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 ROMAN CATHOLICISM 
 
 AS A FACTOR IN EUROPEAN POLITICS.
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 ROMAN CATHOLICISM 
 
 AS A FACTOR IN EUROPEAN POLITICS. 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK C. CONYBEARE, 
 
 Latt Fellow of University College, Oxford. 
 
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 LONDON : 
 
 SKEFFINGTON & SON, PICCADILLY, W. 
 
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 i.'HKARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALTPOHNIA 
 
 SA>rrA BAEBAJRA 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The republication of the following Articles has been under- 
 taken at the earnest request of numerous correspondents. In 
 writing them my aim was to initiate my countrymen into the 
 methods openly pursued by the Latin Church in France in 
 its eternal campaign against civil liberty, against freedom of 
 conscience, against a true and spiritual Christianity. The 
 French Republicans are about to introduce fresh legislation 
 against the monkish orders, and especially against the Jesuits 
 and Assumptionists. They hope thereby to safeguard their 
 Army and Navy and Civil Service from the insidious inroads 
 of these Orders, which have acquired too much control over 
 the education of French youth. Such efforts to avert the 
 catastrophe, moral and intellectual, which the clericals would 
 bring upon France, could they ever succeed in realizing their 
 aspirations, deserve the sympathy of Englishmen. Notwith- 
 standing, the influence of the Latins and of that section of the 
 Anglican Church which apes their rites and methods, and 
 looks forward to reunion with them, is so great in the English 
 press, that even in intelligent journals like the Spectator we 
 already meet with denunciations of the religious intolerance
 
 VI. 
 
 of French Republicans. Certainly they will blunder here and 
 there, for men who are groaning under a sacerdotalist tyranny, 
 which begins by violating the family and home, are apt to hit 
 out wildly. It is certain however that, if in England the 
 mischief ever grew to the dimensions which it assumes in 
 France and Italy, we should not hesitate to resort to measures 
 equally or more drastic. 
 
 Frederick C. Conybeare.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE ... ... ... i 
 
 IL CASO DREYFUS; OR. THE JESUIT VIEW ... ... 33 
 
 JEAN GALAS ... ... ... ... 63 
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK ... ... ... ... ... 91 
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE ... ... ... 118 
 
 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE FRENCH REPUBLIC 140
 
 ROMAN CATHOLICISM 
 
 AS A FACTOR IN EUROPEAN POLITICS. 
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 From the "National Review," February, 1899. 
 
 jfjN an article contributed to this journal in 
 November of the last year, the present writer 
 declared the malady from which France is 
 suffering to be that of " Militarism doubled with Jesuitry." 
 In a volume devoted to the history of the Dreyfus case 
 which has more recently appeared, he felt himself again 
 obliged, after a careful study of French opinion, to lay 
 the chief blame upon the Latin Church in France, and in 
 particular upon the Jesuits of that country. For this he 
 has been taken to task by more than one reviewer and by 
 several personal friends, to whom his language appears 
 to be harsh and unwarranted by the facts. In the present 
 article, therefore, he intends to look a little more closely 
 into the question. Within the short compass of a few 
 pages he cannot hope to reproduce all the manifold indicia 
 of French Catholic feeling which he has either met with 
 in Continental journals, or which have been set before 
 him in conversations and correspondence with trustworthy
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 and temperate Frenchmen. Of a mass of these he has 
 kept no record except that of mere memory. In such an 
 enquiry it is obligatory to derive one's evidence, not from 
 sources hostile to French CathoHcism, but from the 
 writings of French clerics, from the columns of strictly 
 Catholic newspapers, from the works of professed and 
 accredited friends of the Church. 
 
 The Abbe Pichot is, or was, until a few weeks ago. 
 Professor of Mathematics in the Seminary of Felletin. 
 In consequence of an article about the Dreyfus case which 
 appeared in the Supplement of the popular religious 
 paper. La Croix, for August 28th, 1898, he addressed an 
 open letter to the editor, in which clearly and temperately 
 he set forth the grounds on which the condemnation of 
 Dreyfus and the acquittal of Esterhazy appeared to him 
 to be unjust; he also besought the editor to reproduce 
 his arguments instead of merely assuming, as was his 
 wont, that all partisans of revision were "simpletons 
 igogos), pretentious and conceited persons, who look for 
 noon at fourteen o'clock." One or two paragraphs of his 
 letter deserve to be quoted at length : — 
 
 "La Croix," he wrote, "represents Christianity. It gives itself out to 
 be the Christian journal. It is to be feared that the Christianity it jreflects 
 is over much destitute of critical spirit. Catholics have hardly recovered 
 from the universal mystification of which they were the victims at 
 the hands of Leo Taxil . . . Leo Taxil had antecedents which were 
 unmistakable by those who reflected. He even continued to write filthy 
 books . . . None the less the mystification went on for ten or twelve 
 years, to the confusion of Catholics, until some critics— who were of course 
 stigmatized as unbelievers — succeeded in unmasking the humbug himself. 
 Now once more, two years after, from want of critical sense, from want 
 of reflection, from want of any desire to understand the psychology of the 
 professional soldier, thanks to a credulous and blind Press, here we are
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 fallen once more into the same snare ! We see the Catholics partisans of 
 an evident illegality, of an injustice almost as evident, just at a time when 
 Catholics no longer dare ask for themselves anything beyond legality and 
 common right." 
 
 The entire letter, from which we quote the above, was 
 published in pamphlet form under the title, The Christian 
 Conscience and the Dreyfus Affair, with a short preface on 
 the first page of which we read the following well-put 
 truths : — 
 
 "The great Christian mystic Tolstoi recently remarked, in respect of the 
 Dreyfus affair, that the French have at last a case of conscience to settle 
 (les Francais out enfin un cas de conscience a resoudre). ... It is long since my 
 conscience dictated to me the writing of this letter. But I needed first to 
 witness crimes heaped upon crimes, all to cover a simple error, to see 
 Colonel Picquart — a Catholic — arrested, to see him kept brutally au secret, 
 before I resolved on an action which will arouse the protests of the 
 admirers of the army, but will perhaps stand in the way of future crimes. 
 
 •• I needed also to read such words as these, fallen from the lips of an 
 infidel : — ' Amidst dissensions in which the various ministers of the Gospel 
 have abrogated the precept of the peacemaker: " Love ye one another," 
 which should dominate all, we take up this mot d'ordre and make it our law. 
 Since there is such a lack of heirs to maintain the succession of the Divine 
 crucified one, we will try to win a little portion of the heritage for our- 
 selves.' I needed to read this, before I resolved to assert my rights in the 
 succession of Him who came to bring, twenty centuries ago, peace into the 
 world." 
 
 At the end of this preface the Abbe Pichot adds a letter 
 which he has received from a priest who was his teacher. 
 In it the facts which will be dwelt upon in this article, are 
 set forth in language that to every well-wisher of the 
 Latin Church must be painful to read : — 
 
 •' Mv Very Dear Friend,— If I were, like yourself, a simple priest, I 
 should not hesitate to come forward publicly and so obey an impulse 
 which conscience sanctions and which can dispense with other authority.
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 . . . Bni, being a member of a religious congregation,! cannot. . . . I entirely 
 share your way of regarding this sad Dreyfus affair ; not that I have in any 
 special way been let into any secret, but because, having read without 
 prejudice the documents which have been published, it clearly appeared 
 to me that one could not judge otherwise. 
 
 " I am deeply distressed at the attitude of the Catholics. Their preju- 
 dice is so intense, that if a tribunal ever rehabilitates the condemned man, 
 they are ready to accuse the judges of having sold themselves to the 
 Tews.* Regard for justice, the great question of conscience which over- 
 shadows the whole discussion, does not appear to interest them. They 
 model themselves,— and it is a fatal thing to do,— upon their journals. In 
 their eyes everything is lost sight of save race-hatreds and the antagonisms 
 of religion. If we would hear expressed about this matter sentiments 
 that are reasonable and Christian, we must look for them in the papers 
 that are Rationalist and Protestant. It is a deplorable state of mind. 
 You try to remedy it. You will certainly reap some fruit. In any case 
 you will have the merit and satisfaction of having courageously fulfilled a 
 great duty. I congratulate you. — G.C." 
 
 The Abbe Pichot reaped this fruit, that he was censured 
 and punished by his ecclesiastical authorities, as we learn 
 from another " Letter of a Catholic," published in the 
 Siecle of December i8th, 1898. It is signed, F. Depar- 
 dieu, and is well worth reading. It was written with 
 special reference to a letter sent to the Figaro of Decem- 
 ber I2th, 1898, in which the Abbe Pichot, while denying 
 that the Catholic clergy are, and will be, before history 
 responsible for the Dreyfus affair, or that they have in- 
 stigated the conduct of the Etat-Major, yet admits that 
 they have allowed themselves to be deceived and duped 
 by their journals, and now wilfully ignore the facts. 
 
 M. Depardieu thus begins his letter in the Siecle : — 
 
 * This is the line which the anti-Dreyfusards in France, under the guidance of 
 Rochefort, Drumont, Francois Copp^e, and Bruneliere, are now taking.
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 •'Monsieur I' Abbe, — I have read your letter to the Figaro, and I associate 
 myself with the just ones of all religions, as with those of my own, in 
 praising you for having suffered for the truth* 
 
 " But since you recognize that truth and justice are the chief good and 
 the common patrimony of all ho7igst people, let me protest against some of 
 the statements, the inaccuracy of which a prejudice, very natural on your 
 part, has concealed from you. We must not alter the truth, even in favour 
 of the Church. . . . 
 
 " You will not then deny that there are errors which deserve blame, and 
 that persons deceived, because they have done everything in order to be 
 deceived and because they obstinately shut their eyes to the light, are 
 responsible for their mistake and its consequences. 
 
 "Now, if this is true, Monsieur VAhbi, then the clergy of France, from 
 the Archbishops and Bishops down to the last country cure, are with very 
 few exceptions gravely, sadly responsible for the blind obstinacy with 
 which a portion of the French people, less and less considerable every day, 
 but yet still almost the preponderant portion, has upheld for nearly a year 
 injustice, falsehood, atrocious barbarism, nay, the agents and partisans of 
 all this. 
 
 " And to begin with, let not our priests come and say to us : ' This Jew's 
 business did not concern us.' Are those glorious times for ever gone, 
 when not a public crime, not a scandal of court or of street, but found a 
 Bishop to protest against it? Is not the Episcopus before all things he 
 who looks after, watches over the people, and preserves them from going 
 astray ? But a few paces from the place in which I am writing, the Bishop 
 Praetextatus fell under the knife of the Sicarii, because he publicly con- 
 demned the crimes of an all-powerful Queen. 
 
 " If only the clergy, so prompt to mix themselves up, often very indis- 
 creetly, with public affairs, had confined themselves in this matter to a 
 prudent reserve ! But it is proved that on every occasion, in all places. 
 they have been zealous in their support of the miserable authors of a 
 judicial crime that has aroused all over the world the most legitimate 
 reprobation. I know, alas! but two Catholic priests, the Abbe Fremont 
 and yourself, sir, that have had the courage to dissociate yourselves from 
 the troop of wolves. ... All the ecclesiastics with whom I have conversed 
 on the subject, not only approved of the brutal executioners of Dreyfus, of 
 the persecutors of I'icqunrt, but made public profession of their approval. 
 
 • The italics are mine.— F.C.C.
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 "You lay the blame on your journals, which you say have led you into 
 error. But your journals, Monsieiiy I' Abbe, are written by your pupils and 
 by your confreres. They are what you make them. ... No ! If the 
 Church of France would be sincere, let it be thoroughly so, and let it cry 
 vied culpa. Let it give up that grovelling flattery of the sword which has 
 lowered it so much in the world's esteem. 
 
 " What true Catholic soul but has been deeply distressed to see an 
 illustrious preacher,* addressing himself to young people, basely flatter 
 violence, and defend the view that force is the supreme argument ? If the 
 soldier.f whose smile he thus courted, had retained under his uniform the 
 the heart and dignity of an honest man, what contempt must he not have 
 felt for this unworthy disciple of Him who said : ' Blessed are the meek ! ' " 
 
 The writer then outhnes the history of the case, the 
 three weary years during which Dreyfus had no champions 
 outside his own family, the launching of the formal 
 accusation against the wretched man Esterhazy, his 
 acquittal to order, the prostitution of justice in the Zola 
 trials, the confession and death of Henry. Then he 
 continues thus : — 
 
 " While these revelations were being made, honest men, from one end 
 of France to the other, men who think and feel, were stirred at first by 
 legitimate curiosity, and then by irrepressible indignation against the band 
 of scoundrels that had compromised a section of the general staff and 
 sought to compromise the entire army in this villainous affair. These 
 men of heart and head stept forward out of all ranks, out of all corpora- 
 tions, the Church excepted. The Church alone on this occasion furnished 
 no champion of right, of innocence, of truth, so hatefully outraged. I ask 
 you, Monsieur I'Abbc, what avails the priests their five years of philosophy, 
 if in a matter of such public interest they merely acquiesce in the 
 blasphemous follies, the gross sophistries, the cowardly lies of the Libre 
 Parole, of the Patrie, the Jour, the Gaulois, lastly of the Croix, a journal 
 which takes for its frontispiece Jesus crucified, and yet contains nothing 
 but hatred, spleen, and falsehood. 
 
 " Sursiim corda! O ye priests, beat your breasts and say ergo erravimus ! 
 
 * P^re Didon. | General Jamont.
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 For greatly are you gone astray, more so than the pretenders whom you 
 have dragged along with you in your fanaticism, and whose feeble hopes 
 of restoration you have for ever destroyed. — F. Depardieu." 
 
 On Christmas Day the Steele published interviews which 
 a correspondent had had with two leading members of 
 the French clergy. The first of these was M. Mugnier, 
 Vicar of Sainte-Clotilde, one of the most enlightened and 
 upright of the Paris clergy. Asked whether he did not 
 think the time had come for the clergy to give a lead, he 
 answered that the clergy had no business to take sides. 
 "They, too, were soldiers, and," he added, "what does 
 it matter to you what a priest thinks ? " " Nevertheless,'" 
 said his interviewer, " are there not people who expect 
 you to direct their consciences ? " " Certainly," was the 
 answer, " and consciences which can look for direction 
 from me have a right to direction on quite another 
 plane. . . . They hold different opinions, yet to all I must 
 indicate the aim, truth, and justice. Leave the priest 
 aloncf" he added, "leave him in his right place, above all 
 that, above these conflicts. His mission is a higher one." 
 
 " The clergy, then," objected his interviewer, " refuse 
 to take any interest in this question, which yet stirs the 
 human conscience from one end of the earth to the 
 other." 
 
 " Ask that of our chiefs," was the answer. " Question 
 the bishops if you would make the clergy speak." 
 
 " Then you priests would only answer after them ? " 
 
 " Yes, after them, or not at all. I think that that is 
 our duty. Ask Monseigneur the Archbishop." 
 
 The correspondent accordingly sought an interview 
 of Monseigneur Richard, the Archbishop of Paris, who
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 declined the honour, and sent him a message through a 
 secretary that he had a thousand other things to attend to 
 than the Abbe Pichot's letter. 
 
 Lastly, M. Gayraud, a priest and member of Parliament 
 for Brest, was interviewed. He retrenched himself behind 
 the authority of the chose jugee ; though he said he could 
 allow of revision as a political measure destined to con- 
 found the defenders of Dreyfus. He could not, however, 
 hide his violent indignation against the campaign made 
 on behalf of revision, for he considered that no one had 
 the right to disturb men's minds in such a way ; better 
 that justice should go wrong, the light be made darkness, 
 and an innocent man remain in the galleys. 
 
 "If only the clergy had confined themselves to an 
 attitude of prudent reserve ! " is the regretful wish of a 
 sincere Catholic, M. Depardieu. Let us begin with the 
 Jesuit order, and ask — Have they observed such an 
 attitude ? 
 
 Far from it. The Civilta Cattolica, published in Rome, 
 is, as all the world knows, the official organ of the Jesuits. 
 On February 3rd, i8g8, it defined their attitude with 
 regard to the Dreyfus case in a long and carefully formu- 
 lated article, of which the gist was this : that it is, on the 
 whole, better not to kill Jews or send them into exile, but 
 that they ought to be disfranchised in every Christian 
 polity, and forbidden to serve as public functionaries ; 
 they may rightly, indeed, be excluded from citizenship 
 and from all participation in the control of public affairs. 
 
 Is it a mere coincidence that for several years past 
 Drumont has preached exactly the same doctrine in the 
 columns of the Libre Parole ? That it has been the text of
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 six hundred articles which he has written, and of all his 
 books ? If, indeed, his pen differs from that of the Roman 
 Jesuit editor, it is only in this — that the latter observes a 
 certain literary restraint in the expression of his mediaeval 
 intolerance, whereas Drumont, who, by the way, writes 
 detestable French, has the literary tastes and graces of a 
 bargee. And in this connection it must not be forgotten 
 that the manager of the Libre Parole was, if he is not still, 
 M. Odelin — the same person who presides over and 
 controls the great Jesuit training school in the Rue des 
 Postes at Paris. This statement rests not on rumour, but 
 is Drumont's own. He himself announced the fact in an 
 article that he wrote on January i6th, 1895, on the occa- 
 sion of a temporary disagreement with his manager. The 
 school in the Rue des Postes prepares, as is well known, 
 candidates for the great military colleges, St. Cyr and the 
 Poly technique. Most of the Catholic officers in the French 
 army have been trained there, and the young officers so 
 educated know themselves as postards, and ostentatiously 
 flout every Jewish officer. From the day it was started 
 the Libre Parole has been the official organ of this section 
 of the French officers. 
 
 How far the Jesuits admire Drumont we know not. 
 They are too discreet a race to let us into their secrets. 
 But the admiration of Drumont for the order is unfeigned 
 and fulsome. He abominates Jews, and Freethinkers and 
 Protestants are still more odious to him. F"or devout 
 Catholics alone has he any liking, and he goes down on 
 both knees to the Jesuits. 
 
 In the first volume of La France Jnive (p. 261), we 
 learn that " the Jesuit, in his extreme subtlety and clear-
 
 10 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 ness of vision, personifies the French spirit at its best." 
 "They are all very brave, very loyal, and very sincere" 
 {Testament, p. 20). In another work, Fin cVnn Monde 
 (p. 333), he bids us " apply in our projects of intervention 
 in public matters the admirable method of meditation 
 of the * Exercises ' of St. Ignatius." Nor has Drumont, 
 who takes as the motto of his journal the words, " France 
 for the French," left us in the dark as to his political 
 ideal. It is one which will be realized the day when 
 France is handed over, eyes bandaged and hands bound, 
 to the Jesuits. "If," he says, "they had the control of 
 things, everything would go well, as everything went well 
 in Paraguay, of which they had made an earthty paradise." 
 Why does he not include in his ideal the Philippines as 
 well? 
 
 What is the matter with the existing order ? This is 
 the matter. It concedes civil rights not only to Jews, but 
 to Protestants. " To us Catholics," writes Drumont in 
 his Testament (p. 15), " the Protestant, when he usurps a 
 show of authority, is worse than the Jew. He is an 
 enemy more disloyal and more lying. . . . Whenever I 
 have met with a Protestant on my path, I have seen him, 
 in the exercise of his functions, do the work of valet to 
 the Jew." And elsewhere in La France Juive (I., p. 190), 
 he declares that " every Protestant is half a Jew." 
 
 It is not astonishing, then, to find that Drumont casts 
 back wistful glances to the age of the Inquisition. 
 " Torture," he asserts, in his Fin cVun Monde (p. 468), 
 " never existed in the Christian Middle Ages " ; even as, 
 forsooth, " the ancien regime put everyone in a position to 
 resist injustice, and assured to all the rights which would
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. ii 
 
 enable them to defend themselves against tyranny." 
 " The Anti-Semites," he declares, in the Libre Parole 
 for July 20th, 1892, "do not blame the Inquisition. . . . 
 They are convinced that it assured the grandeur and 
 independence of Spain, and their first care, if they were in 
 power, would be to establish a tribtiuiil which would be, it is 
 true, exclusively laic, but which would very much resemble 
 the Spanish Inquisition." Here we learn whence the 
 French Etat-Mnjor gets its idea of military justice, which 
 as Ravary, the acquitter of Esterhazy and accuser of 
 Picquart, has truly remarked, is not as other justice. 
 The trial of Dreyfus, who was falsely condemned after 
 preliminary torture by du Paty de Clam, upon evidence 
 withheld from himself and his counsel, was certainly 
 arranged after Drumont's ideal, the Spanish Inquisition, 
 of which he proclaims the advantages also in these 
 words : — " Never was there any procedure so admirable 
 in its equity, so minute in its circumspection. Never did 
 any tribunal take so many precautions against possible 
 error ; never was respect for the rights of the defence 
 pushed to such a length " {Fin d'un Monde, p. 227). 
 
 Such is the inmost soul, at once naive and cruel, of the 
 man who is, above all others, responsible for the^iniquities 
 which at this moment are a burthen on the conscience of 
 the entire world, of the chief instigator, aider, abettor, 
 and apologist of the French Etat-Major. No wonder that 
 he repudiates the only people who in modern France 
 appear to retain any conscience. " The truth is," he 
 cries, in fury, "that the society which in '89 issued from 
 the Masonic lodges and the plottings of the Jewish 
 cabal (!) was born in the state of mortal sin. It has not
 
 12 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 been baptized, it is outside the Church, and is no good 
 except to be cast out into the draught." 
 
 Let us now leave Drumont, and turn to the strictly 
 religious Press of France ; and no one can find fault, if 
 the two most widely disseminated, and so most influential 
 of its journals, be selected for examination. These are 
 the Pelerin and its political supplement. Though they 
 are edited in the same office, 8, Rue Francois I", Paris, 
 they are practically two papers. The only difference 
 between them is that matter strictly religious prepon- 
 derates in the Pelerin, which not only sells all over 
 France, but is to be also seen in the hands of every Latin 
 pilgrim who visits Rome and Jerusalem. It is a journal 
 of magazine form, and usually contains twenty pages, 
 beside the coloured wrapper and a detachable feuilleton of 
 eight or more pages in length devoted to the history, often 
 legendary, of the Saint for the day. It costs ten centimes, 
 and is now in the twenty-third year of its circulation. 
 On the cover of each copy is a well-executed plate of 
 St. Anthony of Padua, distributing bread to the sick and 
 poor. Angels and fellow-monks escort him bearing 
 baskets of bread ; and above is the Virgin with Child, the 
 latter holding a wreath over the Saint's head. Above this 
 illustration we read the words : — 
 
 " The bread of St. Anthonj' of the Rue Francois P'', in Paris." 
 
 and underneath always appears a notice of this kind : — 
 
 " 645 letters have been placed this week in the box of St. Anthony, 8, 
 Rue Francois I"^^ They announced or recommended: 138 cures, 155 
 spiritual graces, 450 temporal graces, 239 conversions, 124 positions 
 obtained, 467 thanksgivings, 79 calls, 45 marriages, 443 special graces, 
 II first communions, 78 schools, 82 religious houses, 212 shops, 21 objects
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 13 
 
 lost, 23 examinations, 135 families, 148 deaths, 25 lawsuits, 218 young 
 people, 22 parishes." 
 
 The rest of the four pages of the wrapper is filled with 
 selected thanksgiving notices under these various cate- 
 gories. They are headed, Extraits dii Courrier; and a 
 footnote assures us that from want of space it is impossible 
 to print all the thanksgivings received, but that beside 
 those here given in the Pelenn, there are inserted every 
 day in the Croix some of these " edifying recitals." We 
 select from the Pelerin of Sunday, February 6th, 1898, a 
 specimen of these notices. The list for that day begins 
 with the followine: : — 
 
 'f) 
 
 " Army.— Meuse. — 2 francs, promise made to St. Anthony, if I obtained 
 a good number of points in the firing practice. I have obtained more 
 than 1 hoped for, as I am not a very good shot. Thanks. — A blue." 
 
 Certainly the prayers are often for things we ourselves 
 might not pray for, but they as a rule breathe a very 
 sincere, if uninstructed, piety. Now let us turn to the 
 contents of the magazine. 
 
 The first page of the Pclevin has, under the motto, 
 A dveniat regmim tuum, a coloured frontispiece representing 
 the Virgin, Child in arms, standing on the globe, with 
 views of Jerusalem and of the Vatican in the back- 
 ground on either hand. The rest of the page is filled 
 with a review of the events for the week. Four or more 
 pages of each number are taken up with coloured illus- 
 trations of current events. Thus, in the issue of February 
 6th, i8g8, we have pictures of the burning and sacking of 
 Jewish houses in Algiers, of the scrimmage in the French 
 Chamber on January 22nd, i8g8, when M. de Bernis, the
 
 14 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 Royalist and anti-Dreyfusard member, insulted M. Jaures. 
 The last page is a coloured cartoon, intended to cast 
 odium and contempt on the French Republic. 
 
 Let us now give a few specimens of the political style 
 of this journal. In the issue for February 6th, i8g8, we 
 read this : — 
 
 " The agitation caused by the manoeuvres of the Jewish Syndicate has 
 died down a little. But the fire smoulders under the cinders, and we fear 
 that the Zola trial, which is to come on in the Assize Court next week, 
 will rekindle this but half-extinguished conflagration. If France had been 
 more Christian and more faithful to her baptism, she would not have had 
 to suffer this audacious act of insolence on the part of a handful of Jetvs 
 and Protestants. At any rate, this lesson must not be lost. The Catholics 
 have numbers on their side ; they ought to be the moving force and power. 
 Let them at last show that they are." 
 
 The above is directly below the motto : " Thy kingdom 
 come." We turn over a few pages, and on the verso of 
 the picture of the riots at Algiers find a description of 
 what took place under the heading : " Anti-Semitism in 
 Algeria." 
 
 Algiers was on January the 23rd, i8g8, the scene of a 
 violent and fatal riot, instigated by the Anti-Semites. 
 Max-Regis, subsequently elected their Mayor,andDrumont, 
 elected last May as their Deputy in the Chamber by the 
 French of Algiers, were mainly responsible for the dis- 
 turbances. The rioters, with cries of Mort aiix Juifs, 
 overcame the few policemen and Zouaves opposed to 
 them by a timid Governor, M. Lepine, and invaded one 
 of the chief thoroughfares, the Rue Bab-Azoun. The 
 pillage of Jewish shops began. The rioters tore down the 
 shutters, and used the fragments of them to destroy the
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 15 
 
 shop fronts. All the goods within were seized and thrown 
 to the winds, or set on fire, where they were not simply 
 looted. Then the Rue Bab-el-Oued was sacked in the 
 same way. The Jews defended themselves from their 
 house-tops, but were in many instances murdered in the 
 fray. The disorder lasted all day and during half the 
 night. On the next day, after the funeral of a man 
 named Cayrol, who had been killed in the general riot, 
 the crowd set upon two Jews, who refused to give up 
 their places in an omnibus, and murdered them in cold 
 blood. In describing these scenes the Pelerin declares 
 that they were mainly due to the nondescripts dumped 
 down by European nations in the French colonies ; but 
 at the same time it admits that " the looters were 
 encouraged by the approbation of all true colonists." 
 
 Then follows this passage, which it behoves everyone 
 to read who desires to gain insight into the inner aspira- 
 tions of Latin monks of France. It begins with a frank 
 avowal that an Attila's methods of spreading the faith are 
 by no means to be despised. Barbarians, in the eyes of 
 the Assumptionist monks, may make even better mission- 
 aries than Madame de Maintenon's dragoons : — 
 
 " Are these modern barbarians about to open out for Christianity a new 
 path, as formerly did the hordes of Attila ? This would certainly appear 
 to be the case, judging from the following letter addressed to the Croix : — 
 
 " ' The dominant note in the troubles at Algiers has been intentionally 
 passed over in silence by all the Press. It was thus : — 
 
 " ' In the first place, the perfect quiet amidst all the disturbance of the 
 French element in the population. One only had to look at one's neighbour 
 to understand. All felt that this explosion had to come, that it was inevit- 
 able. No one was surprised ; quite the contrary. 
 
 " ' When the riot became serious and the disturbance general, one saw,
 
 i6 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 as if by enchantment, all the French houses cover themselves with inscrip- 
 tions of this kind written by hand or on printed placards : French and 
 Catholic house. Christian house. Catholic shop. No Jews in this house. 
 We are all Christians and Catholics. Long live France ! Down with the 
 Jews ! 
 
 "'Well, on that day Algiers made a more open demonstration on the 
 side of Christ than it had ever done before. She put herself spontaneously, 
 openly, under the protection of Christ. All was clear at a glance; Christ- 
 ian, anti-Jew ; there are for you the two inseparable terms. 
 
 " ' Who had given this mot d'ordre ? 
 
 "'Who had suggested this idea? Ah! no one, if it was not Christ 
 Himself, the Christ who loves the Francs, and to whom one must needs 
 come back, since He alone is the Saviour. 
 
 "'What is more, the protection vouchsafed was clear, palpable, and 
 evident. Not a French house, nor even a foreign one, nor an Arab one 
 either, suffered the least harm ; yet close beside they pillaged everything 
 in the Jew's home, very often when it stood between two non-Jewish 
 shops. Not a single mistake was made. The French traders had no fear 
 for themselves for a single moment. And even if the pillage had lasted 
 longer, they would have come to no harm. No one had any misgivings. 
 
 " ' France, under the protection of Christ, shielded all, save only the 
 traitors. May she, therefore, at last come to realize what influence she 
 will wield in the world in proportion as she makes it more and more clear 
 what she really is, namely before all things, Christian and Catholic' " 
 
 The Pelerin of February 13th, 1898, has brutal carica- 
 tures on p. 12 of Dreyfus on his island. On February 
 20th, 1898, a full-page coloured illustration of General 
 Mercier, at the Zola trial, swearing with quiet recklessness 
 — that " Dreyfus is a traitor, and justly condemned." 
 On p. 16 another cartoon, in which Henry is depicted 
 insulting Picquart in the presence of the judges, along 
 with offensive caricatures of Zola, his counsel, and of 
 various Jews. 
 
 March 20th, 1898, a coloured full-page illustration of 
 the Comte de Mun, who declared in the Chamber that he
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 17 
 
 would like to see all Dreyfusards taken and strangled 
 without ceremony. On the last page a coloured cartoon 
 representing a stage on which a French artisan, with 
 votes and ballot boxes, is in conflict with a Jew, cari- 
 catured in the usual way, and scattering gold pieces. 
 The stage lights throw their shadows on the background, 
 and the shadow of the artisan appears as Christ with 
 nimbus, that of the Jew as Satan with horns and hoofs. 
 
 April loth, 1898. In the weekly review of events we 
 read this note relative to the Pope's attempted mediation 
 between Spain and America : — 
 
 " At the last moment we learn that the Protestants are working might and 
 main to prevent the Holy Father from intervening as a peace-maker." 
 
 On page 7 of the same issue is a homily explanatory of 
 the large coloured cartoon of our Lord's Resurrection. 
 It is headed : " Resnrrexit sicut dixit." In it we read the 
 following : — 
 
 "Christ no doubt is persecuted, flouted, crucified by His enemies. In 
 their speeches they lay Him in the tomb. They cry out that they have 
 done for the Galilean. But the Galilean triumphs after all. He reappears 
 always resplendent in His glory. . . . And Christians sing : • Resurrexit 
 sicut dixit : Alleluia.' 
 
 "We must needs say these things in view of the Jewish {i.e., Drey- 
 fusard) agitation. . . . 
 
 " They that have sold themselves, that betray everything for the Jew's 
 gold, conscience, justice, honour, religious convictions, country — these 
 keep up their odious traffic. And they say : ' We will put an end to it 
 all, to religion, to Christ, to all they love who are not of our race.' . . . Yet 
 we shall see those whom the devil inspires reduced to silence. Let them 
 utter their savage cries. The Cross of Jesus Christ will triumph over 
 them. In the hour marked out by Providence, the as^itation of impiety 
 v.i\\ cease. . . . Catholics, let us never be discouraged."
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 As the general elections of May 8th draw nigh, the 
 Pelerin provides various forms of prayer and pious 
 exercises destined to secure the triumph of Saint Michel 
 over Lucifer — that is, of the Church over the Republic. 
 In the issue for April 28th is a cartoon of M. Brisson, the 
 subsequent author of Revision. He sits in the Tribune 
 of the Chamber with the Croix before him, and behind, 
 Time, armed with Scythe and Watch, touches him on 
 the shoulder. About this time the French Catholics 
 organized a league of "Justice — Egalite," as they called 
 it, for electoral purposes. The Croix and the Pelerin 
 advertised it, and it had its headquarters at their office, 
 8, Rue Francois I". The religious papers claim that it 
 was a great success, and Catholics certainly won many 
 fresh seats, and had large minorities in places which in 
 former years they had not dared even to contest. In the 
 Pelerin for April 24th, 1898, is to be found a copy of the 
 manifesto, with a form of personal adhesion attached, of 
 the Secretariat d' Action Electorale Catholique — "Justice — 
 Egalite.'" It runs as follows : — 
 
 " Sir, — The elections for the legislature require of us urgent efforts and 
 sacrifices. The boldness and the unspeakable manoeuvres of the Dreyfus 
 syndicate demonstrate the immensity of the danger. 
 
 "The Committee of the Catholic Canvassing Committee — 'Justice — 
 Equality' — calls upon men of heart, Catholic patriots, to join together as 
 one man and oppose the coalition of sectaries and revolutionaries. 
 
 " It is a question of saving all works Catholic and French, and of saving 
 our country itself. 
 
 " The work of Catholic organization has made good progress during the 
 last year, but is still very inadequate. Men and money are wanted in 
 order to put forward good candidates. — L. Laya, Advocate at the Court 
 of Appeal, General Secretary, 22, Cours la Reine."
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 19 
 
 On May, 15th, i8g8, the elections were over, and we 
 read in the weekly review of the Pelerin the following : — 
 
 '■ The election of Drumont at Algiers, in spite of the efiforts of the 
 Government and of the Governor, M. Lepine, the pitiful fall of M. Reinach, 
 the friend of Dreyfus, mark a new and favourable phase in the progress 
 of anti-Semitism. Solemn prayers have been offered for the elections in 
 many dioceses and will be renewed before the final balloting." 
 
 The Pelerin of Sunday, June 5th, 1898, contains a 
 flaming testimonial from Cardinal Rampolla to the re- 
 ligious work achieved by itself and by the Croix. It is 
 addressed to " T. R. P. Picard, General Superior of the 
 Augustinian Assumptionists," the Order that owns and 
 runs these journals. On the last page is a cartoon repre- 
 senting Satan interviewing M. Goblet, in a manner 
 apparently little relished by this unsuccessful politician, 
 who lost his seat on May 8th, 1898. 
 
 The Pelerin of June 12th has a cartoon of its favourite 
 politicians, MM. de Cassagnac, Millevoye, Deroulede, 
 Piou, Motte, Lerolle, and Drumont, the rump of the 
 Boulangist party, and all of them now partisans of a 
 coup d'etat by the Church and Army combined. 
 
 Let us turn to the political supplement of the Pelerin. 
 It is in newspaper form, four sides with four columns 
 each. As a frontispiece we have a large engraving of 
 Christ stretched upon the cross, with the legend Chrisius 
 Vincit. Beneath are a biblical text and a calendar for the 
 week. On the second page, at the back of the engraving, 
 is printed the Gospel lesson for the day in French. A 
 notice heads the letterpress to the effect that the journal 
 is edited at 8, Rue Francois I", Paris and at all the 
 bureaux of the supplements of La Croix.
 
