Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

A further complicating twist was the attempts in France to reconcile the church with the aims of the Revolution. These were led by Félicité de Lamennais, a priest but a man with a strong commitment to secular educational institutions. He founded a daily periodical, L’Avenir, which advocated religious liberty, educational liberty, liberty of the press, liberty of association, universal suffrage, and decentralisation. This was very modern, too modern. L’Avenir’s policies proved so controversial that, after several times when publication was suspended, the pope went so far as to issue an encyclical, Mirari vos, condemning this particular periodical.⁵² Lamennais responded two years later by releasing

Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer) in which he denounced capitalism on religious grounds and called for the working classes to rise up and demand ‘their God-given rights’. This provoked another encyclical, Singulari nos, which criticised Paroles d’un croyant as ‘small in size but immense in perversity’, and said it was spreading false ideas that were ‘inducing to anarchy [and] contrary to the Word of God’. Gregory ended by demanding that Catholics everywhere submit to ‘due authority’. But this too backfired, in a sense, because it appeared not long before the revolution of 1848, which revived republicanism among French Catholics, and for the first time significant numbers of the Church hierarchy appeared to be sympathetic to revolution.⁵³

Pius was originally a liberal (he was elected at fifty-five, a comparatively young age for a pope). But he was as changed by the events of 1848 as the rest of his fellow Italians. ‘Now cured of all liberalism’, Pius gave a triumvirate of cardinals a free hand to restore absolute government in Rome.⁵⁴

However, since this attempt was accompanied by a general loss of traditional authority across the broader political landscape (e.g., Italy’s war of independence against Austria, the unification of Germany) this only provoked new waves of anticlericalism. In 1857, in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert portrayed a people who were anticlerical most of the time, even though their children were baptised and they continued to receive the last rites from a priest.⁵⁵ In France, indifference to religion was growing among ordinary people, just as Engels had noted a decade earlier in England.

Anticlericalism in France came to a head in the last decades of the century over the secularisation of the schools. For the Vatican, to lose the schools meant the final blow to its influence.⁵⁶ This is why a number of Catholic universities were established across Europe in the mid-1870s – it was an attempt by the church to recover some of its losses. But this only created a new battleground: priests and schoolteachers were now pitched against one another.

The teachers won. They were led by the Third Republic’s new minister of education, Jules Ferry. Ferry was convinced, as Auguste Comte was convinced before him, that the theological and metaphysical eras were a thing of the past and that the positive sciences would be the basis of the new order. ‘My goal’, Ferry declared, ‘is to organise society without God and without a king,’ and to this end he expelled more than 100,000 religious teachers from their posts.⁵⁷

The Vatican responded to this latest move by setting up Catholic Institutes in Paris, Lyons, Lille, Angers and Toulouse. Each boasted a theological faculty independent of state universities, whose task was to develop their own scholarship to combat what was happening in science and biblical historiography. Lester Kurtz sets out the Vatican thinking.

⁵⁸ ‘First, it defined Catholic orthodoxy within the bounds of scholastic theology, thereby providing a systematic, logical response to the probing questions of modern scholarship. Second, it elaborated the doctrines of papal authority and of the magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church), claiming that the Church and its leadership alone had inherited authority in religious matters from the apostles of Jesus. Finally, it defined Catholic orthodoxy in terms of what it was not, by constructing an image of an heretical conspiracy among deviant insiders.’⁵⁹ The Church now gradually identified a new era of ‘heresy’, set out mainly in the conservative Catholic press (in particular the Jesuit publications, Civiltà cattolica in Rome and La Vérité

in Paris). There was also a series of papal edicts (Syllabus of Erros, 1864; Aeterni Patris, 1879; Providentissimus Deus, 1893), followed by the condemnation of Americanism, Testem benevolentiae (1899), and, finally, a full-bloodied assault on modernism, Lamentabili (1907).