Les congregations hors la loi?: Autour de la loi du 1er juillet 1901, and: Secularisation, separation et guerre scolaire: Les catholiques francais et l'ecole (1901-1914) (review)

For twenty-five years France's republican premiers such as Jules Ferry, René Waldeck-Rousseau, and Emile Combes pursued with a singular zeal the goal of laïcité, a term for which the English "secularization" is an approximate but inadequate equivalent. In a nation whose long-term cultural consciousness and daily political discourse still evoked the passions of the 1789 Revolution, anticlerical policies reflected a struggle to finally and decisively gain the upper hand in what Émile Poulat has called "la guerre des deux France." Given the necessity of securing the future of the Third Republic by winning over the hearts and minds of France's youth, primary and secondary schooling, which even in public schools still saw members of religious orders playing a major role, early emerged as the central battleground in the conflict. The spectacle of Breton peasants rioting to stop French soldiers from forcibly taking repossession of church properties notwithstanding, this war, as Poulat terms it, had ended in the Republic's favor by 1905. Two new books, one a collection of colloquium papers, the other a lengthy study by a single author, add new insights and details to this chapter in French religious history by focusing on the vanquished rather than the victors.

The 1880's marked the laicization of public schooling under Ferry, while the first decade of the new century saw the 1901 dissolution of numerous religious orders, the 1904 banishment from the classroom of members of remaining orders, and the 1905 separation of church and state that removed all public financial support from private schools. In between, the 1890's had witnessed the widely different Catholic responses of abortive clerical-republican reconciliation in the Ralliement and the virulent hostility toward French democracy shown by certain ultramontane, monarchist, and anti-Semitic Catholics during the Dreyfus Affair. The 1905 Law of Separation amounted to a unilateral abrogation of the Napoleonic Concordat dating back to 1801, the latter having both declared a truce of sorts after the violent anti-Catholicism of the Revolution and a reinstatement of traditional Gallican state control of the Church. Popular protests, especially in the west and south, left unchanged the bare fact that the Third Republic had won a more-or-less permanent victory over what Kay Chadwick evocatively if not revealingly objectifies as "the protean monster" of the Catholic Church in France. While indeed it has been typical to study this struggle from the perspective of its monster-slaying victors, some previous histories nonetheless have offered helpful insights into how laicization achieved such a striking success by 1905.

For example, René Rémond points out that the anticlerical parliamentary majority took shape by the end of the 1870's thanks to a marriage of ideas between the longstanding defensive conviction among liberals that organized religion's encroachment on individual conscience had to be consistently thwarted, and a more recent and openly offensive "assertion [among radicals] of a natural incompatibility of modern society and catholicism [sic]." For several decades scholars have tended to formulate such theses, however useful, by examining the church-state struggle from a "top-down" perspective, emphasizing key politicians, clerics, and intellectuals, with Sarah Curtis' 2000 study of Catholic education in Lyon in the nineteenth century serving as a recent example of a newer perspective studying Catholicism in its own right and "from the bottom up," including among other things a detailed analysis of grass roots participation in the conflict. The two even newer studies reviewed here continue this latter kind of approach.

Jacqueline Lalouette and Jean-Pierre Machelon's 2002 book Les congrégations hors la loi? deals...