INTRODUCTION

‘Clericalism? That's the enemy!’ Gambetta's battle cry, hurled in a celebrated speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 4 May 1877, has rightly come to be seen as the declaration of war which heralded the onset of the French Kulturkampf, a struggle between the Third Republic and the Catholic church which lasted between 1879 and 1905 and was characterised by the enactment of two major programmes of anticlerical legislation, one between 1879 and the mid-1880s, the other at the turn of the century, the culmination of which was the complete separation of church and state in 1905. The legislative culture war has been studied many times, and will not be re-examined in this chapter. The focus here, rather, is on the culture war on the ground, in order to demonstrate that the culture war was fought not just between a bourgeois intelligentsia (republican and Catholic) in the forum of parliament and the national press but also involved ordinary people, both villagers and priests, in obscure corners of provincial France. The chapter seeks to show further that the late nineteenth-century conflict was only a particular phase – albeit the most decisive one – in a much longer-running guerre des deux Frances, or ‘war of the two Frances’. The French culture war was in many respects a kind of ‘cold'war which periodically irrupted into ‘hot’ war, as in the Breton guerre scolaire (‘battle of the schools’), which provides our case study.