INTRODUCTION This Third Volume of Our Study Has a Good Chance, We Think, of Holding the Attention of the Reader -- And, Indee

INTRODUCTION This third volume of our study has a good chance, we think, of holding the attention of the reader -- and, indeed, of the secular reader -- in a special way. It is, of course, like its predecessors, addressed primarily to the sons of St. John Baptist de La Salle; and research done by a number of the members of their Congregation assumes an important role in it. We would be failing in our primary obligation should we neglect to use the "family" documentation, unpublished and fascinating, that the Christian Brothers were kind enough to place at our disposition. On the other hand the volume preserves a sort of technical quality: we have made our modest contribution to the history of education. But, in the period we are studying, pedagogical principles and problems present, more so than the distant past, a vital, general and ever "current" interest; indeed, they arise in pretty much the same language as in our own times. The concerns for the future of youth aroused in most of our contemporaries, the struggle that is, unfortunately, conducted over the minds of the young, the heirs to our purposes and our beliefs, have, since 1789, taken on the form as well as the fury and the harshness that they have retained well into the 20th century. Philosophers of "national" education and lawmakers in modern states have drawn upon the concepts that we have already ex mined in Locke, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, the "Encyclopedists" and La Chalotais. Confronting them, and without ignoring the need for change, the champions of the religious tradition have defended freedom of conscience and the rights of divine truth at the cost of heroic efforts and suffering that have included the shedding of their blood. Incompletely and provisionally, they won the day after the excesses of 1792 and the moral anarchy that followed. The precarious equilibrium introduced by the Concordat was, in the aftermath, threatened and ruptured. With "anticlericalism", from which current generations continue to suffer, with atheistic communism, with "totalitarianism", which, creating its own ghastly idols and denying the value of the human person, seems no less formidable to a culture emerging from the Gospel, we find that the errors which our 'father-in-the-faith' combatted and which incurred ha tred, persecution and martyrdom for them, have now grown into convulsive dimensions.11 De La Salle's disciples were quite clearly marked out for the blows of an antiChristian revolution. Not, of course, that they were the beneficia ries of the abuses of the 'Ancien Regime'; nor were they the defenders of privilege or caste, nor the enemies of French unity or fraternity. They were admirably employed in the peoples' service. To them, for a hundred years, was owed the material and intellectual progress of the masses and the im provement of the social environment, in addition to the well-being, the joy and the hope in the homes of day-laborers and in the shops of the small craftsmen. There they had contributed, not only skills for living, but the means for escaping poverty, knowledge indispensable to the exercise of a suf ficiently remunerative profession, a methodical mind, a taste for initiative, wisdom and stability. Nobody so much as these teachers had contributed to the establishment of harmony among the classes of the nation, by devoting themselves to the poor, by dealing respectfully with children who had been abandoned to ignorance and vagrancy, by raising the standard of living of the people, by narrowing the gap between the workers and the middleclass, through their catechetical instruction,· through a useful education, dispensed in reasonable doses, but without distinction of class, and in both tuition free schools and in residence schools. When the country decided to seek reform, to take in hand the conduct of its own affairs and to change its institutions, the Brothers were universally appreciated. Like the majority of Frenchmen, the Brothers looked for the dawn of a better day, in peace, order and in the concord of citizens under the protection of the ancient monarchy. But the weakness of public authority, the decadence of morals, the intrigues of obstinate and ambitious men and the 1 1 influence of a "philosophy" hostile to Catholicism diverted a great and generous enthusi asm. Upon optimistic predictions there followed the doleful reality. Results anticipated for 1789, hastily accepted amidst turmoil, misunderstanding and angry outbreaks were compromised, vitiated and all too generally wasted in the years that followed. And the sectarian passion that drove the Constituent Assembly in its relations with the Church ended in disunity, a rupture with the past, the deposition of Louis XVI, massacres in prisons and, then, by an irresistible descent, in the scaffold for the king, nobles, priests and the humblest of the faithful, in civil war, and in internecine