THE FRENCH DEMONSTRATION OF SUNDAY LAST.
THE proceedings of Sunday, in relation to the Religious Orders in France, are not easily intelligible to any one who attempts to explain them from the point of view of mere State policy, and without reference to the very exacting necessities of a party which wants the combined.support of the friends of true liberty and of the enemies of all autho- rity. As a mere matter of policy, it is impossible to conceive anything more foolish than these petty acts of treason to true liberty,—acts so petty, that while they lash the pious Catholics into resentment, and nourish in them the deep belief that a Republican Government in France will never protect equally all forms of religion, as does the Republican Government of the United States, they have no effect at all in paralysing or fettering the great power which they wound and irritate. Take the miserable spectacle of Sunday last. The Barnabites are an order of Italian Roman Catholic missionaries, whose aim it is to minister to the wants of the Italian poor in Paris. So welcome were they when they first came to Paris, twenty-three years ago, that the Muni- cipality chose them a site for their mission and chapel ; during the whole time of their residence, they say that they have sedu- lously avoided politics ; that during the siege of Paris their house was the headquarters of an ambulance ; and that even during the revolt of the Commune they, as foreigners, were respected by the Revolutionary Government of the ouvriers. All this has not been sufficient to save them now. Apparently, the fact that they were mostly Italians ministering to the poorest of the Italian poor, marked them out as safe prey ; and on Sunday the four Italian fathers of the Barnabite Order in the Rue Monceau were valiantly sent about their business by the French police, while the two French fathers were left to wind up the affairs of the little community. The Carmelites, who are more numerous, wore broken up in like manner, in several different centres of France. At Passy, Montpelier, Bordeaux, Carcassonne, Agen, St. Omer, Bagneres de Bigorre, Toulouse, Lyons, Nice, Pamiers, Montelimart, and Maiche, the Car- melites were driven out, while a body of Franciscans was dis- persed at Beziers. In many cases, the populace were in pas- sionate sympathy with the monks thus dispersed ; in one or two, they sided as strongly with the Government, and sang the " Marseillaise," as a sort of war-cry against the feeble communities broken-up. But on whichever side the people happened to be, they received last Sunday a new lesson in the principles of intolerance, and had fresh religious animosities sown in their hearts by a Government that calls itself the protector of all forms of liberty alike. Even Quinet, were he now living, would confess the infinite imbecility of this pro- ceeding. He thought it childish in the friends of Liberty to encourage the growth of a Church which was, in his opinion, the great foe of liberty,—though it has not been the foe but the friend of liberty in Poland, in Ireland, in Switzer- land, in the United States. But what Quinet contemplated must have been some measure at least defensible on general princi- ples such as a disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church in France, and the placing of all religions on a basis of absolute equality and absolute indifference as regarded the State,—a perfectly legitimate and intelligible, whether it be or be not a wise and prudent, policy. Certainly Quinet never could have supposed, had he been living now, that a Republic which has gained its way to power against the close alliance of a re- actionary Government with an Ultramontane party in the Church, and which has enormously strengthened its position in every subsequent appeal to the people, would be foolish enough and unprincipled enough to use the very weapons the employment of which, in the hands of its enemies, it had so vehemently condemned, in order to secure further its alneady com- manding position,—that it would take a turn at the policy of persecuting the weak and proscribing the helpless. Yet this is what the generous Government of M. Jules Ferry is actually doing,—winning glory by expelling handfuls of foreign missionaries, and threatening dispersion to all sorts of communities of pious and charitable women.
