28 JUNE 1873, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY

THE FRENCH ASSEMBLY ON CORPSES.

THE Right have made another terrible blunder, one which will not only deepen to rancour the hatred of -their enemies, but annoy and perplex several of their friends. They have passed a vote which practically destroys religious liberty in France, not directly, but in the most underhanded and vexatious way, perhaps the one way in which the religious women of France will not uphold them. On Friday week the Member for the Aube was buried at his own request with Civil ceremonials only, his hearse being unaccompanied by any priest and paying no visit to any chapel, M. Brousses in his lifetime having been the steady opponent of the priesthood, and either Deist or Atheist. By a most imprudent rule, the corpse of any Member of the Assembly must be attended to the grave by troops ; but on this occasion the officers, finding that no re- ligious service was intended, abruptly quitted the cortege, which was accompanied only by M. Brousses' private friends. Considerable excitement about this was manifested in the As- sembly, which broke into open protest when it became known that M. Ducros, Prefect of Lyons, had issued an order that funerals celebrated without clerical aid—that is, a considerable majority of funerals in Lyons—should be celebrated at seven in the morning in winter and before six in summer, those hours being chosen, say the Radicals, because it is the time at which the streets are swept and carrion of all kinds carted away. They were much more probably selected because the workmen begin work at six, and the impetuous speeches often uttered at freethinkers' funerals would not be heard ; but the Reds had one strong reason for their impression. M. Ducros, either in a kind of insanity of hatred, or with a touch of malicious humour against his own party, had almost used the words of one of the decrees of 1666, following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

Tile PREFECT OF THE RHONE.

"Art. 2.—Unless under the most exceptional circumstances, of which the Maire will be the judge, inter- ments made without the partici- pation of any of the recognised forms of religion will take place :— " At six o'clock in the morning, from the 1st of April to the 30th of September.

At seven o'clock in the morn- ing, from the 1st of October to the 31st of March."

At all events, whatever its motive, the decree was accepted as a deliberate insult passed by the Clerical party upon the Non- Clericals, and on the 23rd June the Government was requested to explain both incidents. The incident Brousses was defended by the Minister at War, General du Barrail, because the order of the troops was to go to church, a statement received with ridicule; and because "it was impossible to make soldiers give their lives if their faith was sacrificed," a most elevated sentiment, but slightly at variance with what one knows of the Army which conquered the world. It is, moreover, disproved, first, by the ceremony being imperative if the deceased were an officer, whether he were a believer or not ; secondly, by the fact that the corpse of a Protestant or a Jew member would cer- tainly be honoared, Jews and Protestants being paid by the state, yet just as objectionable to the Catholic faith ; and thirdly, by the honour being paid entirely to the delegate of the people, and not the believer or the Voltairian. So excited were the Right by this defence, that General Cissey shook hands with his successor, congratulating him "that Ministries might change, but military principles never "—as if D'Auvergne had never been a Marshal— and his friends rose in a body to cheer him to the roof, while approval of M. Ducros' order at Lyons was passed by 413 to 251, the entire Left Centre either voting with the Government or abstaining. Of course, the usual ex- cuses were put forward that in Lyons the civil burial was made a constant excuse for outrages and immoderate speeches ; but the vehement applause of the Right, the previous language of the Press, and the abstinence of so many members of the Left who wished to pledge the Government to a clerical policy which the peasantry will believe to involve tithes, proved that the motive of the party in power was to show that they regarded an unbeliever as a kind of dog, to be buried in darkness and out of sight. The existing law was quite sufficient to repress outrage. Nothing more detestable can be imagined in the way of

"DECREE OF THE COUNCIL "24. The funerals of the dead belonging to the D.P.R. (Doctrine pretending to be Reformed) can only be performed. . . in places where the exercise of that religion is permitted, from the month of April to the end of the month of September at six o'clock in the morning precisely, and at four o'clock in the afternoon."