 20 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 We take up the number for Sunday, February 13th, 
 1898. The bibHcal text beneath the crucified one is 
 this : — " Arise, O Lord : Why dost Thou slumber ? 
 Arise, and turn us not away for ever. Why dost Thou 
 turn away Thy face ? Why forgettest Thou us in our 
 distress ? " Underneath this text is a large print review 
 of the week's events, the first paragraph of which is 
 abuse of Zola and his counsel. Next comes a paragraph 
 headed: — " Masses offered for the Church of St. Joachim," 
 from which we learn that this paper, the Croix, has been 
 the means of 45,000 masses being offered to the Holy 
 Father, and that the generosity of the faithful is such that 
 promises of 500 to 1,000 masses and more reach every 
 day the office of the Croix, 8, Rue Francois I". These 
 figures give some idea of the enormous circulation 
 enjoyed by the paper. 
 
 In the second column, side by side with the engraving 
 of Jesus on the cross, is the leading article, entitled " The 
 Plot." It begins thus :— 
 
 " Labourers, workmen, traders, the Dreyfus-Zola Scandal, so systemati- 
 cally worked by all who hate France, demonstrates that our country is the 
 prey of a foreign invasion. . . . The interests of the nation are daily 
 betrayed to the foreigner by this German-Jewish band, under the cover of 
 freemasonry. 
 
 " The accomplices more or less wilful of these criminal efforts are 
 these : — 
 
 "I. The Protestant Sectaries who are led astray by a confessional 
 solidarity (solidaritc confessionell:), and for whom the true fatherland is in 
 London and Berlin. 
 
 " 2. The Socialist agitators, who, under the guidance of Prussian Jews, 
 aim at destroying all the forces of society." 
 
 There follows much more of the same kind, very sug-
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 21 
 
 gestive that Drumont hires out his pen to the Croix. On 
 the next page Scheurer-Kestner is abused for being a 
 Protestant. The editors also gloat over the fact that the 
 members of the Dreyfus syndicate are nearly lynched by 
 the mob on their way to and from the law-court. " Why 
 not put them all in prison ? " they ask. On the third 
 page is an account of the electoral agitation conducted 
 by the Croix, which ends thus : — 
 
 " The league of the Ave Maria forms an invincible army. See how 
 Providence forestalls our wishes — the Dreyfus-Zola affair! The enemies 
 of France and of the Church could not have invented anything better 
 calculated to discover to patriots the awful international plot which we 
 have incessantly denounced." 
 
 In the issue of March 13th, i8g8, our eye lights on a 
 paragraph which shows that the teaching of the Jesuit 
 organ Civilia Cattolica has not been thrown away. It is 
 headed : Pas de Jui/s, and runs thus : — 
 
 " In the Assetnblee Agricole of the East of France the following resolution 
 has been adopted : 
 
 "'We will vote for no candidates who will not pledge themselves to 
 propose, support, and pass a law forbidding Jews to have electoral rights 
 or to exercise civil and military functions. 
 
 " ' We ask all Catholics and patriots to adopt this platform at the 
 elections.' 
 
 " Here (adds the Croix) is a programme short, clear, and simple. It will 
 be easy to propose and even force it on candidates at election meetings." 
 
 The exclusion of Jews from all citizenship has, as was 
 pointed out above, been consistently urged by Drumont, 
 particularly in an article in the Libre Parole of December 
 2ist, 1894, at the time of the Dreyfus court-martial. 
 
 April loth, i8g8, was Easter Sunday ; the Calvary was
 
 22 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 the Pelerin's supplement, the Croix had a plate represent- 
 ing our Lord's Resurrection. Alongside of both is a 
 manifesto of the "Justice — Egalite'' league, in which the 
 faithful are thanked for the prayers they have offered and 
 the subscriptions they have sent, and then stimulated to 
 fresh exertions by the following appeal : — 
 
 " God is good, and He comes visibly to aid our dear country. . . . 
 
 " The committee 'Justice — Egalite ' addresses to tiie French Army and to 
 its chiefs the expression of its respectful and sympathetic admiration. 
 
 " And utters the fervent hope: That the French electors will deal sum- 
 marily at the coming elections with the manoeuvres of the Dreyfus 
 Syndicate : — 
 
 " I. By refusing their votes to any candidate who is allied with the 
 Jewry and with Freemasonry, and who is not a resolute opponent of the 
 Dreyfus Syndicate. 
 
 " 2. By putting forward in every electoral district, and energetically 
 supporting candidates who are French by nationality and origin and of 
 proved patriotism." 
 
 On Sunday, April 17th, the Croix has a fresh article on 
 the electoral situation. After a bitter attack on Protes- 
 tants we read this : — 
 
 "Is it too much to require that future deputies should have no pacts 
 with the partisans of the traitor Dreyfus ? . . . 
 
 " Fervent prayers are raised to Heaven. The leaguers of the Avr Maria 
 will do wonders. The readers of the Croix and adherents of the committee 
 'Justice — Egalite ' will fight like lions, and God will give them the victory. 
 
 " Let us not forget that the elections take place on May the 8th, the 
 Feast of Jeanne d'Arc and of St. Michel." 
 
 On April 24th, under the rubric Gazette, the following: — 
 
 " A fresh symptom of the decay of anti-clericalism : — 
 " The commis-voyageurs (merchant travellers), whose impieties used to be 
 famous at tables d'hote, and who, in Gambetta's time, were exalted as the
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 23 
 
 destroyers of clericalism, now never travel without an important docu. 
 ment, their certificate of baptism. 
 
 " Every time one of them is asked, ' But are you not a Jew ? ' he answers, 
 • I ! Never. Here is my baptismal certificate.' " 
 
 These truly pious bagmen remind us strangely of the 
 Christian and Catholic colonists of Algiers, a city where, 
 if you enter a Jewish shop you run the risk of being 
 photographed in doing so by a Catholic artist, who lurks 
 outside in order to your subsequent identification and 
 exposure as a friend of the Jews. 
 
 The same issue contains, under the capital rubric : — 
 " Candidat, Repondez" hints for the heckling of candidates 
 at the approaching election. 
 
 "Let us rather see who you are. 
 
 " Here are three questions. Enlighten us and answer frankly. 
 
 " Are you in favour 0/ liberty for ail except for evil and for evil-doers ? 
 
 " Are you for the equality of all good and true Frenchmen ? 
 
 " Or, on the contrary, are you a grovelling valet of the new aristocracy, 
 and do you believe in restoring privileges simply and solely in favour of 
 Freemasons, foreign Jews, Panamists and Sectaries [i.e., Protestants). 
 
 "CANDIDATE, ANSWER! 
 
 "Are yod the Friend of Jew.s? 
 
 " The friend of Jews is not our friend. . . . 
 
 " What think you of Zola ? 
 
 " What think you of the traitor Dreyfus and of the Syndicate ? 
 
 "The electors must know; for it is said already that the weak-kneed 
 ones of the Government have promised to capitulate on the morrow of the 
 elections to the influences of Jews, Protestants, Masons and foreigners, and 
 to revise the Dreyfus case. 
 
 "If you were a deputy would you be in the flock of tlie Syndicate? 
 
 "Would you be with those who will basely forsake the Army ? 
 
 " Will you be one of the dumb dogs ? 
 
 " Are you a Freemason ? . . ."
 
 24 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 The issue of May ist has, along with a letter of advice 
 how to vote from the Archbishop of Aix, the text of 
 another broadside issued for voters by the Committee 
 "Justice — Egalitc." This committee, the reader must 
 bear in mind, is composed of ecclesiastics, and has its 
 headquarters in the office of the editors of the Pelerin 
 and the Croix. It is entitled Les Sans-patrie, and we 
 reproduce one or two flosciili from it : — 
 
 " Frenchmen, it appertains to your good sense and patriotism to frustrate 
 the plot of the international Jewry, represented by Dreyfus the traitor, and 
 Zola the Italian, to parry the blow levelled by Freemasonry. Patriots, 
 to-day more than ever, it needs be that our loved France should be kept 
 for the French.* . . . 
 
 " No more slavery ! But a France independent, proud, and respected. 
 
 " Down with the Jews ! Down with the Freemasons ! 
 
 " To the Devil's Island with all anti-patriots ! " 
 
 There is about the above, as indeed about most 
 that meets the eye in these remarkable religious 
 newspapers, the true ring of Drumont and Deroulede, 
 and of the other friends and allies of the hired traitor 
 Esterhazy. In the same issue we have the text of another 
 electoral broadsheet or placard, also sold at the rate of 
 fifty for the half-franc. It is entitled : " Freemasons,- let 
 us have no more of them ! " From it we learn that the 
 Freemasons "form an imperium in imperio," iha.t "they 
 take their mot d'ordre from Lemmi, the great enemy of 
 France, from the Cornelius Herz, the Artons, the great 
 Panama swindlers, from the Dreyfus, the Zolas . . ." 
 we are begged to " remember that nearly all the per- 
 
 * " La France aux Francais" is the motto which Drumont sets at the head of 
 his paper, the Lib>e Parole.
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 25 
 
 sonages mixed up with the proces Zola-Dreyfus were 
 members of the lodges." It ends thus : — 
 
 'b^ 
 
 " We must have no more of them. Why? Because they excite and heep up 
 a war of religion (!) Full of tenderness for the Jews, full of regard for the 
 Protestants, they are ever filled with a sectarian hatred of the religion of 
 the majority of Frenchmen. . . ." 
 
 On May 8th, the day of the elections, we read that : — 
 
 " The army of Catholics and patriots has aroused itself. They thought 
 it was dead and buried. The sectaries and Dreyfusards affected to trample 
 on us. To-day they change their tune. Very few are the departments 
 which hold aloof from the Catholic and patriotic movement. All the worse 
 for them ! . . . The Catholic executive committee '/ws^w — Egalite' is to- 
 day known all over France, and shelters itself under the shadow of La Croix. 
 It feels the heart of France palpitate with a marvellous impulse of generosity. 
 In a few weeks it has received 120,000 francs, and will go on receiving money 
 till the ballotings are over ; for it is necessary to contribute to the cost of 
 numerous candidatures. . . . God be praised 1 Its efforts have not been 
 in vain. The results won are most encouraging. Henceforth France has 
 a Catholic organization." 
 
 One more extract will suffice. It is from a leader in 
 the supplement politique of the Pelerinfor July loth entitled, 
 Totijours Dreyfus : — 
 
 " Here we are plunged again into the cursed Dreyfus affair. The Jews 
 and their accomplices, partisans of the traitor, have sworn to move heaven 
 and earth. All the worse for them if they provoke fresh troubles inside our 
 country and even complications with foreign nations. . . . 
 
 " Shall we then never have done with this business ? 
 
 "Is there then no law to chastise these partisans of a traitor who give 
 rise to the gravest difficulties, and threaten to plunge the country into 
 revolution or war ? 
 
 "Alas! The truth must be avowed. The triumph of the masonic sect 
 in France is withal that of the international Jewry. Even if this band 
 does not govern outright, anyhow no one dares to govern without and in
 
 26 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 spite of it. If you lay hands on the lowest of these wretches, you at once 
 bring the whole sect, the whole Jewry about your ears. They dared to 
 strike Dreyfus and send him to the Devil's Island. The blow fell upon 
 them all, and they are resolved to return it, blow for blow." 
 
 The above extracts, culled from sixteen issues only of 
 these " religious " journals, could be multiplied in- 
 definitely by anyone who cared to run his eye through 
 their files for the whole of the year i8g8, and especially 
 through the file of the daily Croix.* They bear out the 
 following conclusions : — 
 
 1. The French bishops, throughout the year 1898, 
 allowed their Church to identify itself with the cause of 
 the guilty Etat-Major, to ally itself with a band of forgers, 
 assassins, and traitors, whom as Christians they should 
 have led the way in denouncing and repudiating. 
 
 2. They cannot plead that they knew no better, and 
 had no data upon which to form a judgment. As early 
 as November, 1897, the innocence of Dreyfus and the 
 guilt of Esterhazy were established; and the documents 
 and depositions published before the end of February, 
 1898, were more than sufficient as a basis for a clear and 
 certain pronouncement on the merits of the case. In- 
 telligent persons all over France, especially the Protes- 
 tants, recognized the truth ; the whole civilized world 
 outside France recognized it. The French bishops, 
 through their relations with the outside Catholic world, 
 were peculiarly well situated to come by the truth, had 
 they wished to do so. 
 
 3. They have allowed Drumont to come forward and 
 
 ♦There are several religious journals of this name in France. They give 
 different local news, but are all alike in sentiment.
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 27 
 
 pose urbi et orbi as the political spokesman of French 
 Catholicism. They have suffered their religious journals 
 all over France to disseminate the gospel of Drumont, a 
 man whom future generations of Frenchmen will execrate 
 as the evil genius of his country in this last decade of the 
 nineteenth century, as the preacher of civil war, as the 
 apostle of religious hatreds and intolerance ; of anarchy 
 and assassination, of fraud and injustice, of forgery and 
 treason, the friend, apologist, and accomplice, 
 
 4. The French bishops have allowed all this without a 
 single protest. In private they have encouraged it. 
 They have hoped to exploit the popularity of the French 
 Army on behalf of religion as they conceive it. They 
 have not cared whether Dreyfus was innocent or Ester- 
 hazy guilty. All they saw in their shortsightedness was 
 the ephemeral truth that Dreyfus would make a good 
 stick with which to belabour Freemasons, Protestants, 
 and Republicans of conviction. Accordingly by nerveless 
 acquiescence, where not by active participation, they have 
 caused the faithful to stumble. 
 
 5. The French Jesuits, in particular, are responsible. 
 For firstly, they in their great school of the Rue des Pastes 
 educate the vast majority of French officers ; they turn 
 them out devout Catholics in opinion, and Royalists in 
 their sympathies. But they have not used their influence 
 over their pupils, young and old, on behalf of humanity, 
 justice, truth, and of that peace and brotherhood between 
 officer and officer which is essential to the well-being of 
 a national army. Secondly, they have not repudiated 
 Drumont and his works. Thirdly, in their official organ 
 the CiviWl Cattolica they preach the very doctrine which
 
 28 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 is the keynote of all Drumont's works, and which con- 
 stitutes the official programme of the party of treason and 
 injustice, of violence and forgery. Fourthly, the intimate 
 connection between their Order and the Libre Parole of 
 Drumont has been attested by Drumont himself, 
 
 6. The Catholic party in the French Chamber, led by 
 the Comte Albert de Mun, has above every other party 
 distinguished itself by its bitter hostility to the cause of 
 justice and humanity. It would be unfair to the leading 
 spirits of this party to suppose that they have any illusions 
 about the innocence or guilt of Dreyfus and Esterhazy. 
 Nevertheless, when Drumont in the course of last Decem- 
 ber appealed for subscriptions with which to prosecute 
 MM. Yves Guyot and Reinach, as many as 300 Royalist 
 and Catholic princes, dukes, marquises, counts, and 
 viscounts of France hastened to record in the columns of 
 the Libre Parole their unfeigned admiration for Henry the 
 forger, and accomplice in treason of Esterhazy. All 
 these personages are devoted sons of the Latin Church. 
 To the mottoes which they append to their subscriptions 
 we will presently refer. 
 
 It is improbable that the English reading public have 
 much insight into the inner spirit of the French clerical 
 party, or the present writer would not have been called 
 to task by his reviewers in Tlie Times, in Literature, in 
 The Glasgow Herald, and in The Outlook, and Pall Mall 
 Gazette, for his criticisms of the attitude in the Dreyfus 
 case of the French Church and Jesuits. That these 
 journals are so reluctant to believe evil of the Latin 
 Church abroad is really a high tribute to the patriotism, 
 honesty, and humanity of those who within these islands
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 29 
 
 are adherents thereof. To praise the English ultramon- 
 tanes for these qualities would be to insult them ; because 
 it would be to impute to them the possibility of being 
 other than, as English subjects, trained like the rest of us 
 in self-government, self-reliance, religious tolerance, and 
 political fair play, they must necessarily be. They, no 
 doubt, have been as much in the dark as many others, 
 with respect to the sinister and self-compromising line 
 taken in this terrible business by the French Church — a 
 Church which is only too ready to miss great moral issues 
 when they are set before it, and to cause others to miss 
 them. A true friend would surely suggest to English 
 Catholics that they might do worse than send out mis- 
 sionaries to their French co-religionists to instruct them 
 in the elementary principles of political righteousness. 
 English Catholics have surely a vital interest to save, if 
 they can, from moral bankruptcy the eldest daughter of 
 their Church. 
 
 The demoralization wrought by the anti-Semitic Press, 
 to which we must reckon the religious journals above 
 examined to belong, is painfully shown in the posthumous 
 honours which its readers heap upon Colonel Henry. 
 That this officer was a perjured and self-convicted forger 
 was an acknowledged fact ; yet this Press has ever since 
 his death acclaimed him as a patriot, a hero, a martyr of 
 the Jews. M. Charles Maurras in the royalist Gazette de 
 France, the doyenne of Paris papers, long ago extolled this 
 miscreant as a suitable object of a culte domestique in every 
 French home, and declared that nothing but " the scruples 
 of a mischievous half -Protestant education restrained " 
 the Revisionist Press from doing honour to his memory.
 
 30 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 More recently Colonel Henry's widow, for whom every- 
 one must feel the deepest pity, has been instigated by the 
 military faction to prosecute MM. Yves Guyot and Joseph 
 Reinach for an article written by the latter in the Steele, 
 of which M. Guyot is editor. This article was an attempt 
 to gauge the extent of Colonel Henry's complicity in 
 treason with Esterhazy, who, be it remembered, in his 
 memoirs, admits that he has been for twenty years the 
 intimate friend of Henry, whereas the latter's widow 
 denies that they ever knew each other until the middle of 
 the year 1898. The drift of M. Keinach's article was 
 identical with that of one which appeared from the present 
 writer's pen in the National Review for December, 
 1898. 
 
 The kindest thing would have been to dissuade this 
 poor lady from a prosecution which, if impartially con- 
 ducted, can only involve her husband's memory in fresh 
 infamy. But to the partisans of the Etat-Major, who 
 hope to have another Judge Delegorgue or Perivier to 
 plead before, it seems a splendid opportunity of wreaking 
 vengeance on the two men who have been so strenuous in 
 the uphill fight for truth and justice. Accordingly, the 
 Libre Parole opened in December a subscription Irst to 
 raise funds wherewith to sustain this ill-timed suit. 
 Royalists and Catholics all over France hastened to sub- 
 scribe, and within a fortnight 130,000 francs were raised. 
 As is often the case with partisans inspired by mere 
 passion to open their purses, many contributors accom- 
 panied their subscriptions with an expression of their 
 inmost feelings ; and, if we glance down the lists of the 
 Libre Parole, we meet with many such entries as these : —
 
 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 31 
 
 " St. Bartholomew's night saved France from dismemberment, 2 francs. 
 "A. Bailliere and one of his friends, who would like to see 100,000 Jews 
 and other traitors to the country guillotined, 100 francs." 
 
 As there are less than 80,000 Jews in France, this friend 
 of Esterhazy leaves a good margin. 
 
 " For the widow of Henry, for the extermination of the Jew and of the 
 Huguenot, i franc. 
 
 " Out of France with the Jews ! A St. Bartholomew's for the Free- 
 masons, 8 francs. 
 
 " A group of officers who impatiently wait for the order to experiment 
 with the new explosives and new cannon on the 100,000 Jews who poison 
 the country, 25 francs. 
 
 " A.V. For the complete extermination of the youtres, 1 franc. 
 
 " Some gold while we wait for lead ! Ariste and Jeanne, 20 francs. 
 
 " One who begins to understand St. Bartholomew's in view of the 
 anti-patrio'.ic attitude of the Protestants, C. L., o francs. 50. 
 
 " R. J. For the extermination of Jews and those indoctrinated by them, 
 2 francs. 
 
 " Out of France with Jews or let them be hung, 5 francs. 
 
 "The Abbe C. The blood of Colonel Henry cries out for vengeance, 3 
 francs. 
 
 " An aggrege of the university who begins to understand St. Bartholo- 
 mew's and the i8th Brumaire, 2 francs. 
 
 " A licencii in history who finds the Inquisition to be an institution of 
 public utility, and St. Bartholomew's a work of national purification, 5 
 francs. 
 
 " Hurrah for a Jewish St. Bartholomew's, M. A. Poisson, 3 francs." 
 
 Such is the ferocity inspired by the I.ibre Parole and the 
 Croix. It remains to mention what appears to us to be 
 one of the mo.^t mebincholy signs of the time. This was 
 a sermon preached in the Madeleine on Sunday, Decem- 
 ber I2th, to a crowded and fashionable congregation by 
 the Pere Coub6. For an hour he assailed the Jews with 
 every formula of opprobrium dear to their mediaeval
 
 33 A CLERICAL CRUSADE. 
 
 oppressors ; and his vast, well-dressed audience uttered 
 not any protest, but greeted the gravest of his insults with 
 a hum of approval. Nevertheless Jesus said : Blessed 
 are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' 
 sake : for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Surely this 
 is the lot of the Jew in France at this time. And if a 
 tree is to be known by its fruit, what shall be the judg- 
 ment on modern French Catholicism ?
 
 IL CASO DREYFUS; OK, THE JESUIT 
 
 VIEW. 
 
 N the last number of this Review I could only 
 refer in passing to a remarkable article, entitled 
 " // Caso Drey/tis," which appeared in the 
 Civilta Cattolica for February 5th, i8g8. It was not 
 signed, and it professes to be written from the fixed 
 standpoint of this journal, which has always been recog- 
 nized as the official exponent of Jesuit opinion. I have 
 been accused of reckless calumny of the Jesuit Order, 
 because in my history of the Dreyfus case I pointed to it 
 as a mainspring of the affair. I now propose, by way of 
 substantiating my opinion, to examine somewhat at length 
 this officially authorized exposition. It begins as follows : — 
 
 " In the memory of man there was never got up such a hullabaloo over 
 a legitimate sentence judicially pronounced more than three years before, ^ >* 
 
 as has lately been raised all over the civilized world about that which has ^ 
 
 in France condemned the traitor Captain Dreyfus to perpetual banishment 
 to the Island of the Devil. . . . 
 
 ' "What has unchained such a tempest all of a sudd enj Where is the 
 /Eolus who has let his reins go? The Count de Man, amidst the applause 
 of the Chamber, hinted at the truth in the course of December last, when 
 he spoke in veiled language of pa mysterious force, of an occult power^J 
 that has turned France topsy-turvy, all in order to vilify the guardians of 
 her flag. His words called forth loud cheers, when he eloquently appealed 
 to his hearers to defend the honour of the army against this malignant 
 
 C
 
 34 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 power ; and the ovation awoke echoes from one end of the country to the 
 other. 
 
 "The veil was transparent enough. Who did not know the history, 
 •^^^ open or secret, of the traitor Dreyfus ? A captain in the French Army 
 and appointed to the Etat-Major, of Alsatian origin, he is a Jew by race 
 and— what is more— he is, so it is said, a leader in Freemasonry^!^ All the 
 same, it was discovered some three years back that he was a common spy, 
 and that he had communicated to a foreign Government, which paid him 
 for them, French documents of great military importance. Brought before 
 a court-martial and convicted of treason, he was by an unanimous vote of 
 the judges condemned to be deported to Guiana. 
 
 "The trial was held in secret. The proof of his treason was presented 
 
 to his defenders in the shape of a bordereau or list, authentic and wholly in 
 
 jv, his handwriting. But the other documents, still more irrefragable, which 
 
 '0*^ — vponstituted clear evidence of his guilt, were of such a delicate and ticklish 
 
 f>V f nature that the French Government was not able to divulge them without 
 
 ^«^ endangering the safety of the State. For this reason the judges alone, 
 
 under pledge of the most absolute silence, were made acquainted with 
 
 them and accorded liberty to examine and study them as much as they 
 
 liked. Apart from this necessary secrecy, all the rest of the trial was 
 
 conducted and concluded in accordance with the strictest rules of law." 
 
 There are four points in the above which merit atten- 
 tion. The first is that a certain spirit of levity characterizes 
 the words in which the Jesuit editor approaches a ques- 
 tion about which most good and reflecting persons, not 
 only in France, but all over the world, already felt the 
 most serious misgivings. The second is the rumour, 
 eagerly caught at by him, that Dreyfus was a Freemason, 
 whereas he was not. Thirdly, we note the assertion 
 about the bordereau. To all who had eyes and ears it 
 had been satisfactorily demonstrated three months before 
 that the bordereau was not in the handwriting of Dreyfus, 
 but of Esterhazy. Lastly, we must particularly notice 
 the conception of a fair trial, as one in which closed doors
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 35 
 
 do not suffice, but in which the accused is condemned 
 upon documents freely shown to a dozen officers picked 
 at random, but withheld from the accused and his counsel, 
 who was one of the most upright and loyal members of 
 the French bar. The reason of State advanced by a 
 d'Ormescheville or a Ravary is to countervail all the safe- 
 guards of the French military code, which enacts severe 
 penalties against such illegalities. The arch-violator of 
 the law, Mercier, has up to the last stoutly declined to 
 admit that secret evidence was used, and is at least . 
 ashamed to publicly confess his crime. Not so the 
 Civilta Cattolica, which begins by frankly avowing and 
 palliating a felony which strikes at the basis of modern 
 society. Its political conscience has not advanced beyond 
 the letlre de cachet. 
 
 Section 2 of the article begins thus — 
 
 ( " The brand of treason to his country was thus for ever stamped on the 
 forehead of this misbegotten Hebrew.^ Nor did the public ever doubt in 
 the least that it was deserved, seeing that a court-martial, in which loyalty 
 and honour joined hands, had impressed it. (And this brand was burned 
 into the brow not of Dreyfus only, but of cosmopolite Jews at large^ (jMost 
 painfully of all, its smart was felt by the colony of them which dominates 
 France.^ 
 
 I have been blamed by English members of the Society 
 of Jesus for writing of the Dreyfus trial that in it " the 
 Jesuits had secured their victim, their indispensable 
 traitor. . . ." Henceforward, I have said, they could argue 
 " that Dreyfus being a traitor, all Jews were traitors as 
 well." I think no one who reads the Civilta Cattolica will 
 dispute my assertion. 
 
 The Jesuit publicist next relates to us how the Jews
 
 36 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 were emancipated in France and given equal rights with 
 other citizens. This, he remarks, " was a corollary of 
 the so-called principles of 1789, the yoke of which was 
 then imposed on the necks of Frenchmen." 
 
 After this subtle tribute to the merits of the ancien 
 regime, the writer proceeds to combine in one sentence 
 two misstatements, y " By means of immigration from 
 Germany, their race has increased in France, not out of 
 measure indeed, but so much that one already counts 
 130,000 of them. '^ It is well known that nearly all Jews 
 who have entered France during the last 100 years, the 
 Dreyfus family in particular and the Reinachs, are immi- 
 grants, and often patriotic refugees, from Alsace and 
 Lorraine, and not from Germany at all. The last French 
 census also shows that the entire number of Jews in 
 France is 75,000, about half of the above estimate. 
 
 There follows an unaccountably over-coloured picture 
 of the influence and power of the French Jews. The 
 modicum of truth in it is that the Jews, along with the 
 Huguenots, the secular victims of the Latin Church, have 
 allied themselves, as it was their right and duty to do, 
 with that party in French politics which opposed the 
 machinations of the Vatican against the Republic" and 
 against those principles of liberty, truth, and justice which, 
 until yesterday, that form of government symbolized in 
 France. Such is the sense which we may attach to the 
 words in which the Civilta sums up its reflections on this 
 point, viz., these : — 
 
 " Masonry, mistress of the State, depends servilely upon the Jews; and 
 by means of it they hold in their hands the Republic, which for that reason 
 has been called Hebraic rather than French."
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 37 
 
 After this approval of the favourite thesis of Drumont, 
 the Jesuit organ complacently reproduces an absurd 
 calumny of Edouard Demachy, the scoundrel who tried, 
 and tried in vain, to blackmail the Rothschilds. It is 
 useful to notice this calumny, because it reveals the inner 
 mind of the clerical party in France towards Protestant 
 England. 
 
 "As regards the English occupation of Egypt, it was possible to assure 
 the Government of London that a single one of the Jews (? Baron Roths- 
 child) could be relied upon to hocus the Press, the Ministers, and the 
 Parliament of France.') 
 
 In a similar strain of confiding simplicity, M. Drumont 
 announced in the Libre Parole of October 15th, i8g8, that 
 M. Delcasse's policy of evacuating the Upper Nile was 
 inspired by Mr. Strong and myself: 
 
 " Les rodomontades anglaises nous laissent froids. Malheureusement, 
 elles n'ont pas le mcme effet sur Delcasse, qui en remplit ses culottes et 
 dont la politique exterieure est dirigee par Conybeare et le gentleman 
 Strong." 
 
 But we must return to the Civilta Cattolica. After 
 propounding seriously the fiction of Drumont that the 
 French Jews own 80 out of the 260 milliards of property 
 which there arc in France, it proceeds to a friendly 
 appreciation of that author's labours. 
 
 "It is true," it writes, " that anti-Semitism had already taken vigorous 
 root, but it was more economical than political and national. The school 
 of Edward Drumont, which has waged war most pertinaciously on the 
 Jews, appeared to many to lean towards some sort of Socialism rather than 
 towards a Christianity of justice and civil right. (However, the Dreyfus 
 case proved a lamp which shed the light abroad better than all the books, 
 pamphlets, and journalistic articles in the world could do.'X
 
 38 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 We shall see presently how the modern Jesuits con- 
 ceive of a christianesimo eqiio e civile. Meanwhile we must 
 reproduce their caricature of an agitation in which all 
 who were participators were noble and disinterested men, 
 who had pure justice and the redress of a fraudulent 
 iniquity for their aim, and whose action will in future 
 generations be surely recognized as the only bright side 
 of this miserable episode. It is as follows : — 
 
 "The treason and condemnation of Alfred Dreyfus were regarded by 
 cosmopolite Judaism as a terrible blow falling on all alike. Some steps 
 had to be taken to remedy it. But how ? Jewish subtlety excogitated the 
 subterfuge of a judicial error, which might be feigned to have occurred." 
 
 Let the reader not forget that our writer has already 
 
 *\j ^dmitted that the Dreyfus verdict was illegally obtained 
 
 \r / ^y '^^^ °^ secret evidence. He continues thus : — 
 ,/ 
 
 "Taking its stand on the revelations made by Rochefort in the Iniransi- 
 geantS^he Hebrew Congress held last summer in Basle had for its pretext 
 to discuss the recovery of JerusalenA; but it was really held to hatch the 
 who le conspii3r.y . The Hebrews \jrere joined in it by Protestants of high 
 position. An Israelitish syndicate was formed, which raised the millions 
 necessary to the success of so difficult an undertaking. Rochefort has 
 afl&rmed that by October the first four of these millions had already been 
 raised, pretty well all in Germany. So far one does not know how -much 
 has been raised in France. More than others the Jew takes it for his axiom yj^ 
 that pecuniiB ohediunt omnia. . . .\One thing is certain, that gold flowed yv 
 rivulets through the market of venal busybodies, scribblers, lawyers, and 
 journalists of every country.] Un various styles and all sorts of ways they 
 were hired to win regard and public pity for the ' innocent victim ' of a 
 trial hurried through behind closed doors, for the ' martyr confined in 
 the Devil's Island. 'Y^.^ v", , 0C\ 
 
 Mark how this writer borrows from Drumont his whole 
 ."'■explanation of the Dreyfus agitation, his entire political
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 39 
 
 philosophy; how also he welcomes the fables of a man 
 like Rochefort. And in the fourth section of his essay he 
 almost surpasses them in their own peculiar style of 
 writing ; for he tilts at what he is pleased to call "the 
 Jewish and Judaizing journalism of the two worlds." ^He 
 tells us of " the mass of fables, lies, impostures, resorted . 
 to " by the Dreyfusards ; he weeps over " the foul trick 
 played on the unfortunate Major Esterhazy, by way of 
 shifting on to his shoulders the weight of Dreyfus' sins." 
 He exults in the Major's ''triumphant acquittal by the 
 Court-Martial of Jan. ii.' ) Then he dwells con amore of 
 course, on the " abominable patronage (of Dreyfus) by 
 Emile Zola, the filthiest novelist that ever contaminated 
 France " ; as if the greater number of French romanticists, 
 with Paul Bourget at their head, were not now basking in 
 Royalist saloons, as their reward for sympathizing with 
 Drumont ; and as if a great author's noble championship 
 of truth and right were the less noble by reason of faults 
 which characterize them equally with him. 
 
 Zola, we learn, was "in the last resort joined by way 
 of ally by the ex-frate, the apostate Hyacinth Loyson." 
 To the mind of the writer of the Civiltd the whole " dirty 
 plot," as he calls it, is clear ; and he once more goes to 
 Rochefort for a choice of language in which to describe it : — 
 
 " Rochefort," he writes, " adverse as he is to all religious faith, summing 
 up the obscene history of such heinous wickedness, has ended by defining 
 it as a ' great conspiracy of anti-Catholic and anti-French interests.'! In 
 this conspiracy Protestantism has played a leading part, with its Lutherans 
 and Calvinists, Scheurer-Kestner, Gabriel Monod, Trarieu>4» Leblois, and 
 other half-hearted paladins of ihe ignoble Jewish joust\ lAnd by way of 
 keeping it going the Anarchists and Socialists at last took the field, with a 
 tail of a few Liberalist associations and bands of law students from Italy.'
 
 40 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 All this concentration of trickery, perfidies, and intrigues opened the eyes 
 of all who were not resolved to keep them shut ; and as a consequence 
 public opinion, which the Synagogue had hoped to capture, revolted when 
 it looked it in the face and saw it unmasked. So much so that in the end 
 Masonry did not dare to openly take sides with it. . . . Hence the general 
 applause with which the Deputies greeted the noble words of the Count 
 de Mun when he exposed and crushed their dark machinations. Hence 
 the unanimous votes given in Chamber and Senate to the Minister who 
 declared that the betrayer of the flag and country had been properly and 
 duly condemned. Thus put to the test, the Masonic brethren of the two 
 assemblies were obliged to cold-shoulder their Jewish brethren and 
 patrons, and to applaud anyone who pointed to them as enemies of France, 
 and felons." 
 
 Such a passage as this in the official journal of the 
 Society of Jesus amply confirms the explanation supplied 
 in the February number of this Review of the attitude 
 assumed in the Dreyfus case by the Latin Church and its 
 journals. They wanted a scourge for the backs of the 
 Protestants and friends of freedom, and they found it 
 ready to hand in the Dreyfus agitation. It was a real 
 good fortune to them to be able to exploit the natural and 
 unassailable popularity which in France the Army enjoys. 
 How successfully they wielded the whip is seen, if we 
 examine the election manifesto of M. Lebret, the present 
 Minister of Justice in France, and the chief author of the 
 loi de circonstance lately devised to deprive the hapless 
 victim of the last chance of being justly tried. The 
 clauses of that manifesto are so many capitulations to the 
 electoral questions drawn up by the monkish editors of 
 the Croix and Pelerin. 
 
 " Je ne suis ni juif, ni franc-magon ! 
 