butchery among the revolutionaries themselves. As the religious question moved to the forefront, it goes without saying that the history of the Christian Brothers, the teachers invited by a divine vocation, merged throughout this period with the history of France. Effortlessly and artlessly our account inserts itself into the texture of national events. Alongside the Brothers, with whom we are principally concerned, there appear successively on the scene the people who have become so well known to the public-- the Mirabeaus, the Talleyrands, the Condorcets, the Brissots, the Dantons and the Robespierres. And, too, since we carry the present inquiry to the point at which the Revolution "officially" ended, at which the Empire (the by-product of the French Republic) arose on the ruins and assembled pieces, old or new, suspect or sound, which were at hand for the reconstruction, we shall seek taking form the new figures of those who played roles in the Directory, the actors of the 18th Brumaire, the co-workers in the task begun in 1800 (as early as 1805 it was already a structure of imposing proportions)-- the Portalis', the Fourcroys, the Chaptals, the Berniers, the Regnaults and the Feschs, who had followed upon the Lakanals, the Daunous, the Barbe-Marbois and the Jourdans of a more unsettled period; until, on the horizon, there looms the imposing profile of Napoleon Bonaparte. In this list we have included the names of two churchmen whose activities, important for other reasons, unfolded in the politico-religious do main: these were the man who negotiated the Concordat of 1801 and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lyons. We shall have nothing special to say about Étienne-Alexandre Bernier, but Joseph Fesch will detain us at some length, since it was he who had supported the Christian Brothers. In the world of religion, however, there were men of a different priestly bent whom we are pleased to point out for the importance of their role in the direction of the Institute: there was Father Emery, the Superior of the Society of St. Sulpice, Father Picot Clorivière, Father Varin, Father Chaminade and Father Paul; and, at an other, less important level, there was Father Bienaimé and Father Bernadet. And at the heights there stands out in sharp relief the white robes of the Sovereign Pontiffs, Pius VI, the victim of the Revolution, and Pius VII, the Pope of the imperial coronation. Especially does the first of these occupy a very important place in our study: it was to his orders, on the whole, that the Brothers remained faithful throughout the sad events of the period 1791-1799; and it was to his paternal concern and his energetic initiative that they owed the preservation of their agonized Congregation. We have selected his portrait for the frontispiece of the present volume in order to recall that the sons of St. John Baptist de La Salle, like their Founder before them, had given evidence of the strongest attachment to the Roman See, as well as to acknowledge the felicitous outcome of Pius VI's interventions in favor of the Institute. A danger lies in wait for us along our way. The history of the French Revolution is so fascinating that we could easily be misled into abandoning the purpose we are pursuing and, quite needlessly and clumsily repeat the work of our teachers-- Pierre La Gorce and Georges Goyau. We hope that we have not overstepped the limits of moderation and that we have used the writings of these great historians without plagiarizing them and only for the purpose of illuminating and verifying our own. As in our two earlier volumes, we must redefine the climate, the landscape and the spirit of the period, with the view of better understanding its documents, and provide our sketches with their precise coloration. This is why, in several chapters, we speak of the Brothers only after 2 we have reconstructed "the locality" in which they lived, narrated the general nature of the facts, and analyzed the legislative and administrative texts within which were framed the Brothers decisions and actions. The Brothers remain the protagonists in the drama that we shall be recounting in three acts: the juridical destruction of the Institute, the "diaspora" and fresh beginnings. We shall first of all attempt to throw light on the Leader, Brother Agathon, remarkable to the end, in the harshest tests, just as he was in the days of his pedagogical fame and of his administrative successes. Thereafter, the Congregation, taken as a whole, will become visible in the crisis of 1789-1792, in the very dangerous and cruel moments of decisions regarding the constitutional schism, the collapse of the schools and the suppression of the "secular Congregations". Then will come, in their turn, those who were sacrificed, the exiles, from the martyrs of the September massacre to the victims of the Directorship Terror, without neglecting the captives in the Rochefort "prison- ships" and the Brother who mounted the scaffold in Rennes.

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