Considered in relation to its effect on the condition of the French nation, the whole character of this policy is simply unintelligible ; nor is it made at all less so by M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire's absurd afterthought of justifying it as a sort of tax on celibacy, a blow struck by the State in favour of married life. If that were its drift, it would not be
religious celibacy which would be alone aimed at. It is pro- bable that both irreligious celibacy and irreligious marriage is infinitely more fatal to the objects of marriage and the steady growth of population, than any religious or, if you please, superstitious celibacy. The only explanation of the resolve of the Republican statesmen in France to enforce these unhappy decrees is our knowledge that a certain very active, and by no means insignificant, portion of the Republican Left, is not likely to give its support to any party which does not gratify its aggressive feeling towards the Roman Catholic priesthood, and that the Republicans do not think themselves strong enough to attempt any attack on the position of the secular priesthood, which is much more strongly bound up with French history than are the monastic Orders. It is supposed to be necessary to do something to carry the Extreme Left of the Republican party with the Moderate Left, nor is there anything which seems, on the whole, so little dangerous as these assaults on monks and nuns who have little of the widely ramified influence of the parochial clergy, and are yet recognised as embodying in themselves the essential principles of the Roman Catholic faith. And no doubt, for the time, this low consideration is not without force. It is very possible that this sacrifice to the principle of intolerance may stave off for a year or two longer the necessity of fighting M. Clemenceau and the French Irreconcilables on more strictly political ground, on ground involving questions touching the borders of Socialism, and on ground involving questions touching the very existence of the Army. For a time, this sacrifice of religious liberty to the prepossessions of the fanatical enemies of all sacerdotalism may keep the Extreme Left in co-operation with the Moderate Left, and so arrest political controversies which the Liberal leaders do not think as yet ripe for discussion. But however plausible this policy may appear, it is certain to sow a crop of evils far more dangerous than any it can ward off. In the first place, it delays sine die the prospect, which the Pope wisely desired to improve, of the Catholic Church assuming a neutral attitude in
relation to political controversy. It is not possible that the secular clergy should desert the cause of those with whom, by their own principles, they are closely bound up. At all events, it is quite certain that they will not. What Archbishop Guibert has said in his protest against the action of the Government of France, will be re-echoed by every sincere Roman Catholic who reads his words. And even of honest Protestants, not a few will be deeply discouraged by this evid- ence that they must expect from the Republican rulers whom they have taken so much pains to set up, a new beginning of the old mischievous and disorganising crusade against the national religion. And the prolonged alienation of the Catholic Church from a Republican form of Government, together with the consequent stimulus that must be given to monarchical plots, is by no means the worst result of this bad policy. Against that, if it were all, the Republic might easily hold its own. The worst of this policy is that it will stimulate fanati- cism both in religion and in irreligion,—that it will sting the Catholics into crusades against republican infidelity, and the atheists into still more furious raids upon the priesthood. If all the monastic Orders are dispersed to-morrow to the four corners of Europe, the exigency which carried these decrees will im- mediately reappear. There will be M. Clemenceau, with his Montmartre friends, ready to cry out that the Government is still the friend of priests and armies, of unjust Courts of Justice, and of plundering capitalists who sacrifice labour to wealth ; and then something more must be done to keep their mouths shut, and in all probability a new mode of attack on the Church must be discovered, for the sake of uniting all sections of the Left. Indeed this need for finding victims to sate for a time the ven- geance of the Reds, promises no proximate end. Something less safe, and more irritating, will be demanded at every fresh step, till at last there seems nothing that will be left except an open attack not merely on the Established Church, but on the Catho- lic religion—ultimately, it may be, religion of every kind—in France. And so soon as such an end as that comes in view, all true friends of liberty will be bound to desert the cause which will then have rendered religious liberty impossible. We say this is the only logical ending of such concessions. But we are very far indeed from believing that it will be the real end. Sooner or later, the Republicans must come to their senses, and bethink themselves that if they would not fall into the errors and crimes of the great Revolution, they have no choice at all but to hold fast by the principle of re- ligious liberty, and apply it equally on all sides,—to believer and unbeliever, to Protestant and Catholic, alike. If they
choose to withdraw the support of the State from all religions alike, and to leave all alike—protected equally in their worship —tothe support of voluntary contributions, that is an intelligible and honourable policy compared with the one at which they are now fitfully nibbling. But they cannot, for very shame continue to call themselves the friends of liberty of thought, speech, and association, and then define their meaning as extending only to such thought, speech, and association as please the partisans of the Extreme Left. The very idea of a Republic is degraded by such gross partiality as that.
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