 "Je ne suis I'ami ni de M. Trarieux, ni de M. Reinach, dont tousles
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 41 
 
 bons Francais ont juge la conduite. Dreyfus a ete justement condamne, 
 et je suis energiquement oppose a toute agitation ayant pour but la 
 Revision de son proces. Commetous les patriotes, je reprou%'e hautement 
 la campagne infame menee en faveur du traitre par un Syndicat de Sans- 
 patrie. 
 
 " En votant pour moi, vous ferez justice designobles calomnies afiSchees 
 a la derniere heure sous le voile de I'anonyme, et vous vous associerez a 
 ma confiance inalterable dans I'armee nationale. 
 
 " Vive I'Armee ! ! 
 
 " Vive la Republique ! ! " — Gkorges Lebret. 
 
 It will be seen at a glance how this confession of faith 
 of a so-called Republican answers line by line to the code 
 of intimidation compiled by the Catholic electoral com- 
 mittee and scattered all ov^er France in May, 189S, in 
 myriads of posters. I translated this code in the last 
 number of this Review, and now, that it may be the better 
 compared with M. Lebret's manifesto, I cite it in French. 
 
 CANDIDAT, REPONDEZ ! 
 
 " Etes-vods l'ami des jdifs? 
 
 " L'ami des juifs n'est pas le notre. . . . 
 
 *' Que pensez-vous de Zola ? 
 
 " Que pensez-vous du traitre Dreyfus et du syndicat ? 
 
 " II faut que les electeurs le sachent, car on dit deja que les faiblards du 
 governement ont promis de capituler au lendemain des elections devant 
 I'infiuence juives, protestantes, ma9onniques et etrangeres et de reviser le 
 proces Dreyfus. 
 
 " Si vous etiez depute, serez-vous dans le troupeau de moiitons du 
 syndicat ? 
 
 " Serez-vous avec ceux qui lacheront I'arm^e ? 
 
 " Serez-vous parmi les chiens muets ? 
 
 "CANDIDAT. REPONDEZ! 
 
 " Etes-vous franc-ma9on ? . . . 
 
 " Nous voulons que la chamhre gonverne au nom de la France. 
 
 " Et non le Grand-Orient, au nom de le fr;inc-ma9onnerie cosmopolite.
 
 42 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 " Nous voulons etre en Republique frangaise et non en franc-magonnerie 
 enjuivee et allemande. 
 
 " Candidat, Repondez. Etes-vous franc-macon." 
 
 It is the secular policy of the Vatican to strengthen and 
 consolidate the power and authority of its priests by fair 
 means or foul in France or elsewhere. Sometimes it trips 
 and falls into ambushes laid by Leo Taxils and Diana 
 Vaughans. Over the Dreyfus case also it may reap the 
 whirlwind where it has sown with the wind. Meanwhile, 
 it has by means of it succeeded in intimidating scores of 
 the weaker-kneed Republicans.* 
 
 We must once more return to the Civilta Cattolica. The 
 Jesuit essayist has quoted a saying which he attributes to 
 Bismarck, that " God created the Jew in order that he 
 might serve as a spy to anybody who was in want of 
 one " ; and in the last three of the seven sections into 
 which he divides his diatribe, he considers the problem 
 of what position to give to the " Jewish spy " in a 
 Christian State where justice and civil equality shall 
 prevail. He begins this part of his subject thus — 
 
 " The thing which most grieves and terrifies the cosmopolite Jewry is 
 the practical conclusion which people are beginning to draw from all this 
 witches' carnival. The civil parity which the Jew now enjoys notwith- 
 standing his national disparity is beginning to be regarded as constituting 
 a real privilege, not to be justified at the bar of true reason, and on many 
 grounds dangerous to the welfare of a country. In France, and as a result 
 elsewhere, anti-Semitism, from being economical, is ever more and more 
 
 * A flippant friend remarks to me of Georges Lebret as follows : — 
 "When I peruse the credo of this betrayer of the last stronghold of his country's 
 honour, I can well believe that, after reciting it before a mob of Pelerins, he 
 turned up his eyes to heaven, crossed himself devoutly, and like the pious bag- 
 men, dear to the heart of assumptionist monks, handed all round a copy of his 
 baptismal certificate."
 
 \ 
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 43 
 
 becoming political, and winning general adhesion. This is seen in the 
 various proposals for putting legal restrictions on Jews, which are every- 
 where being, discussed, and are widely and more than usual regarded as 
 necessary. (The racial solidarity of Jews, anterior and superior in them to 
 all patriotism of any kind, has, owing to the outcry raised over the Dreyfus 
 case, been made as clear as day and brought home to the popular mind.j 
 That the Jew, however much he be naturalized, can never cease to be first 
 a Jew and then a citizen of the country in which he was born and raised • 
 
 to equality with its people, is to-day a truth accepted as an irrefutable 
 postulate. The truth is at last being brought home to Frenchmen ; and 
 the pretended error of justice, invented in 1897 by the Jews in order to 
 rescue one of themselves who i% a felon to France, is being transformed 
 into a clear demonstration^ of the true political error committed by the 
 Assembly which in 1791 conferred French nationality on the Jews."\ 
 
 Our essayist next looks about for authorities that jj 
 
 support his view, and, as we might expect,(fbegins with /«,j/- 
 J. E. M. PortaHs, the reactionary and clerical instrument 
 of Napoleon I. a hundred years agoA The passage which 
 he quotes from this author is a sure indication of what is 
 really uppermost in the Jesuit's mind, for it is one in 
 which Portalis argues for the exclusion of Jews from 
 citizenship on the score of their religion. " The truth," 
 blandly observes our writer, "thus lucidly set forth by 
 Portalis has been amply demonstrated in the Civilta 
 Cattolica." 
 
 Another authority quoted is the manifesto addressed 
 by thirty-one members of the jRoumania n Parliament to QK 
 
 the Powers when, in 1878, these claimed to impose~on — ^^ 
 the Roumanian State a law granting civil equality to the 
 Jews. In this manifesto we read the following : — 
 
 "The Jews form not only a religious sect, but a complex indelibly*--:^ 
 peculiar in respect of race, and of those definite beliefs of nationality 
 which cause every one of them to remain, though immersed among other
 
 44 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 people, a Jew. Hence it is impossible for them to form blood-relationships 
 with other peoples, and impossible for others to share with them their 
 feelings, which are directly opposed in every way to those of Christians. 
 And the strongest obstacle lies in their religion, which for them is law at 
 once sacred and civil, and which fixes their cult as well as their political 
 and social organization." 
 
 It is evident from their use of the above citation that it 
 is ultimately the religion of the Jew which, in the opinion 
 of these successors of Loyola, disqualifies him for citizen- 
 ship ; and they prize the effete wisdom of Portalis or the 
 prejudices of a half civilized Roumanian more highly than 
 the counsel of the great civilized Powers of Europe. 
 
 Our publicist next refers with satisfaction to the various 
 proposals made in the French Chamber during the last 
 year or two, and eagerly adopted by the party of the 
 Count de Mun for exceptional treatment of the Jews. He 
 particularly exults in M. de Beauregard's proposal of 
 January 12th, 1898, to deprive them of citizenship. This 
 proposal, he complacently remarks, was the result of the 
 scandals which followed the acquittal of Esterhazy. 
 f"^ He next looks round for authorities nearer home, and 
 
 singles out M. L. Vial's book, Le Juif Roi, comment le 
 detroner, Paris, 1897. The character of this book will be 
 judged by the fact — recorded with satisfaction by the 
 Civilta — that it gained the first prize in a competition 
 opened by Drumont in the columns of the Libre Parole 
 for the best book against the Jews. This book has, so we 
 learn, for its motto the saying of Peter the Venerable : 
 Servetur indceis vita, auferatur eis pecimia. " The means 
 propounded in this book," says our Jesuit essayist, " for 
 ridding France of Jewish influence appear to be on the 
 
 V '
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 45 
 
 whole well conceived and reasonable." He only objects 
 to the last of M. Vial's plans, which is "to hunt out 
 Jews, by love (!) or by force, after the example of Russia, 
 constraining them to leave behind the riches they have 
 plundered." 
 
 Probably it is the sense that Russia has a similar short 
 method of dealing with Jesuits, which leads the Civilta 
 Cattolica, not without humble apologies to M. Drumont, 
 col biiona venia di chi gli ha decretato il premio, to hint 
 that " this last solution of the problem is neither practical 
 nor just nor Christian." Not practical, because even if 
 France did obtain the much-to-be-desired anti-Semitic 
 Government, her social, political, and economic conditions 
 are unlike those of Russia. Not just, because in taking 
 from the Jew his ill-gotten gains, there is a risk of your 
 depriving him also of what he has fairly earned. This is 
 the only obstacle which presents itself to the Jesuit mind 
 in the way of a policy of confiscation which would spare 
 the Christian usurer, but strike down the Jewish one. 
 Not Christian, because not in strict accord with that of 
 the Roman Church and of the Popes. 
 
 However, it is chiefly its impracticability which con- 
 demns M. Vial's plan. Otherwise it is clear our Jesuit 
 philosopher would adopt it. Where, he asks, could the 
 Jews go, if all nations adopted a plan, otherwise so 
 excellent ? ^ 
 
 ("To the 6ery sands of the Sahara or to the frozen seas of the poles J 
 Mbreover, their expulsion en masse from every country, even if it were 
 possible, would not be lasting, nay, would be contrary to the designs of 
 God, who. in the people of Israel, cursed and dispersed to every corner of 
 the world, by the mouth of His prophets, has established a manifest proof 
 of the truth of Christianity."
 
 46 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 Accordingly in his seventh section our Jesuit friend 
 sums up the view which the reasonings of Portahs, of the 
 Roumanians, of MM. Drumont and Vial, incline him to 
 regard as the only sound one : — 
 
 " Nearly the only remedy, and anyhow the most efficacious one, as we 
 have never ceased for years and years to point out, lies in a fundamental law 
 agreed upon by the several States, which would assimilate Jews to 
 foreigners and have them treated not as citizens but as strangers. ... It 
 is no use to cling to the mockery of equality or common rights. To insist 
 on a common right, where social conditions are disparate, is like insisting 
 on one and the same measure for different statures. What is fair and 
 necessary is equal respect for different rights. This is a truth which our 
 ancestors understood thoroughly well, and that is why the civil edifice, 
 erected by them, resulted in a fair harmony and not in the anarchy which 
 in our days is deplorable. 
 
 " We need not consider now the details of the many reforms (sic) which 
 must accompany this law, in order to reconcile the rights of Christian 
 peoples with the charity and duty due to Jews. It is enough for us to insist 
 on the point which is most important, and we could wish that it were 
 unanimously inculcated with the eloquence which is wasted in preaching 
 other means by those who merely beat the air." 
 
 Such, then, is the Jesuit ideal. Jews because of their 
 religion, and because the Dreyfus case demonstrates that 
 they are a race of spies, are to be deprived of the ele- 
 mentary rights of citizenship and given that status of 
 pariahs which Christians enjoy in Turkey. The Jesuit 
 Order is the brain of modern Latin Catholicism ; and 
 such is the net result of its reasonings. 
 
 And as we turn over the pages of the Civilta Cattolica, 
 and I have waded through the whole of its dreary series 
 for the year 1898, we form the conviction that the civil 
 rights of Protestants would — if Jesuits had their way — 
 very soon follow those of Jews. In number after number
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 47 
 
 the French Protestants who, led by men like Trarieux 
 and Scheurer-Kestner, have so nobly come forward as the 
 champions of truth and justice are held up to contempt 
 and abhorrence. If anyone doubts this, let him run his 
 eye through the pages which chronicle the development 
 of the Dre5'fus case in the issues of Jan. ist, Feb. 6th, 
 Feb. igth (p. 497), March 5th, May 7th. The comment 
 on the case at this last date is particularly noticeable, 
 because in his letter to The Times of Jan. 17th, M. de Mun, 
 the leader of the French Catholic party, has declared that 
 it was ''a complete error" on my part to connect the 
 French Catholics so closely as I have done with anti- 
 Semitism, and to lay upon them a prime share of its guilt. 
 He has declared that 
 
 " The representatives of the Catholic Church — the bishops, the clergy, 
 the religious congregations, and particularly the Jesuits . . . stand alto- 
 gether outside it. Most of them gave it a cold welcome, many of them 
 extend to it but scant sympathy. . . . They have all, too, and at all times, 
 been careful not to confound it in the least with Catholic actions, and, 
 above all, with Catholic Apostleship." 
 
 If only one could interpret the above words as indi- 
 cating on the part of M. de Mun and his followers some 
 faint misgivings as to the part they have played in openly 
 applauding and advocating violence and forger}', in hound- 
 ing to death men more clear-sighted and patriotic than 
 themselves ! Alas, the general tone of his letter assures 
 us that he is past remedy, and he does not scruple to 
 stigmatize the noble struggle of a minority of his countr}'- 
 men for truth and justice as *' an odious campaign against 
 the heads of our national army, undertaken with the 
 connivance of the Jews, or at least without any protest on
 
 48 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 their part." All honour to them for joining in it. Many 
 of them have shown that they still have in them the 
 moral strength and independence which makes of men 
 martyrs and Maccabseans. In " A Clerical Crusade " I 
 proved how remote from the truth are M. de Mun's state- 
 ments in regard to the clerical representatives of French 
 Catholics. That they are equally untrue as regards its 
 political representatives, the Civilta Cattolica for this date, 
 May 7th, i8g8, assures us. For what do we learn from it ? 
 It begins by exulting in the document forged by Henry, 
 of which it says Colonel Picquart had had the " audacity " 
 to deny the genuineness ; and it points out that as a 
 result of the " heads of the army having adduced this 
 warranty of Dreyfus' guilt before the court of assize . . . 
 all France had thrilled with a patriotism spurring them 
 not only towards the Government, but still more towards 
 the iwmini teniperati, onesti." Who are these "temperate 
 and honest men " ? They are the Catholics and the Con- 
 servative rallies. Meline, my reader will remember, had 
 slammed the door in the face of MM. Dron and Millerand, 
 Radical Deputies who were pleading for bare justice and 
 warning their countrymen of the dangers of an alliance 
 with the Reactionaries. 
 
 "This," says the Civilta, " is the first time that a Minister has solemnly 
 repudiated the help of the Radicals in order to accept that of the Catholics 
 and Conservative rallies (i.e., Royalists who at the Pope's bidding pretend 
 to accept the Republic). Thus the way is opened for an agreement in 
 regard to questions which the Catholics have at heart." 
 
 There is no denying it. The Latin Church in France 
 is largely responsible for the Dreyfus case. A great 
 historic church which in a case like this supplies no
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 49 
 
 champions of innocence, must as a whole be regarded as 
 championing guilt. " He that is not with m.e, is against 
 me." This carnival of crime in France is the firstfruits 
 of the new and unholy alliance between the Pope and the 
 French Republic. 
 
 In the Civilta Cattolica of May 21st we have an eulogy 
 of Edouard Drumont, who, it is said, '' has in Algiers y')\ 
 moved heaven and earth with his burning words to shake ,(^^0^ 
 off from the neck of the people there the yoke of the/' (^"^ 
 Jews." The methods employed in Algiers are, as readers 
 of the last number of this Review have learned, arson and 
 assassination. At the same date the Civilta congratulates 
 itself upon the results of the French General Election. jil 
 
 The leading Dreyfusards had lost their seats, thanks to / ^ 
 
 the wide diffusion of the political catechism of the Croix, jA 
 so the Jesuit organ complacently remarks as follows : — ► -r 
 
 " Considering the quality of the adversaries who have fallen and of the , 
 friends we have made a conquest of, the Conservative party has gained 
 enough; and that was all that was desired by good Frenchmen and the 
 Pope.""^ 
 
 By this testimony, then, the Pope had at last got a 
 French Chamber that he liked. We know its exploits. 
 In its first Session it placarded all over France the forgery 
 of Henry, so dear to the heart of Cavaignac ; and a few 
 months later it has, with the help of the clericals, voted 
 away the last safeguard of justice and civil liberty, and so 
 initiated that policy of exceptional legislation towards 
 Jews of which the Civilta has been for years the ardent 
 advocate. How well M. Dupuy, one of those originally 
 responsible for the judicial crime, has learned the lesson 
 which the Civilta has, by its own confession, inculcated, 
 
 o
 
 50 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 is seen by the defence he offered lately in the French 
 Chamber of the Loi de circomtance, by which, with the aid 
 of Lebret, he has dethroned justice. To lovers of consti- 
 tutional methods who objected that the shameful law was 
 exceptional, M. Dupuy could only reply that the Dreyfus 
 case was so exceptional as to justify exceptional laws. In 
 other words, when an impartial court of justice threatens 
 to acquit an innocent Jew, special legislation must be run 
 through to avert such a calamity. Well may the Civilta 
 welcome in its next issue of June i8th the presence in the 
 French Chamber of Drumont, Deroulede, and Millevoye 
 as " friends of religious liberty." 
 
 Further revelations of Jesuit feeling over the Dreyfus 
 case meet our eye in the issues of July i6th, p. 232, and 
 August 6th. In the numbers for September we naturally 
 look for a dirge over the corpse of the forger Henry, but 
 in vain. Except for a faint allusion on September 17th 
 to the malaugurata questione Dreyfus, the hyaena of the 
 Vatican — as the respectable Italian Press rudely but not 
 inexcusably calls the Civilta — ceased to shriek for a few 
 weeks. It was evidently staggered a little by the revela- 
 tion of Henry's crime. However, by October ist it has 
 recovered its equanimity, and in default of any arguments 
 of its own gladly avails itself of those which Drumont, to 
 the disgust of all Europe, had invented in order to palliate 
 almost the worse crime of our generation. 
 
 "Henry," so we are informed, " wrote his forgery that it might be used 
 as a proof of Dreyfus' guilt and put a stop to the agitation which had 
 already begun,* the true proofs being such that they could not be laid 
 
 * It is hardly true to say that the ngitatim had begun as eaiiy as November 1st, 
 1896, when Henry perpetrated his forgery.
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 51 
 
 before the public. From his mode of operation it is evident that he was 
 braver in the battles he fought in the colonies than he was commendable as 
 chief (commendevole capo) of the important Intelligence Department, in 
 which he succeeded his former superior, Picquart." 
 
 So, then, Henry's forgery was merely a bank-note issued 
 by the Etat-Major against the anti-Dreyfus bullion hidden 
 away in its coffers. It was onl}- Henry's way of going to 
 work {modo di operaie) that was at fault. He was, in 
 short, a brave officer, but a bad jurist. The same argu- 
 ment was advanced, as has often been remarked, in M. 
 de Mun's organ, the Gazette de France, by his friend, 
 M. Charles Maurras, who also regretted that the Drey- 
 fusard organs were "restrained by the scruples of a 
 mischievous half- Protestant education " from consecrating 
 the forger and making of him a domestic idol. There 
 is an almost entire identity of sentiment, argument, 
 aspiration, and even of language, between the Civilta 
 Cuttolica and the Libre Parole, which was founded by 
 Odelin, the administrator of the Jesuit school, founded 
 with Jesuit money,* and for several years managed by him. 
 
 One is the more surprised at the hardihood of the 
 Comte de Mun's denials, if one examines the school- 
 books put into the hands of boys and girls in the Latin 
 Church schools of France. For example, I take up one 
 entitled Fleurs de VHistoire, by Theophile Valentin, and 
 issued by Edouard Trivat, 15. Rue des Tanneurs, 
 Toulouse. The title-page informs us that it is written 
 a I'lisage dc la Jcuncsse, and it is published under the 
 approbation of the following French ecclesiastics : Son 
 
 • This interesting fact is attested by the editor of J'/te Month, ii Jesuit journal, 
 in the article to which I refer below.
 
 52 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 Eminence le Cardinal Desprez, Archbishop of Toulouse ; 
 The Abbe Tages, Vicar-General at the Archbishopric of 
 Paris ; Monsignor Coste, Bishop of Mende ; M. G. Pela- 
 got, Vicar-General in the Bishopric of Puy ; M. I'Abbe 
 Touzery, Vicar-General and director of the journal L'Edu- 
 cation Catholique (who signs for the Bishop of Rodez et de 
 Vabres) ; M. I'Abbe Courchinoux, laureat of several acade- 
 mies (who signs for Mgr. the Bp. of St. Flour) ; M I'Abbe 
 Figuiere, honorary canon and professor of rhetoric in the 
 Petit-Seminaire of Mende. 
 
 On page ii8 of this book, so loaded with high episcopal 
 sanction and constantly given as a prize in Catholic 
 schools, it is pretended that the army of Prince Eugene, 
 cut off in Russia, owed its safety to the treason of a Jew 
 who sold the password of the Russians ; and we find the 
 following note added : " Le fond du caractere des Juifs, 
 c'est d'etre traitres, fourbes et menteurs," and we are 
 referred to p. 122 for further information about the Jews. 
 On p. 122, accordingly, we read the following : — 
 
 (jj^Note upon the Jews. — The Jews are a cursed race, since they sold our 
 Saviour and disowned His blessings. j|By their religion and their politics 
 they tend to enslave and ruin all nations, and in particular the French, on 
 whom they have alighted like vultures on a rich quarry/ They are 
 dangerous and insatiable parasites that lay hands on everything — soil, 
 money, commerce, industry, administration. All means come handy to 
 them in order to divert into their own pockets the sources of wealth — 
 treason, crime, fraud, theft, assassination. ... 
 
 " The wealth of France is estimated at 150 milliards, and the Jews alone 
 own more than eighty milliards of it. And yet they came to us without a 
 farthing. Not being numerous enough to do what they want by them- 
 selves in the light of day, they organize themselves in the dark, and hatch 
 their perfidious plots against religious as well as civil society — against 
 everything which stands for order, morality, and justice.
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 53 
 
 " Freemasonry is in their hands a docile instrument, and by means of it 
 they to-day govern the world. 
 
 "If the peoples do not take care, they will perish through the Jews. 
 For the edification of our readers we refer them to the following works of 
 M. Drumont : La France Juive. La fin d'un Monde, and La Derniere Bataille." 
 
 With what truth, in presence of such facts, can it be 
 said that the representatives of the French Church have 
 held aloof from anti-Semitism. The Comte de Mun 
 asserts that " he has been very intimate with English- 
 men," and he declares that 
 
 " He respects too much those among us who do not share his religious 
 beliefs to imagine for an instant that they will consent to be brought back 
 by such writings (as ' the Dreyfus case ') to their former habits, now so 
 entirely abandoned, of cherishing unjust suspicions against the Roman 
 Church." 
 
 It is a pity that M. de Mun and his friends evince so 
 little respect for other religions than their own in France. 
 They had much better husband for home use the con- 
 sideration which he lavishes on Englishmen. But when 
 he goes on to appeal to "the shades of Gladstone and 
 Manning" we are fairly astonished. Was Manning a 
 Jew-baiter ? Was he not rather full of cordiality for 
 Jews ? Did he not come publicly forward to express his 
 sympathy with them over the cruel persecution they have 
 endured in Russia ? 
 
 And why M. de Mun should profane the name of 
 Gladstone by appealing to it as he does, I hardly know. 
 Has he forgotten that famous pamphlet in which our 
 great statesman, in a series of resounding charges, never 
 retracted and never seriously refuted, since they directly 
 rested on the inspired utterances of the infallible pontiffs,
 
 54 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 exposed just those vices of modern Catholicism which are 
 so apparent in the pages of the Civilta Cattolica, in the 
 French reHgious and clerical Press, in the public policy 
 of the Comte de Mun ? Those charges have by many 
 been forgotten, so we reproduce them : — 
 
 " I. That Rome has substituted for the proud boast of semper eadem a 
 policy of violence and change in faith. 
 
 " 2. That she has refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she 
 was fondly thought to have disused. 
 
 " 3. That no one can now become her convert without renouncing his 
 moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the 
 mercy of another. 
 
 " 4. That she (Rome) has equally repudiated modern thought and 
 ancient history." 
 
 There is only space to reproduce here parts of the 
 catena of evidence with which Mr, Gladstone supports 
 the second of his charges, and I will omit, also, for the 
 sake of brevity, the chapter and verse references which he 
 supplies to papal encyclicals and syllabus. He writes 
 thus : — 
 
 " I will state, in the fewest possible words, and with references, a few 
 propositions, all the holders of which have been condemned by the See of 
 Rome during my own generation, and especially within the last twelve or 
 fifteen years. And in order that I may do nothing towards importing 
 passion into what is matter of pure argument, I will avoid citing any of 
 the fearfuHy energetic epithets in which the condemnations are sometimes 
 clothed : — 
 
 " I. Those who maintain the liberty of the Press. 
 
 " 2. Or the liberty of conscience and of worship. 
 
 " 3. Or the liberty of speech. 
 
 " 4. Or who contend that Papal judgments and decrees may, without sin, 
 be disobeyed, or differed from, unless they treat of the rules {dogmata) of 
 faith or morals.
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 55 
 
 "5. Or who assign to the State the power of defining the civil rights 
 (jura) and province of the Church. 
 
 " 16. Or that any other religion than the Roman religion may be 
 established by a State. 
 
 "17. Or that in 'countries called Catholic' the free exercise of other 
 religions may laudably be allowed. 
 
 " 18. Or that the Roman Pontiff ought to come to terms with progress, 
 liberalism, and modern civilization." 
 
 Now no one, least of all myself, would suggest that 
 English Roman Catholics, if they were brought to the 
 practical test, would put in force the principles above 
 enumerated ; for the very good reason that with very few 
 exceptions they are Englishmen first and Latin Catholics 
 second. Moreover, they live in a medium, social and 
 political, where such propositions do but excite a smile, 
 where no one pays any attention to them or takes them 
 seriously. Englishmen and Americans, as I have before 
 urged, just because they have left so far behind the 
 mediaeval intolerance, which is yet after all the theoretical 
 backbone of the Papacy, find it almost insuperably diffi- 
 cult to put themselves in the position of a French or 
 Italian Liberal, for whom the Roman adherence to these 
 principles is an ever-present menace to much that for 
 him, as for us, makes life worth living. And no doubt 
 it is the sense that the great Anglo-Saxon communities 
 have — let us hope for ever — emerged from the miasmatic 
 mist which he himself breathes that leads the writer in 
 the Civilta Cattulica to omit them from his purview, and to 
 recommend only France, Germany, Austria, Roumania, 
 and Italy as suitable regions for the realization of the 
 "fair harmony" which he boasts was "erected by his
 
 56 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 ancestors " (gli avi nostri), but overthrown in such large 
 measure by " the so-called principles of 1789." 
 
 The reality of the menace to civilization which the 
 Latin Papal code, ever unrepealed and constantly re- 
 affirmed, really constitutes, is brought home to us in a 
 striking way if we take up another work, identical in tone 
 with the Civilta Cattolica. This is a book entitled Analecta 
 Ecclesiastica, Revue Romaine, Theovetique et Pratique de 
 Theologie, Droit, etc. After this title follows the motto : 
 " Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia," and the name of the editor, 
 Felix Cadene, Prelat domestique de sa Saintete. M. 
 Cadene, who stands so near to the Pope, has twenty-one 
 collaborators, w^ho mostly occupy high positions in the 
 Latin Church. In the first issue of this publication for 
 the year 1895 we find a study of the Spanish Inquisition 
 by P. Pius a Langonio, a member of the Capuchin order; 
 and assessor, judge, and general secretary of the holy 
 office of the Inquisition. This writer, in the course of 
 his disquisition, takes occasion to relate how on February 
 28th, 1404, in Cordova a priest was accused of having 
 merely kept up an outward show of Christianity, but of 
 having lived in secret as a Jew, observing the Mosaic law. 
 After hearing the record of his sins read out, the Inquisi- 
 tors, who were armed with full Papal authority, condemned 
 the accused without any further hearing as a heretic, and 
 handed him over, after a bishop had duly stript him of 
 his priestly garb, to the civil arm. The recreant priest was 
 then led with a rope round his neck, seated on an ass, to 
 the gate of the city and then burned alive. After narrating 
 this ghastly story our Capuchin general secretary of the 
 holy office of the Inquisition continues in these words : —
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 57 
 
 " It is true that there are a great many children of 
 darkness who, when they read the above sentences, will 
 rage against what they are pleased to call mediaeval in- 
 tolerance with fury in their eyes, with snarling jaws and 
 snorting nostrils. . . ." 
 
 Then he proceeds to liken this condemned priest in his 
 backsliding to Captain Dreyfus in his treason — treason 
 which, he says, " all France cannot think of without 
 flaming wrath, and which public opinion has branded as 
 a crime to be expiated only with death." Then he 
 exclaims : — 
 
 " The beneficent vigilance of the holy Inquisition is the 
 true religious peace, and to it we owe that fixity of faith 
 which makes the true nobility of the Spanish nation." 
 
 And then his holy joy overpowers the Capuchin, and 
 he bursts forth into the following rhapsody over the flames 
 which consumed the unhappy victim of the year 1404 : — 
 
 "Oh, may ye be blessed, ye flaming pyres, by which 
 some few, and they all too cunning, persons were put out 
 of the way, yet in any case hundreds and hundreds of 
 souls rescued from the abyss of errors and, perhaps, also 
 from eternal damnation. . . ." 
 
 And he concludes with the words : " How glorious is 
 the memory of a Torquemada ! " 
 
 If my reader will turn to the February issue of this 
 Review he will find on page 793 a similar eulogy of the 
 Inquisition, the glory of Spain, from the pen of Drumont, 
 and extracted from the Libre Parole of July 20th, 1892. 
 Whether Drumont draws his inspiration from the publi- 
 cation of the Pope's Domestic Prelate, or the Prelate from 
 Drumont, I leave it to my reader to decide.
 
 58 IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 On February 27th, 1896, Herr von Eynern quoted in 
 the German Parliament this Capuchin's rhapsody, where- 
 upon a member of the Catholic centre, Herr Porsch, 
 denied all knowledge of the book, and declared that Herr 
 von Eynern " seemed to be wallowing in an altogether 
 peculiar kind of literature." * I have done a good deal of 
 such wallowing, and on another occasion will produce 
 results of it, omitted now because I am confining myself 
 to citing what has special reference to the Dreyfus case. 
 The same tone is to be found in all the journalism inspired 
 by the Vatican, notably in the Latin fortnightly paper 
 called Vox Urbis, founded in i8g8, in the second number 
 of which, for November last, we find a spiteful resume of 
 the current phases of the Dreyfus case, written in clumsy 
 Latin, and ending thus : — 
 
 " Caveant tamen et Clemenceau et eius factiones pro 
 Dreyfus constitutae, ne stultis suis factis amplissimos 
 homines exercitum que lacessant, et memoria teneant 
 quod est in proverbio : ne quid nimis." 
 
 Such evidence as I have adduced leads us to doubt 
 whether Father Humphrey was not wholly serious when 
 he made in a room at Balliol long ago that onslaught upon 
 Jews and Protestants, which is still remembered. I alluded 
 to it in my volume t upon the Dreyfus case, and as Father 
 
 * " In einer ganz eigentlimlichen Sorte von Literatur herumzuwiihlen." 
 fNot wishing to be personal, I disguised in my book, The Dreyfus Case, the 
 identity of Father Humphrey under the pseudonym Father Humbert. I have 
 given the evidence so fully in the text because the Editor of Tke Month inserts 
 this note in his issue for February, 1899 : — 
 
 " By way of . . . discovering to us his own value as a witness to facts, Mr. 
 Conybeare here mentions (i.e., in The Dreyfus Case, p. 7) an undergraduate recol- 
 lection of his own. About twenty years ago, ' Father Humbert, the Oxford 
 Jesuit,' at a breakfast party at Balliol College, when the conversation turned on 
 Italian unity, lost his temper, and exclaimed, ' Oh ! if I could only have the civil
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 59 
 
 Humphrey has lately impugned the general accuracy of 
 the story as I have told it there, I venture to retell it in 
 the very words of Mr. J. O. Simon, to whom he spoke : — 
 
 " The conversation turned to the subject of the Inquisition, and Father 
 Humphrey was attempting to defend it. This made me boil, as I alwa}S 
 do, because of my own family tradition. For our ancestor, Don 
 Caesar Orobio, was burned alive in the seventeenth century, and his son, 
 Balthasar Orobio, was incarcerated for three years. He was the famous 
 author of Israel Avenged. I said to Father Humphrey, ' Perhaps then, if 
 you had the chance, you would begin by applying thumbscrews to me and 
 to my Protestant friends here ? ' 
 
 '■ Father Humphrey : ' Oh! dear, no, I should go for your necks at once.' 
 
 "Whereupon I said, 'Well, we may be thankful that in England at any 
 rate we have an efficient police force to restrain you.' 
 
 " Father Humphrey : ' That is our only deterrent.' " 
 
 Forgetful of the maxim noscitur a sociis, the editor of 
 The Month has taken up the cudgels for the French 
 Jesuits in the February number of his journal. "There 
 is," he says, alluding to my own and Mr. Barlow's books 
 on the Dreyfus case, " a persistent attempt to fasten the 
 responsibility for it, and for the anti-Semitic campaign 
 connected with it, upon the Society of Jesus, and that 
 naturally is a feature in the case which we cannot view 
 with unconcern," 
 
 Those who have followed the proofs, easily to be multi- 
 plied, which I have furnished in the preceding pages and 
 in the February number of this Review, would naturally 
 expect a Roman Catholic who feels so much concern 
 about the point mooted to take the first opportunity of 
 
 government in my hands for six months ! I w juld hedge round Jews and Protes- 
 tants like yourselves, and stamp you out." Father Humphrey nmst have been the 
 Jesuit intended, and his comment on this veracious story is, ' Mr. Conybeare's 
 recollection of my words is about as accurate as his recollection of my name.' "
 
 6o IL CASO DREYFUS; 
 
 dissociating himself from Drumont and his confederates. 
 Instead of doing so the editor of The Month regards 
 Drumont as a prime witness to the truth on every subject, 
 and rests his statement that French anti-Semitism is not 
 rehgious, but social and financial, entirely on Drumont's 
 own ipse dixit, as if that were worth having. No doubt it 
 is to some extent social and financial. That I have never 
 denied, but that even in Drumont's case it is in a still 
 higher degree religious, no one who reads his eulogies of 
 the Inquisition can doubt. Were it not so he would 
 hardly have a hundred times, and notably in his preface 
 to the Abb6 Desportes' book, Le Meurtre Rituel, have 
 repeated the fable that the Levitical customs of the Jews 
 oblige them to murder Christian children. In Portugal 
 this same fable is told by every peasant, not of the Jews, 
 but of the Jesuits themselves. This article in The Month 
 teems with misstatements that I could correct if I had 
 space. I will only notice two, both on page 122. The 
 writer there declares that the Union General or Finance 
 Company got up by the Jesuits was resented by the Jewish 
 bankers as an " invasion of their monopoly," and that 
 these bankers " accordingly bought up all its paper and 
 presented it all for payment at the same hour." This is 
 an error. The Jews are no more the only bankers in 
 Paris than they are in London ; and anyone who takes 
 the trouble to read the article, "Union Generale," in 
 Larousse's Supplem.ent for 1889, will see that the company 
 was an ill-managed bubble from the first, in which mis- 
 guided French people invested their savings on anti- 
 Semitic or religious grounds just as they invested them 
 in the Panama Canal on patriotic ones. The next state-
 
 OR, THE JESUIT VIEW. 6i 
 
 ment is that the Baron de Reinach, the banker, enriched 
 himself by the Panama collapse, and handed on his ill- 
 gotten gains to his nephew, M. Joseph Reinach, that the 
 latter lives on them, and that " this, his hereditary rela- 
 tion to the Panama catastrophe, explains that which is so 
 unintelligible to English readers, the special bitterness 
 with which M. Joseph Reinach is regarded by the anti- 
 Semites of the present hour." 
 
