A certain lull prevailed, however, during the last 10 years of the 19th century. Doubt less the anti-religious laws and decrees of which we spoke above were still being enforced, and a law was added to them in 1892, which obliged the vestries or parish boards of trustees to submit their accounts to be audited by the state, and another one in 1895 which imposed upon the religious congregations a special and exceptional tax, obliging them to pay on what was claimed by the government to be inherit ances from their deceased members. But what ever malevolence inspired these two measures, they did not constitute any serious evil, and it may be said in general that this period saw the polemics become rather milder, the appeals for reconciliation more numerous and more elo quent. And to the voice of Pope Leo XIII, who was in favor of the acceptance of the Republic, was added, on the side of the govern merit, the voice of Speller, Minister of Public Worship, proclaiming the necessity of a new spirit ; and even a Prime Minister, Jules Manes, declared "it was not the function of govern ment to molest a part of the citizens on account of religious convictions.* That was, alas, only a little rift in the clouds, a momentary clearing up in a stormy sky; and instead of a new spirit in place of the spirit of peace, there sprang up almost suddenly a tempest more violent than ever. All the -world is aware of the occasion or the pretext for it, namely, the Dreyfus case. Even if people ques tion the innocence of Captain Dreyfus, they can not question the illegalities of his trial, and the great number of honest men in France who, blinded by party spirit, opposed for a long time the necessary revision 'of his sentence, com promised greatly the sacred cause of patriotism and religion of which they held themselves up as defenders. But the injustice of which one person was the victim and which has finally been atoned for to the honor of our national conscience does not at all render legitimate the acts of injustice which since then have been committed, under pretext of vengeance, against thousands of other persons, members of the religious orders and especially of the orders of women of whom the majority knew nothing whatever of the °affair* or of politics of any kind.
Let me •add that there had been always a certain number of eminent Catholics who fought earnestly in favor of Dreyfus, and notorious enemies of the Church who were his adversaries to the end. Moreover it is right and of the first importance to point out that, if many Catholics were mistaken in that affair, as were so many other Frenchmen, they acted as indi viduals and in their personal capacity; nobody can point to a single act, a single word, of any ecclesiastical authority advising them to take the unhappy steps they did. But whatever one may think of the °Affaire Dreyfus* there can be no doubt that it inflamed passions, political, social and religious, to an unprecedented degree, and that it has been the direct cause of the difficulties or rather hostilities which we have now to narrate.
I will not enlarge upon the action of the Prime Minister Waldeck Rousseau in conse quence of which the courts, in January 1900, dissolved the Order of the Assumptionists against which, as against the Jesuits, the friends of Dreyfus were especially irritated. That par ticular measure was soon lost sight of in a general act which reached in its effects almost all the religious orders of men and women in France; the law which the same minister had passed against them in 1901.
According to this law, religious associations cannot be formed °without authorization given by a law determining the conditions under which they operate,* and supposing that they have ob tained such authorization, they cannot found any new establishment except by virtue of a decree given in the Council of State. But there is
something more. These establishments, after all those authorizations, are always at the mercy of the Executive.
The text of the law here merits attention. "The dissolution of a congregation, or the closing of any establishment, may be pronounced by decree given in the Council of Ministers.* And this suppression, or the refusal of authori zation, is very effective: every member of an illegal association is liable to a fine of upwards of 5,000 francs and to be sent to prison for a period of one year.
The same penalties may be exacted from any person who lets a room, a hall or a work shop to any member of a congregation; and these penalties may be doubled in the case of a founder or director.
But what steps must a congregation take in order to obtain proper authorization? It must previously submit to and even afterward hold at the disposal of public officers an exact ac count of its income and expenses, an exact statement of the value of all its property, whether personal or real, the name, age, oc cupation, past and present, of each of its mem bers, with a complete record of his history. If notwithstanding this, authorization is refused, then they are °dissolved by the very fact, and the liquidation of their property take place by public process.* Now, the text of this law, severe enough in itself, was enforced by the Combes cabinet with so much rigor, and I may say so much illegality, that its principal author, M. Waldeck Rousseau himself, was obliged, on two oc casions, in June and in November 1903, to declare in the Senate that the law had been completely warped by his successor; he gave battle to the Combes ministry exactly on this point and was defeated by a majority of 11 votes. The authorization was refused en masse to all congregations except five small ones whose destiny remained undecided, and this without any examination and in such fashion that the names of the greater number of them were not even mentioned in the single debate on the subject. Some congregations, notably the Jesuits and Assumptionists and others like them, seeing • that the government was setting a trap for them, had preferred to disband of their own will, and so escaped, to a great extent, from administrative vexations and confiscations. The other congregations which, on the advice of the Pope, of the majority of the bishops and of the most liberal laymen, had submitted to the law, now de clared their membership and their possessions to be in a far worse predicament than those who did not submit, for they were unable to save a single one of their houses or property of any kind, or even to preserve the individ ual freedom of their members, whose names had been given voluntarily in the request for authorization. One single provision of the law remains in abeyance: that which reserved to the members of orders pensions on their proper ties. This property was sold by the govern ment at ridiculously low prices, because honorable men would not buy it, and the money realized on the sale has been swallowed up by the expenses, which had to be supplemented by advances from the government. The pretended billion of francs of the congregations has, therefore, melted away in legal expenses; and the members of the congregations were left to die of hunger, or to emigrate to free countries.