A FRENCH STATESMAN ON THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE.
By Editor
YVES GUYOT, former French minister of public works, declares that "to be constructive and progressive a national governor must neither ally itself to, nurture, nor even protect beyond that protection properly offered any other social or industrial body, a religion." In an article telling "Why France Sought Separation of Church and State," which has just appeared in a leading American newspaper, we have the most recent expression on the subject from the side of the champions of church and state separation in France. M. Guyot says: The trouble between France and Rome, which has lately terminated in the law of separation, began with the Concordat, negotiated by Napoleon and Pius VII. This instrument served to enrol the clergy of France for the sole benefit of the Vatican. It organized and marshalled them without any regard to the wishes of the national government, and practically made them independent of the authority of the archbishops and bishops, who, under the Concordat, were state officials. It withdrew the higher clergy from the criticism and control of the inferior clergy. Finally, it withdrew the whole body of clergy from the criticism and control of faithful Roman Catholics. It elevated them above and beyond all controversy. The Concordat so organized the Catholic Church in France that all competition with her was impossible. To seek to oppose the clerical party and the Roman influence without first destroying that organization was to wish to suppress the effects without destroying the cause. Men who benefited by that organization made an abuse of the power it gave them as much from the point of view of home policy as from that of foreign policy. The Catholic Church fancied she had found in General Boulanger the "pronunciamento" man she was ever seeking. The effort having failed, the clerical party, under the leadership of the Jesuits, invented the Panama scandals. Their object in doing that was to cast suspicion on parliamentary institutions. With that object in view they also imported anti-Semitism from Austria, where it had been invented. Their chief desire was to drive the Jews from the army; the Jews once driven out, they would proceed to hunt the Protestants, then the Freemasons, and all independent men. They intended that the officers of the army should all be pupils of the Jesuits. It was the present pope who, by his attitude toward M. Loubet during the voyage of the latter to Italy, provoked the separation of church and state. Up to that time, whatever may have been the discords between the Elysée and the Vatican, the influence of the pontiff on the foreign policy of France had been incalculable, and often only discernible in subsequent events. The diplomacy of the French Republic, even in its secular functions, had often been subordinated to clerical influence. The occupation of Tunis, which provoked the Triple Alliance in 1882, was the result of a manœuvre of Bismarck and the Catholics, of which France was the dupe. It needed the secularization of home politics to secularize the foreign politics of France. The king of Italy had visited France in 1903. The Vatican sought to prevent M. Loubet from returning the visit. On April 28, 1904, he sent a circular to the powers declaring that he considered such a visit "a grave offense against the sovereign pontiff." M. Loubet went to Rome, and the ambassador of the French Republic to the Vatican was withdrawn, and the separation of church and state, about which French politicians had hesitated so long, became the happy consequence of the papal insolence. Napoleon established the Concordat to make it an instrumentum regni. All the strength that the Catholic clergy drew from the Concordat they employed against every government which had existed since 1800 in France, including even that of the Restoration. Not only did the official organization made possible under the Concordat preserve the church in France against schism and competition of all other sects and societies—religious as well as industrial—by placing the bishops' authority above all control, but it also allowed the church to make a permanent and violent interference in the home politics of France, and, moreover, to obtain an influence, as powerful as it was bad, over the foreign policy also. The separation of church and state has for the first result the freeing of public life, of parliamentary debates, from clerical questions and their ever-hazardous and dangerous contingencies. The second, I trust, will be a permanent separation between religion and all politics—foreign and home. Moreover, from all points of view—social, political, moral, and religious—a movement for the liberation of religion from the control of the state will also be proved to be right.