 This is all a calumny as base and cruel as it is false, 
 and one is surprised that a self-respecting English editor 
 did not leave it to repose in the columns of Drumont who 
 invented it, instead of thrusting it before the eyes of his 
 Catholic readers. As a matter of fact, M.Joseph Reinach 
 declared in the Press before the death of his cousin, Baron 
 de Reinach, that he would not in any case accept the 
 succession, and he has inherited nothing from his cousin, 
 for the very good reason that Cornelius Her2 had ruined 
 him. The Baron incurred enormous debts to satisfy the 
 extortionate claims of Herz on the agents of the company, 
 and died altogether penniless. 
 
 We look across our narrow seas and our eyes are 
 riveted with horror on the events which are passing in 
 France. There we gaze upon a second tragedy of Lao- 
 coon, on an ominous struggle in which the heroic figures 
 of Justice and of her children Liberty and Truth are 
 being slowly strangled and crushed to death in the 
 monstrous folds of militarism and priestcraft. 
 
 It has not been within the scope of this article to dwell 
 upon this conflict which may well be the prelude for 
 France of the fate which befel a famous city of old.
 
 62 IL CASO DREYFUS. 
 
 Indeed, I felt too disheartened at the turn events have 
 taken. I rather chose as my task the work of aiding the 
 future historian by trying to ascertain and fix upon the 
 right persons the true responsibihty, to do this in the 
 present while the evidence is fresh and the ink still wet 
 on their pens. Individuals pass, but the Latin Church 
 will remain ; and its partisans will assuredly try to obscure 
 the truth about the Dreyfus case in the future as they are 
 trying to do it in the present. It is therefore the duty 
 of all who have knowledge now, and have the records 
 open to them, to publish what they know. Nothing, alas, 
 that is said or done in England, can prevent the act of 
 base vengeance which the Camerilla of the French War 
 Office have planned to execute on their noble victim 
 Picquart. Nothing we say or do can retrieve the honour 
 of a nation which, in response to the clamour of such men 
 as Quesnay de Beaurepaire, Drumont, and Rochefort, has 
 dethroned Justice just as she was about to acquit the 
 innocent and condemn the guilty. Hardly ever before 
 in modern history has a legislative chamber framed and 
 passed a retrospective law for the expressed and avowed 
 purpose of ensuring judicial murder. Englishmen can 
 only stand by and deplore the fate which at the end of 
 this century overtakes the nation that at its beginning 
 heralded sooner than others the advent of better things. 
 There is an old eastern proverb : — " Son, be not like the 
 almond-tree, which is first to bloom and last to ripen its 
 fruit. But be like the mulberry, which is last to bloom 
 and first to ripen its fruit." It is much to be feared that 
 France is like the almond-tree in this figure.
 
 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 (August. 1S99.) 
 
 ]N the 13th of October, 1761, a young man of 
 twenty named Gober Lavaisse crossed the 
 bridge over the Garonne, by which the dusty 
 highway from Bordeaux entered Toulouse. As became 
 the son of a weaUhy advocate he was on horseback, and 
 he proceeded leisurely, for it was barely four o'clock, to 
 the stables where he could procure a fresh horse to carry 
 him to the country chateau on the further side of the city, 
 where his parents were then staying. No horse was to be 
 had, so he accepted the invitation of some friends who 
 had met him in the street to stay to supper with them. 
 These friends were no other than Jean Galas, the subject 
 of this article, a man of sixty-eight years of age and some- 
 what infirm, and his son. They led him into their house, 
 and presented him to Madame Galas. Jean, the father, 
 was a Protestant and a rich merchant, much respected by 
 his fellow-townsmen, even by the Gatholics. His wife 
 was English by birth, but connected by descent with the 
 house of Garde-Montesquieu, one of the oldest families of 
 Languedoc. They had four sons, with whom they had 
 ever lived on terms of the utmost affection. The second 
 of these, Louis, had been converted to the Latin religion.
 
 64 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 largely through the influence of the faithful old honne 
 Jannette. But his change of religion had not broken 
 the harmony which reigned in the family, and not only 
 did his father allow him a pension of 400 livres, but the 
 nurse Jannette, a devout Papist, continued to live, and 
 had now lived for thirty years, with them as their only 
 servant. The eldest son, Mark Antoine, the peculiar 
 friend of young Lavaisse, was a romantically inclined 
 youth, moody and melancholy, but a clever musician and 
 litterateur. Having no business talent, he wished to go to 
 the bar ; but found it closed to him as a Protestant, and 
 was averse to changing his rehgion. In those days the 
 Huguenots, if they wished to pursue any other profession 
 but trading, had to arm themselves with billets de con- 
 fession or certificates bought from accredited Latin priests 
 attesting — and that falsely — that they had received the 
 absolution of the Church. Mark Antoine had failed to 
 get the requisite certificates, and had furthermore lost a 
 little while before what money he possessed at billiards. 
 He was in despair, and having stimulated his already 
 overwrought brain with readings of Plutarch, of Seneca, 
 Montaigne, of Hamlet's monologue, which he knew by 
 heart, and of a French tragi-comedy entitled Sidney, he 
 had resolved to commit suicide that very evening. A 
 younger brother, Donat, was away on business in 
 Switzerland ; but the youngest of all, Pierre, was at 
 home, as also the two youngest children who were girls. 
 
 Lavaisse entered their house about five, and chatted 
 awhile with Madame Calas, till she rose to help her 
 servant prepare the supper. At the same time she sent 
 Mark out to buy some Roquefort cheese, of which he was
 
 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 a connoisseur. Lavaisse also went out to bespeak a horse 
 to carry him on his journey early the next morning. At 
 seven o'clock they all sat down to their meal, which 
 passed pleasantly enough, the sons discussing with 
 Lavaisse the antiquities of the town. They were still 
 at dessert when Mark, whose gloom the whole party had 
 noticed, got up and went into the kitchen which adjoined 
 the eating-room on the first floor. The servant Jannette 
 asked him : " Are you cold, Monsieur I'Atne ? Won't you 
 warm yourself? " And he answered : " No, on the con- 
 trary, I am too hot," and abruptly quitting the room he 
 went downstairs. The rest of the party finished their 
 supper, and then went into the adjoining salon to talk ; 
 Lavaisse and the father seating themselves on the sofa, 
 the youngest boy in an armchair, where he went to sleep. 
 Close upon ten his mother woke him up, and bade him 
 light M. Lavaisse, who was leaving, down the stairs. 
 They descended, and at once their cries brought the 
 father and the servant running downstairs, at the top 
 of which Madame Calas halted in terror. Pierre and 
 Lavaisse, as they turned to pass through the counting- 
 house into the street, had run against Mark who was 
 hanging dead, suspended by a cord with a running knot 
 to a pole placed across the top of the folding doors, which 
 stood open. 
 
 The father grasped the body to lift it and cut it down, 
 but one end of the pole slipped away from the top of the 
 door, and the corpse fell, the father falling over it. The 
 mother at the same time ran downstairs, while Pierre and 
 Lavaisse went for a surgeon. Their cries and those of 
 the bonne Jannette brought the neighbours running to the 
 
 E
 
 66 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 house, where they found the father and mother bending 
 over the body and applying restoratives, but in vain. 
 
 Except for the marks of the cord on the neck, the body 
 bore no signs of violence. The suicide had taken off his 
 coat, and had laid it, neatly folded up, on the counter, 
 before committing his crime. His hair was not dis- 
 arranged nor his shirt-frill. It was only noticed, when 
 the body reached the town hall, that the tip of the nose 
 was scratched, and the chest slightly abrased — injuries 
 due to its transport face downwards in the first cart that 
 came handy over roughly paved streets. 
 
 Ever since the thirteenth century, when the streets of 
 Toulouse ran with the blood of the Albigeois saints, 
 the Catholics of that city have been famous for their 
 fanaticism, accentuated by the presence of a minority of 
 hard-headed, stubborn, and independent-minded Protes- 
 tants. It was at Toulouse that the Catholics solemnly 
 thanked God for the death of Henri III., and made oath 
 to murder the first man who should recognize Henri IV. 
 as his Sovereign ; and nearly up to the close of the last 
 century they commemorated witn joyous processions and 
 fireworks the massacre in 1562 of 4,000 of their fellow- 
 citizens in the sacred cause of religion. It is the -Arch- 
 bishop of Toulouse and the neighbouring members of the 
 French hierarchy who to-day lend their sanction to such 
 infamous Catholic school-books as the Fleurs de I'histoire.* 
 
 Some gloomy fanatic, among those who ran up that 
 evening to see what had happened, whispered his suspicion 
 that it was no case of suicide; but that Jean Calas had 
 strangled h.is own son to prevent his becoming a Catholic. 
 
 * See The National Review for March, 1899, p. 151.
 
 JEAN CALAS. 67 
 
 Perhaps even it was the father's indignant denial* that 
 his son could have committed such a crime of his own 
 initiative, which drew the suspicion on to himself. For 
 we must not forget that in those days the body of a suicide 
 was denied burial, and exposed at the crossways. Any 
 parent who loved his children so fondly as did Jean Calas, 
 might well begin by making such a protest. Whether or 
 no his fatherly love gave a starting-point to the infamous 
 rumour, it quickly spread ; and in a few hours all the 
 Catholics of the quarter were telling one another how the 
 unfortunate Mark Antoine had meaned to abjure his 
 heresy the very next day ; how his father had been caught 
 bending over his son's body in the act of strangling him ; 
 how the neighbours had heard the murdered man's cries ; 
 how the Protestant religion makes it a duty for parents to 
 strangle their children rather than allow them to become 
 Catholics ; how in this case the Protestants had in a 
 preliminary conclave appointed one of their number, the 
 young Lavaisse, to assist the father in murdering his son. 
 " Voila bien le peuple ! Voila un tableau trop fidele de ses 
 exces ! " wrote Donat Calas, on July 2nd, 1762, in a memoir 
 from which I borrow the above details. 
 
 The fate of the unhappy family was sealed by the action 
 of a capiioul, or alderman of Toulouse, the Sieur David, who 
 from the first gave ear to the accusing crowd, and arriving 
 on the scene hurried the whole family off to the hotel de 
 ville. There he cast them into separate undergound cells, 
 not excepting even the Catholic bonne, and one Caseing 
 
 • Pierre Calas defxjsed on July 23rd, 1762, as follows : — " My father in his first 
 outbufbt of grief, said to nie : ' Do not go and spread the tale that your brother 
 has made away with himself; save at least the honour of your unhappy family.'"
 
 6S JEAN CALAS. 
 
 by name, a merchant and intimate friend of the family, 
 whom Pierre Calas had fetched to aid and advise them ; 
 and at whose instance it was that Lavaisse had called in 
 a surgeon named Gorse, and then had run to inform the 
 greffier or clerk of the aldermen. The next day Caseing 
 was released ; but the others, after interrogatories in which 
 their guilt was assumed, were committed for trial and put 
 in irons on November i8th, about five weeks after the 
 tragedy. 
 
 Meanwhile, the suicide's body had been subjected, not 
 to the statutory and horrible exposure at the cross-roads, 
 but to the pomp and ceremony of a martyr's interment. 
 He had, of course, died a Calvinist ; yet the brotherhood 
 of white penitents claimed him as their own, because some 
 fanatic came forward and pretended that he had meaned 
 to join their fraternity. This gave the aldermen an excuse, 
 and they decreed a public funeral in the great Church of 
 St. Etienne. Forty priests, and ten times that number 
 of white penitents, escorted the bier. The function was 
 held in their chapel, and the whole church was draped 
 with white. In the centre of the nave a catalfalque was 
 set up, surmounted by a skeleton — a loan from a local 
 surgeon, and so contrived as to move its limbs and head, 
 when concealed strings were pulled from below. This 
 ghastly figure bore in one hand a white placard on which 
 one read the words. Abjuration de Vheresic, and in the other 
 a palm, the emblem of martyrdom. On the next day the 
 grey friars held a like service, and no detail was omitted 
 which could inflame the fanatical temper of the Catholics. 
 The death sentence of Jean Calas was thus agreed to by 
 all in advance, in the same way as the Libre Parole and
 
 JEAN CALAS. 69 
 
 Mercier decreed Dreyfus' guilt weeks before his Court- 
 Martial. 
 
 Strict canonization alone did the suicide escape, and 
 that he would have received except for the timely inter- 
 vention of Voltaire's pen. For the people already looked 
 upon him as a saint ; some invoked his name ; others went 
 to pray at his tomb ; others entreated miracles of him ; 
 more still had to tell of those he had wrought. A man 
 stone-deaf heard the church bells ringing ; an apoplectic 
 priest had miraculously recovered, with the joint aid of the 
 new saint and of an emetic. A written attestation of these 
 and other miracles was drawn up and existed ready for the 
 use of the Committee of the Roman Curia, which has to 
 certify to the miracles of a son of earth, before the Pope can 
 canonize him. Over and above all this, the bi-centenary of 
 the great sixteenth century massacre of the Huguenots 
 was drawing near; and it was generally felt by the 
 Catholics that Calas' scaffold would fitly grace the festival. 
 Providence itself — so it was declared from the local pulpits 
 — had furnished a victim for the occasion. Even so in 
 the last four years the fanatics of the Latin Church have 
 acclaimed the unjust sentence on Dreyfus as a heaven-sent 
 opportunity of cudgelling Jews and Protestants. Naturatn 
 expellas furca, tamen usque reciirret. 
 
 From the hands of the aldermen of Toulouse, the 
 victims passed before the Parliament of Languedoc, and 
 this august body organized a trial to which, in many 
 particulars, the Dreyfus Court-Martial of 1894 offers a 
 striking parallel. One witness had heard Mark Antoine's 
 cries from the further end of the city, just as if the 
 victim had shrieked like a steam-syren. Another had
 
 70 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 peeped through the kej'hole, and seen men running about 
 inside Calas' house. A house-painter named Matei swore 
 that his wife had told him that a woman named Mandrille 
 had told her that a woman she did not know had told her 
 that she had heard the groans of the victim at the 
 extremity of the street. What a parallel this to the 
 story of Dre3^fus' confession of guilt ! A half-witted but 
 devout surgeon — perhaps the one who lent the skeleton — 
 declared that the food he found during the post-mortem in 
 the stomach of the deceased had been there four hours, 
 and not two only, as the case for the accused pre- 
 supposed. On the other hand, the depositions of the 
 Calas household, taken separately, agreed on all essential 
 points, and it was pointed out than an infirm old man of 
 sixty-eight years could not have throttled a strong man 
 in the prime of life, even with the help of Lavaisse, who 
 was also — be it noted — the bosom friend of the deceased. 
 It was allowed by all that, if the young man had been 
 assassinated, the whole family, including the Catholic 
 bonne, must be equally guilty, and this was at first^the 
 opinion of the majority of the judges. Nevertheless, they 
 condemned the father alone to be broken on the wheel 
 and burned, in the belief and hope that in his agony he 
 would yield and avow the complicity of the rest. Ques- 
 tioned in the midst of his torment, he merely answered, 
 " Alas, where there was no crime, how could there be 
 accomplices ? " 
 
 A single subdued cry escaped the lips of Calas when the 
 tortures began, and the executioner's first blow was struck. 
 The rest he bore with fortitude. He spoke during the 
 last minutes of his life only of the truths of Christianity.
 
 JEAN CALAS. 71 
 
 Against his judges he uttered no word of complaint, but 
 declared that he did not impute his death to them ; they 
 must have been deceived by false witnesses. His very 
 last words to the Jacobin monk, Bourges, Professor of 
 Theology in Toulouse, who, with another monk of the 
 same order, Caldagues, was charged to minister to him in 
 his last moments, were the following: " I die an innocent 
 man ; Jesus Christ, who was innocence itself, consented 
 to die by a punishment yet more cruel. I do not regret a 
 life which, I trust, ushers me into eternal bliss. I only 
 bewail the lot of my wife and my son ; and the thought of 
 yon poor stranger, the son of M. Lavaisse, to whom I 
 thought I was doing a mere act of courtesy in asking him 
 to supper, intensifies my regret," 
 
 As he spoke the alderman who first arrested him, and 
 had come, though not by official necessity, to gloat over 
 the spectacle of his death, exclaimed : " Wretch ! Behold 
 the executioner who is about to reduce your body to 
 ashes; tell the truth!" Calas merely turned his head 
 away a little, and next moment the executioner did his 
 work. This was on March gth, 1762. 
 
 Pierre Calas, who, after his father, was looked upon as 
 the guiltiest of the family, was sentenced to perpetual 
 banishment. He quitted the city by one gate, but was 
 promptly rearrested, led back through another, and in- 
 carcerated in the Jacobin monastery. There the monk 
 Bourges offered to rehabilitate him and have the sentence 
 of banishment repealed, if he would change his religion. 
 After being imprisoned by the monks for four months, he 
 escaped, and it was largely through his means that the 
 attention of the King's Council was drawn to the case and
 
 72 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 the injustice remedied, so far as it was, humanly speak- 
 ing, possible to remedy it. Lavaisse and Jannette had 
 been let go free by the executioners of Calas ; although, 
 had there really been any crime committed, they must 
 have been privy to it. The widow also had been liberated, 
 although her guilt could be in no way inferior to that of 
 the rest. The truth was that the judges themselves were 
 impressed with the composure and dignity in sufferings 
 and death of their victim, and already felt misgivings. 
 The very priests who attended him on the scaffold openly 
 declared that he had died like an ancient martyr. All 
 the same, the widow's daughters were taken away from 
 her and placed in a convent. She herself, penniless, 
 starving, afraid of all, as an English-born woman well 
 might be under such terrible circumstances, begged her 
 way to Paris, in the desperate hope of being someday able 
 to lay her case before the King and appeal to his mercy. 
 
 Thanks to the leaven of the French Ency^opgedists 
 which had already begun to work, Paris was less fanatical 
 in those days than Toulouse, and the widow found 
 defenders. M. de Beaumont, a celebrated advocate in 
 the Paris Parliament, interested himself in her case, and 
 drew up an appeal for her to which fifteen advocates' put 
 their names. M. Loiseau composed an eloquent memoir 
 on the case in all its aspects. M. Mariette, advocate 
 before the King's Council, drew up her plea in a manner 
 which carried conviction to all. Lastly, Voltaire, ready 
 then to defend the cause of innocence, as he was subse- 
 quently when he pleaded for Count Lally, La Barre, and 
 our own Admiral Byng, threw himself for three years into 
 the agitation, and more than anyone else forced it on the
 
 JEAN CALAS. 73 
 
 ear of society. The case inspired his masterly treatise on 
 Tolerance, of which the Parliament of Languedoc, in 
 solemn mockery of themselves, ordered a copy to be 
 publicly burned, just as they had done with Pascal's 
 treatise against the Jesuits. 
 
 But, although opinion was almost unanimous in Paris, 
 long before the King, in council, annulled the barbarous 
 sentence, there were many eager for the part of advocates 
 diaboli. The divots, or truly pious people, said out loud 
 that it was better to let an old Calvinist be broken on the 
 wheel, even if he were innocent, than oblige eight coun- 
 cillors of Languedoc to admit that they had been mis- 
 taken. So to-day in France the Ligne de la Patrie of 
 Coppee and Brunetiere would rather that Dreyfus was 
 left chained to his torrid rock than that the credit of the 
 General Staff of the army or of the seven officers who 
 illegally sentenced him should be impugned. " There are 
 more magistrates than there are Galas," was the remark 
 of the eighteenth century analogues of General Gonse. 
 The whole of the Galas family was, in short, to be sacri- 
 ficed in honour of the magistracy. Times have changed ; 
 and in France of to-day it is no longer the honour of the 
 judges — which is cheap enough — but of officers, which is 
 incompatible with admission of fallibility. 
 
 For long months the Toulouse Gourt refused to deliver 
 up the proccs verbal and other documents of the case, but 
 in vain. The widow, her son Pierre, Lavaisse, and 
 Jannette were all cited before the chamlre des reqiietes de 
 Vhutel, or Supreme Gourt. The young Lavaisse, in 
 particular, presented depositions which moved the 
 admiration of all. He could well have pleaded from the
 
 74 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 first, had he been a liar, that he left the house before the 
 supposed crime was committed. He had been threatened 
 with torture, yet he had held bravely to the truth, and 
 had shown himself ready to share death with the Calas 
 family as he had shared their bonds. In the end the 
 Judges of the Paris Court unanimously declared the family 
 innocent, rehabilitated the father's memory, condemned 
 the Toulouse jurisdiction, and issued a faculty to the 
 family to sue it for damages. They also laid before the 
 King a formal appeal, that he would in his bounty make 
 good the financial ruin which had befallen the family. 
 The King responded by bestowing 36,000 livres on the 
 mother and children, and 3,000 on the faithful old servant 
 Jannette. 
 
 The happy conclusion of a case which had agitated 
 French society, and, indeed, all Europe, hardly less — 
 considering the different circumstance of that age — than 
 has the Dreyfus case to-day, created widespread joy, 
 especially in Paris. The highest society flocked to visit 
 the widow and her children in the Paris prison, to which, 
 pending the sentence of the Supreme Court, they volun- 
 tarily betook themselves ; and when they were acquitted 
 and liberated, the public places and promenades of Paris 
 were crowded with the triumphant partisans of innocence. 
 What completed their joy was the circumstance that the 
 acquittal was pronounced on March gth, 1765, exactly 
 three years after the victim of Catholic intolerance had 
 perished. 
 
 I have spoken of those who, during those three years, 
 chose for themselves the part of advocatus diaholi. They 
 had the excuse of being contemporaries, of being im-
 
 JEAN CALAS. 75 
 
 mersed in the current strife of the day, of Hving before 
 the French Revolution, of being at least sincere Catholics, 
 blinded by zeal and devoid of hypocrisy. Who, however, 
 would have thought it possible that in the year of grace 
 1898, when just 136 years had passed, during which all 
 historians had sifted the facts and admitted them, as 
 related in the above pages, there should arise a French- 
 man eager to pla}' the part over again, and that without 
 extenuating circumstances ; eager to rival the Abbe Freron 
 who, in the Anue Litletaire of 1765, earned the scorn and 
 moved the indignation of all men by arguing that it was 
 perfectly natural that Calas should have murdered his son 
 from fanaticism ; because, forsooth, Junius Brutus had 
 executed his from a sense of duty ; and that, if the King's 
 councillors at Paris had given credit to the depositions of 
 the Calas family, that merely proved, not Calas' inno- 
 cence, but their credulity. Our modern Freron is no 
 other than M. Brunetiere, academician and editor of the 
 Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 
 On March 15th, 1898, soon after the conclusion of the 
 Zola trial, this writer published in his review an article 
 entitled Apres le Proces, which was in effect an apology for, 
 and eulogy of, brute force — blind, deaf, and dumb. 
 
 The moral suggested to him by the Zola trial, and the 
 part played in it by the most distinguished French paleo- 
 graphers, biologists, and chemists, is this, that of all 
 governing classes, one composed of intellectual persons is 
 in a republic and a democracy the worst. He does not 
 scruple to declare his preference of an oligarchy composed 
 of priests, plutocrats, and praetorians. He tenders an 
 assurance of his contempt and hatred " to the intellectucls,
 
 76 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 who for the last hundred years have done us so much 
 harm." What business, he asks, has a paleographer 
 (e.g., Paul Meyer) to oppose his own judgment about the 
 bordereau to that of a court-martial. France, we are told, 
 is fallen the victim of Freemasons, Protestants, and Jews. 
 Anti-Semitism is the legitimate revenge of the Catholics. 
 Only let Frenchmen renounce the right to think for them- 
 selves and make it over to the Vatican ; only let them 
 embrace his own idea of militarism, and everything will 
 come right at once. Such is the drift of M. Brunetiere's 
 reflections. 
 
 In the year i8g8 a series of articles, entitled Billets diHa 
 Province, appeared in the Paris Steele, from the pen of a 
 brilliant writer calling himself Michel Colline. The one 
 for August I2th contained a just sketch of M. Brunetiere 
 under the transparent title of " Basile." It begins by 
 rallying him for his insincerity, for the charlatanry and 
 pedantry of his new flights in the art of literary criticism. 
 Then the writer asks : — 
 
 "Why is he now paying court to the Catholic clergy? Why in the 
 Dreyfus affair has he put himself — to use his own pretty phrase— on the 
 side on which he never ought to be ? Why has he written this detestable 
 article 'Apres le Prods' the pervading ugliness of which is peculiarly visible 
 in the paragraph, so truly dishonourable to a man of reflection, entitled, 
 • De guelques intellectuds ' ? . . . For if one must suppose that he believes 
 one word of what he has said, it would follow that be denies the utility 
 of individual action in history, denies the possibility of a wise man being 
 in the right when he opposes public error, denies the part played by genius 
 in the work of civilization, denies liberty of thought, the sovereignty of 
 conscience, all in a word that makes up the intellectual and moral dignity 
 of man. 
 
 " If," continued Michel Colline, in words solemn, but not too severe, 
 " if he is not merely making mock of us all, then he has done it out of sheer
 
 JEAN CALAS. 77 
 
 wickedness, and to aid the spirit of darkness, which, from the time of the 
 Crucifixion of Christ up to that of the butchery of Jean Huss and of 
 Galileo's imprisonment, seeks to overwhelm from age to age the light which 
 will make us free. 
 
 "Nothing," he continues, "is more sacred, I know it well, than a 
 religious conviction ; and it seems at first sight as if we had no sort of 
 right to call on a man to give reasons for things incapable of demon- 
 stration, which he is free to believe, if he chooses. And no doubt this is 
 true, as long as it is a religious conviction that we are dealing with ; but, 
 by his own admission, Basile has none, and he has left himself no divine 
 hopes. Never has one beheld aught more dry and hard, less softened by 
 any tinge of mysticism than this man's soul. Naturally the Church would 
 rather have an atheist to work and fight for it than a Christian who 
 labours only for God ; and, delighted to have such an instrument, she asks 
 no question about his motives. But this question we may here ask, with- 
 out fearing to be found indiscreet. Since it is no impulse of faith that 
 urges him, what is his motive ? What political end does he follow in 
 constituting himself a missionary of the Pope ? " 
 
 But the Sting of ihisjeti d' esprit lay in its last parag;raph, 
 wherein the writer regrets the long delay of Brunetiere's 
 promised volume on Voltaire : — 
 
 "This I regret," remarks the satirist in concluding. "I should have 
 been curious to read the censure which, if he be logical, he must pass on 
 the generous defender of Calas ; or if, by chance, he approved of Voltaire's 
 action, I should be very curious to see how he reconciles this traditional 
 approval with the hasty judgment which he has lately passed on indi- 
 vidualism and on intellectuals." 
 
 M. Brunetiere lost no time in fitting the cap on his 
 head. He sat down and penned a letter to the Siccle, 
 angrily threatening the editor, M. Yves Guyot, with the 
 pains and penalties of the law if it was not inserted at 
 once. It was easy to please him, and his diatribe 
 appeared the next day.
 
 78 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 " One of your collaborators, M. Michel Colline," he writes, "is curious 
 to know what I should have been able to say of the ' generous defender of 
 Galas' in a volume which I have not written. I can easily satisfy him." 
 
 He then quotes from his article on Galas, which had long 
 before appeared in the Revue des Deux Monies, and in 
 which, while candidly recognizing Galas' innocence, he 
 yet somewhat ignobly disputes Voltaire's " generosity," 
 and does his best to disparage him as an apostle of tolera- 
 tion. The last paragraph of his letter it is, however, 
 which contains M. Brunetiere's latest self-revelation. 
 
 "These few pages," he writes, alluding to his citations of his own 
 article, " are twenty years old. ... I will content myself by adding this 
 much to them to-day, namely, that I am not so sure as I used to be of the 
 innocence of Calas ; and every question of judicial error being a specific 
 one, I do not believe that there was any judicial error in the Dreyfus 
 affaire." 
 
 M. Brunetiere is a type of which many examples exist 
 in modern France, nearly twenty of them meeting us 
 without our going beyond the charmed circle of his 
 brother academicians. It is with reason therefore that 
 the league of self-styled patriots formed to do honour to 
 the memory of Henry the forger by the poets Coppee * and 
 Deroulede has come to be known as the Ligue des Basiles. 
 In French literary history M. Brunetiere, if he lives at 
 
 * For those English readers who desire a nearer acquaintance with M. Copp6e, 
 the dear friend and political henchman of General Mercier, I may point out that he 
 has told the story of his conversion to " Catholicism," in a work entitled, " Happy 
 Sufferings," recently translated by Catharine M. Welby, with a sympathetic intro- 
 duction by the Rev. W. H. Hutton, B.D., Fellow and Tutor of St. John's 
 College, Oxford, and Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Ely. This translation 
 is published by Messrs. Rivington. M. Coppde's conversion to Catholicism un- 
 happily coincides with his conversion to the cult of Fraud, Forgery, Treason, False 
 dossiers, and hateful Injustice to Jews and Protestants.
 
 JEAN CALAS. jg 
 
 all, will live not as the pedant who discovered the evolution 
 des genres in literature, and claimed in consequence to 
 have founded a new school of criticism, but as the man 
 who, in order the better to believe in Dreyfus' guilt, in 
 order to sink his conscience and intelligence to the level 
 required by Drumont and the Libre Parole, began at last 
 to question even the innocence of Jean Calas. 
 
 It is nearly one hundred and forty years since Calas 
 perished on the rack, and in the interval France has seen 
 the great Revolution, in honour of which her citizens 
 inscribe on their archways and public monuments the 
 legend of Liberie, Egalite, Fratemite. Nevertheless, a 
 great proportion of them, and in particular those over 
 whose lives and minds the Latin Church retains its sway, 
 are still strangers, as much as Bossuet was and more, to 
 the principles of civil and religious liberty and toleration. 
 Witness the cowardly behaviour of the French clergy and 
 bishops throughout this struggle to obtain justice for the 
 innocent man Dreyfus. Merely because he was a Jew, 
 the mot d'ordre has been passed to every confessor in the 
 land to warn those whose consciences they directed 
 against feeling or showing any sympathy with the victim. 
 The Church, as a whole, has espoused the cause of the 
 forger Henry and of the traitor Esterhazy ; and it has 
 done so with open eyes and wilfully, because it aspired to 
 deal through Dreyfus a blow at the modern civilization 
 which in its heart of hearts it detests. 
 
 A book lies before me of which the popularity is, per- 
 haps, one of the worst symptoms of the insane wickedness 
 which seems to be inseparable from latter-day French 
 Catholic piety. It is called '' Le Peril Protestant, an Essay
 
 8o JEAN CALAS. 
 
 in Contemporary History." It had already in March last, 
 when I purchased my copy, gone through eleven editions 
 in as many weeks, and is no doubt still selling at the same 
 rate. It is issued from a "religious" press, and by a 
 publishing house which devotes itself to selling works of 
 piety, the Librairie St. Joseph, and its author is the same 
 Ernest Renauld who has been lately urging the officers 
 who are to retry Dreyfus at Rennes to discard all evidence, 
 to listen only to their conviction intime of his guilt, and 
 send him back to the He dii Diable to die. This advice 
 he tenders in its proper place, the columns of the Libre 
 Parole ; and, needless to say, his volume is the quintessence 
 of all the worst falsehoods with which that flagitious 
 journal has, since it was founded by the Jesuits and with 
 Jesuit money in 1892, been poisoning the French mind. 
 A notice on the cover indicates the author's end and aim 
 to be nothing less than a general proscription of the 
 Protestants all over France. " In this book," says this 
 notice, " will be found, department by department, the 
 names of and posts filled by Protestant functionaries, as 
 well as the names of Protestant university men, not only in 
 Paris but in the provinces." Opening it we read this on 
 the first page : — 
 
 " The aim of this book is then to unmask the enemy, the Protestant, the 
 ally of the Jew and the Freemason, against the Catholic, who is to-day the 
 victim of this diabolical alliance." 
 
 There are, according to this writer, 650,000 Protestants 
 in France, and he accuses this slender minority of oppress- 
 ing thirty-eight millions of Frenchmen, because, as he says, 
 it monopolizes the universities, and because Protestants
 
 JEAN CALAS. 8i 
 
 everywhere fill posts of confidence in the administrative 
 and financial system of France. At first sight, he says, 
 one might infer that their moral and intellectual superiority 
 was overwhelming, and so any unbiassed judge would do. 
 But this conclusion ill suits a scribe of the Libre Parole 
 writing for Catholics, and he accordingly sets out to prove, 
 in six hundred pages of close print, that it is because they 
 excel in fraud, vice, treason to France, and every form of 
 impiety, that they have come to the fore. 
 
 Of course, the Dreyfus affair is the stock topic of the 
 book. Here is the writer's characterization of some 
 courageous members of the Ecole des Charles, who were 
 among the first to champion the cause of right. 
 
 " What is Paul Meyer ? 
 
 " A Jew, in spite of his conversion to Protestantism.* 
 
 "What are Messrs. Molinier ? 
 
 "Two Protestants, friends of the Dreyfusard Monod. 
 
 "What is M. Giry ? 
 
 " Nothing but the husband of two Protestant wives in succession, just 
 as are Ribot and Trarieux. 
 
 " What is M. Bournou ? 
 
 " The intimate friend of Molinier. 
 
 " The Ecole des Chartes also has become the prey of a Protestant 
 Syndicate." 
 
 And this is his sketch of Scheurer-Kestner, the last 
 representative in France of an undivided Alsace, and one 
 who, after 1870, gave up everything in order to remain a 
 French subject : — 
 
 " Yes, indeed, many veils are rent, many masks torn off; and the man 
 whose life we are told was clear as crystal, this last deputy of Alsace, as he 
 calls himself, with tremolos in his voice, has been shown up as a Protestant 
 
 • M. Paul Meyer is a Catholic.
 
 82 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 sectary, who puts his religious hatreds, his Germanophile sympathies at 
 the service of the most abominable campaign which ever agitated opinion 
 and exasperated the French conscience." 
 
 And then, after the manner of the Libre Parole, he 
 proceeds to attack Scheurer's private hfe, which is as 
 blameless as his public life has been noble, and his services 
 to science eminent. 
 
 "Do you dream that he is a paragon, this Scheurer ? Not a bit of it. 
 It remains to show him to you in a very different light. It appears that, 
 austere Protestant though he be, he is yet a man for all that ; and papa 
 Scheurer, in spite of his white hairs, still feels his heart thrill with feelings 
 all the more burning because they are returned. 
 
 " And, perhaps, if nature had created him less giddy, our Senator would 
 not have made up his mind to enter the Dreyfusard plot. Dans tous les 
 grands evenements cherchez la femme." 
 
 When we see such ordure as this slung at the noblest 
 figure in modern France, we understand how it is that 
 the Francophile party in the annexed provinces has in the 
 last two years dwindled to insignificance. The eleventh 
 edition has an appendix entitled Loew et Cie, full of such 
 insults to the President of the Criminal Chamber of the 
 Cour de Cassation as are dear to the heart of Quesnay de 
 Beaurepaire and his faction. M. Loew, like Scheurer- 
 Kestner, is an Alsatian, and therefore, according to 
 M. Renauld, a Prussian and a Jew. 
 
