter of high interest to understand why that fear and anger have proved in the actual conflict of parties so nearly impotent. France is nominally Catholic, at least a third of its people are sincere believers, a clear majority wish for an established Church, or they would avoid fresh taxation by suppressing the Budget of Public Worship, yet the most determined resistance alike of the Papacy and of the French Church, with its long history, has had substan- tially no effect at all. All devices for delay failed, and only one great amendment, pledging a part of the revenues to be confiscated to the support during life of necessitous monks, was finally swept through. It increases the impact of the blow that the General Election is fixed by the Constitution for next year, and that consequently every Deputy who voted for the Bill must have believed that his electors would on the whole approve a deadly blow levelled at institutions which the Church not only sanctions, but holds to be among her most effective agencies. The electors are not intimidated, they are not ignorant of what is going on, and they know well when they choose how to apply pressure to their representatives: Why, then, is there no commotion, no evidence even of acute general interest, none of that silent but fatal passive resistance which compels Government after Government to withdraw the proposal for an Income-tax, recommended by so many Budget Committees and by the most eminent economists of France ?
The explanation usually current in this country is that the Frenchman has ceased to believe, and as regards certain classes, more especially the professionals and the smaller traders, that is probably true. But it may be questioned whether it is true of t he population as a whole, as a body with a strong national and political life. No large community ever occupies for long an attitude of simple negation, and France shows no sign of adopting any other creed than the Roman Catholic. Protestantism makes no way, and no wildly dissident sect ever obtains so many followers as to attract general attention. There is plenty of superstition in France, but the superstitions do not crystallise into creeds. Frenchmen were rid of the Catholic Church once, so completely that the interregnum left a perceptible mark on the minds and habits of a, generation ; but they took it back with pleasure, or at least acquiescence ; and at present, though they sing satires on it, and pardon easily atrocious insults to it, they show no incli- nation for its suppression. The Socialists among them do, but only succeed by doing it in deepening the suspicious dislike with which they are regarded by the majority, especially of peasants. That majority, as we interpret their, attitude, care very little about religion in the higher sense, and look upon the Church, when they glance that way, as a corporation which, being rich and powerful, may become oppressive ; but they regard the parish priests as necessary servants of the parish, not to be abolished on any account. They wish to have the usual religious ceremonies, baptisms, marriages, and funerals, performed in the regular and accustomed way, and to see in each parish a priest who, when their wives or daughters desire it, will receive confessions. How far they attach religious importance to these ceremonials it is difficult to decide, feeling differing widely in every province, but we suspect that in them all Frenchmen would regard the disappearance of the cures with uneasy qualms, and in some—Brittany and Provence, for example—with both irritation and dismay. The suppression of " religion " during the Revolution was one of the many blunders of the Terrorists which prepared the way for the great reaction towards order and authority. So long, however, as the parochial system is left intact and the ceremonies are paid for without a separate tax, the peasantry are content to leave all broader questions, both of religion and ecclesiasticism, to the central power. If the Monarchy favours the Church, they do not mind ; if the Republic bruises the Church, they do not care. We cannot remember a decree in either direction which has excited a real popular commotion. The social pretensions of the higher clergy, which in France are very great, create little irritation, but the chief Clerical exemption—exemption from conscription for ecclesiastical students—was swept away without ex- citing any general or effective remonstrance. All that, while the parish priest remains, is regarded as an affair of Govern- ment with which the elector has no concern. He may be a little annoyed by an " irreligious " proposal, thinking his priest, who is very angry, rather a worthy fellow, or he may be pleased because the Government, which is himself over again, has shown itself able to act in defiance of priests; but he does not really care, as he does care, say, about the abolition of tithes. He is not going to pay them again— a belief that they may be reimposed is the greatest diffi- culty of propagandist Royalists—but if the State dissolves monasteries or takes away monastic revenues he is not personally so much as interested. He does not see why monks should be so rich, but he does not contribute unless he pleases to their riches, and they are, therefore, no concern of his.
If this is an accurate statement of the mental position of the French majority, foreigners may un- consciously exaggerate the political effect of irreligious Bills. They expect such Bills to raise an agitation, which never begins. The matter is left by the electors to the Government or the Chambers to decide. Such indifference is favourable to the Church when Conservatives are in power, for they can " respect the clergy " as much as they like without general irritation, but unfavourable when the Liberals are dominant. Then the Ministry almost always want to conciliate the Socialists, or the party which dreads Clericalism, and secures their adhesion, or at least their neutrality, by some anti-Clerical Bill which seems to outsiders " dangerous," but which, as a rule, passes by large majorities. The Conservatives storm and the Clerics weep, but the extremists chuckle, and the mass of Frenchmen remain entirely unmoved because the one religious institution they really care about is un- affected. The Government in France, in fact, can deal with the Church as it pleases if it leaves the parish priests alone. They collectively form an institution which reckons among the half-dozen or so with which no Government since the Revolution has had the courage to interfere. Successive Ministries may think themselves despotic, and in many directions actually be so, but they never interfere with equality, or the codes, or universal liability to military service, or the distribution of property at death. Those are institutions which, like the exemption of Englishmen from arbitrary arrest or the sovereignty of parliament, are beyond discussion ; and so, if the history of eighty years is sufficient evidence, is the right of a Frenchman to the unpaid services of a parish priest. So long as he has that, the Church may take care of itself, which, as we see, it is not quite competent to do, the Deputies, as we have often pointed out, being more irreligious than the electors because chosen from the classes which have really lost their faith. Even they, however, are too much in awe of their constituents to vote for the abolition of pay to the parish priests.
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