after which he had become an inactive politician in the Senate, while making a large fortune at the bar. In spite of having eschewed politics he had been ranked in the public mind with Gambetta and Jules Ferry as one of the small number of politicians of the Republic who had risen high above mediocrity. While he had none of the magnetic exuberance which furthered the popularity of Gambetta, his cold inexpansiveness had not made him unpopular as was his other chief, Jules Ferry. Indeed, his unemotional coldness was one of the elements of the power with which he dominated parliament; and being regarded by the nation as the strong man whom France is always looking for, he was the first prime minister of the Republic whose name was made a rallying cry at a general election. Yet the country gave him a majority only for it to be handed over to other politicians to use in a manner which he had not contemplated. On the 3rd of June 1902 he formally resigned office, his ministry having lasted for three years, all but a few days, a longer duration than that of any other under the Third Republic.
M. Loubet called upon M. Léon Bourgeois, who had already
been prime minister under M. Félix Faure, to form a ministry,
but he had been nominated president of the new
Chamber. The president of the Republic then offered
the post to M. Brisson, who had been twice prime
M. Combes
prime minister.
minister in 1885 and 1898, but he also refused. A
third member of the Radical party was then sent for, M. Emile
Combes, and he accepted. The senator of the Charente Inférieure,
in his one short term of office in the Bourgeois ministry, had made
no mark. But he had attained a minor prominence in the debates
of the Senate by his ardent anti-clericalism. He had been
educated as a seminarist and had taken minor orders, without
proceeding to the priesthood, and had subsequently practised
as a country doctor before entering parliament. M. Combes
retained two of the most important members of the Waldeck-Rousseau
cabinet, M. Delcassé, who had been at the foreign
office for four years, and General André, who had become war
minister in 1900 on the resignation of General de Galliffet.
General André was an ardent Dreyfusard, strongly opposed to
clerical and reactionary influences in the army. Among the
new ministers was M. Rouvier, a colleague of Gambetta in the
grand ministère and prime minister in 1887, whose participation in
the Panama affair had caused his retirement from official life.
Being a moderate opportunist and reputed the ablest financier
among French politicians, his return to the ministry of finance
reassured those who feared the fiscal experiments of an administration
supported by the Socialists. The nomination as minister
of marine of M. Camille Pelletan (the son of Eugène Pelletan,
a notable adversary of the Second Empire), who had been a
Radical-Socialist deputy since 1881, though new to office, was
less reassuring. M. Combes reserved for himself the departments
of the interior and public worship, meaning that the centralized
administration of France should be in his own hands while he
was keeping watch over the Church. But in spite of the prime
minister’s extreme anti-clericalism there was no hint made in
his ministerial declaration, on the 10th of June 1902, on taking
office that there would be any question of the new Chamber
dealing with the Concordat or with the relations of Church and
state. M. Combes, however, warned the secular clergy not to
make common cause with the religious orders, against which
he soon began vigorous action. Before the end of June he directed
the Préfets of the departments to bring political pressure to
bear on all branches of the public service, and he obtained a
presidential decree closing a hundred and twenty-five schools,
which had been recently opened in buildings belonging to private
individuals, on the ground that they were conducted by members
of religious associations and that this brought the schools under
the law of 1901. Such action seemed to be opposed to M.
Waldeck-Rousseau’s interpretation of the law; but the Chamber
having supported M. Combes he ordered in July the closing of
2500 schools, conducted by members of religious orders, for which
authorization had not been requested. This again seemed
contrary to the assurances of M. Waldeck-Rousseau, and it called
forth vain protests in the name of liberty from Radicals of the
old school, such as M. Goblet, prime minister in 1886, and from
Liberal Protestants, such as M. Gabriel Monod. The execution
of the decrees closing the schools of the religious orders caused
some violent agitation in the provinces during the parliamentary
recess. But the majority of the departmental councils, at their
meetings in August, passed resolutions in favour of the governmental
policy, and a movement led by certain Nationalists,
including M. Drumont, editor of the anti-semitic Libre Parole,
and M. François Coppée, the Academician, to found a league
having similar aims to those of the “passive resisters” in our
country, was a complete failure. On the reassembling of parliament,
both houses passed votes of confidence in the ministry and
also an act supplementary to the Associations Law penalizing
the opening of schools by members of religious orders.
In spite of the ardour of parliamentary discussions the French public was less moved in 1902 by the anti-clerical action of the government than by a vulgar case of swindling known as the “Humbert affair.” The wife of a former deputy for Seine-et-Marne, who was the son of M. Gustave Humbert affair. Humbert, minister of justice in 1882, had for many years maintained a luxurious establishment, which included a political salon, on the strength of her assertion that she and her family had inherited several millions sterling from one Crawford, an Englishman. Her story being believed by certain bankers she had been enabled to borrow colossal sums on the legend, and had almost married her daughter as a great heiress to a Moderate Republican deputy who held a conspicuous position in the Chamber. The flight of the Humberts, the exposure of the fraud and their arrest in Spain excited the French nation more deeply than the relative qualities of M. Waldeck-Rousseau and M. Combes or the woes of the religious orders. A by-election to the Senate in the spring of 1902 merits notice as it brought back to parliament M. Clémenceau, who had lived in comparative retirement since 1893 when he lost his seat as deputy for Draguignan, owing to a series of unusually bitter attacks made against him by his political enemies. He had devoted his years of retirement to journalism, taking a leading part in the Dreyfus affair on the side of the accused. His election as senator for the Var, where he had formerly been deputy, was an event of importance unanticipated at the time.
The year 1903 saw in progress a momentous development of the anti-clerical movement in France, though little trace of this is found in the statute-book. The chief act of parliament of that year was one which interested the population much more than any law affecting the Anti-clerical movement. Church. This was an act regulating the privileges of the bouilleurs de cru, the peasant proprietors who, permitted to distil from their produce an annual quantity of alcohol supposed to be sufficient for their domestic needs, in practice fabricated and sold so large an amount as to prejudice gravely the inland revenue. As there were a million of these illicit distillers in the land they formed a powerful element in the electorate. The crowded and excited debates affecting their interests, in which Radicals and Royalists of the rural districts made common cause against Socialists and Clericals of the towns, were in striking contrast with the less animated discussions concerning the Church. The prime minister, an anti-clerical zealot, bitterly hostile to the Church of which he had been a minister, took advantage of the relative indifference of parliament and of the nation in matters ecclesiastical. The success of M. Combes in his campaign against the Church was an example of what energy and pertinacity can do. There was no great wave of popular feeling on the question, no mandate given to the deputies at the general election or asked for by them. Neither was M. Combes a popular leader or a man of genius. He was rather a trained politician, with a fixed idea, who knew how to utilize to his ends the ability and organization of the extreme anti-clerical element in the Chamber, and the weakness of the extreme clerical party. The majority of the Chamber did not share the prime minister’s animosity towards the Church, for which at the same time it had not the least enthusiasm, and under the concordatory lead of M. Waldeck-Rousseau it would have been content to