 This is a fair specimen of the calumnies which M. 
 Renauld has collected about leading Huguenots all over 
 France. In the spring of i8g8 he sent out to reliable 
 Catholics and priests in almost every parish in France a 
 confidential circular, in which we find propounded the 
 following question : —
 
 JEAN CALAS. 83 
 
 " Do you know about the Protestants any facts of a 
 kind to compromise them or excite pubHc opinion against 
 them ? " 
 
 A postman dropped one of these by mistake into the 
 box of one M. Lecoat, a Breton Protestant and pastor at 
 Tremel, who unkindly communicated it to the public 
 Press. On page 457 of his book, M. Renauld gives us 
 the secret dossier of the hidenx Lecoat, as he calls him. 
 We learn that he takes English money, like the rest of 
 the Huguenots, that he falsified the Renauld circular, and 
 so forth. But it is there to confute him, as is also the 
 book. Its six hundred pages stuffed with libels fished up 
 all over France are in themselves a sufficient attestation 
 of the rag-picking methods employed in order to compile it. 
 
 This book breathes the adoration of Henry the forger, 
 to which we are long ago accustomed among the followers 
 of the Comte de Mun. " The Colonel," we read, page 
 203, " lost his head. He confessed. He sacrificed him- 
 self. In prison at Mont Valerien he asked himself whether 
 Cavaignac had not turned Dreyfusard . . . and, victim 
 of blind discipline, he preferred to die. He committed 
 suicide." 
 
 M. Renauld's repertory of abuse is considerable. Thus 
 M. de Pressense is a parpaillot ; the Times correspondent 
 at Paris is a "filthy reptile": '' Lc Times bavait par la 
 plume de Vimmonde reptile connu sous le nam de Blowitz." 
 As to Picquart, M. Renauld " cannot quite make out 
 what his religion may be, but he has good reason to 
 believe that he is of Jewish origin. And judging from 
 his dirty tricks, it seems as if he made his own to the 
 utmost the cult of servility, delation, spying, cowardice
 
 84 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 and lying. What is more, the spelHng of his name shows 
 that it is not one of French origin." The National 
 Review, we are told, is a Dreyfusard journal, and when 
 in June, i8g8, it printed my "awful article" (article 
 cpouvantable contre Vetat-major frangais), it " showed 
 clearly how much of calumny, vulgarity, and outrage 
 Englishmen's hatred can inspire." 
 
 And, indeed, as one reads this book, a type of many 
 which make their appearance every month in modern 
 France, one realizes how England and things English 
 are viewed by the average Catholic abroad. We are 
 beheved to be leagued with the United States and 
 Germany with the triple object, firstly, of dismembering 
 certain States in which we regard Catholicism as being 
 still too firmly rooted. These States are France, Spain, 
 and Portugal. Secondly, of securing the preponderance 
 of the Protestant States all over the world ; and thirdly, 
 of giving to the Jews the control of the Protestant States. 
 It is solemnly affirmed that England is bound by treaty 
 to pay Prussia one million sterling per annum in further- 
 ance of these aims ; and the supposed programme and 
 secret treaty are printed in leaded type as an introduction 
 to the book. Nor is it only against Catholicism that we 
 Englishmen seem to plot so diabolically. The reader is 
 gravely assured on page 53 that three hundred thousand 
 Christians were massacred by the Turks in 1896-1897 
 at the instigation of England. One might hope after this 
 that the writer would condemn the massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew's. It was cruel, he says, but it was politic. 
 He accuses the handful of French Protestants in the 
 Chamber of being responsible for Hanotaux' policy of
 
 JEAN CALAS. 85 
 
 giving the Turk a free hand three years ago, and pretends 
 that he cannot after that "understand the factitious 
 indignation of the French Protestants when they speak of 
 St. Bartholomew's." They were traitors to their country, 
 he declares, and sold to England then as now. 
 
 The same rancorous bigotry animates another recent 
 volume which lies before me, entitled: Americanism and 
 the Anti-Christian Conspiracy, by the Abbe Henri Delassus, 
 Canon of Cambrai and Director of the Semaine Religieuse. 
 It is published by the Societe de Saint Augustin, printed 
 by the press of the Catholic faculties of Lille, and recom- 
 mended by the Archbishop of Cambrai, The massacres 
 and acts of cruelty by which Protestantism was nearly 
 exterminated in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries were, we are told on page 8, "miracles recog- 
 nized as such by ecclesiastical authority," a statement 
 which perhaps refers to the service of thanksgivings for 
 the St. Bartholomew's massacre, which was printed by 
 the Pope in 1572, and of which a copy, almost unique, is 
 preserved in the Bodleian. "The same protection was 
 accorded us," continues Delassus, " by the Divine Mother, 
 using the same means, against Jansenism." And he 
 piously ejaculates : " Gatide Maria Virgo, cunctas hcereses 
 sola in'.eremisti in nniverso mundo." 
 
 The Declaration of the Rights of Man is, according to 
 this writer, the very worst of the heresies against which 
 Frenchmen are to look for such supernatural aid. " Here 
 we have the root of all the evil," he remarks, in his intro- 
 duction (p. vii.). "This declaration," he says, on page 
 94, " was condemned by Pius VI., and from it flows the 
 entire sum of modern errors, to wit, liberty of the human
 
 86 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 person in respect of God ; and as corollaries therefrom, 
 liberty of thought and liberty of the Press, liberty of con- 
 science and liberty of cult, the supremacy of society and 
 its independence from the Church, sovereignty of the 
 nation, or the right to make laws which derive their 
 authority, not from God, but from a majority in Parha- 
 ment." "All these ' montrosities,' " he continues, " were 
 condemned anew by Gregory XVI. in his encyclical 
 Mir art, and by Pio IX. in the Syllabus." The liberal 
 Catholic movement which, under the name of Ameri- 
 canism, has spread to France, is declared to be a mixture 
 of all these errors, with the poison of the "liberal and 
 humanitarian Judaism " of the Association Israelite Uni- 
 verselle thrown in as a ferment. The result, he declares, 
 is religious indifference among the masses. " Tolerance 
 is another, and not less efficacious solvent of religion," as 
 this monk conceives of religion, " that tolerance," he 
 adds, " which Freemasonry elevates into the first of all 
 rights and the first of all duties in the sphere of religion." 
 Such is the true inwardness of the Papist outcry against 
 Freemasonry. 
 
 The old tract to which I have alluded as preserved in 
 the Bodleian, and of which an excellent facsimile, edited 
 by the librarian, Mr. E. B. Nicholson, can be bought for 
 one shilling, is entitled : " Ordine delta solenissima proces- 
 sione fatta del Sommo Pontefice nelV A Ima citta di Roma, 
 per la felicissima nova delta destruitione delta setta ugonotana,'" 
 that is, " The order of the solemn procession held by the 
 Supreme Pontiff in the city of Rome to commemorate the 
 most happy news of the destruction of the Huguenot 
 sect." The Pope and his Cardinals began the solemnities,
 
 JEAN CALAS. 87 
 
 SO we read, with " Un hellissimo Te Deiim laiidamns da 
 excellentissimi musici," and the tract was printed on the 
 very day of the celebration, September 8th, 1572, by the 
 Impressori Camerali, that is, at the Pope's private press. 
 The massacre had taken place on August 24th, sixteen 
 days before. 
 
 In spite of the proud boast of Rome that she remains 
 ever the same. Englishmen had in the last fifty years 
 begun to think that she had accommodated herself a little 
 to the modern conceptions of tolerance and civil liberty. 
 In the Dreyfus affair, however, she has shown herself just 
 as full of rancour, just as hostile to modern ideas, just as 
 ready to oppress and proscribe Jews and Protestants as 
 ever she was. Not a word in Mr. Gladstone's famous 
 tract on Vaticanism of which she is not now, a whole 
 generation after it appeared, anxious to exemplify the 
 truth. 
 
 The situation in France is summed up in the following 
 letter, written in view of an article, entitled " A Clerical 
 Crusade," published in the February number of this 
 Review. Its writer is one of the most spiritually-minded 
 of French religious writers. His books are in the 
 liands of every cultivated Catholic all over Europe and 
 America, and his monographs never fail to arouse the 
 enthusiasm of our own High Church journals. It is as 
 follows : — 
 
 " Lorsque I'infaillibilite du pape fut proclame il se trouva hiiit ^veques 
 fran^ais pour s'y opposer. Aujourd hui il ne n'en est pas trouv6 un seul 
 pour Clever la voix et dire une parole de paix. La liaine devemie le 
 thermometre de la piet6, voila le spectacle que nous reservait lY-glise de 
 home pour la fin du 19""^ siecle.
 
 88 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 " II y a la plus qu'un fait ordinaire. C'est une maniere de miracle, que 
 jamais les adversaires les plus acharnes de cette eglise n'auraient ose 
 s'imaginer. 
 
 " Je vous suis tres reconnaissant comme Frangais et comme Chretien 
 d'avoir appele I'attention du public qui reflechit sur le fond de la arise qui 
 nous tourmente. 
 
 " When the infallibility of the Pope was proclaimed there were found 
 eight French bishops to oppose it. To-day there has not been found a 
 single one to raise his voice and speak a word of peace. Hatred become 
 the thermometer of piety, such is the spectacle which the Church of Rome 
 had in store for us for the close of the igth century. 
 
 " This is no common fact. It is a sort of miracle, of which the bitterest 
 enemies of the Church would never have dared to dream. 
 
 " I am very grateful to you as a Frenchman and as a Christian for having 
 drawn the attention of the public which reflects to the real nature of the 
 crisis which torments us." 
 
 In the last century it was only through the influence of 
 Voltaire and of the Intellectuals whom he represented that 
 the wrongs of the Calas family were redressed. It is the 
 same class that has to-day, after one of the most honour- 
 able struggles ever beheld in history, succeeded in lifting 
 off the neck of France the millstone of guilt which Jesuitry 
 and militarism had fastened there. But they would have 
 found the task impossible if the French did not retain, as 
 a legacy from their Revolution, a large measure both of 
 liberty of speech and of emancipation of the male con- 
 science from the thraldom of priest and confessional. 
 The end for which the French Jesuits have toiled unceas- 
 ingly since 1870 has been to exploit in their own interest 
 the 2eal of their countrymen for a renovated army. They 
 have aspired to govern the army through its corps of 
 higher officers, and through a Jesuitized army to govern 
 France. They have failed ; for we cannot suppose that
 
 JEAN CALAS. 89 
 
 the officers at Rennes, who will in a few days retry Dreyfus 
 on the charge of betraying the documents enumerated in 
 the bordereau, will follow M. Renauld's counsel, and, in 
 the teeth of all the evidence, condemn him afresh on the 
 strength of a conviction intinie. If they do, France will 
 find herself at a lower level than she ever touched under 
 the ancien regime, for under that Calas' memory was at 
 least rehabilitated, even if it was too late to repair the 
 crimes of fanaticism. 
 
 In the coming century, the position of France and 
 Belgium and Italy among the civilized States, and the 
 amount of good work, moral and intellectual, they will be 
 able to achieve, the measure of their civilization, will 
 depend upon how far the sleepless fanaticism, intolerance, 
 and intrigues of the ultramontane Church can be counter- 
 worked and crushed. 
 
 It is a proof, were any needed, of Captain Dreyfus' 
 magnanimity that he has been the last man in the world 
 to realize or even suspect the true nature of the forces 
 which from the first were arrayed against him. Up to 
 the very end he has supposed that he was the victim of a 
 judicial error, has believed in the good faith of those who 
 condemned him, in the loyalty of such men as Mercier, 
 Felix Faurc, and Boisdeffre. The latter, if the minis- 
 trations of the Pere du Lac have left in him any lingering 
 relic of a human conscience, must feel himself seared as 
 with a hot iron when he reads that all through the last 
 year of his agony of suspense on the Devil's Island the 
 victim supposed that it was to him that he owed the 
 promised revision of his case, that he even wished to send 
 him a telegram at Cape Verde when at last he was on his
 
 90 JEAN CALAS. 
 
 way home, to thank him for the success of his efforts in 
 behalf of his innocence. It had to be left to Maitres 
 Demange and Labori to disillusion him, to recount to 
 him all the dreadful details, the conspiracy of his own 
 comrades, the mediaeval hatreds ever smouldering on in 
 the bosom of the Catholics, and now fanned into a flame 
 by their religious Press. It needed courage to broach the 
 truth to him ; it was an effort to convince him. They 
 knew that at last he understood, when he exclaimed of 
 the judges, who gave ear to forged evidence which they 
 gave him no chance to refute, " They were not judges. 
 They were assassins," and added these memorable words, 
 " Henceforth I shall live for the weak, for the oppressed, 
 for the unhappy."
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 (October, 1899.) 
 
 ERINDE AC SI CADAVER — "Act as though you 
 were a corpse." Such is the maxim in which 
 Ignatius Loyola summed up the intended re- 
 sults of his new method of disciplining the individual soul, 
 and it cannot be denied that the five French officers, who 
 in wanton defiance of the evidence, of their oaths, and 
 of humanity at large, have just recondemned an innocent 
 comrade to the galleys, do not faithfully reflect the spirit 
 of their Jesuit instructors. The gist of their method may 
 be gathered from the following passage of the Spiriiiial 
 Exercises of Loyola : — 
 
 " Rule 13. Lastly, that we may ourselves be altogether of one mind 
 with and in conformity with the Catholic Church, in case she shall have 
 defined as being black that which to our eyes appears white, we are in duty 
 bound to at once pronounce it black." 
 
 And this from the " Letter on Obedience " : — 
 
 " You shall diligently beware of at any time endeavouring to twist aside 
 unto your own the will of your Superior. His will you ought to regard as 
 the will of God. Such an endeavour would be not to conform your will to 
 the divine, but to control the divine by the standard of your own will, 
 thereby inverting the order of that divine wisdom. How great in truth is 
 the error of those who, blinded by self-love, are led to esteem themselves
 
 92 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 obedient when they have by some means or other brought round their 
 Superior to what they wish themselves. . . . 
 
 " He that would wholly immolate himself to God must offer not his 
 will alone, but also his intelligence — that is the third and highest grade of 
 obedience; so that he not only wills his Superior's will, but feels as he 
 feels, and submits to his judgment his own, so far as a devout will can 
 bend the understanding to itself. . . . 
 
 " I ought to desire to be ruled by a Superior who endeavours to subju- 
 gate my judgment and subdue my understanding. . . . When it seems to 
 me that I am commanded by my Superior to do a thing against which 
 my conscience revolts as sinful, and my Superior judges otherwise, it is my 
 duty to yield my doubts to him, unless I am otherwise constrained by 
 evident reasons." 
 
 But where blind and dumb obedience is put first and 
 the voice of conscience second, the latter has, inside an 
 army or monastic order, small chance of being heard: — 
 
 " I ought not to be my own, but His who created me, and his, too, by 
 whose means God governs me, yielding myself to be moulded in his hands 
 like so much wax. ... I ought to be like a corpse, which has neither will 
 nor understanding ; or like a small crucifix, which is turned about at the 
 will of him that holds it ; or like a staff in the hands of an old man, who 
 uses it as may best assist or please him." 
 
 It is true that in a solitary passage Loyola seeks to fix 
 a moral limit to the carrying out of his system : — " In all 
 things," he says, " except sin, I ought to do the will of 
 my Superior, and not my own." But this sentence is 
 only read in the introduction to his treatise, where he 
 wishes not to shock the novice who has just taken up his 
 book. Such a passage hardly breaks the monotony of the 
 discipline, and certainly cannot change its general aim 
 and tendency, which is, as it were, to eradicate and scoop 
 out the conscience of the individual man, leaving a
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 93 
 
 vacuum into which the dictates, good or evil, of the 
 hierarchical Superior, accepted blindly and without criti- 
 cism as Divine, are to be thrust. Esprit de corps (there is 
 no English phrase) is to override all distinctions of right 
 and wrong. Men are to be broken in exactly as if they 
 were colts. They must, before all things, achieve that 
 highest grade of obedience, which Loyola defines as the 
 " sacrifice of the intellect." They must learn, that is, not 
 only to will as the Superior wills, but to will to judge of 
 a situation as he judges. They must make his wish their 
 own, and let that wish be father of their thoughts. Least 
 of all must they claim a right of private judgment, but 
 must, whenever authority has proclaimed its mandate, 
 treat all secret misgivings of the conscience as the voice 
 of the Tempter. There is to be but a single will and 
 conscience pervading the Order, that of its General. Its 
 members shall have none of their own. 
 
 Without any wish, therefore, to excuse the action of 
 these five military judges, we may yet understand it. It 
 is the result of what we may call the Jesuit mentality, 
 which is exclusive of genuine — that is, individual — moral 
 responsibility. Certain savage races squeeze the heads of 
 their infants so that their skulls assume a particular 
 abnormal shape, which is never lost all through life. The 
 same result is attained in the moral and intellectual 
 sphere by Jesuit training ; and as in France it is partic- 
 ularly the priests and the officers who fall under this 
 influence, they are most apt to display the moral deformity 
 which results. And as the savage races to which we have 
 alluded regard their tortured skulls as handsome and 
 fashionable, so French monks and officers reckon to be
 
 94 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 their peculiar glory that which the rest of the world sees 
 to be ugly and infamous. This explains why Esterhazy, 
 the friend of Drumont, as well as traitor, brothel-keeper, 
 and mercenary of the Pope of Rome, is "the man" of 
 the French General Staff, and was lately acclaimed as the 
 incarnation of military honour : also why Drumont, the 
 friend of Esterhazy, as well as arch-liar, blackmailer, and 
 moral assassin is " the man " of the French Church, its 
 most trusted adviser and henchman. 
 
 M. Carriere, who conducted the prosecution of Dreyfus, 
 betrayed, in his closing appeal to the Rennes Court- 
 Martial, a shrewd appreciation of the Jesuit mentality of 
 at least five out of the seven officers who composed it. 
 There they sat, the crucifix suspended over their heads, 
 on which they had sworn to judge according to the 
 evidence without hatred and without fear. On the one 
 side were ranged the witnesses for the truth, Picquart, 
 who has already endured over a year's imprisonment for 
 its sake, Freystatter, the only one of the 1894 judges who 
 has a conscience along with courage to tell the truth, 
 Trarieux, Forzinetti, Lamothe, Sebert, Cordier, Hartmann, 
 Ducros, and a handful of other brave men. On the other 
 side the Generals and five Ministers of War, convicted of 
 fraud, false-witness, attempted assassination, of complicity 
 with the traitor and brothel-keeper. Before the judges 
 stood the victim of their lies, the typical martyr of our 
 age, the modern Prometheus liberated for a space by the 
 fifty highest judges of his land from his rock of torture, 
 spiritualized by suffering, resolved to live only that he may 
 at last win justice. These five officers were the sub- 
 ordinates of the guilty Generals. They knew the truth.
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 95 
 
 and knew that the eyes of the whole world were turned 
 upon them. They had either to acquit or else enforce the 
 maxims of the founder of the Jesuit Order. And Carriere 
 knew how engrained in their souls was the doctrine that 
 you should do anything, dare anything for your hierarchical 
 Superior. So he did not shrink from the vile task imposed 
 upon him. The last words with which he overawed the 
 five are memorable : — 
 
 " I have a single observation to make, and that a simple one. 
 
 " You have heard a great number of witnesses. 
 
 " I must ask you to divide them in your thoughts into two groups, of 
 which the one asks you to acquit the accused, the other demands of you 
 his condemnation. 
 
 " It will be your duty to weigh these two groups and to give to each the moral 
 importance which you ought to attribute to it ; and you will give your decision 
 in favour of the one which influences in its favour the scales of your 
 justice." 
 
 The judges listened to this appeal, and five of them 
 gave their verdict — against their knowledge of the facts, 
 against the evidence, in favour of the guilty Generals, who 
 were, after all, their official superiors. 
 
 The Court- Martial of 1894 was opened five years ago 
 with these significant words from the lips of its President, 
 Colonel Maurel, addressed to Dreyfus' counsel, Maitre 
 Demange : — 
 
 " Silence ! There are other interests at stake than 
 those merely of the accusation and defence." 
 
 " Other interests ? " Yes, those of the higher officers, 
 Boisdeffre and Henry, whose guilt and treachery and pecula- 
 tions the unpopular Jew was singled out to expiate. The 
 Court- Martial of Rennes in 1899 closed with a similar appeal.
 
 96 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 It is on record that the Court-Martial of 1894 would 
 not and could not condemn on the bordereau alone. They 
 were not satisfied that Dreyfus wrote it ; and it needed 
 the perfervid perjury of Henry and the wilful forgeries and 
 falsifications of Mercier's secret dossier to overcome their 
 scruples. They had no knowledge that the handwriting 
 was that of Esterhazy, or they would have acquitted 
 Dreyfus. In 1899 every doubt which hung about the case 
 is dissipated. The real traitor has been recognized, 
 though acquitted to order eighteen months before. He 
 has admitted his guilt before all the world. Nevertheless, 
 the five judges of 1899 condemn Dreyfus afresh and 
 mechanically on the bordereau, and on it alone. The 
 three Court-Martials of 1894, 1898, and 1899 thus form a 
 crescendo of crime, a series of three waves, of which the 
 last is, according to the proverb, the greatest ; what an 
 ancient Greek would call the triknmia of infamy. 
 
 And it cannot any longer be alleged that the guilt is 
 only that of a few officers, as I for long strove to main- 
 tain, and as Colonel Picquart once alleged, though I think 
 he would now no longer do so. In the years 1898 and 
 1899 at least seven military courts have been called 
 together to condemn Dreyfus, to acquit Esterhazy, to 
 eject Picquart from the active army, similarly to eject 
 Joseph Reinach from the army of reserve, to decide that 
 Esterhazy, the brothel-keeper, adulterer, and swindler of 
 his kith and kin, had in no way tarnished his military 
 honour, to acquit Colonel du Paty de Clam, to recondemn 
 Dreyfus. Some fifty French officers have sat as judges in 
 these courts. I will not take into account the Ravarys, 
 the Dj Pellieux, the D'Ormeschevilles, the Taverniers,
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 97 
 
 the Carrieres, who assisted and guided their deliberations, 
 for they may have been selected for their vile tasks by the 
 military authorities because their vileness was tried and 
 ascertained beforehand. But these fifty odd military 
 judges were chosen at random from the entire corps of 
 officers according to panels fixed long beforehand. Of 
 them three only have been found to possess conscience or 
 honour, intelligence, or a sense of truth and justice. 
 Three alone are not a disgrace to humanity, three alone 
 not cannibals, ready at the word of command to offer 
 human sacrifices on the altar of shame. Captain Frey- 
 statter is one of them. The names of the two who did 
 their duty at Rennes have not transpired, though Captain 
 Beauvais is thought to have been one. 
 
 It was the spectacle of the mental and moral degradation 
 of the average French Officer which from the first forbade 
 us to expect much from the tribunal of Colonel Jouaust. 
 All knew that one of its members had alread}' offered 
 incense to the memory of the forger Henry by subscribing 
 to the fund raised in his honour. The insolent request of 
 the General in command of the Rennes garrison, in the 
 name of his officers, to the editor of the local Liberal 
 journal VAvenir de Rennes, "not to send his paper any 
 more to the military club," was an earnest of what was to 
 follow. It was a final demonstration to the world's Press 
 that French officers are resolved to feed their minds only 
 on the lies of Drumont's Libre Parole, of the Eclair, the 
 Soir, Judet's Petit Journal, and Rochefort's Intransigeant. 
 I knew how bold and difficult a task it is to try to snatch 
 away from a bird of prey the quarry into which it has once 
 set its talons. Therefore I despaired of the second Court- 
 
 c
 
 gS SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 Martial, much as I admired the quixotism shown by 
 Dreyfus' friends and family in petitioning the Court of 
 Cassation, not simply to annul the verdict of 1894, but to 
 send the victim once more before his peers, in order that 
 by those who had first condemned him he might be finally 
 acquitted. And now there is left faint hope of any 
 redress. In order to secure a fresh appeal to the Court 
 of Cassation the champions of innocence must be able to 
 allege a new fact unknown to this last Court-Martial. 
 But there was nothing that was unknown to its members. 
 All the facts stared them in the face ; they knew the whole 
 truth, and chose to flout it. The numerous irregularities 
 of the trial might be used to upset it, if it were not in 
 France. The five have, by the very cynicism of their 
 procedure, closed every avenue of judicial remedy. 
 
 As the Constitution permits it. President Loubet may 
 grant a free pardon,* for he has all along been convinced 
 of Dreyfus' innocence. But as to anythmg further, even 
 he seems to be cowed by the verdict, no less than his 
 Ministers, Gallifet and Waldeck-Rousseau. They had 
 signed a writ for the arrest of the criminal Mercier several 
 days before the conclusion of this last trial, and it was 
 already in the hands of the Rennes police. Yet it has not 
 been served, and Mercier is not arrested, though he only 
 left that city on the Monday after the trial. It is evident 
 that his intention in staying there was to dare the Govern- 
 ment to arrest him, and they have flinched from doing their 
 duty. Cowardice and impotence beset almost all the 
 fugitive Ministries of the third Republic. A free pardon, 
 alone, would only be a fresh insult to justice and a fresh 
 
 * Since this was written the pardon has been granted.
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 99 
 
 stain on France, unless the President expressly alleged 
 the prisoner's innocence as his reason for granting it. 
 
 The present French Ministry is not likely to be 
 permanent. The Chamber of Deputies must shortly 
 reassemble, and its first act will be to get rid of the motley 
 incongruous Cabinet, which shuns its responsibility, and 
 has not the courage even to arrest M. Guerin in his 
 extemporized fortress in the Rue Chabrol. The baser 
 sort of Republicans, who only want an excuse for dropping 
 the matter, have already begun to proclaim the sanctity of 
 this new chose jiigee, and Meline is likely to be restored 
 to power in order to protect it, as for over two years he 
 protected the crime of 1894. No French Premier has 
 nowadays a chance of retaining power for more than three 
 months, unless he is employed with the aid of the Comte 
 de Mun and the clericals, in hushing up a great crime. 
 And when M. Meline comes back, the Generals will 
 insist on the resignation of M. Loubet, who has given them 
 deep offence. Their unspeakable instrument, Cavaignac, 
 will probably succeed to the office of President, and the 
 walls of forty thousand communes will be placarded afresh 
 with new forgeries destined to prove to the French peasant 
 that there do not really exist even the extenuating circum- 
 stances for Dreyfus' crime which the five, recoiling from 
 their own guilt, have alleged to exist. Fresh forgeries, 
 too, are badly needed to counteract the moral eflfect 
 produced by the dissent of two honest judges from the 
 iniquity of the five. The first action of the Generals, so 
 soon as they get another Minister of War, will be to 
 Court-Martial and condemn these two judges and wreak 
 their full vengeance upon Picquart. In doing this they
 
 100 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 will have the approval of such austere Republicans as 
 Freycinet, Ribot, Dupuy, and will win the applause of 
 M. de Mun and the French hierarchy. A military 
 oligarchy, pitiless and shameless, will control France as 
 before. Yet, perhaps, not openly, for it can always make 
 sure of nominal Republicans to do all it wants. 
 
 The only Party which is at all likely to protest against 
 this policy of " appeasement and reconciliation," which 
 the knock-kneed Republicans are already advocating, are 
 the Socialists led by Jaures — who, however, is not in 
 the Chamber — and the few old Radicals who follow 
 Clemenceau. They may be able to prevent the general 
 proscription of Dreyfusards which Cavaignac had planned 
 and prepared just before he fell from office in the autumn 
 of last year, and which will soon be advocated afresh ; but 
 they will not be able to avoid the condemnation, by 
 packed juries of Nationalists, of Yves Guyot, of Joseph 
 Reinach, and of Zola — of the two former as a peace- 
 offering to the manes of the patriotic forger Henry, of the 
 latter as an act of homage to the traitor Esterhazy. 
 
 There are at present 60 Socialists in the Chamber ; 57 
 Radical Socialists who are practically of the same Party ; 
 121 Radicals who may be relied on to unite with the 
 former in moments of danger ; 226 Republicans, few of 
 whom can be trusted to oppose the officers, and lastly 100 
 rallies and reactionaries, professed champions of Church 
 and Army alike. The Socialists are really stronger in 
 France than the number of their Deputies would lead one 
 to suppose. At the General Election of May, 1898, which 
 was fought under great disadvantages, because Meline and 
 his followers rigged the election as much as they could,
 
 SIVORD AND CASSOCK. loi 
 
 they polled 1,402,000 votes out of a total of 6,346,000 
 cast — that is nearly a quarter. This was an increase of 
 their strength by more than a hundred per cent, upon 
 the election of 1893, when they only cast 598,000 votes. 
 They were thus the only Party which in i8g8 gained 
 ground to any marked extent. 
 
 The proved cowardice of the ordinary Republican 
 politician being what it is, it is probable that the Military 
 Party will get their way. The one danger which threatens 
 them would also be far from advantageous to the Dreyfu- 
 sards ; it is that of violence in the streets, rioting and 
 incendiarism. For it must not be forgotten that in Latin 
 countries the Roman superstition has a peculiar faculty of 
 generating out of its own bosom antagonists hardly less 
 dangerous to society than the Jesuits, feather-headed 
 fanatics whose ideal is anarchy and indecency, and their 
 method of attaining it the wrecking of churches and the 
 destruction of property. This Party, along with the Black 
 Internationals or Jesuits, formed the strength of General 
 Boulanger's movement. In it they joined hands to wreck 
 a Republic which combined public order with liberalism 
 and toleration. Drumont has tried to reunite the broken 
 segments of this party, and started the Anti-Semitic cry 
 because the Jews were hated by the Anarchists as capital- 
 ists, and by the Jesuits on religious or rather superstitious 
 grounds. The Anarchists, however, have after all more 
 sense of justice and principle than the Jesuits; the foul 
 wrong done to Dreyfus has stirred their indignation, and 
 they will not again join forces with the Jesuits even to 
 overthrow the State. 
 
 At the time of the election in May, 1898, Dreyfus had 
 
 ^.IHKARY 
 
 untvv:p?tty 01^ caufor 
 
 r. • vrrn A nADDAUA
 
 I02 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 few supporters among the candidates, and the merits 
 of his cause were unknown among the masses. The 
 artisans were listless, or regarded the case as a mere 
 internal squabble among the capitalists. Consequently, 
 Jaures and Joseph Reinach, who alone tried to ventilate 
 the grievance, lost their seats. The exposure of Henry's 
 forgery woke up a certain number of artisans. Pressense, 
 Jaures, and other eloquent champions of right, have, often 
 at the risk of their lives, addressed meetings all over 
 France. The trials of Urbain Gohier and of Picquart 
 called attention to the misdoings of the General Staff; and 
 this last supreme deed of open and cynical injustice has, let 
 us try and hope, lit a flame of indignation which will not 
 easily be extinguished. Fresh prosecutions of Dreyfusards 
 and the attempts which will be made to silence them, will 
 only spread the fire. It must also be borne in mind that 
 two out of five of the conscripts called up year by year 
 take with them into the barracks the opinions they have 
 picked up in the Socialist clubs and cafes of their qtiartier. 
 They have learned, especially in the last two years, to look 
 upon the officer as a monster of injustice and arbitrary 
 brutality. This before they enter the army. In two or 
 three years' time they return to their homes with all their 
 fiercest prejudices verified and strengthened. The hatred 
 of the General Staff and of the whole corps of officers is at 
 this moment gathering force in the great cities with the 
 rapidity of a snowball, and may at any moment lead to 
 a dangerous explosion. 
 
 In an open letter which I wrote in June of last year to 
 M. Joseph Reinach, on the occasion of his being expelled 
 from the territorial army for having translated paragraphs
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 103 
 
 of my first article in this Review, I ventured to assert my 
 confidence in the traditions of honour and fair play which 
 I imagined to prevail in the French army as in our own. 
 An unknown correspondent — one of many such — at once 
 wrote to me from the Ardeche to thank me for my 
 denunciation of Esterhazy, yet to blame me for speaking 
 of the officers as I had done. 
 
 " Je vous demande," he wrote, " de ne plus croire une seconde aux 
 qualites de justice et de courage, qu'auraient selon vous, les Laubardemont 
 de rfitat-Major, ignare, podagre, gateux, que la Republique a la bonheur 
 de posseiier pour la conduire a la boucherie. Jamais, au grand jamais, 
 les militaires ont eu un dix milliardeme d'atome de justice et de courage. 
 Ces qualites, ces vertus sont incompatibles avec leur etat. C'est un metier 
 de liche, d'assassin et de voleur ; d'animal en rut, de tigre." * 
 
 When the same correspondent goes on to affirm that 
 French Court-Martials are "tribunaux de sang et d'imbec- 
 illite," one is certainly disposed to agree with him. Every 
 artisan knows that his son during his term of service is at 
 the mercy of such tribunals, able to imprison and murder 
 at will. The Generals have provided him during the last 
 two years with a series of object lessons. Instead of 
 furthering the cause of discipline by their guilty machina- 
 tions, they have hopelessly ruined it ; and it cannot be 
 long before some great and terrible upheaval occurs to 
 startle the already scandalized world. 
 
 The Generals have, no doubt, an inkling of the hatred 
 
 • " I would ask you not to believe for one ninmenl in the qualities of justice and 
 courage which you attribute to the Laubardemonts of the General Staff. It is 
 ignorant, gouty, rotten, and under it France's only luck will le to he led to 
 butchery. Never, never have the swashbucklers had a tenth millionth atom of 
 justice and courage. These qualities, these virtues, consort not with their con- 
 dition. Their profession is that of the coward, assassin, and thief; of the rutting 
 animal, of the tiger."
 
 I04 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 which at least two out of every five privates feel for their 
 officers. If it were not so, they would have long ago effected 
 a coup d'etat. To do it successfully, they must rely on their 
 men to shoot down the mob rather than fraternize with it. 
 In this respect the Merciers and Rogets of to-day are at a 
 disadvantage as compared with Louis Napoleon, who had 
 at his command regiments of veterans dissociated by long 
 terms of service from the crowd, callous to its sufferings, 
 and altogether out of sympathy therewith. They are as 
 much afraid of their men as the opportunist politicians are 
 afraid of them, and as long as they can get time-serving 
 Ministers to grovel before them, they will acquiesce, and 
 gladly, in the show of constitutional government. But it 
 cannot last for ever. Thousands of recruits during the 
 last eighteen months have written letters every week to 
 persons I could name filled with such sentiments as those 
 which I transcribed above. They are all "enraged" 
 Dreyfusards, and are not — most of them — such cowards as 
 the guilty Generals and the subservient politicians, who 
 cower at the sight of the gilt braid and ostrich plumes. 
 
 Lionel Decle is one who has done his three years' service 
 in the French cavalry, and has detailed his experiences in 
 a graphic narrative entitled. Trooper 3809, published this 
 year in English by Mr. Heinemann. He knows his 
 country's army, so to speak, inside out, and his conclusion 
 (Preface, page x.) is that the " Dreyfus case is, unfortunately, 
 but a greatly magnified example of what daily happens 
 throughout the French army." And on page 240 he illus- 
 trates in an amusing little history the extent to which it is 
 a principle of French discipline that you should perjure 
 yourself to order. A Sergeant Vaillant had been accused
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 105 
 
 by a Captain Hermann of stealing a suit of M. Decle's, 
 whereas the latter had freely lent them to him. 
 
