The Falloux Law (1850)

From Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), pp.142-143.

In the 18th century the Enlightment emphasis on rationality came into conflict with the traditional teachings and powerful political and economic position of the Catholic Church. Intellectuals like Voltaire questioned religious faith and argued that the religious superstition was holding back human progress. During the 1790s many of the leaders of the French Revolution viewed the Church as part of an old social order that was oppressing the people and took steps to weaken it. As a result of their loss of property and position many aristocrats and some wealthy members of the bourgeoisie began to have second thoughts about their skepticism concerning religion and started to look to the Church as a bulwark against the lower classes. It was believed that religious faith would keep the poorer classes less dissatisfied with their position in society. As Emperor, Napoleon worked out an arrangement with the Pope for the return of Catholicism as a government sponsored religion, but the tension between liberal-minded skeptics and conservative Catholic traditionalists remained. This tension became a major element -- in many ways the major element -- in French politics in the decades following the passing of the Falloux laws, which historian Gordon Wright describes below.

[The Falloux Law], a major event in the nineteenth-century religious, educational, and  political history  of  France, marked the successful conclusion   of  a  ten-year Catholic  campaign to secure greater influence in education. It gave  the church  the  right  to operate secondary schools (colleges) alongside  those of the state,  and  it increased church influence in  the supervision of state primary schools. Similar bills had  been defeated  four  times  during the 1840's by the skeptical Orleanist  politicians.  In 1850 many of those same  politicians  (Thiers, for example) swung over  to join the conservatives  in its support.

The motives that  produced this change  of mind were not all admirable ones. The hysterical  red scare produced by the June  Days  led Voltaireans like Thiers to acclaim the church  as "the  last bulwark  of the social order." "Every  Voltairean in  France with a few thousand  pounds  of  income," remarked  Ozanam bitterly, "wants to send  everybody  to Mass, provided  that  he himself  doesn't  have to  go."  Thiers even  talked of giving   the  church  a total monopoly of  primary education. The mood of the moment benefited Catholic  reactionaries like Veuillot and  led even a mildly liberal Catholic like Montalembert to declare:  "There is only  one  recipe  for making those who  own  nothing believe in property-rights: that is to make  them  believe in God, who dictated the Ten Commandments and who  promises  eternal  punishment to those who  steal." The  trend  in France was furthered by a swing  toward reaction  in  the  Vatican Pius IX,  after  recovering his lost  throne  in 1849, abandoned his earlier  liberal  inclinations. It  was clear by the end  of 1848 that the Christian democratic current, so prominent in the early months of  the  revolution, had in fact touched only a small elite within   the church.  Not  until  the  twentieth century was it to know  a significant  revival.

The  Falloux Law  has  been  described as the greatest  clerical victory  of the nineteenth century.  Although the confirmed  Voltaireans among the bourgeoisie remained skeptics,  they nevertheless began to send  their sons to Catholic colleges; within  a generation, half of the secondary students  in  France were enrolled  in Catholic  schools. The  return to the faith that had revealed itself within the aristocracy after  1814, and that had begun to affect the middle classes in  the 1840's, now  made  rapid  progress  among the bourgeoisie.  This  process of rechristianization was  to give Catholicism a solid bourgeois base in twentieth-century France. The  church's   problem henceforth would  be  to check the trend toward unbelief  that had  already set in strongly among the urban workers and that was to make serious  inroads among the  peasantry  as well after the mid-nineteenth century.

If the  Falloux Law  was  a  victory  for  the  clericals,  it  was  in  some ways a costly one.  Its effect was to intensify  the anticlerical spirit  of the left and to infect the whole  republican movement with an almost unreasoning suspicion  of  the church. It  was no accident  that  the  next generation saw the  conversion  of Freemasonry from its mildly deist  and liberal outlook to a mood of violent republicanism and bigoted anticlericalism, or  that  an obscure  politician  in 1863 coined the  durable battle cry, "Clericalism, there  is  the  enemy!"  Anticlericals became convinced that the church's  purpose was to achieve a complete monopoly of education in order  to tighten its grip on the state; they  believed that church schools were brainwashing machines whose influence would  divide French  youth into two irreconcilable camps. The  Falloux Law  became a kind  of symbol  of the conflict, a bogey to frighten the left. Thus the Second  Republic, which at the outset  had brought republicans and Catholics together in a flush of fraternity and good will, ended  by making the religious  problem  a major  political issue destined to poison the atmosphere in France  for generations.

Objectively,  the Falloux Law scarcely deserved  such opprobrium, for it was  a  compromise that   infuriated Catholic extremists like Veuillot as much  as it aroused the anticlericals. The real tragedy for France was  that this  relatively  moderate Catholic victory came  at  a moment when passions  were  building up  on  both  sides. During the subsequent generation the loudest  Catholic voices were  to be those of  the Veuillot faction, while the most vocal republicans would  be turning to a dogmatic and  materialistic  doctrine called  positivism.   Neither  faction  was inclined  toward  peaceful coexistence or was ready  to let the  Falloux Law,  in either  its original  form  or  a revised  version, be given  a fair  trial.