principle, or more perverse in the way of policy. Individually we have no favour for civil interments, which deprive the people of the best opportunity they ever have of hearing divine truth, and recognising the great fact of mortality, just when their hearts are softened ; nor are we without dread lest the decrease of the sense of the sanctity of the body should increase the- contempt for human life—though oddly enough, in America, a. people who hold their lives very cheap have their dead rela- tives embalmed—but religious liberty involves complete liberty to differ with the religious on those subjects, and of all forms. of persecution the persecution of a corpse is the most dastardly. It ranks in sentiment with the mutilation of dead soldiers.. The Voltairians are the Dissenters,:of France, they are an. enormously numerous body, and to prescribe to them a form of burial is like prescribing to them a form of worship, of baptism,. or of marriage. The State must see that the burial accords with the sanitary laws, that the christening must be registered, that the marriage must be recorded on the day it takes place,. but there its power should stop. As the body of a Voltairiam can do no more injury to public health than the body of a.. Catholic, to draw any legal distinction between them is as monstrous an oppression as it would be to compel a Catholic. priest to read his service over the body of a Mohammedan under penalty of dismissal, or, as the French Revolution did for a time, to refuse sanction to any religious ceremonies whatever. If, indeed, every freethinker's funeral were sure to be followed, by some fierce outrage upon a religion respected by another class —a thing which certainly happened in England and Ireland at times of excitement—it might be necessary to accompany the funeral by gendarmerie, or even pass a special law upon the subject ; but as it is certain the corpse could not be so guilty, it is not the mode of burial which should be interfered with. And above all, the law should be equal. Catholics- have uttered violent diatribes at funerals before now, and dis- turbed public order besides—as in the instance of the death, of great actresses, when the demand of the mob is that priests shall perform the funeral ceremony, not that they shall not— and the law should press upon all equally, and if possible, with equal lightness. Let Cleric and Voltairian be equally content, or, if they can bring themselves to that state of mind; equally sad, that an unconverted opponent is gone.

The immense imprudence of a vote like this must be apparent to all reasonable men. It will, in the first place, embitter all passions—for instance, in Marseilles it will drive ai majority nearly mad—without gaining anything for the Govern- ment, except the suspicion that it is under that clerical influence- which a majority of Frenchmen detest. We do not say a, majority of Frenchmen are Voltairians, though the number of unbelievers even among Legitimists, is very great ; but at. majority are certainly disposed to keep the Clerical Order in its place, to leave it a share of education, to give it State pay, but to refuse it a place in the governing power. No bishop. in France has held power since the Revolntion. No election. has ever been materially clerical. In the very last one, the election of a third of this Assembly, the peasants listened to the cure with profound respect, muttered to each other that. he wanted war for Rome, and voted dead against his nominee. They will now suspect that the Right are all men of the soutane. As Gambetta declared in the splendid speech tele- graphed textually by the Evening Standard on Thursday—as speech Liberal journals have left to their Tory opponent—"the peasantry have only to suspect that the late Government which delivered France was overthrown in the interests of the Clerics, and their voice would drown these miserable rheto- ricians." The very object of the new party should have been to show the people that they were not so dreadful as they seemed, that they were at least as liberal as Bonapartists, that though they wished for a King, it was for a king with the ideas of the nineteenth century, who would not corrupt their Press, or coerce their votes, or place them entirely under the episcopal yoke. If they had done this steadily for three years they might have realised their hopes, but instead of this, they order the Prefects to coerce the electors—who, though tame enough, hate the coercion—they issue secret circulars favour- ing the corruption of journalists, and they support by an enormous vote an official insult to the religious sentiments of the population of the second city in the Republic. All this time the Republican party, once so infuriated, is meek and orderly to tameness, fights the battle of freedom in Parliamentary fashion, or resists clerical persecution by abstention from the vote, and tells the Army in a most excited speech that French soldiers make no pronuneiamientos, and that Liberals trust MacMahon. They know well that France will see.