The Law of 1905 in Question: Legislative Compromise and the Role of Moderate Catholics in Pacifying the Law By Pierre Sarliève Course: HIST 449, Honours Graduating Essay Instructor: Dr. Robert Brain A graduating thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in The Faculty of Arts Department of History We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard Supervisor: Dr. Michael Lanthier Committee Members: Dr. Robert Brain and Dr. Michel Ducharme University of British Columbia May 3, 2021 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................................ iii Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ...................................................................................................................................................... 12 A Law Situated in a Circumstance of Aggravated Political Tensions ........................................................ 13 The Disputed Leadership of the Separation Project (October 1904 - March 1905) .................................. 15 The Churches’ Reactions to Combes’ Project ........................................................................................... 18 The Chamber of Deputies Rejects Combes’ Bill and Briand Takes Over ................................................... 20 Final Parliamentary DeBates and the LiBeral Turn ................................................................................... 21 Chapter 2 ...................................................................................................................................................... 27 The Dioceses of Versailles and Alby at the Turn of the Century ............................................................... 30 Theoretically Condemning the Law of Separation: the Church Feels Persecuted ..................................... 31 Preparing a Political Narrative – a Law Forged by the Enemies of the Church ........................................ 35 Political Engagement Against the Law: The Law of Separation Goes Against National Will ................... 39 Catholic Engagement in the Legislative Elections of 1906 ....................................................................... 41 Chapter 3 ...................................................................................................................................................... 46 The Crisis of the Inventaires ..................................................................................................................... 47 The Actions of the Catholics Who Desired to Work with the Separation ................................................. 51 Briand’s Response to the Crisis ................................................................................................................. 56 The Spirit of Compromise Prevails for the Buildings of Worship .............................................................. 58 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 63 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................. 69 ii Acknowledgements This research project would never have been achieved without the assistance of scholars who pushed me to improve my work from beginning to end. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Michael Lanthier, for his breadth of knowledge on the Third Republic and his constant willingness to organize meetings to discuss my thesis. Your consistent and considerable efforts to proof-read my writing have given me a wonderful initiation into the world of scholarly writing and research. I would also like to thank Dr. Robert Brain for his ability to offer me a clear picture about the essential contents of my thesis and his critical outlook on my sources. Furthermore, I am indebted to Maurice Gelbard for his digital archive containing all the different bills on the Law of Separation and key speeches, articles and reports which were not available in digital form at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. His collection of sources allowed me to complete this project in a time when travel to France was simply impossible. Finally, thank you to my friends and family for your consistent support in hearing me pitch my ideas to you. iii Introduction From the ardent debates of the French Revolution to each time an act of jihadist terrorism is committed on French soil, the country is thrown anew into a global debate about laïcité. Laïcité, a term difficult to translate, is a form of secularism that is central to the France’s identity and its troubled history sheds light on today’s lively debates. In 1905 the French government passed a law stipulating “the separation of churches and the state,” which barred the state from officially recognizing, funding or endorsing religious groups, and represented a major shift in church-state relations in France. It is strongly associated with the guiding principle of laïcité, despite the term not being mentioned in the legal text, and has become an integral part of France’s contemporary political DNA.1 However, this principle has been a controversial source of debate for the past 115 years. Indeed, it is controversial both at the national level, where it is subject to increasingly contradictory debates regarding its original purpose and the ‘arrival’ of Islam in politics, and internationally, where France is often accused of being an intolerant and discriminatory country.2 These discourses, often overwrought and emotional, have led to a certain confusion about the significance of the original law and the context in which it emerged and was implemented. As radical as it was, the Law of Separation between the Church and State, passed in December 1905 after months of discussion, demonstrated a real desire for pacification rather than further confrontation with French Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Even if its intransigent Catholic opponents would have been very surprised to hear it, its initiators 1 Boyer, Alain. 1905, La séparation églises-état: De La Guerre Au Dialogue. Paris: Cana, 2004, 13. 2 Colosimo, Anastasia. “Laïcité: Why French Secularism Is So Hard to Grasp.” Institut Montaigne, May 22, 2018. 1 wanted it to be a law of appeasement.3 This is not just a retrospective view: both laïques and moderate Catholics strived for appeasement during the deliberations, against the extremists in their camps. Some politicians of the Third Republic did indeed have anticlerical ambitions for the legal project, they wanted to use lawmaking to quicken the decline of a Church that was often feared by Republicans. During the Law’s inception, some bills envisaged the prohibition of worship, the revocation of religious freedoms, or the confiscation of church property. However, this anticlerical tendency was overcome at the time of the elaboration and the early application of the Law of 1905, making way for a much more tolerant version of the Separation. The main goal of this thesis is to provide a different understanding of the Law of Separation between the Churches and the State, otherwise known as the Law of 1905, and to oppose the idea that it was a definitive separation of the churches in France from the state, a final resolution of the complicated relationships between the Republic and religions, symbolizing the culmination of republican glory and freedom of thought. Not only was the elaboration of the Law of 1905 a process of gradual appeasement and compromise, its application between 1906 and 1907 was also a period of further concession and dilution due to the failures of the most anticlerical modalities in the Law’s harsher bills. Most importantly, it was the Church’s resistance on the most practical affairs of the Law – the inventories of the goods of the Church and the status of the buildings of worship – which proved to be most successful in constraining the state to modify its legislation. 3 Baubérot Jean. Vers Un Nouveau Pacte laïque? Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1990. 2 First and foremost, this thesis intends to address the tendencies in the present political debate to spread confusion about the origins of the Law of 1905 and the French secular regime. In these debates, some politicians, and even some scholars, have tried to promote a narrative which holds that “at the beginning of the twentieth century, most political actors claimed above all a true religious freedom against the Catholic Church.”4 Furthermore, many continue to argue that the Law is the culmination of some sort of paradigm shift of modernity where the Republican state progressively surpassed the influence of conservative, “obscurantist” Catholic forces in the country.5 In a recently published article after the terror attack on Samuel Paty, the author recognizes that “of course, the Law of 1905, which serves as a benchmark in matters of secularism in France, is often seen as a law of appeasement, supported by believers, agnostics and atheists.” Nevertheless, he claims that it “was only the culmination of a process in which secularism had to be combative to impose itself and be accepted vis-à-vis a Church from which the Republic wished to emancipate itself.”6 This current of