by M. Doumer, ex-Governor-General of Indo-China, who, though he had entered politics as a Radical, was now supported by the anti-republican reactionaries as well as by the moderate Republicans. A violent debate arose on the question of expelling from the Legion of Honour certain members of that order, including a general officer, who had been involved in the delation scandal. M. Jaurès, the eloquent Socialist deputy for Albi, who played the part of Éminence grise to M. Combes in his anti-clerical campaign, observed that the party which was now demanding the purification of the order had been in no hurry to expel from it Esterhazy long after his crimes had been proved in connexion with the Dreyfus case. The debate was inconclusive, and the government on the 14th of January obtained a vote of confidence by a majority of six. But M. Combes, whose animosity towards the church was keener than his love of office, saw that his ministry would be constantly liable to be put in a minority, and that thus the consideration of separation might be postponed until after the general elections of 1906. So he announced his resignation in an unprecedented manifesto addressed to the president of the Republic on the 18th January.
M. Rouvier, minister of finance in the outgoing government, was called upon for the second time in his career to form a ministry. A moderate opportunist himself, he intended to form a coalition cabinet in which all groups of Republicans, from the Centre to the extreme Left, would be represented. Second Rouvier ministry. But he failed, and the ministry of the 24th of January 1905 contained no members of the Republican opposition which had combated M. Combes. The prime minister retained the portfolio of finance; M. Delcassé remained at the foreign office, which he had directed since 1898, and M. Berteaux at the war office; M. Etienne, member for Oran, went to the ministry of the interior; another Algerian deputy, M. Thomson, succeeded M. Camille Pelletan at the ministry of marine, which department was said to have fallen into inefficiency; public worship was separated from the department of the interior and joined with that of education under M. Bienvenu-Martin, Radical-Socialist deputy for Auxerre, who was new to official life. Although M. Rouvier, as befitted a politician of the school of Waldeck-Rousseau, disliked the separation of the churches from the state, he accepted that policy as inevitable. After the action of the Vatican in 1904, which had produced the rupture of diplomatic relations with France, many moderates who had been persistent in their opposition to the Combes ministry, and even certain Nationalists, accepted the principle of separation, but urged that it should be effected on liberal terms. So on the 27th of January, after the minister of education and public worship had announced that the government intended to introduce a separation bill, a vote of confidence was obtained by a majority of 373 to 99, half of the majority being opponents of the Combes ministry of various Republican and reactionary groups, while the minority was composed of 84 Radicals and Socialists and only 15 reactionaries.
On the 21st of March the debates on the separation of the churches from the state began. A commission had been appointed in 1904 to examine the subject. Its reporter was M. Aristide Briand, Socialist member for Saint Etienne. According to French parliamentary procedure, the The Separation Law. reporter of a commission, directed to draw up a great scheme of legislation, can make himself a more important person in conducting it through a house of legislature than the minister in charge of the bill. This is what M. Briand succeeded in doing. He produced with rapidity a “report” on the whole question, in which he traced with superficial haste the history of the Church in France from the baptism of Clovis, and upon this drafted a bill which was accepted by the government. He thus at one bound came from obscurity into the front rank of politicians, and in devising a revolutionary measure learned a lesson of moderate statesmanship. In conducting the debates he took the line of throwing the responsibility for the rupture of the Concordat on the pope. The leadership of the Opposition fell on M. Ribot, who had been twice prime minister of the Republic and was not a practising Catholic. He recognized that separation had become inevitable, but argued that it could be accomplished as a permanent act only in concert with the Holy See. The clerical party in the Chamber did little in defence of the Church. The abbés Lemire and Gayraud, the only ecclesiastics in parliament, spoke with moderation, and M. Groussau, a Catholic jurist, attacked the measure with less temperate zeal; but the best serious defence of the interests of the Church came from the Republican centre. Few amendments from the extreme Left were accepted by M. Briand, whose general tone was moderate and not illiberal. One feature of the debates was the reluctance of the prime minister to take part in them, even when financial clauses were discussed in which his own office was particularly concerned. The bill finally passed the Chamber on the 3rd of July by 341 votes against 233, the majority containing a certain number of conservative Republicans and Nationalists. At the end the Radical-Socialists manifested considerable discontent at the liberal tendencies of M. Briand, and declared that the measure as it left the Chamber could be considered only provisional. In the Senate it underwent no amendment whatever, not a single word being altered. The prime minister, M. Rouvier, never once opened his lips during the lengthy debates, in the course of which M. Clémenceau, as a philosophical Radical who voted for the bill, criticized it as too concordatory, while M. Méline, as a moderate Republican, who voted against it, predicted that it would create such a state of things as would necessitate new negotiations with Rome a few years later. It was finally passed by a majority of 181 to 102, the complete number of senators being 300, and three days later, on the 9th of December 1905, it was promulgated as law by the president of the Republic.
The main features of the act were as follows. The first clauses guaranteed liberty of conscience and the free practice of public worship, and declared that henceforth the Republic neither recognized nor remunerated any form of religion, except in the case of chaplains to public schools, hospitals and prisons. It provided that after inventories had been taken of the real and personal property in the hands of religious bodies, hitherto remunerated by the state, to ascertain whether such property belonged to the state, the department, or the commune, all such property should be transferred to associations of public worship (associations cultuelles) established in each commune in accordance with the rules of the religion which they represented, for the purpose of carrying on the practices of that religion. As the Vatican subsequently refused to permit Catholics to take part in these associations, the important clauses relating to their organization and powers became a dead letter, except in the case of the Protestant and Jewish associations, which affected only a minute proportion of the religious establishments under the act. Nothing, therefore, need be said about them except that the chief discussions in the Chamber took place with regard to their constitution, which was so amended, contrary to the wishes of the extreme anti-clericals, that many moderate critics of the original bill thought that thereby the regular practice of the Catholic religion, under episcopal control, had been safeguarded. A system of pensions for ministers of religion hitherto paid by the state was provided, according to the age and the length of service of the ecclesiastics interested, while in small communes of under a thousand inhabitants the clergy were to receive in any case their full pay for eight years. The bishops’ palaces were to be left gratuitously at the disposal of the occupiers for two years, and the presbyteries and seminaries for five years. This provision too became a dead letter, owing to the orders given by the Holy See to the clergy. Other provisions enacted that the churches should not be used for political meetings, while the services held in them were protected by the law from the acts of disturbers. As the plenary operation of the law depended on the associations cultuelles, the subsequent failure to create those bodies makes it useless to give a complete exposition of a statute of which they were an essential feature.
The passing of the Separation Law was the chief act of the last year of the presidency of M. Loubet. One other important measure has to be noted, the law reducing compulsory military
