War between states has been accepted as the only legitimate form of violence as long as states have existed. In pre-1914 Europe recourse to war was recognized by statesmen as a normal and acceptable instrument of policy and diplomacy – an extension of politics by other means, in the famous formulation of Clausewitz. In the twentieth century, however, the character of war was transformed. Wars were waged with unprecedented savagery: the rules of war formulated over centuries and codified in The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 were ignored as states abandoned the notion of limited war in favour of all-out, ‘total’ or ‘apocalyptic’ war, pursued for ideological ends. Herbert Butterfield, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, characterized each of the two world wars as ‘a war for righteousness’, which he defined as a war ‘in which the conflict of right and wrong admitted of no relenting’. In this regard, Butterfield contended, the total wars of the twentieth century recalled the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which statesmen and political thinkers since the Enlightenment had viewed with horror as an affront to civilization. The deadliest features of twentieth-century warfare, according to Butterfield, were the product not of modern technology but of a theory of war which eschewed all restraint or limits. Hatred, viciousness, a refusal to compromise – these were the characteristics of the modern ‘war for righteousness’, conferring on conflict what Butterfield called a ‘daemonic’ quality.

Introduction

The relationship between church, state and nation in nineteenth-century France was shaped in large measure by the legacy of the preceding revolutionary era. The French Revolution had begun with the blessing of the church but it ended in a seismic rupture. Whereas the clergé patriote of 1789 had looked to religion to bind the nation together, within a few years religion had developed into the single greatest source of national discord. The Jacobins proclaimed the Republic one and indivisible, but their onslaught on Catholic Christianity in effect turned France into not one nation, but two.

On one side of the fault-line lay those who continued to identify with the revolutionary idea of the sovereignty of the people, to be realised in the construction of a new kind of polity, the liberal or democratic nation-state. On the other were those who refused to embrace a social order which did not rest on religious foundations and who still thought of France as the Christian nation par excellence, the eldest daughter of the church, the creation of a Christian monarchy best exemplified by St Louis. The Revolution thus bequeathed to the nineteenth century a mythic vision of a culture war’ between les deux France which would last throughout the nineteenth century, and even beyond, though only after 1879 would it once again involve hostile action on the part of a republican state against the forces of organised religion.

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.