 " If you want," said the Captain to Private Decle, " to avoid the serious 
 consequence of your act, I am prepared to overlook it, provided that you 
 swear that Sergeant-Major Vaillant has stolen your clothes." 
 
 " I am sorry I cannot do so, sir," I replied, "as that would be committing 
 perjury. . . ." 
 
 '• What ! " exclaimed the Gendarme, evidently much astonished, " how 
 can you say that Sergeant-Major Vaillant did not steal a suit of clothes 
 from you when your captain says he did ? " 
 
 M. Decle's pages teem with acts of injustice which it 
 makes your blood boil to read ; yet he declares that the 
 lot of a trooper, whose higher officers are gentlemen of 
 good family, is much better than that of an infantryman, 
 whose officers are mostly ex-corporals and sergeants picked 
 out for commissions because they excelled in brutal severity, 
 injustice, bullying and blackmailing. 
 
 A foreigner cannot visit a French parade-ground many 
 times without witnessing outbursts of ill-temper on the 
 part of officers altogether unjustified. One such I will 
 narrate which I saw myself the last time 1 watched soldiers 
 being trained. It was at Ajaccio, on the afternoon of 
 January 22nd, 1894.* Four raw recruits were told to 
 march across the parade-ground. They had evidently only 
 joined the ranks the day before, and did their best, but 
 reached the further side a little out of touch with one 
 another. Instantly a smart dandy of an officer stepped up 
 to them as they halted, and gave the right file a slap on the 
 face that made him reel, lifted his foot sharply and kicked 
 the next man in the groin with all his force, then gave the 
 
 * I relate this from a diary written at tlie time.
 
 io6 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 third a blow with his fist in the stomach that doubled him 
 up. That seemed to exhaust him, and turning to the first 
 man he snarled, " Ce n'est pas que tu n'entends pas le Frangais, 
 mats que tu es malhonnete.'' I then heard him sentence all 
 four to several days in the cells. The recruits stood like 
 statues, but I turned to my companion and said, " It 
 should need a temper less vindictive than these Corsicans 
 have, to make any one of those four shoot that fine fellow 
 at the first opportunity." 
 
 On April the 4th, 1871, the Archbishop of Paris, Georges 
 Darboy, a saintly man, who had been arrested by the 
 Communists as a hostage, was shot in cold blood by them 
 withm the prison of La Roquette. The President of the 
 Conr de Cassation, M. Bonjean, perished with him, as well 
 as several lesser personages. This outrage thrilled the 
 civilized world with horror, and somewhat justified the 
 terrible retribution wreaked by General Gallifet upon those 
 who committed it. Yet it was not nearly so foul an 
 outrage as that which has been perpetrated in the case of 
 Captain Dreyfus, nor half so cowardly. It was done by a 
 handful of civil rebels who in the six months' siege of their 
 city had endured nameless sufferings. They were engaged 
 at the moment in a desperate house-to-house struggle with 
 the advancing Versailles army. Everyone on either side 
 was roused to fury. It was in the minds of all the citizens 
 of Paris that the insane ambition of an empress, who was 
 a mere tool in the hands of the Church and Jesuits, had 
 plunged France into so disastrous a war. 
 
 At Rennes, where France, the French Army and the 
 Catholic Church were the real defendants, and were on 
 their trial at the bar of ecumenical opinion, no such
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 107 
 
 extenuating circumstances can be alleged, as can for the 
 Communists of 1871. It is a time of profound peace ; no 
 enemy threatens France. The victim is known to be 
 innocent. His innocence indeed is the chief count against 
 him ; nay, the only count, his Judaism apart. He is a 
 tried officer, loyal to France and to the uniform he wears. 
 He has already undergone nearly five years of unspeakable 
 torture, chained to a torrid rock in the most fever-stricken 
 part of the tropics. His health is ruined. He sits there 
 unmoved, a type of mart3rdom, of spiritual dignity, while 
 his old companions of the army glibly rattle off their 
 perjuries and insults, old and new, against him. 
 
 It is something that the whole body is not mortified ; 
 and the Dreyfusards may be truly said to keep the 
 conscience of France. They form a splendid minority, 
 and, we hope, may be found yet to be the germ of a national 
 resurrection from the grave that Jesuitry has dug. They 
 have displayed an unflagging enthusiasm for truth and 
 justice, a courage in the midst of defeat, a capacity of self- 
 sacrifice, an ardour, a burning hatred of injustice, a love of 
 liberty, an intrepidity amidst the howls of Anti-Semite 
 mobs, a dignity and self-restraint under insult, a readiness 
 to take their lives in their hands — a complex of heroic 
 virtues, which in any other land would have sufficed for 
 the founding of a new religion, for the constitution of a 
 new city, of an ideal State. Let us pray that a new France 
 may arise through their unselfish efforts. If so, Dreyfus 
 will not have suffered in vain. It is they alone whose 
 presence in a tainted capital makes one hesitate to boycott 
 the coming Exhibition. The apologue of Abraham inter- 
 ceding for the cities of the plain has its application here :
 
 io8 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 " Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but 
 this once : peradventure ten shall be found there. And 
 the Lord said : I will not destroy it for the ten's sake." 
 Assuredly, unless the French quickly throw off the incubus 
 of guilt and bring forth better fruits, they will some day 
 wake up and find a big hole in the map of Europe where 
 formerly the name of France was written. 
 
 Over and above that purification of the feelings which 
 every great and true tragedy produces in those who witness 
 it, there is another lesson to be learned from the Rennes 
 Court-Martial, especially by the Anglo-Saxon races. We 
 live in an age of transition and uncertainty. The old 
 landmarks of faith have shifted somewhat, and a large 
 number of English men and women look for some new 
 rock on which to rest their faith. The Bible sufficed for 
 our forefathers, but for the more cultivated children of 
 the Oxford movement it suffices no more ; and although 
 they build libraries in the name of Dr. Pusey, this old- 
 fashioned divine would feel himself dazed and lost if 
 he entered their class-rooms and heard the convictions 
 brusquely thrown aside as out of date to the establish- 
 ment of which he devoted a life of scholarship and 
 study. In such a situation the elite of the new 
 Ritualistic Party has looked about for new havens in 
 which to drop anchor and ride in safety ; and the Roman 
 Church, to the external observer immobile, unchanging, 
 uncompromising, admitting no salvation outside its pale, 
 disciplined, centralized, equipped with monkish Orders, 
 learned and ascetic, indubitably ancient, and supporting 
 a tradition which reaches far back, and has not on a 
 superficial view undergone violent changes, such as was
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 109 
 
 the European Reformation — a Church with all these 
 quaHties, and in spite of them all living and energetic, 
 always intriguing, and not like Eastern Christianity, 
 lethargic and locked in the embrace of a military despotism, 
 has thrown a spell over the minds of English clergymen, 
 who wander without a compass in deserts — so it seems 
 to them — of Erastianism, Puritanism and Agnosticism. 
 Hence the talk about religious reunion. Hence the mis- 
 giving about the validity of English Orders. If that be 
 disputed and denied, will not the efficacy of the Sacraments 
 be lost as well, and nothing remain save the shifting sands 
 of a higher criticism, which has already called much, and 
 will yet call more and more in question ? But reunion 
 has meaned for those who felt themselves in this plight, 
 not reunion with a sturdy Scotch Presb}-terianism, not 
 with the Puritans and Noncomformists, who are the back- 
 bone historically of the English and American polities, 
 not even with the Eastern Church, a respectable body if it 
 could be freed from Russian Tsardom, but reunion with 
 Latin Catholicism. The ill-starred experiment of the last 
 of the Stuarts is to be tried once more. Authority and 
 probabilism is to replace hard thinking, private judgment, 
 reasonable faith. The control of priest and confessional 
 over the individual conscience is inculcated, as if our home- 
 made morality were inferior to that of Latins, or our 
 women less pure than Spanish penitents. The apex of 
 humiliation and un-English self-distrust is reached when 
 Lord Halifax, in behalf of the four or five thousand weak- 
 kneed clergymen who compose the English Church Union, 
 crawls cap in hand to the footstool of an Italian Bishop, 
 and beseeches him to be so gracious as to recognize the
 
 no SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 validity of English Orders. His petition was very properly 
 spurned, but the want of manliness remains. Rome is 
 ever there like a magnet to attract these drifting particles. 
 
 The European Reformation, like the dissent of the 
 Middle Ages, was in its essence, a revolt not against the 
 superstitions of the Latin Church, but against its callous- 
 ness, its cynical cruelty, its injustice, its fanaticism, against 
 the confessional and the attendant open immorality of 
 celibate priests and popes. These were the qualities which 
 earned it as early as the eleventh century from the saints 
 of Lyon, of Albi, of Lombardy, the title of Meretrix Ecclesia, 
 of Nidus Serpentmn, of Mundana Ecclesia, of Bestia. And 
 now, after a lapse of ten centuries, the Dreyfus affair, 
 like a flash of nocturnal lightning, reveals to us that this 
 Church, Englishmen's fear and dislike of which Lord 
 Halifax, addressing his admirers in the Guildhall, declares 
 to be wholly unreasonable, has in its heart of hearts learned 
 nothing and forgotten nothing. Every cannibal instinct 
 is lurking within it as of old. Before all the world a great 
 historic scene has been set up anew, a drama of cosmic 
 import acted over afresh. The Roman Church has been 
 asked to choose between the just man and the unjust. 
 From every sacristy the cry has gone up : " Release unto 
 us Esterhazy. But as for Dreyfus, the innocent Jew, 
 crucify him, crucify him ! His blood be upon our heads." 
 
 We are not exaggerating. From every clerical journal 
 in France and Italy and Belgium during the last two 
 years one could cull paragraphs reeking with cruelty and 
 cowardice, panegyrics of forgers and assassins, lies and 
 slanders, which if they were brought together, would fill 
 a series as long as the Acta Sanctorum. In every corner
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. iii 
 
 of this sinister drama a skulking Jesuit may be detected. 
 Is a confessor wanted, who, abusing the trust reposed in 
 him by a weak woman, prostituting his spiritual functions, 
 can provide the French Staff with a flesh and blood 
 original for their mythical veiled lady ? — the Pere du Lac 
 is there, that paragon of learning and piety, whose virtues 
 the Comte de Mun lately extolled in the columns of The 
 Times. Is a military adviser wanted to recommend to 
 General de Boisdeffre the good Catholics whom it is 
 desirable to promote to the highest positions in the army ? 
 Again the Pere du Lac is there, and in his daily walks at 
 Versailles with the disciple he loves, he faithfully discharges 
 the pious duty. Is money wanted and business talent to 
 start the Libte Parole on its campaign of lies ? Again the 
 Pere du Lac is there, and deputes Odelin, manager of his 
 military school, to find both money and organizers. Never 
 has any great national calamity or disgrace befallen France 
 but what some figure like the Pere du Lac may be detected 
 hovering beforehand in the obscure background of the 
 crime. It was so on the eve of the Massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew's, it was so on the eve of S6dan. 
 
 If the murder of Dreyfus is not the handiwork of the 
 Roman Church, then how comes it that it is the Jesuit 
 organs alone all over the world which by their indecent 
 exultation over the verdict of the five, have jarred upon 
 the ecumenic conscience ? In Great Britain, it is true, 
 the Latin Catholics are more temperate ; nevertheless, in 
 Ireland their organ, The Freeman's Journal, seeks to justify 
 the crime in long columns of feeble sophistry. In French 
 Canada the Jesuit paper La Pairic, of Montreal, acclaims 
 it, as does the Catholic Press of Belgium. In Rome the
 
 112 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 Jesuit Voce delta Verita hails it with deHght, and explains 
 that its sentiments are those of the Pope himself. The 
 other Vatican journals of Rome, the Osservatore and the 
 Popolo Romano, do the same. Lastly, we learn, on the 
 authority of The Times newspaper, that " during a conversa- 
 tion which took place recently between Cardinal Rampolla 
 and the representative of one of the Great Powers 
 accredited to the Vatican, the Papal Secretary of State 
 gave strong expression to his delight at the verdict of 
 Rennes, which, he declared, would put an end to the 
 Dreyfus agitation in France." Perhaps we ought to be 
 grateful to the Pope's chief adviser for not having at once 
 arranged a solemn Te Deum of thanksgiving, like that with 
 which the Vatican commemorated the Massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew's. Probably he reserves that for the actual 
 massacre of Jews and Protestants, which the ultramontane 
 Press in France has for the last two or three years been 
 openly registering its vows. 
 
 The French Croix, the organ of the Assumptionist 
 monks, of whom plenty have also been imported into 
 England, and who are ringleaders in the recent plot 
 against the French Republic, prints, underneath its frontis- 
 piece of our Lord suspended on the cross, the following 
 sentiment in regard to the verdict of the five : " As patriots 
 we are rejoiced ; as Catholics we praise God." 
 
 I have devoted an article in an earlier number of this 
 magazine to an analysis of the sentiments of this remarkable 
 " Christian " organ, which, during the last few weeks, has 
 tried to persuade its readers that it was really Colonel 
 Picquart who shot Maitre Labori in the back. It is 
 interesting here to note the excuses for it made by members.
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 113 
 
 of the Latin hierarchy in England. Thus Cardinal 
 Vaughan excuses it on the ground that it is only a cheap 
 paper ; as if it were less wicked to circulate so hideous a 
 sheet for a penny among millions of poor people than for 
 a franc among the rich few. 
 
 The Jesuit editor of the Month, Father Sydney Smith, 
 makes a still lamer answer in his March issue to my 
 e.xposure, in the February number of this journal, of the 
 methods of Drumont and of the Assumptionists. He 
 refuses to recognize Drumont as a " practising Catholic." 
 Yet this is just what Drurnont, in the French Chamber, 
 in his journal and his books, openly proclaims himself to 
 be. The Month is " confident that if they {i.e., Drumont 
 and the admirers of Henry) tried to approach the Sacra- 
 ments, apart from repentance, they would not be admitted 
 to absolution by any priest aware of what they had done." 
 
 I defy the editor of the Month to prove — i. That the 
 Libre Parole is not the favourite reading of the majority of 
 French ecclesiastics ; 2. That in any instance the Sacra- 
 ments have been refused either to Drumont or Boisdeffre, 
 or to any other member of the gang. 
 
 As to La Croix and Le Pclerin, its associate, the Month 
 is in a quandary. "These papers," it says, "are religious 
 organs ; at least, religious papers." Here is a very fine 
 distinction. " But the case of their managers is different." 
 Yes, for they are monks, whereas Drumont is only the 
 hireling of monks. 
 
 "We ourselves," continues the Month, "know of their language only 
 from the extracts in Mr. Conybeare's article in the February National 
 Review, and our feeling is that we should like to have more of the context 
 and less of Mr. Conybeare's dots of omission and colouring summaries. 
 
 H
 
 114 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 The summaries, selections, and omissions of such a man one profoundly 
 distrusts, and one can conjecture contexts to his quotations that would 
 essentially alter the impression which, as given in his pages, they produce." 
 
 The answer to this is that I gave the number of issue 
 and the page in the case of every single extract, and that 
 if I omitted anything — and in a magazine article I had to 
 be brief — I omitted contexts which, by their nauseous 
 piety or argot, made the quotations, if anything, more 
 revoltingly wicked. The Jesuit who thus impugns my 
 literary honesty was, I understand, himself confabulating 
 with the Paris Jesuits just before he wrote. They could 
 have supplied him with the issues of La Croix and Le 
 Phlerin at short notice. Why did he not consult them 
 before accusing me of dishonesty ? If he will undertake 
 to publish in full in the Month the incriminated articles in 
 the original French, I undertake to send them to him. 
 
 The climax of disingenuousness is, however reached 
 when these English Jesuits assert that their Order cannot 
 be held responsible for the infamous article of the Civilta 
 Cattolica, which I gibbeted in the March number of this 
 Review in an article entitled : " The Jesuit View." Thus 
 in the Month for April, Father Sydney Smith, returning to 
 the charge, pretends that the article of the Civilta criticized 
 by me is no more than the utterance of a pious opinion by 
 a single individual, that it is the only one of the kind 
 which has appeared, and that it appeared as long ago as 
 January, 1898. This defence, like the Cardinal's, reminds 
 one of the excuse for her misfortune which the wet-nurse 
 offered to the righteous Mrs. Easy in Marryat's immortal 
 volume : " Please, ma'am, it was a very little one." It is 
 enough to reply to Father Smith that in January, i8g8,
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 115 
 
 the entire truth about Dreyfus' innocence was known, that 
 the article in the Civilta was couched in the editorial We, 
 and specially based its conclusions on the principles which 
 the Civilta has promulgated ever since, in 1849, a brief of 
 Pius IX. raised its staff into a perpetual college under the 
 General of the Jesuits, for the purpose of teaching and 
 propagating the faith. No palinode has appeared in its 
 pages. On the contrary a few weeks ago, when this 
 journal celebrated its jubilee, the present Pope, in a brief 
 of congratulation, effusively recognized the services which 
 it has uniformly rendered to the cause. 
 
 It is true that the Tablet and one or two more of the 
 papers circulating among Latin Catholics in England (not 
 in Ireland) have spoken up for right and truth in this 
 great crisis. But they are exceptions, and indignant 
 " Catholics " have written in the Tablet complaining of its 
 editorials, and declaring that " supporting Dreyfus is siding 
 with the enemies of the Church in France " {Tablet, April 
 22nd, 1899). But a great organization must be taken as 
 a whole, and its few members who respire the healthier 
 air of England and the United States are distrusted and 
 condemned in high Catholic circles both in France and 
 Italy, as is evident in the recent conflict over Americanism 
 and the ideas of Father Hecker. As a whole, the Latin 
 Church, at any rate among the Latin nations, has been 
 against Dreyfus, against innocence, truth, justice, charity, 
 humanity itself. The Times does well when it writes as 
 follows : — 
 
 " T\\K French Church, which should have learned from its own past 
 sufferings the danger as well as the cruelty of great injustices, has, by 
 some strange aberration, allowed the mantle of its moral authority to be
 
 ii6 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 
 
 cast over every unclean and un-Christian passion that skulks under the 
 name of Anti-Semitism and Nationalism." 
 
 Such is the Church after which Lord Hahfax hankers, 
 and with which he aspires to Hnk his own, to which he 
 humbly goes for recognition of Enghsh Orders. Let him 
 leave it to Cardinal Vaughan, if he likes, to bring a chapter 
 of French monks to officiate in his new cathedral in 
 Westminster, but Heaven forbid that Englishmen should 
 forget the lesson which they read in every episode of their 
 history, or permit their brightest traditions to be brought 
 to naught. 
 
 Among the Feuilles detachees of Ernest Renan is a letter 
 to M. Jules Lemaitre, which is prophetic and all the more 
 remarkable because it is addressed to one who is now the 
 coryphaeus* of those whose unparalleled turpitude is aiding 
 the fulfilment of the great critic's melancholy forecast. 
 
 "And then, after all," he writes, " who knows the future ? You think 
 me more of a pessimist than I am. Yes, I am terrified to see a tradition so 
 grand as that of the French kings entrusted for keeping to a sovereign so 
 narrow, so thoughtless, so prone to believe in calumny, so easily deceived 
 as the people represented by universal suffrage. Yet I do not deny that 
 the present hour has its advantages and its sweets. The vain, when they 
 no longer march in the van of progress, are proud to march in the van of 
 decadence. There is more liberty among us now than there has ever been 
 before in our land, perhaps than in any land in the world. The exaggerated 
 criticisms passed on the present regime proceed from minds that have no 
 knowledge of the past nor any misgivings as to the future which they 
 call up. 
 
 " Provided only it lasts I . . . There is the only reserve we make as 
 regards our present contentment. If it were only our poor selves at stake 
 -we should have the right to be improvident, venturous, rash. But it is 
 
 * Jules Lemaitre is president of Brunetiere's Ligue de la Pairie, rightly nick- 
 named Ligue des Basiles.
 
 SWORD AND CASSOCK. 117 
 
 France that is at stake— her existence, her destiny. On the other side of 
 the page of the Temps, where I read of these pleasing festivities * and of 
 M. Carnot's great speech, I read under the heading Saint-Ouen :— 
 
 •' M. le General Boulanger 1,043, Elected. 
 
 "M. Naquet, Boulangiste 981, Elected. 
 
 " M. Laguerre. Boulangiste 981, Elected. 
 
 " M. Deroulede, Boulangiste 979, Elected. 
 
 " Some people with whom I have spoken of it have answered that Saint- 
 Ouen is not a very enlightened neighbourhood. Maybe ; but 1 fear that 
 in France there are a vast number of cantons which, politically at any rate, 
 are not more enlightened than Saint-Ouen. 
 
 " And this is why, sometimes, I cannot help seeing amidst the rays of 
 this fair sunset a dark cloud gathering, fringed with gold, out of which 
 may quite well issue a rokh that would rob us of our all. However, let us 
 continue to put our hope in reason, and believe me your faithful friend. 
 
 "E. R." 
 
 Truly, the rokh of the Arab's fable has flown forth and 
 enshadowed a decadent France with its foul wings. It is 
 the hideous reality of a Jesuitized army. But let us look 
 away from the horrible spectacle, and gaze on the figure 
 of innocence, on the just man numbered with the trans- 
 gressors. Nineteen centuries back, when it was willed to 
 reveal to us our highest self, a Jew was chosen. Has not 
 one been chosen again to-day in order to strengthen, and 
 purify, and quicken our flagging consciences ? 
 
 * The reference is to the inaugural /?/« of the Exhibition of 1889.
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 (January, 1900.) 
 
 [ANY months ago I ventured upon a forecast of 
 what would be the ultimate result in France 
 of the Dreyfus case in the following words : — 
 Frenchmen will forgive their Army, but they will never 
 forgive their Church. Its truth is already apparent. A 
 new project of amnesty is being laid before the Chamber, 
 of which the prime object is to exempt General Mercier 
 and his comrades from the punishment which their crimes 
 deserve. At the same time is introduced legislation 
 directly aimed at the religious Congregations. 
 
 The President of the French Cabinet, assisted by M. 
 Monis, his Minister of Justice, has formulated as follows 
 what may be called the policy of the sponge : — 
 
 " A full and entire amnesty is accorded to all the matters (faits), 
 criminal or delictuous (cviminels on delictueux), connected with the Dreyfus 
 affair, or which have been comprised in any prosecution relative to any one 
 of those matters. 
 
 " All criminal and civil actions relative to the matters in question are 
 extinguished." 
 
 The first of these two paragraphs annuls all the 
 sentences which have already been passed, that upon 
 Dreyfus himself excepted. And this exception is favour-
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 119 
 
 able to him, for as long as the iniquitous verdict of Rennes 
 stands, it is possible, in case a new fact should transpire, 
 to appeal once more to the Court of Cassation and have 
 it quashed. Such an appeal, if successful, would restore 
 him his honour and deprive the party of lies of the single 
 cheap privilege which the sentence of Rennes conferred 
 upon them, that of being able to continue to stigmatize 
 their victim as a traitor to his country. 
 
 The second paragraph revives an institution \\hich 
 ceased to exist with the monarchy, namely, the royal right 
 to abolish a pending prosecution. There are three dis- 
 tinguished civilians against whom actions arising out of 
 the Dreyfus case are still pending — Zola, Yves Guyot, 
 and Joseph Reinach. The first of these demands to be 
 retried once more for his famous letter, J'accuse, in which 
 he denounced General de Luxer and six other officers for 
 acquitting by order the traitor Esterhazy in January, 1898. 
 Even apart from a formal amnesty being accorded, it is 
 probable that General de Luxer would, on entering the 
 court, have asked leave to withdraw the prosecution ; for 
 his accusation of Zola implied a defence of Esterhazy, 
 and the latter having long ago freely " rounded on " his 
 exalted military accomplices, and having been recently 
 condemned to three years' imprisonment as a vulgar 
 swindler, is no longer a persona grata. The Praetorian 
 Party long ago tried to jettison so inconvenient an ally, 
 and they are not now inclined to champion his innocence 
 afresh. The other two defendants, Reinach and Yves 
 Guyot, are no less anxious to be put upon trial. They 
 would, like Zola, have had some chance of being acquitted, 
 inasmuch as popular opinion is now to a certain extent
 
 120 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 ranged on their side ; and in any case the advocates 
 Clemenceau and Labori would have subjected Mercier, 
 Boisdeffre, Gonse, and the other chiefs of the War Office 
 gang to a damaging cross-examination. 
 
 But the most certain hope of a new fact transpiring on 
 which Dreyfus might have based an appeal to the Court 
 of Cassation lay in the prosecution of Mercier, already 
 resolved upon in the spring of 1899 by a vote of the 
 French Chamber, and then only postponed until after the 
 issue of the Rennes Court-Martial because of an amend- 
 ment introduced by the philosophic Protestant Ribot. 
 The French Chamber has thus pledged itself to prosecute 
 Mercier for the forgery in 1894 of the Panizzardi telegram, 
 for the communication to Dreyfus' judges in 1894 of a 
 secret dossier, in which, amidst much similar evidence, this 
 forgery was contained, and for the subsequent destruction, 
 in order to shield himself and on the pretence that it was 
 his own private property, of Du Paty's commentaire in 
 which the forged telegram was used in order to fix upon 
 Dreyfus sundry documents which alluded to a spy D., but 
 had no application to the accused. 
 
 The exemption of Mercier from the threatened pro- 
 secution is a genuine calamit}^ not only for Dreyfus, but 
 for the French Army as well. Paragraph 3 of Article 443 
 of the Criminal Code enacts that : — 
 
 " Revision of a sentence may be demanded in case one of the witnesses 
 heard sliall posteriorly to the condemnation have been prosecuted and 
 
 condemned for perjury (faux tcmoignage)." 
 
 Mercier was not the only military witness who disgraced 
 his uniform in this way at the Rennes trial. Indeed, M.
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 121 
 
 Urbain Gohier's description as " platoon perjur}- " of the 
 evidence given on that occasion by the military witnesses 
 against Dreyfus is no exaggeration. This amnesty now 
 makes it impossible to prosecute Mercier or any other one 
 of thenx, and so eliminates a whole class of " new facts." 
 The only hope which is left for Dreyfus of being able to 
 rehabilitate himself and remove the stigma attached to 
 his family lies in a possible revelation b}^ the Germans of 
 the documents purchased from Esterhaz}^ and Henry with 
 the connivance, it would seem, of Boisdeffre. In the end 
 it may be that his conscience will speak a little louder to 
 Colonel von Schwarzkoppen than it has hitherto done. 
 Even then, however, he could not act without the consent 
 of the German Emperor, who is the last man in the 
 world to be biassed by conscience in questions of external 
 policy. If he can at any critical time use these documents 
 to shatter the already tottering reputation of French 
 General Staffs, he will do so ; but not otherwise. For 
 the sake of Dreyfus he will never embroil himself with an 
 important section of French opinion, or run the risk of 
 embittering Franco-German relations by interference in a 
 case of which the rights and wrongs are without his help 
 already patent to the whole world. 
 
 It is bad enough to embarrass Dreyfus by thus elimi- 
 nating his chances of obtaining a fresh revision of his 
 case. It is worse still, because Zola and Yves Guyot and 
 Reinach are only too anxious to be prosecuted, not because 
 they love law courts or notoriety, but because they trust 
 that their trials would help on the sacred cause of justice, 
 for which they have already risked and sacrificed so much. 
 It is worst of all for the Army itself that a sponge should
 
 122 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 be passed over Mercier's slate. In a country of universal 
 conscription like France the whole of the male popula- 
 tion passes through the ranks of the Army. What an 
 opportunity for its officers to set an example to all of 
 honour, of truthfulness, of freedom from bigotry and in- 
 tolerance, of devotion to the highest interests of the 
 community ! More than any other professional class they 
 might influence their fellow-countrymen for good. We 
 see the opposite. In decreeing an amnesty, rejected with 
 scorn b}' the Dreyfusards, but welcomed by Mercier and 
 his peers, the French Government proclaims aloud to the 
 Army that the manufacture and use of forgeries, that 
 perjur}' and conspiracy, are only criminal when civilians 
 indulge in them. The chiefs of the Army are, like the 
 privileged ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages, above the law, 
 and their stars and decorations and rank protect them 
 from the consequences of their crimes. One thing alone 
 is unpardonable in a French officer, and that is to have a 
 conscience and to obey it. 
 
 One of Mercier's friends at the Rennes trial, Colonel 
 Bertin, summed up in a single cynical phrase the offence 
 which, in the eyes of the majority of his fellows. Colonel 
 Picquart committed when he refused to take the advice of 
 Gonse and be a consenting party to the death of an 
 innocent man. " I realized," remarked Bertin, " that 
 there was someone who was no longer marching straight 
 behind the chiefs." Billot promptly complimented Bertin 
 on the soldierly character of his words. " Colonel 
 Bertin," he said, " has all the qualities of an officer of 
 the Etat-Major — impersonality," etc. Such are the 
 beauties of the passive obedience expected in the French
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 123 
 
 Army. Picquart refused to take a hand in the game of 
 assassination and to perjure himself; and he is the only 
 officer who has been hounded out of the Army over the 
 matter. 
 
 In an Army where such an ideal of conduct prevails 
 there must of necessity be many who, when they find 
 opportunity, will rival the African exploits of Voulet and 
 Chanoine, and will train their guns on their own fellow- 
 citizens. Not a few of the higher officers seem to have 
 been implicated in the plot against the Republic for which 
 Deroulede and Guerin are now being tried before the 
 French Senate. But they are not among the accused. 
 Their epaulettes are sacrosanct. It is evident, however, 
 that the impunity thus granted them will in time bear 
 such fruit as every pact made with bandits must bear. 
 The gangrene of demoralization will spread ; and though 
 for the moment the Army has been checkmated, because 
 it did not know which of the pretenders, the Bonapartist 
 or the Royalist, it preferred, the moment may come when 
 it will have made up its mind, or, anyhow, think that it 
 has. Then will begin an epoch of intestinal strife and 
 civil bloodshed, in comparison with which the slaughters 
 of the Great Revolution were a mere trifle. 
 
 Meanwhile, the era of repressive measures directed 
 against the Latin Church, which seemed to have closed 
 with the death of Gambctta, has opened anew. The last 
 word of the Jesuit official organ, the Civilta Cattolica, 
 upon the Dreyfus case is that the French Army has shown 
 an " excess of religious feeling," and thereby incurred the 
 enmity of the Protestants, Jews, and Freemasons. The 
 French Republicans are afraid to try conclusions with the
 
 124 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 Army, but they mean, if they can, to wipe off some old 
 scores with the religious Congregations to whose intrigues 
 they rightly ascribe that excess of religiosity on the part 
 of the officers which has led to all the crimes and scandals 
 of the Dreyfus case. Accordingly, M. Waldeck- Rousseau, 
 the Prime Minister, with much finesse, has framed a law 
 which will hit them none the less hard because it does not 
 mention them by name nor contain any allusions to 
 religion so-called. The problem was how to strike at 
 associations of monks and nuns without mentioning their 
 religious character and without prejudicing trades unions, 
 joint-stock societies, unions of professional societies, and 
 commercial syndicates of every kind. Article 2 of this 
 new law enacts that : — 
 
 " Every association (of persons, not necessarily holding property in com- 
 mon) founded for a cause or in view of an object that is illicit, contrary to 
 the laws, to the Constitution, to public order, to morality, or entailing 
 renunciation of rights outside the common (droits qui ne sont pas dans le 
 commun), is null and of no effect." 
 
 For example, the Anti-Semitic League of M. Guerin has 
 an illegal object in view — namety, the pillage and murder 
 of Jews. This law, therefore, at once exposes its members 
 to prosecution. And the preamble setting forth the 
 reasons for the new legislation explains the utility of this 
 second article as an instrument with which to assail the 
 Latin Church. 
 
 "Our public right," says this rubric, "proscribes everything which 
 constitutes an abdication by the individual of his rights as such, a renun- 
 ciation of the exercise of the natural faculties of all citizens ; of the right 
 to marry, to buy and sell, to carry on trade, exercise any profession ; the 
 possession, in a word, of anything like a personal servitude."
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 125 
 
 Now the members, male and female, of Latin Congre- 
 gations take vows not to marry ; they are also obliged to 
 alienate their individual property and give up the control 
 of it to the Orders they join. It follows that all the 
 religious Congregations fall under the condemnation of 
 this law, for they are all alike based on the renunciation 
 by their members of their individual liberties. Only such 
 an Order as that of the Paulists, who take no vows, 
 founded in America by Father Hecker, could escape ; 
 and, by a singular irony, the ideas of this saintly man 
 have been lately proscribed by the higher French eccle- 
 siastics, and, under Jesuit dictation, condemned by the 
 Pope himself. 
 
 In England such a law as the above would seem to be 
 ^n unwarrantable interference with personal liberty, and 
 it would incidentall}' affect colleges whose statutes impose 
 celibacy on their fellows. It only incidentally affects 
 religious Orders in France, and they can escape its 
 penalties by refounding themselves upon a rule which 
 curtails among the associates neither the liberty to marry 
 nor the right to manage their individual property. But 
 then they would cease to be associations of monks and 
 nuns. It will be interesting to see whether the religious 
 Congregations in France manage to evade it. English- 
 men have no right to condemn this proposed law off-hand. 
 The Latin Church has no innate respect for liberty and 
 tolerance, and only affects to love such things in order to 
 place itself eventually on a vantage-ground from which it 
 may repudiate them. Let those who doubt this read Mr. 
 Gladstone's tract on Vaticanism, or any of the Catholic 
 journals of the Continent. He will soon reach the con-
 
 126 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 elusion that the toleration of those whose eternal ideal is 
 one of intolerance, and who would, if they could, restore 
 the Inquisition and the Stake to-morrow, is a question of 
 expediency. In England the Latin Church and its 
 Anglican imitators have such a slight hold on the masses 
 that to take elaborate precautions would be to pay too 
 high a compliment to so contemptible a party. But the 
 danger is far more real in France. I once ventured to 
 condemn the legislation of Ferry and Gambetta in con- 
 versation with one of the most reasonable and liberal of 
 my teachers, the late Mr. Lewis Nettleship, of Balliol 
 College. He merely replied that we Englishmen have no 
 right to criticize the French in this matter, for we have 
 not so lately been under the heel of the priest as they. 
 
 But the ingenuity of M. Waldeck- Rousseau and of his 
 Minister of Justice, M. Monis, does not end here. The 
 great Latin Orders of Jesuits, Dominicans, Carmelites, 
 Capucins, Benedictines, and of the newer and particularly 
 vicious Assumptionists, are cosmopolitan societies, taking 
 their marching orders from Italian officials in Rome and 
 ramifying all over the world. Accordingly Article 13 of 
 the new law enacts that : — 
 
 " There may not be formed, without previous authorization being given 
 by a formal decree of the Conseil d'Etat,* any associations {i.e., of persons, 
 not necessarily of goods as well) between French subjects and foreigners, 
 any associations between Frenchman and Frenchman of which the head- 
 quarters and directorate are located abroad or entrusted to foreigners." 
 
 The favourite gravamen of the Church of France 
 against the Jews and Protestants is that the latter are in 
 religious communion with men of other countries. It is 
 
 * i.e., the Cabinet.
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 127 
 
 in such works as Le Peril Protestant, recently criticized in 
 this Review, and in the pages of such papers as Drumont's 
 Libre Parole and of the various Croix, that this rehgious 
 Chauvinism of the fanatical party finds its most violent 
 expression. The Ultramontane Church, however, lives in 
 a glass-house, and it is certainly clever of the Republicans 
 to have thought of paying it out in its own coin. Even 
 Meline himself, fond as he is of the Papal enemies of the 
 Republic who masquerade as rallies, would shrink from 
 giving to any of these Orders a formal authorization 
 to exist in France. By consequence they all become 
 " illicit associations " ; and every man or woman who 
 joins or has joined one of them is liable to the penalties 
 set forth in Article 7 of the new law — that is to say, to a 
 fine of not less than sixteen nor more than 5,000 francs, 
 and to a term of imprisonment varying from six days to 
 an entire year. 
 
 No association which has not obtained the formal 
 authorization of the Conseil d'Etat, even if its members 
 are not fined and imprisoned, will lead any other but a 
 precarious existence. The new law specially enacts that 
 such unauthorized associations shall be unable to possess, 
 borrow, alienate, or defend their property. This law 
 applies to all such existing associations no less than to 
 any which shall be hereafter constituted. 
 
 The religious Congregations in France are liable to a 
 special tax upon their buildings and such other real pro- 
 perty as they own in common. They resent this tax, and 
 have steadily and for years resisted or evaded the payment 
 of it. In the period April ist, 1896, to November ist, 1899, 
 the French Exchequer sued recalcitrant communities of
 
 I2S POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 monks in 524 cases, and won in as many as 502. In 
 ninety-seven of these it executed forced sales to realize 
 the debt due to itself. Many of the Congregations, how- 
 ever, evaded the tax by setting up a man of straw, either 
 one of themselves or a reliable outsider, as the nominal 
 owner of their establishments, and by making affidavits 
 that they were only his tenants at will. The Assump- 
 tionists, in spite of their parade of patriotism, have shown 
 themselves to be past masters in the art of evading the 
 law. These Fathers of the Cross, as they call themselves, 
 own spacious buildings at Paris, Arras, and Bordeaux. 
 They adduced evidence in the courts to prove that they 
 did not own their buildings. The Government argued 
 that their agreements were fictitious, and, when the lower 
 courts decided in favour of them, appealed to the Court 
 of Cassation ; but that court also, in a judgment dated 
 November 21st, 1898, decided in favour of these holy 
 men. The Cabinet of M. Waldeck- Rousseau has brought 
 before the Chamber a law which will, in future, render 
 such evasions impossible, and it is high time that the 
 Exchequer should be protected from their dishonesty. 
 The Assumptionists, in particular, have been caught out in 
 their lie just a year after they, by means of perjury, 
 obtained a judgment in their favour ; for, in the course of 
 recent perquisitions made at their house in Paris, 8, Rue 
 Frangois P"', in expectation of discovering evidence of 
 their complicity in the Royalist plot against the Republic, 
 there was discovered in the safe of the Pere Hippolyte, 
 along with a sum of nearly two million francs, a contve- 
 lettre or counter-deed, proving that the person whose 
 tenants they swore themselves to be was a man of straw.
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 129 
 
 and that Fathers Picard and Bailly — the latter the Pope's 
 favourite — are the real owners of these vast premises. 
 Thus these respectable gentlemen stand convicted of fraud 
 and perjury, and we may hope will be punished as 
 rigorously as the law permits. M. Waldeck- Rousseau's 
 new law provides that in future the proprietor, be he real 
 or fictitious, of a house or houses tenanted by a religious 
 Congregation will be held liable for the tax. He will 
 have to recover it from his tenants, and this pious fraud 
 will be effectually checked. 
 
 It must have astonished many readers of English news- 
 papers to learn that so large a sum as ,^72,000 had been 
 discovered in the strong-box of the Paris Assumptionists. 
 But it is a fact which will not surprise anyone who has 
 looked through many files of the Croix and Pelerin news- 
 papers, and it is also a fact which explains why it was 
 necessary for the Pope to honour — as he did early in 
 October, 1899 — with a special reception the Pere Bailly, 
 whom Mr. St. George Mivart, the most distinguished 
 savant of whom the English Romanists could boast, has 
 justly stigmatized in the columns of The Times as a " mis- 
 creant," and whom even the Reverend Father Smith, the 
 London Jesuit, is at last ashamed to defend. The 
 explanation is a simple one. M. Bailly has largely con- 
 tributed to the Pope's cash balance. It is a pity that an 
 infallible pontiff should feel such vulgar necessities. 
 Nevertheless, it is a fact that he is peculiarly at the mercy 
 of those Orders whose members, being most skilled in 
 playing on the superstitions of the vulgar, are the richest 
 and so best able to replenish his coffers. Foremost 
 among these Orders is in all probability that of the 
 
 I
 
 130 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 Jesuits. Next come, as M. Zola has so well pointed out 
 in his Rome, the reverend fathers of Lourdes. The 
 Assumptionists are not far behind in the art of exploiting 
 the faithful, and to a large extent they are in partnership 
 with the priests of Lourdes, since they whip up pilgrims 
 to the sacred grotto from all over France. 
 
 But how do the Assumptionists raise such enormous 
 sums of money ? If we take at random a number of their 
 Pelerin, say, for February 20th, 1898, we find on the 
 wrapper such a notice as the following : — 
 
 " Seven hundred and eighty-nine letters have been deposited this v^eek 
 in the tronc of St. Anthony, 8, Rue Frangois I", Paris. They announced 
 or recommended: 153 healings, 562 temporal graces, 193 conversions, 
 180 positions obtained, 492 thanksgivings, 36 vocations, 52 marriages, 
 553 special graces, 12 first communions, 260 trading establishments, 
 41 lost objects, 24 examinations, 168 families, no deceased, 27 law suits, 
 125 young people, 21 parishes, 10 literary works." 
 
 Of these 789 letters addressed to St. Anthony some 67 are 
 quoted on the coloured wrapper under the heading E xtraits 
 du Courrier, and the 67 authors of them together con- 
 tribute offerings which aggregate a total of 643 francs, say 
 £26. The remaining 722 correspondents of the Saint 
 may be reckoned to have supplied him in the same week 
 with funds amounting to at least ;^26o. We see, there- 
 fore, that this single Paris establishment of the Assump- 
 tionists derives a weekly revenue of about £z'^o from the 
 particular cult which they make it their business to push 
 and exploit. That is, ^^15,600 a year poured into the 
 coffers of one monastery, of which the leading members 
 nevertheless perjure themselves in the law courts in order 
 to avoid a small tax which would help to pay the salary
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 131 
 
 of the army and navy which they profess to adore ! 
 
 Nor does the above exhaust the matter, for the same 
 wrapper contains a hst of subscriptions amounting to 400 
 francs for the week — over £800 per annum. 
 
 Another number of the Pelerin, taken at random, that 
 for March 20th, 1898, registers 675 letters for the week, 
 with separate subscriptions from the Cellules de Notre- 
 Dame de France amounting to 1,150 francs from five con- 
 tributors only. It is not clear, however, that the latter 
 sum goes into the pockets of the Assumptionists. The 
 wrapper for June 12th, i8g8, reports 3,170,970 francs 
 collected up to June 5th for the Veen National. Over and 
 above these sources of revenue these perjury-loving, but 
 saintly men, make a large, very large, profit out of the sale 
 by millions of their pernicious journals and out of their 
 thriving trade in cheap lives, pictures, and images of their 
 saint. They also issue from their bonne presse, as they call 
 it, quantities of cheaply got up but extravagantly super- 
 stitious Lives of the Saints. It is always the R. P. 
 Hippolyte who invites subscriptions and offerings, and it 
 was in his coffer that a chance perquisition on the part of 
 the Government revealed the sum of ;^72,ooo. 
 
 Some of the extracts from the letters addressed to the 
 Saint are simple and touching, if superstitious, and one 
 does not find it in one's heart to condemn the following 
 two : — 
 
 "Hcrault. — Two francs promised to St. Anthony if we found our poor 
 dog, who had gone astray on the mountain. He has turned up safe and 
 sound. I fulfil my promise." 
 
 " Haute Saune—1 lost my purse in a tram-car, so it was very hard to 6nd 
 it. I prayed to St. Anthony, and promised him something. A few 
 instants later I found my purse again."
 
 132 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 St. Anthony of Padua is the modern Hermes, and more 
 than any other figure in the Christian mythology is able 
 to restore lost objects to their owners. But he is also most 
 useful as a patron of trade, and too many of the blessings 
 implored are of a temporal rather than of a spiritual kind, 
 as witness the following typical paragraphs : — 
 
 "Nord. — Promised five francs to St. Anthony if he would accord me his 
 protection in regard to our business, and in particular for the success of 
 three ventures which preoccupied us. We have been heard. Thanks." 
 
 '• Nord.— Ha.ving promised St. Anthony five francs for the success of a 
 very risky scheme, I send them and thank him." 
 
 There are many such extracts as the above, and in 
 many cases the enterprises with which the Saint associates 
 himself seem to bear a rather speculative character. He 
 must be a very useful Saint on 'Change. 
 
 The Extraits du Courrier of the Pere Hippolyte have 
 evidently been carefully selected, and everything unedify- 
 ing is excluded. If, however, the student of popular 
 religion, as promoted by the religious Congregations of 
 modern France, desires a less sophisticated record he 
 must turn to other less " edited " records of piety, for 
 example, to the Propagatetir de la devotion a Saint Joseph 
 et a Saint Antoine de Padoue, which is a monthly journal 
 "edited by ecclesiastics with the authorization of their 
 superiors." It is now in its thirty-seventh year, and on 
 the front page are printed suitable testimonies to the 
 Pontifical approval which it has earned, thus : " Cette 
 revue fait beaucoup de bien (5 Mai, 1876). Deus te benedicat 
 et dirigat (11 Mai). Pius P.P. IX." * 
 
 * In the rest of this article the writer is indebted to a large extent, both for his 
 matter and his handling of it, to an article in the Sidc/e for October 9th, 1899, by 
 M. F. Buisson, entitled, " Comment on abetit une Nation."
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 133 
 
 The first few pages of each number of the Propagateur 
 contain pious lucubrations, wearisome enough to read, 
 but of a nature to help you to understand the intellectual 
 calibre of the Anti-Dreyfusards. Their key-note is the 
 Credo quia abstirdicm. Premisses are chosen, arbitrary 
 and out of harmony with all history and human develop- 
 ment. On them is raised with tortuous skill and infinite 
 subtlety the childish fabric of sacerdotal doctrine. But 
 what is really interesting are the pious notices printed in 
 the second half of each issue under the heading, "Traits 
 inedits de la puissance et de la bonte de Saint Joseph ct de 
 Saint Antoine de Padoue envers leur dcvots servitenrs." 
 These form a record of the " Spiritual graces and tem- 
 poral favours " bestowed by these Saints on their 
 " cherished ones." They are often curious. Thus a 
 young girl begs her Heavenly patron (as late as April) 
 " to get her successfully married before May comes in " 
 (p. 183). Another maiden thanks him because "instead 
 of one husband that she looked for, she has now the 
 choice of two " (p. 34). On p. 85 we have the prayer of 
 a suitor, who implores of the Saint '* success in a law-suit 
 against a Jew." What a title to the protection of a 
 Saint ! Another votary seems almost to trade on his 
 intimacy with the Saint when he writes as follows : — 
 
 " We are now trying to find a good situation for the lad, and once more 
 it is to St. Joseph that we turn, that he may himself arrange the matter. 
 ... It seems to me that a child who bears his name, who has so often 
 been entrusted and recommended to his care, has a special right to be 
 protected by him." 
 
 Women, it seems, are prone to a sort of nervous im- 
 patience in the way they approach the Saint. One of
 
 134 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 them writes : '* If St. Joseph chose, he could accomplish 
 this totir de force. ... My pretensions are large, but I 
 know the riches of St. Joseph. He could, if he only 
 would" (p. 424). What Saint could resist such an appeal 
 from a lady ? 
 
 The female teachers in Church schools are among the 
 most assiduous correspondents of the Saints. Their vows 
 are generally for success over the hated State schools : — 
 
 "I had made a promise," writes one of them (page 367), " to my dear 
 protector that, if we got at least three pupils from the lay school, I would 
 record this favour in the Propagateur. Instead of three we have had six. 
 That is a miracle, for in the whole of the fifteen years which have passed 
 since the school was laicized we have never succeeded in detaching a 
 single one. We took no steps ourselves, and it is St. Joseph alone that 
 brought them to us." 
 
 The following illustrates the little tiffs which are apt to 
 arise between religieuses and their celibate cures : — 
 
 •' I hasten to discharge a debt of gratitude to St. Anthony of Padua and 
 St. Joseph, who have won a visible favour for me under the following 
 circumstances : — 
 
 " In the parish where I have been for seventeen years at the head of a 
 communal school we had a rector who, instead of upholding the religieuses, 
 detested them, and took pleasure in humiliating them in everything and 
 everywhere. 
 
 " I was myself the particular object of his petty persecutions, and yet I 
 could not hope for a change of place owing to the terrible law. 
 
 " V^eary of it all, and sometimes even in despair, I could not see what 
 was to become of me, when it occurred to me to have recourse to St. 
 Anthony and St. Joseph, promising if the rector were transferred to send 
 five francs to the poor of St. Anthony and to publish the fact in the 
 monthly bulletin. Oh ! Prodigy ! I only made this promise on Sunday, 
 and the rector, who was already slightly indisposed, grew worse and 
 worse, and died on the following Friday. 
 
 " And now I fulfil my promise, and send you a postal order for five
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 135 
 
 francs, hoping you will be so good as to insert my letter in your Propa- 
 
 gaUur, which I undertake henceforth to disseminate. I must beg you not 
 
 to publish my name. 
 
 "(Signed) Une Abonnee." 
 
 (March, 1899, p. 122 ) 
 
 Here is another of the same kind : — 
 
 "A poor nun, molested and persecuted by . . . her cure, addressed 
 herself to St. Joseph, and prayed him to procure for the holy man an 
 advantageous change of post so that she might be freed from a tyranny 
 which had become unbearable. ... It was a difficult matter, for the 
 cure was not quite the sort of man that rival parishes quarrel with one 
 another in order to secure. . . . The good St. Joseph went to work in 
 another way : a beautiful bronchitis (une belle bronchite) came on, the cure 
 made a nice little confession, was prettily shrived, and went off all devoutly 
 to the other world,* . . . and the poor little sister Clara, as she tells her 
 beads for him, never fails to say after each Gloria Patri, ' Thank you, my 
 good Saint Joseph.' " 
 
 " La pauvre petite scetir Clare!" Think of the pretty 
 little homilies on forgiveness and humility with which 
 this witty little nun must regale the children whom pious 
 superiors entrust to her care. Surely we have laid bare 
 before us in the above notice the inward soul of one of 
 those '' Sisters of the Good Shepherd," who, in their 
 orphanage at Nancy, according to the testimony of the 
 Bishop of that district, sweat poor children for years in 
 making choice embroideries, pocket the proceeds, and 
 then turn them, helpless and forlorn, into the streets, to 
 lead a life perhaps no better than that of the fast women 
 of Paris, who (to quote the words of the Mother Superior 
 in answer to the said Bishop) are the best customers for 
 the work produced in these establishments. 
 
 • " Le cur6 bien confess^, bien adm;nistr6, s'en est allc ddvotcment en I'auire 
 monde."
 
 136 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 However, let us hear the other side. Here we have a 
 Cure's case against a nun : — 
 
 "Monsieur le Comte.* — I should be showing ingratitude to our great 
 Protector if I did not announce to the readers of the Propagateiir of 
 St. Joseph the following facts : — 
 
 " Ciiyc of a parish of 2,000 souls which have remained Christian, my 
 ministry was only hampered by the words and acts of a schoolmistress . . . 
 who was, I regret to say, not a laywoman. She, under stress of I know 
 not what devilish inspiration, played a part which she never ought to 
 have played. 
 
 " It was then that my prayers were heard and answered beyond all I 
 hoped for. 
 
 " One morning they told me on a sudden that Sister D. was very ill. I 
 found her unconscious, and the doctor assured me that she only had a few 
 hours to live. . . . Not desiring the death of a sinner, but her conversion, 
 I immediately had recourse to my Protector, who turned no deaf ear to 
 my prayer. 
 
 "The patient rallied and regained life. Her days are no longer 
 threatened, but the organ she used in order to damage her cure, her 
 tongue, remains paralysed. The doctors assure me that she will never 
 speak again. 
 
 "Punished in that part of herself whereby she sinned, walled up in a 
 perpetual silence, our poor invalid has time to think and expiate her sins. 
 
 "In the hope that so striking a fact, so terrible a chastisement, will 
 make an impression on certain persons too ready to play the part of back- 
 biters and gossips. I am yours, &c., M., cure." 
 
 Many are the faithful whom the monks have persuaded 
 that the worst sin they commit is not to pay up ready- 
 money to their Saint. Thus, in April (p. 176), a poor 
 woman avows that, after getting her mother cured of 
 paralysis, she delayed to send her money at once : — 
 
 ' ' I told the good Father (Anthony) that he must grant me some fresh 
 favour before I wrote to you. Perhaps it is to punish me that he has 
 allowed my poor mother to relapse, for her hand seems paralysed now." 
 
 * Not M. le Comte de Mun, but De Travanet, who edits the Propagateur.
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 137 
 
 Of course the Propagateur publishes a mere selection 
 made by the Comte de Travanet. What must he not 
 exclude when he admits such matter as the following con- 
 fession from a female penitent : — 
 
 " I had promised an insertion in the Propagateur in a moment so critical 
 to myself that I might even have lost fortune, reputation, honour — in a 
 word, everything." (March, p. 123.) 
 
 In another notice (p. 133) a certain young woman con- 
 fesses that she is — 
 
 " Cast down, in despair. Oh, St. Joseph knows my secret. St. Joseph 
 must do something at once, for otherwise I am lost. Dare I say it, my 
 very faith will be in danger." 
 
 In turning over the pages of such journals as the 
 Propagateur and the Pclerin, we overhear the inner voice 
 of popular French Catholicism in all the naivete of un- 
 restrained expression. We have the religion painted by 
 itself, not as an intellectual elite holds it, but as the masses 
 live it. Let anyone read in the corpus of Greek inscrip- 
 tions the ex votos from the walls of temples of Esculapius 
 and Aphrodite ; let him place beside such ex votos the 
 above examples of modern popular French piety, and he 
 will be compelled to admit that between the old religion 
 and the new there is little changed except names. Proba- 
 bly the Anglican divines who sigh for a reunion with the 
 Latin Church have no inkling of the intellectual tempera- 
 ment which that communion engenders and fosters among 
 the millions of France, and it i.s a pity that a tlorilegium 
 of extracts from the cheap Catholic Press of the Continent 
 cannot be circulated in our Anglican seminaries. These 
 pious ejaculations, deemed worthy to be published, not
 
 138 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 
 
 by hundreds but by thousands, in monkish papers, reflect 
 the rehgious tone of rich and poor, high and low, of 
 peasant and great proprietor, of master and servant ; but 
 they are all alike in this, that the votaries all treat their 
 Saint as a savage does his fetish. Never a moment's mis- 
 givings as to whether the prayer is one meet to be offered 
 to a God who is a spirit and to be worshipped in spirit 
 and in truth, never the question raised if the vow is just 
 and good and holy, never any scruple as to whether they 
 deserve what they ask for, or whether they ought not to 
 do something themselves in order to gain the end. They 
 make the vow, promise a sum of money, pay, give thanks, 
 and are quits with their idol. Moral scruples rarely 
 intrude in this dreary procession of superstitious requests. 
 It is true that the editor of the Propagateur prefaces the 
 traits inedits from which the above specimens are taken 
 with a caution that " they are humbly submitted to the 
 judgment of the Church," and that " they possess but a 
 purely human authority." But what reflections must they 
 arouse in the minds of educated and sensible Catholics. 
 Let one of the latter publish a book like the Life of Father 
 Becker, in which ideas of truth and justice are boldly pro- 
 claimed, and a real attempt made to shake off the slough 
 of mediaeval superstition and monkish corruptions, at once 
 the Roman curia is perplexed, angry, and tumultuous. 
 The machinery of the Inquisition is set in motion and the 
 work solemnly condemned. But not a word of censure 
 from the Pope or any of his Bishops for the monks who 
 batten on the superstition of the vulgar ; not a syllable of 
 blame for the besotted journals which publish its out- 
 pourings. Nowhere any protest of a higher religion, any
 
 POPULAR CATHOLICISM IN FRANCE. 139 
 
 attempt to raise the tone of the faithful, to spiritualize 
 their hopes and prayers. The traffic in indulgences of 
 the sixteenth century was not morally half so deadening. 
 
 And in France what hope is there of a better state of 
 things ? It is true that six grown men out of seven sit 
 loose to the Church, even when they are not actually 
 hostile to it. But nearly all who have partly emanci- 
 pated their own minds and consciences, continue to sacri- 
 fice to the system the better half of themselves, I mean 
 their wives and children. The priest or monkish con- 
 fessor is allowed to dominate and debauch the souls of 
 the latter as much as he likes. Few men have the 
 courage so far to break with the Church as to withdraw 
 their family circles from its debasing influence. It is a 
 sign of the time that many enlightened Frenchmen, 
 among them M. Yves Guyot, are beginning to see that a 
 merely negative attitude on the part of fathers and hus- 
 bands is of no use. The bacillus of superstition can only 
 be eliminated by the culture in the mind of some healthier 
 germ. Such a germ they see in French Protestantism, 
 from which they have hitherto held aloof, however deep 
 might be their antagonism to Catholicism. Now they 
 frankly urge that all who are dissatisfied with the super- 
 stitions of Rome should openly declare themselves Protest- 
 ants and commit the religious training of their children to 
 the nearest pasteur. In no other way can their country 
 escape the fate which has overtaken Spain.
 
 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE 
 FRENCH REPUBLIC. 
 
 (July, 1900.) 
 
 UNICIPAL elections in France have more 
 political significance than they have in Eng- 
 land, and more particularly is this true of Paris. 
 A party which can get possession to-day of the handsome 
 Hotel de Ville upon the Seine is likely to assert itself 
 before long in the country at large. The recent success, 
 therefore, of the Ligus de la Patrie Francaise has filled 
 genuine Republicans — it is necessary to distinguish 
 between genuine and mock ones — with dismay. The 
 Paris Municipal Council has hitherto been the chosen 
 home of anti-Clericalism. It has on a sudden become a 
 sacristy. It is true that its decrees in the past were often 
 feather-headed and revolutionary ; and it was by a wise 
 prevision that the Prefect of the Seine — an officer appointed 
 by the executive government — was entrusted with authority 
 to veto its resolutions whenever they were ultra vires — 
 which they often were. But in spite of all its extrava- 
 gances the old council had its redeeming points. It was 
 a bulwark of Liberalism, though of a hot-headed kind. 
 It encouraged and promoted the education of the people, 
 and appointed to its popular lecturerships such profound
 
 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 141 
 
 and open-eyed students of the past as the late Andre 
 Reville. In favour of the Ligiie de la Patrie, which has 
 now captured the stronghold, nothing can be said, not 
 even that it is anti-revolutionary. It is rather a Catilin- 
 arian conspiracy of the worst kind. Its organizers are 
 fly-blown men or women of letters, like Coppec, Jules 
 Lemaitre, "Gyp," and Brunetiere ; perjured assassins and 
 accomplices of the traitor Esterhazy, like Mercier, Roget, 
 Cavaignac, and Gonse ; gutter journalists, like Rochefort ; 
 Jew-baiters and blackmailers, such as Drumont and Mille- 
 voye ; Jesuits, like the Peres du Lac and Coube ; Assump- 
 tionist miscreants, like the Pere Bailly ; visionaries who 
 yearn for a fresh epoch of Caesarism, and are on the look- 
 out for a new Boulanger, like Paul Deroulede. Perhaps 
 the latter would like to play the part himself, in case 
 General Roget persists in hanging back. Lastly, there 
 is the whole pack of Royalist curs, from the Due 
 d'Orleans — the ejected of the " Bachelors' " — downwards. 
 This motley group veils its designs under the conveniently 
 vague name of Nationalism. No one, of course, can 
 blame a Frenchman for setting above all other interests 
 those of France. But this bastard Nationalism is a mere 
 mixture of reactionary and obscurantist Jesuitry with an 
 unscrupulous militarism. It is dangerous to France, and 
 equally dangerous to the peace of Europe. Its cry is 
 France for the French, but its real aim is the proscription 
 of all non-Catholics and the assassination of Jews. It has 
 no sense of where or what the real commercial interests 
 of France are, and would therefore raise round her a 
 Chinese wall of tariffs, destructive of her prosperity. It 
 would excite war at home and, by dint of Chauvinist
 
 142 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 exaggerations, as ridiculous to other nations as they are 
 intolerable, plunge the country into war with all her 
 neighbours. A loyal Frenchman loves the army, but 
 these latter-day patriots, by way of flattering it, fill their 
 journals with foolish appeals to it to march one day on 
 Berhn, the next on Rome, the third on London, and 
 every day against the people. An army constituted and 
 led as they would have it be — and there is a serious risk 
 of their getting their way — ceases to be a safeguard of 
 peace, a form of national insurance for which the sober 
 taxpayer cheerfully makes provision, and becomes a menace 
 to liberty, to industry, to national repose and well-being. 
 The respectable traditions of glory and order are forgotten, 
 and have no place in the propaganda. Instead of them 
 are sown the seeds of hatred and violence. It is a fatal 
 irony that such a faction should have got the upper hand 
 in Paris at the very moment when a great exhibition is 
 being held, destined to exhibit to the entire world the 
 progressive triumphs during the past century of the arts 
 of peace. Such Nationalism is a negation of industry, as 
 it is of religious tolerance, of intelligence, and morality. 
 It is inimical to trade and commerce, and, like the third 
 Empire, can only lead to disaster and national humiliation. 
 In Italy it is the cue of the Vatican to hold aloof, at 
 least in appearance, from politics, and in view of the 
 general election at the beginning of this month of June, 
 the usual fiat went forth to all the faithful to be ni eletti ni 
 elettori. The object of Pio Nono in imposing this rule is 
 to boycott the Italian Government, which he regards, and 
 wishes others to regard, as one of usurpation and sacri- 
 lege. The result has been to prevent the formation in the
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 143 
 
 Italian Chamber of a Catholic Party, though it has not 
 hindered the priests from intriguing with the Anarchists 
 and fomenting discontent and a spirit of riot in the large 
 industrial centres. In France the Vatican has pla3-ed of 
 late years a game different in form, but equally selfish in 
 substance. Leo XIII. was persuaded ten years ago that 
 the Royalist cause was hopeless, as indeed a cause must 
 be of which the Due d'Orleans, neither a gentleman nor 
 a wit, is the champion. Accordingly, the edict went 
 forth to the faithful to recognize, and be loyal to, the 
 Republic. Not a few honest Republicans — among them 
 M. Spiiller — welcomed this step on the part of the Vatican, 
 because they believed it would lead to a change of spirit 
 among the clergy, who, it was hoped, in becoming loyal 
 to a Republic which professes to base itself on the Rights 
 of Man, would gradually be liberalized. The Vatican, 
 however, had other ends in view. It merely wished to 
 capture the Republic and clericalize it ; to embrace it in 
 order the better to strangle and suffocate it ; to purge it 
 of what the priests everywhere denounce as Freemasonry, 
 which is Clerical slang for the spirit of religious tolerance 
 coupled with respect for civil rights and equality of all 
 before the law, of Jews and Protestants as well as of 
 Catholics. They would substitute for this spirit the prin- 
 ciples of the Syllabus. A party of Rallies was accordingly 
 formed, consisting of old Royalists who have nominally 
 turned Republicans, yet retain all the prejudices of the 
 ancien regime. Concurrently the French Clerics redoubled 
 their efforts to possess themselves of the army and of 
 the schools. The Dreyfus case is a melancholy proof of 
 their success in the former enterprise ; and they have
 
 144 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 made such strides in the field of education that the present 
 Ministry of M. Waldeck-Rousseau, as a last desperate 
 means of obtaining public servants who are not Seminarists 
 in disguise, has promulgated a law requiring every candi- 
 date for the army or bureaucracy to have spent the last 
 three years of his boyhood in a State lycee instead of in a 
 Jesuit school. 
 
 The Rallies in the French Chamber do not number fifty, 
 but the impulse which created the party makes itself felt 
 over a far wider area. It is equally responsible for the 
 degraded Nationalism of Rochefort, Millevoye, and Judet ; 
 for the outburst of mediaeval passion against the Jews, 
 voiced by Max Regis and Drumont ; for the conversion 
 into missionaries of the Pope of such men as Brunetiere, 
 Paul Bourget, and Jules Lemaitre, of whom the last was 
 not so long ago a clear-sighted Intellectual, the friend of 
 Renan and participator of all his opinions. To it we may 
 also attribute the flabbiness of politicians like Meline, 
 Dupuy, and Ribot, from the latter of whom one expected 
 something better than a silent approval of the abomin- 
 ations of Mercier and his accomplices. 
 
 To a much larger extent than anyone would suppose, 
 who has not narrowly scanned the evidence adduced by 
 the Public Prosecutor, M. Bulot, in their recent trial, the 
 Assumptionist monks have conduced to this general re- 
 action in France. The Pere Picard, the General Superior 
 of the congregation, when interrogated, defined its aims to 
 be primarily of a religious order, but accessorily political 
 also, so far as politics depend on religion. " Other ques- 
 tions," he said, " only come within our scope incidentally, 
 or anyhow as depending from the religious idea, because
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 145 
 
 this latter dominates everything." The notorious Pere 
 Bailly, editor-in-chief of the many Croix which circulate 
 in France, made the same admission ; though some of the 
 other defendants, Peres Vaujoux, Jacquot, Maubon, Chicard, 
 and Chabaud, had not about them this minimum of honesty, 
 and stoutly denied that their association pursued any but 
 strictly religious aims. 
 
 In the English Press, even in such well-informed organs 
 as The Standard and Spectator, one reads from time to 
 time that the French Republicans have provoked the just 
 wrath of the Latin Hierarchybytheir wanton and gratuitous 
 attacks upon the religious congregations, as if the latter 
 were harmless groups of devoted clergymen following 
 purely religious aims, inspired with and setting themselves 
 to inspire others with purely spiritual ideals. Those who 
 write in this way in our English journals imagine that 
 the political impartiality, one might almost say magna- 
 nimity, traditional among English clergymen as a body, 
 is also the attitude of French monks. It is well, therefore, 
 to draw a picture of the political and electoral activity of 
 these innocent Assumptionist monks, most of whom pro- 
 fess to play a merely religious part. We are able to draw 
 it from records of their own seized in their convents in 
 November of last year by the French police, and read out 
 in their public trial in the course of last January. 
 
 In Italy, as I have said, it is the policy of the Vatican 
 to hold aloof from political elections ; but in France the 
 Assumptionists have devised, at the instance of the Pope 
 and his curia, an electoral organization which would put 
 to shame the most expert American bosses. Tlirir motto 
 is Adveniat regnnm ttuim, their professed aim the triumph 
 
 K
 
 146 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 on earth of the Spirit of the Crucified Jesus. Their 
 methods, however, are painfully secular, and for the last 
 twenty years have merely centred round the polling-booth. 
 In 1880 they were dispersed as an unauthorized religious 
 congregation ; but in the same year they re-formed their 
 ranks, and in 1883 they founded the Croix, a daily journal 
 which has for its frontispiece a large wood-cut of Christ 
 on the Cross. There are, beside the Paris edition of the 
 Croix, nearly one hundred provincial editions. They are 
 all similar in form and sentiment, and differ chiefly in 
 their local news. There is also a Croix de la Marine, 
 which is circulated among the sailors by their clerically- 
 minded admirals. To maintain uniformity among all these 
 journals there is, beside the hundred odd provincial com- 
 mittees, a central committee, which edits a secret journal 
 only distributed to members of the local committees. 
 This journal is entitled the Croix des Comites. Its task is 
 to keep the local editors in step with each other, to unify 
 and guide their policy. The use of the Croix in all its 
 editions, as well as of some thirty other daily and weekly 
 journals edited by the Congregation, is to "spread the 
 light," that is, to disseminate hatred of Jews and Protestants, 
 distrust of modern science, a spirit of grovelling super- 
 stition and prostration before the priests, and above all a 
 fanatical rejection of all liberal ideas, of tolerance, of lay 
 education. Another influential committee exists to trans- 
 late into political action the spirit thus diff"used among the 
 people. This is the Comite Jiistice-Egalite, which ramifies 
 all over France, and of which the inner ring, or Secretariat, 
 is presided over by the Assumptionist monk, Pere Adeodat. 
 Yet other committees exist of the same kind and pursuing
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 147 
 
 similar aims, e.g., the Comite de VAve-Maria, and the Work 
 or CEuvre de Notre Dame dii Saint. The reader must not 
 be shocked by the frequent abuse of sacred names and 
 paraphernaHa by this clerical Tammany Ring. 
 
 The Pere Adeodat has a secretary of the name of 
 Alexandre Laya, who, in a document seized last year in 
 a monk's cell at Moulins, gives us a summary of the 
 work carried on by the Assumptionists during the years 
 1897 and 1898 in Paris and the provinces, " in both of 
 which places, thanks be to God, their efforts have not 
 been in vain." In Paris, he says, the Assumptionist 
 Committees began to work at the municipal elections 
 four or five years ago, and at once established an union 
 of all the Catholic groups. At the former municipal 
 elections they made an impression ; and this May they 
 have secured a majority, as we have seen, in the Paris 
 Civic Council, demonstrating their strength and impor- 
 tance, and avenging themselves on the Government of 
 Waldeck-Rousseau, which in January prosecuted and 
 fined them sixteen francs a head. But let us return to 
 the document of M. Laya. We learn from it that the 
 work already crowned with success in Paris was long ago 
 begun in the provinces as well. Letters and circulars 
 were showered all over France, agitators sent down to 
 stir up people, and permanent politico-religious caucuses 
 formed in all the centres. The aim of these provincial 
 caucuses was the same as in Paris — namely, to co-ordinate 
 for a common effort all the motley groups, united by no 
 bond save a common hatred of a well-ordered liberty. 
 Jules Guesde, the Anarchist-Socialist, D6rouledc and the 
 dregs of Boulangism, Pere Dulac, the Due d'Orlcans, M.
 
 148 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 Buffet, and all the professors of the religious obscurantism 
 now fashionable, have been, by the efforts of M. Adeodat, 
 welded into the Nationalist Party. To use M. Laya's 
 phrase, all the " honest groups " have been united, and 
 their electoral programme is defined to be the same as 
 that of the Croix. It is the so-called programme of 
 Christian schools, of the propaganda of the faith, of St. 
 Frangois de Sales. It is the sum of all " good " works 
 promoted and sustained by Christian generosity for the 
 glory of God, for the welfare of souls, and the salvation 
 of the Patrie. It is, in short, applied Catholicism. 
 Whenever there is voting these caucuses are to work for 
 the return of the "good" Catholics. No election is 
 beyond their scope ; municipal, cantonal, legislative, 
 presidential, and even elections of Chambers of Com- 
 merce and of Agriculture — all alike are to be watched 
 and provided for. Without such organization, says M. 
 Laya — and he is right, — nine-tenths of the electors might 
 at the bottom be on our side, and yet we should continue 
 to be beaten at elections. 
 
 The duties of the Assumptionist caucus are- thus 
 defined : — It shall occupy itself with revisions of the 
 register of voters, shall study diligently the body of 
 electors, their wants and the currents of opinion which 
 stir them. With every elector its members must be 
 personally acquainted, so as to set him in one of three 
 classes — viz., good, bad, or doubtful. The "good" 
 electors must be reinforced, marshalled in battalions, 
 encouraged to become apostles of the good cause. The 
 doubtful ones and waverers must be won over. The bad 
 ones had better be left alone, at least to begin with.
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 149 
 
 Among the "good," propagandism is to take the form 
 of lectures, pamphlets, processions, and, when an election 
 is at hand, of " crusades of prayer." The list of candi- 
 dates must be prepared, handbills printed and distributed. 
 Every polling-booth must be watched, frauds and acts of 
 personation followed up and punished by annullation of 
 the elections at which they were employed ; those polls, 
 however, where, by use of such m.eans, the vote of the 
 faithful wins, must be upheld against the indictments of 
 the enemy. The party of the Croix, in fine, must ever be 
 in the breach, holding the enemy perpetually in check. 
 Silently and without flagging the committee of "Justice- 
 Equality " is to pursue in all elections the work so 
 eminently desired by Leo XIII., and so necessary to 
 P'rance. So far M. Laya, from whom all these details 
 are drawn. 
 
 Another secret document read in court at the trial of 
 the Assumptionists on January 22nd gave further details 
 of how the work of Clerical propagandism is pushed 
 forward. A committee must be got together in the chief 
 town of every department, or, better still, of every 
 electoral district, composed of laymen or priests. How 
 got together ? asks the writer, who answers his own 
 question. To raise such a committee, he declares, only 
 needs a man of action, and, thank Heaven, there are still 
 left such men in France. Let such a one take the bull 
 by the horns, and one fine day assemble three or four, or, 
 maybe, ten of his friends. The number he begins with 
 does not matter. It will soon grow. The main thing is 
 to make a beginning, and at this staf,'c of the proceedings 
 the local Croix can give valuable aid, and even supply a
 
 150 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 committee ready made. Care must be taken to obtain a 
 competent secretary, for he is the prime wheel in the 
 mechanism. He must be an educated man, with some 
 knowledge of law, keen, clear-headed, gifted with com- 
 mon-sense, and, above all, with affability. 
 
 Such a secretary, we are told, will often have to be paid 
 — and that to the mind of our good monks is the only 
 inconvenient thing about him. 
 
 The committee thus formed and the secretary found, 
 the next step is to examine in detail the political con- 
 ditions of the borough or electoral region. Each member 
 of the committee must take in hand two or three, or 
 more, of the communes or parishes which make it up ; 
 and they must begin by procuring lists of the voters, for 
 without such lists they will be working in the dark. And 
 here the inborn secretiveness of the Clerical worker is 
 shown by the writer of the document I am summarizing. 
 It is much better, he says, to go to the head centre of 
 the arrondissenient (electoral district) or of the department 
 for such lists than to the mayors of the communes ; for in 
 these petty centres, even where the presiding officer is a 
 safe man, the clerk is apt to be the schoolmaster, and 
 will be likely to set his wits to work and make suppositions 
 about what the list is wanted for. " He is quite capable, 
 indeed, of suspecting that the person who asks for the list 
 means to busy himself over the elections." 
 
 Let us suppose that the several members of the Croix 
 committee have secured the lists they need in the round- 
 about way described ; the duty which next devolves on 
 them is to secure each in the one or two communes or 
 parishes selected by him an agent or representative of the
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 151 
 
 Fathers of the Assumption. And in the rules laid down 
 for the choice of such an agent the fox-like cunning of 
 these monks, who, by the way, never weary of maligning 
 the Freemasons for the reputed secrecy of their propa- 
 ganda, is strikingly apparent. The local agents are not 
 to know that they are acting for the Assumptionists, but 
 are to be altogether ignorant of their relations with them. 
 
 Such a requirement seems, at first sight, impossible of 
 achievement ; and yet the secret document assures us 
 that in nearly all the departments the Fathers have 
 secured agents in every commune who fulfil this condition 
 of ignorance. It is only possible if the member of the 
 central committee of the province or electoral district 
 takes care that all communications between the agent in 
 the commune and the Fathers themselves should pass 
 through himself. He has a Jekyll and Hyde part to play, 
 posing as a good Republican to the agent, who is a puppet 
 in his hands, and as the obscurantist and anti-Republican 
 that he really is to the good Fathers. 
 
 The agent or correspondent in the commune — and \n 
 France there are about 38,000 communes — is, so we 
 read, to be of a certain age, of good position, liked and 
 respected by as many as possible, above all a conscientious 
 man and of irreproachable life. The central committee 
 man will not approach him as an emissary of the Fathers, 
 but will just ask him to help him as a private individual by 
 informing him quietly of all that ^oes on in his village, of 
 all that concerns either its common life or the lives of the 
 individuals living in it. " If the village correspondent 
 wants to know what you arc about, you will lell him," 
 says our document, "that it lies in your power to smooth
 
 152 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 away difficulties and render services. You must not give 
 him the name and address of the secretary of the general 
 committee unless you are quite sure of your man. Never 
 let him know that it is for the Assumptionist Fathers that 
 you are so busy over electoral matters." 
 
 The particular services to be rendered by the uncon- 
 scious parish agent of the Assumptionists are next 
 described. He is to be given the list of local voters and 
 asked to note after the name of each whether he is good, 
 bad, or doubtful. If possible, the opinions of others in 
 the place are to be obtained. " You must get together 
 several persons and read out to them the names on the 
 list one by one, and ascertain from them the opinions of 
 each voter. Very often they will disagree, and one voter 
 will be reported good by one and bad by another. In 
 that case you must set him down as doubtful." 
 
 The village correspondent in his turn is to seek the co- 
 operation of as many young men as he can of twenty-five 
 to thirty-five years of age ; and unmarried, if possible, 
 because unmarried men have no wives to gossip, have 
 more liberty, and are, as a rule, less lazy. These- can- 
 vassers, as we should call them in England, must be 
 carefully kept in the dark in regard to the Assumptionists, 
 nor must they know that they form part of an organiza- 
 tion ramifying all over France. " Once more," says the 
 secret document, " what we want to effect is good, and 
 not merely to make a noise." It is essential to conceal 
 from the agent in the commune the cause for which he is 
 really at work. Neither he nor the canvassers he collects 
 in his village must suspect that they are affiliated to the 
 central committee of the jfustice-Egalite.
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 153 
 
 We have thus the outline of a complete electoral 
 organization ; of which only the upper grades know what 
 they are about, while the lower ones work in the dark for 
 employers of whom they would be ashamed if they knew 
 who they were. A complete service exists, says the 
 document, so soon as the central committee of the pro- 
 vince, its secretary, village correspondents and their 
 delegates or canvassers have been created. The Assump- 
 tionists will have then created "an administration along- 
 side of the administration, a mayor and justice of the 
 peace alongside of the ordinary mayor and justice of the 
 peace." 
 
 Certainly the Assumptionists deserve to succeed, in so 
 far as energy and thoroughness merit success. They have 
 organized in France a State within the State, with a secret 
 police of their own. A staff of public lecturers, who 
 ostensibly have nothing to do with the Assumptionists and 
 are to deny all connection with them, completes the 
 edifice, which might well excite the envy of a Russian 
 Minister of the Interior. 
 
 Let us suppose an election is at hand, and the machine 
 so carefully elaborated is to be set to work. The boss or 
 member of the great provincial committee will go round 
 to each parish or commune beforehand, and interview his 
 collaborators singly or together. It will be best, however, 
 on this occasion to see them one by one, or in small 
 groups of two or three at a time ; for he will so obtain 
 more detailed information about things, and will avoid 
 exciting the suspicions of the enemy, who, did they know 
 the forces arrayed against them, would redouble their 
 watchfulness.
 
 154 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 It will be understood that the party of the Assump- 
 tionists is not so strong or popular in France as to be able 
 to run candidates of its own, except in a very few dis- 
 tricts ; but their compact and secret organization has 
 enabled them to influence elections almost everywhere ; 
 and in May, i8g6, they everywhere heckled the Candidates 
 about the Dreyfus case, with the result that a Chamber 
 was elected capable of applauding Cavaignac and of 
 ordering Henry's forgeries to be posted up in every com- 
 mune of France. 
 
 In most constituencies a candidate who frankly came 
 forward as a Clerical would have no chance ; but there 
 is less difficulty in procuring candidates who profess 
 Republican principles, yet are ready to sacrifice them 
 under pressure. The aim of the Justice-Egalite Com- 
 mittee is therefore to secure the return of squeezable 
 candidates ; and in a secret circular addressed to its 
 members and seized at Moulins, in the Assumptionist 
 convent, we read the following : — 
 
 " In districts where it is possible, our friends will avail themselves of 
 local conditions and of the state of opinion among the voters to choose a 
 candidate who is out-and-out Catholic and faithful to pontifical directions. 
 Short of that they will demand of the candidate a minimum at least of 
 concessions, substantial and made in writing." 
 
 That the above is no vain pretension was shown by the 
 famous Pact of Bordeaux, so called. This was a sort of 
 Kilmainham Treaty, under which the Anarchist or extreme 
 Socialist candidates secretly agreed with the Justice- 
 Egalite League to aid the Clericals in return for their 
 support at the polls. The pact succeeded admirably for 
 a time. In Italy the Clericals have long intrigued in the
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 155 
 
 same way with the more turbulent and irreconcilable of 
 the Socialists, much to the detriment of the country and 
 without likelihood of permanent profit to the Papacy. 
 The priestly ambition in that country is to dislodge the 
 King and his Government. It is forgotten that the Pope 
 would follow the King out of Rome within six weeks. 
 
 Beside the Croix in its numerous issues, the Justice- 
 Egalite League has a journal of its own bearing the same 
 title ; and in order to make use of the women, who in 
 France are the mainstay of sacerdotalism, there is a 
 special branch of the propaganda called the " Work of 
 Notre Dame de Saltit," with sub-committees called of Joan 
 of Arc and Ave Maria. Nothing proves the sagacity of 
 the Assumptionist Fathers so clearly as the care with 
 which they everywhere enrol the women, and set them to 
 exercise pressure on the men. A chief reason why at this 
 moment Jewish and Protestant officials are so detested in 
 France by the Clericals is, that the priests cannot get at 
 them through their womenkind. 
 
 The association of Noire Dame de Saint was founded 
 immediately after the Commune, and was blessed by the 
 Pope and enriched with special indulgences in a brief 
 dated May 17th, 1872. It is controlled by a council of 
 Assumptionist monks, has its staff, its president, Pere 
 Picard, and secretary, Pere Bailly ; its own fund, superior 
 and offices in the Assumptionist Monastery at 8, Rue 
 Fran9ois I., Paris. Its aims, and those of the sub-com- 
 mittees we have named, are defined as consisting in united 
 prayer for the conversion of France to Jesus Christ 
 through Christian legislation, unity of effort among 
 Catholics, and the triumph of the Church. Zealous
 
 156 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 women are chosen as its associates, who distribute every 
 month its httle blue journal and collect funds to carry on 
 the work. The first duty of these zealous females, mar- 
 shalled under the Pere Bailly, is defined to be electoral 
 work. This is declared by the circular of the League of 
 the Ave Maria to be the work of works. " The women 
 of France," it declares, " anxious to preserve for their 
 country the religion which is its grandeur and strength, 
 have resolved to combine in order to uphold the interests 
 of faith and fatherland." Their duties are many. In the 
 first place, to disseminate the Croix and other publications 
 of the bonne Presse. It is interesting to notice that just as 
 the mediseval Dissenters, often Manicheans and always 
 arrayed against the State, which in those days was 
 Catholic, denominated themselves the boni homines, so 
 the Ultramontanes of to-day, equally inimical to the 
 State, but inimical for reasons far less respectable, talk of 
 bonnes elections, of bonne legislation, of their bonne Presse. 
 Good in their slang means obscurantist and reactionary. 
 
 The next duty of this female league is to use whatever 
 domestic influence they have on the side of the Croix^3.nd 
 its ideas. They have servants, tradesmen, all sorts of 
 proteges, on whom they can put pressure ; and through the 
 wives of the poor people they must seek to influence the 
 popular voter. Thirdly, they must see that a "good" 
 tone dominates their salons ; and this is the field on 
 which they must combat with tact and prudence the 
 inertia and prejudices of some, the vain excuses and 
 witticisms of others. The salon is the best medium in 
 which to work upon and win over waverers. Lastly, they 
 must be at their posts in election times, foregoing every
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 157 
 
 social engagement in order to be present in their various 
 constituencies. Inside their homes the women must take 
 care that their children are brought up in the faith and 
 conformably to the ideas of the Croix, so tliat they may 
 be zealous Catholics when they grow up. They must 
 also collect funds for the jfustice-Egalitc League, must 
 perpetually warn their friends against sending their sons 
 to State schools instead of to those kept by Jesuits, 
 Christian brothers, and other monks. They must help to 
 unmask the Freemasons and the Jews, taking care not to 
 deal with them to the detriment of Catholic shopkeepers. 
 
 The Assumptionists have organized yet other guilds 
 and leagues for girls, whom they try to turn into propa- 
 gandists from the moment of their first communion. 
 There is also an order of " Knights of the Cross," formed 
 of young men over eighteen. They are admitted after a 
 period of six months' probation, three as noviciates and 
 three as postulants ; and on the morning of their admission 
 they make a solemn declaration on their knees before the 
 altar and sign a promise that they will be true to the rules 
 and obligations of the order. Their duty is to propagate 
 the principles of the Assumptionists, and to insinuate 
 themselves into households for that purpose. 
 
 Secret dossiers by the thousand were found in the 
 Assuniptionist houses of all the prominent men in France. 
 At Bordeaux, under the mattress of one of the monks, 
 was hidden the dossier of M. Charles Bernard, Anarchist- 
 Socialist Deputy for that city. It was a closely-written 
 book fifty pages long, drawn up by a Catholic lady who 
 had been instigated by the monks to insinuate herself into 
 the home of M. Bernard's mother and ingratiate herself
 
 158 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 with her for the express purpose of spying on him. It 
 chronicled his actions and words, day by day and hour 
 by hour. M. Bernard is one of the Deputies whom the 
 Assumptionists (in a secret list drawn up by Pere Picard 
 and seized at Bordeaux) claim to have returned to the 
 Chamber by their efforts. We find M. Bernard's act of 
 capitulation to them. It is addressed to the Pere Laver- 
 dure, and runs thus : — 
 
 "My Dear Friend,— You ask me on which side I shall sit. Beside 
 M. Drumont, of course. Anti-Semite I am, and shall always remain, 
 along with other champions of liberty ; never with the sectaries. As for 
 the congregations, I shall demand for them, you may be sure, the rights 
 common to all citizens." 
 
 We have seen how much store these descendants of 
 inquisitors set by the women, and so are not surprised to 
 hear of the seizure in their cells at Bordeaux of lists of 
 the wives of electors all over France. They were com- 
 piled, in response to a special appeal, in all but four or 
 five departments of France. In these lists the women 
 are divided into two classes only : those who are devout 
 and practising Catholics and those who are not ; the 
 "better" and the "less good" among the husbands are 
 those whose wives fall into one or the other of these 
 categories. 
 
 The English public is by now familiar with the Croix, 
 for which Cardinal Vaughan, writing in The Times, could 
 find no better excuse than that it was a " cheap " paper. 
 The importance which the French monks attach to the 
 dissemination of this poisonous sheet may be measured 
 by the rules they make for the choice of Camelots or 
 street-vendors of it : —
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 159 
 
 "Choose," so we read in these impounded secret documents, "a small 
 boy ten to fifteen years of age, sharp and good-looking. A small boy is 
 better than an older one, because he has a certain cheek about him, which, 
 I am sorry to say, often disappears when he is a little older. He is not so 
 shy about forcing his paper upon people, and does not mind worrying them, 
 making his way into private houses and bars, where he will bother the people 
 drinking till he gets their halfpence out of them. If the children you engage 
 are a little shy to begin with, and afraid of their elders, entrust the first sales 
 to several at once. When they are together they have more pluck." 
 
 We also find instructions to inundate an entire town 
 with the Croix, distributing it for two or three days 
 gratuitously so as to secure it a footing. It is also to be 
 sold on the steps of every church. 
 
 In England a vast poHtical organization like the Prim- 
 rose League cannot be carried on for nothing, nor can the 
 Assumptionists maintain such a propaganda as the pre- 
 ceding pages reveal without ample funds. That they 
 have these at their disposal is clear from the fact that in 
 November last the police commissioned to search their 
 premises in Paris found a sum of nearly two million francs 
 in the safe of their treasurer, Pere Hippolyte; and the 
 police commissary, when he expressed surprise at their 
 keeping so vast a sum in ready money, was assured by 
 another of the Fathers that in proportion to their daily 
 disbursements, it was not excessive. It is also one of 
 their cardinal doctrines that money expended in dis- 
 seminating the Croix is better spent than in building 
 churches or in alms. In an anonymous pamphlet of the 
 Justicc-Ef;alite committee we have such sentiments as the 
 following : — 
 
 "Ah! If I had only known it earlier! What a lot of money wasted 
 without advancing the ' good ' cause a single step I Praise be to God,
 
 i6o THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 who has put into my hands this precious instrument (viz., the Croix) of 
 apostleship. Until now I confined myself to succouring physical misery, 
 to adorning and embellishing the House of God, to aiding the erection of 
 new shrines. And now I find, after sacrificing the better part of my income 
 in this way, that even if there be in my parish somewhat fewer poor 
 people, there is not one Christian the more. For while I was relieving 
 their bodies evil journals were assassinating their souls. The more I 
 embellished the House of God, the more these journals disfigured and 
 soiled souls which, by calling, ought to be the living sanctuaries of God. 
 Down, then, with the old tactics, naive and generous, but too often un- 
 fruitful. Instead of them I shall spread all I can the Christian journal, I 
 shall subscribe to it, shall preach it up in public, shall give it away." 
 
 It is not within the scope of the present article to 
 examine at length the scope and morality of this 
 " Christian " journal, of which the dissemination is to 
 replace old-fashioned alms-giving. In former numbers of 
 this Review I first edified the English public on this 
 subject, and subsequently the daily and weekly Press of 
 England, especially The Times, took the matter up and 
 drove it home. Space only permits me in this con- 
 nection to notice two points. One is the extraordinary 
 secretiveness of the Assumptionists who have formed and 
 control this vast propaganda. It was proved that in their 
 great establishment in the Rue Fran9ois I. in Paris they 
 had beside the public entrance a secret approach from a 
 back street, known only to themselves. Thus they were 
 able last November to dodge the police, who only found, 
 when they entered, such documents as the Fathers had 
 not cared to remove. At Bordeaux compromising 
 documents were found under the mattresses of the 
 monks, who there had very short warning of the 
 domiciliary visit and no secret exit. One of the Fathers, 
 P. Hilaire, of Livry, made various statements to the
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. i6i 
 
 magistrate as to the origin of a sum of about /'6,ooo 
 spent on his chapel. This was in November, iSgg. In 
 January of this year, when placed upon oath, he had 
 quite another story to tell, and being asked to explain the 
 discrepancy, coolly replied that on the former occasion he 
 was not under oath nor liable to punishment if he con- 
 cealed the truth ; he did not feel himself compelled to tell 
 the truth except when he was put on oath ! * 
 
 • The Jesuits long ago discovered the doctrine of mental reserve. The 
 Assuniptionists have accepted their doctrine and made many fresh discoveries of 
 their own. For surely it is something new and unheard of that the advent of the 
 Kin£;dom of God upon earth can be hastened by the dissemination in the columns 
 of the Croix of a ribald song, originally printed in the Lidre Parole of Drumonl, 
 and written to celebrate the attempted assassination at Rennes of that fearless 
 champion of truth and justice, the advocate of Dreyfus, Maftre Labori. In every 
 one of the eight or more stanzas of this song there is open approbation of 
 assassination and lightly concealed obscenity. Its refrain is as follows : — 
 
 " As-tu vu 
 Le trou d'balle, le trou d'balle, 
 
 As-tu vu 
 Le trou d'balle a Labori." 
 
 And the last two stanzas are these : — 
 
 " Bref, apr6s tant de Souffrance, 
 L'avocat est venu 
 Prendre sa place i I'audience 
 En gardant sa balle dans le . . . dos. 
 
 II a fait une belle harangue, 
 
 Son bagout a reparu — 
 Y a rien qui ddlie la langue, 
 Comme d'avoir une balle dans . . . I'dos." 
 
 Such is the literature which P^re Bailly, the welcome visitor of the Vatican and 
 the darling of the French Episcopacy, is not ashamed to disseminate. " Buy as 
 many numbers as you can of the Croix," so we read in one of his secret circulars 
 (July 12, 1899). " Drop them casually, and as if you meant nothing, on benches, 
 on the parapets of walls, under trees in the public promcn.idcs, on the se.its in 
 railway stations and in trains, on the tables of the cafc-s." I.ct us not forget also 
 that the particular issue— it is 167,000 on week-days and 350,000 on Sundays— in 
 which Drumont's vile song is reprinted, was set up in type, pulled and sewn by 
 212 young girls under the direction of the Steurs OblaUs. 
 
 L
 
 i62 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 Some of my readers may be saying to themselves : 
 What of all this ! The association of the Assumptionists 
 was dissolved by the French Courts in January last, and 
 the Dreyfus case is ancient history. And even if it be 
 not, what concern is it of Englishmen how the French 
 mismanage their own affairs ? 
 
 The answer to such criticism is twofold. It does 
 matter to us what the general policy of the Roman 
 Church is ; it does matter how it is shaped and controlled. 
 And when we find, on the morrow of the trial of these 
 Assumptionist miscreants, the Archbishop of Paris — M. 
 Richard — going to condole with them, and M. Gouthe- 
 Soulard, Archbishop of Aix, and other prominent bishops 
 writing letters in the Croix in which the French Premier, 
 M. Waldeck-Rousseau is insulted and denounced as a liar 
 and a thief, we can only conclude that the Roman Church 
 approves of the Croix. When we furthermore find the 
 Pope welcoming Pere Bailly, its editor-in-chief, and 
 blessing him solemnly and in public, we are sure that the 
 sentiments of the Croix have got the upper hand in the 
 Vatican, wherein is formed the public opinion of CatJiolics 
 all over the world. 
 
 Secondly, it does matter to England what Party is 
 dominant in France. It is true that the Assumptionists 
 as a congregation have now been once more dissolved ; 
 but monks, who for years evaded the payment of taxes on 
 their houses by nominally entrusting them to men of 
 straw, will soon begin afresh under some alias or other. 
 It is true that the Vatican has forbidden them in their 
 capacity as monks to write any more about politics, but 
 they will write in some other capacity. And even if they
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 163 
 
 do not, they have done their work ; for at this moment 
 they and their Party are really dominant in France. 
 This the recent almost unanimous vote of the French 
 Chamber proves. The Waldeck- Rousseau Ministry was 
 suspected of a design not so much to revive the Dreyfus 
 case as to allow certain actions, compromising to Mercier, 
 Boisdeffre and the late Colonel Henry, to be threshed 
 out publicly in the Law Courts. Accordingly a Deputy 
 named Chapuis in the last days of May proposed a 
 resolution pledging the Government to prevent any 
 further discussion of the case ; and the Government 
 bowed to what was clearly the general feeling of the 
 House. No other vote so damaging to France, so 
 eloquent of the moral rottenness of her politicians, of 
 their slavish readiness to drown all considerations of 
 truth and justice in order to protect a Mercier, has ever 
 been passed. The vote of July 7th, 1898, decreeing that 
 Henry's forgery should be posted up in all the com- 
 munes of France, was not half so dishonouring; for 
 ignorance had nearly as much to do with it as fear of 
 the Generals. Now every Frenchman is fully informed, 
 and every Deputy has in his hands the evidence of 
 Dreyfus' innocence and of Mercier's guilt. Yet they 
 pass with only sixty dissentient voices a resolution of 
 which the drift is to prevent the victim ever obtaining 
 redress, and Esterhazy's patrons from ever being 
 punished. Not only so, but journals like the Fif^aro and 
 the Aurore, which have fought well for the truth, justify 
 the vote on the express ground that such " pacification " 
 as this is the only way to save France and the Republic 
 from the peril of Militarism.
 
 i64 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 As a matter of fact France lies at the feet of Generals, 
 who can so overawe the Civil Courts and Parliament that 
 a Mercier cannot be brought to justice, that Labori's 
 assassin cannot be found, while a Picquart can be perma- 
 nently drummed out of the Army. For the last five years 
 the Civil Government has been engaged in a death-duel 
 with a Militarism of which the inner heart and core is 
 Jesuitry. The Republicans have made one concession 
 after another to Etat-Majors composed of criminals. In- 
 stead of being disarmed or pacified the wolf is all the 
 more hungry ; and old-time Republicans, first M6line and 
 now Ribot, have joined the wolves. 
 
 The recent vote of May 22nd is therefore a triumph for 
 the Jesuits and the guilty Generals, their alumni; with 
 whom all the corps of French officers of all grades, and 
 all that in France constitutes or would like to be thought 
 to constitute good society, stands solidly united. And 
 their alliance is joined and reinforced by all the elements 
 of disorder, as well as by a phalanx of discontented and 
 conceited literary men such as Brunetiere, Jules Lemaitre, 
 Paul Bourget, Copp6e, and others. 
 
 The Waldeck-Rousseau Ministry pretends and believes 
 itself to be one of Republican defence. Yet how can a 
 Republic live except by enforcing respect for justice and 
 upholding the equality of all before the law. It has the 
 courage to do neither. As long as Dreyfus remains under 
 the stigma fixed upon him by the friends of Esterhazy, — 
 as long as the reptile press of Rochefort, Drumont, Judet, 
 and Pere Bailly can heap on him and on those who have 
 stood by him the epithets which only befit themselves, — 
 until the millstone of scandal and crime is lifted off the
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 165 
 
 neck of the country, so long the constitution is Republican 
 in name alone. Like any South American Republic, it 
 is a rule of cut-throats varnished over with a show of 
 constitutional forms. 
 
 But what concerns Englishmen most deeply is that the 
 Nationalists who really govern France at this moment, 
 seeing that the soi-disant Republicans have not the courage 
 to strike down their tyranny, are filled with a bitter and 
 irreconcilable hatred of England, of our free institutions, 
 and our religion. For months their journals, such as the 
 Libre Parole, Gaulois, Eclair, Intransigeant, and Petit 
 Journal, have been preaching a holy war against the 
 British Empire. All these rags count their readers by 
 hundreds of thousands, whereas the more sober ones 
 count them only by tens. The old wrong of Alsace- 
 Lorraine is effaced from the memory of most Frenchmen. 
 None remember the events of 1870 save those who are 
 well past middle age, and this explains the fact, so strange 
 to outsiders, of the existence in French public opinion of 
 a strong current in favour of an alliance with the Prussians 
 against ourselves. The Germans, unlike the French, will 
 never make war on us from sentimental reasons ; but 
 they would yield readily to utilitarian ones, and would 
 join with the French Nationalists to-morrow if a safe 
 opportunity presented itself of despoiling us of our Empire. 
 It therefore behoves us to be watchful of what takes place 
 in France. 
 
 It is worthy of notice that both in Germany and France 
 the only Party disposed, during the dark moments of the 
 Transvaal War, to be— I will not say just or favourable 
 to England,— but sober and reasonable from a foreign
 
 i66 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 standpoint, were the Socialists. In the Reichstag they 
 alone have shown any perception of how important to 
 German industry it is that the open markets of England 
 and the British Empire should not be closed by hostile 
 tariffs, as they would be if they were controlled by any 
 other Power ; and as they may be by us, if German envy, 
 hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness should strain 
 overmuch our magnanimity. In France equally it is the 
 Socialists who recognize the enormous importance to 
 France of the English market. Perhaps what is most 
 important about the Waldeck-Rousseau Ministry is the 
 presence in it of M. Millerand, the leader of the Col- 
 lectivists. It is the first time that a French Ministry has 
 comprised a representative of this Party, and no one can 
 say that M. Millerand has not discharged the duties of 
 his portfolio — that of commerce — with sobriety and con- 
 scientiousness. The alliance of the genuine Republicans 
 with the Socialists marks an epoch in the history of 
 France, and in future Cabinets the latter cannot well be 
 neglected. It suits the interest of lukewarm Republicans 
 like Meline and Ribot to deliver philippics before meetings 
 of comfortable French tradesmen against a Ministry which 
 has made terms with Collectivists, but an alliance with 
 men like Millerand and Jaures is surely more respectable 
 than one with Mercier and Roget. 
 
 It cannot be said that the trial and condemnation in 
 the Senate of Deroulede and his friends, or the disso- 
 lution of the Assumptionists by a Law Court, has really 
 strengthened the Republic. It is time to recognize that 
 the policy of the so-called Liberty of Instruction, instituted 
 by the Lot FaUoux some fifty years ago, has but given the
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 167 
 
 control of the upper class education to the Jesuits, and of 
 primary schools to the Freres Ignorantins, the Christian 
 Brothers founded by the just canonized saint, La Salle. 
 Instead of a really French education managed by the 
 State, you have a system inspired by an Italian prelate 
 and managed by obscurantist monks who take their orders 
 from Rome ; and one has only to read the syllabus and 
 possess a very slight acquaintance with Vatican aims and 
 methods to realize that the Lot Falloux, by freely author- 
 izing other schools and colleges in France than those 
 immediately under State control, has proved a weapon in 
 the hands of Clericals, who enslave the conscience, and 
 would, if they could, destroy all freedom of speech of the 
 Press, nay, the human intelligence itself. The system of 
 allowing monks to educate children is no more satisfactory 
 from a moral than from an intellectual and political stand- 
 point. During the years 1897 and 1898 some twenty-five 
 monks were convicted in French tribunals of indecent 
 assaults on children, and were condemned between them 
 to a total of over 250 years' imprisonment. The large 
 majority of these criminals were Christian Brothers. It 
 must not be forgotten that such offences are peculiarly 
 difficult to bring home, and for every conviction there 
 must be hundreds who escape. If our Board-School 
 teachers had the same low morale — inseparable from 
 monkery — as these Christian Brothers, several hundreds 
 of them would go to gaol every year for indecent assaults 
 on the children confided to them. 
 
 Again, the Waldeck- Rousseau Ministry is afraid to 
 strike down the real culprits, Mercier, Roget, Boisdeffre, 
 and the other booted and spurred employers and patrons
 
 i68 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST 
 
 of the traitor Esterhaz3\ They have, no doubt, banished 
 Deroulede to the congenial land of Spain, but no other 
 form of Government would have let off so easily self- 
 convicted conspirators against itself. Imagine how the 
 German or Russian Governments would treat individuals 
 who confessed that they only waited for a better chance 
 of overthrowing the rule of Tsar or Kaiser and sub- 
 stituting another sort of sovereign. In monarchial States 
 — Italy apart — high treason is a real crime, and punished 
 as such. In France, however, all persons of good family 
 and connections, all sportsmen, all bon ton society, con- 
 spire with impunity against the Republic. And the 
 blame rests less with the military ruffians than with the 
 weak Republicans, the Melines, Dupuys, Ribots, who 
 tolerate them. Even the turfmen and snobs, who insult 
 and assault the President at Auteuil or demonstrate in the 
 streets, only translate into action the tone of their clubs, 
 and cannot logically be punished so long as Mercier and 
 Roget are held in honour. 
 
 The truth is that in France justice is in abeyance, and 
 honour and truth are of no account. For the nonce, 
 travelling rugs and carpets are being spread out to cover 
 up the torrents of mud poured out in the Dreyfus and 
 Deroulede trials. For the need for peace is just now felt 
 to be more urgent than the need for justice. The Exhibi- 
 tion is the occasion for a truce of God, with which, 
 however, God has not much to do. It is merely the 
 hollow peace of two groups who have hung up questions 
 of honour for a little, but are ready to fall on one another 
 again. Meanwhile, the fate of the Republic hangs on a 
 hair, which at any moment the sabre may sever, as soon
 
 THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 169 
 
 as a Roget is found who, instead of sticking to discreet 
 '•' forgeries, has the courage to risk striking a blow. The 
 Republic is saved for the Exhibition only. The propa- 
 ganda of a Church which has set truth and justice at the 
 bottom of the scale and slavish deference to the priest at 
 the top, has sapped the conscience of France. True, the 
 Intellectuals have made splendid efforts to awake it and 
 infuse fresh life. They have failed and are foiled. The 
 number of genuine Republicans has probably never been 
 very great in France, at least, not among the bourgeois 
 middle class ; and the revolt of the Repubhcan Centre 
 against a Government which leans on the Socialist Left 
 gathers strength every day, and is now voiced by journals 
 like the Dehats and Temps, of which the Republicanism 
 used to be above suspicion. As soon as the doors of the 
 Exhibition are closed, if not before, Waldeck- Rousseau's 
 Ministry will fall, and a MeHne or a Dupuy will follow with 
 a Cabinet of Clerical and Mihtarist puppets. The inevit- 
 able reaction will follow. In every large city, including 
 Paris, there will be outbursts of mob violence, and with 
 the new century, France will definitely enter upon a fresh 
 cycle of revolutions, of proscription, and, possibly, of civil 
 war. 
 
 There is something pathetic in the votes of confidence 
 in the Army which the French Parliament regularly 
 passes in the vain hope of keeping Cerberus in good- 
 humour. Here is the last of the kind of May 28th : — 
 
 ** The Chamber, approving of the acts of the Govern- 
 ment and sure of the loyalty of the Army to the country 
 and to the Republic, passes to the order of the day." 
 Imagine an Anglo-Saxon Parliament going out of its way 
 
 M
 
 170 THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. 
 
 to express its confidence in the loyalty of its Army to 
 itself. Outside France or Spain or a Spanish-American 
 Republic such a vote is inconceivable. In the French 
 Chamber this resolution was cut in half and the part 
 expressive of confidence in the Cabinet received 288 
 votes against 247 ; the little compliment to the Army was 
 voted unanimously. Such votes are significant, and 
 mean that half the French Chamber is aware of what is 
 the fact — namely, that practically the entire corps of 
 officers is disloyal to the Republic ; though it would be 
 hard to define where else their loyalty lies, unless indeed 
 to the Jesuits who have taught them and formed their 
 characters. The minority of 247, composed of Royalists, 
 Anti-Semites, coup d'etat men, and Rallies, are all united 
 in a common hatred of the free institutions of which MM. 
 Loubet and Waldeck-Rousseau are left the last weak 
 representatives. They invite the Army daily in their 
 Press to move and sweep away Parliamentary Govern- 
 ment. With the Croix they would probably prefer that 
 the Republic should commit deliberate suicide, and by 
 way of regular vote install a military dictator responsible 
 only to his mistresses and to the priests who would 
 control their consciences. But if they cannot get a 
 majority to do it by vote they are quite ready to eject by 
 force M. Loubet and other symbols of a real Repubhc ; 
 and it is the knowledge of this which paralyzes with fear 
 the Constitutional Party, and wrings from it amnesties 
 for Mercier and other weak compacts with crime, which, 
 instead of disarming, merely embolden the enemy who is 
 knocking at the gate. 
 
 Printed by Curtis &■ Beamish, Ltd., Coventry.
 
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