Chapter M: LANTAIGNE: “It is clear that the expulsion of the

fraternities was prompted by evil intentions, and was the result of malicious calculation. It is also certain that the religious who were expelled did not deserve such treatment. In striking them it was believed that the Church was being struck. But the blow, badly aimed, strengthened the body that they wished to shake, and restored to the parishes the authority and the resources which had been diverted from them. Our enemies did not know the Church, and their chief minister of that time, less ignorant than they, but more desirous of satisfying them than of destroying us, made a war on us that was merely mimic and for purposes of show. For I do not regard the expulsion of the non-licensed orders as an effective attack. Of course, I honour the victims of this clumsy persecution; but I consider that the Church of France has in the secular clergy a sufficient staff to govern and minister to souls without the help of the regulars. Alas! the Republic has inflicted deeper and more secret wounds on the Church. You know too much about educational questions, Monsieur Bergeret, not to have discovered several of these plague-spots; but the most poisonous one was induced by the introduction into the episcopate of priests feeble in mind or in character. … I have said enough about that. The Christian at least consoles and reassures himself, knowing that the Church will not perish. But what will be the patriot’s consolation? He discovers that all the members of the State are gangrened and rotten. In twenty years what progress in corruption! A chief of the State whose sole virtue is his powerlessness, and who is denounced as criminal if it should get wind that he ventures to act, or even merely to think; ministers subject to a foolish Parliament, which is believed to be corrupt, and whose members, more ignorant every day, were chosen, moulded, nominated in the godless clubs of the freemasons to carry out an evil policy of which they are yet incapable, and which is surpassed by the evils brought about through their turbulent inaction; an incessantly increasing bureaucracy, vast, greedy, and mischievous, in which the Republic believes she is securing for herself a band of supporters, but which she is nourishing to her own ruin; a magistracy recruited without law or equity, and too often canvassed by the government not to be suspected of obsequiousness; an army, nay, a whole nation, unceasingly pervaded by the fatal spirit of independence and equality, is poured back straightway into town and country, a whole community, depraved by barrack life, unfitted for arts and trades, and disliking all labour; an educational body which has a mission to teach atheism and immorality; a diplomatic corps which fails in readiness and authority, and which leaves the care of our foreign policy and the conclusion of our alliances to innkeepers, shopkeepers and journalists; in a word, all the powers, the legislative and the executive, the judicial, the military, and the civil, intermingled, confused, destroyed one by the other; a farcical rule which, in its destructive weakness, has given to society the two most powerful instruments of death that wickedness ever devised: divorce and malthusianism. And all the evils of which I have made a rapid summary belong to the Republic and spring naturally from her: the Republic is essentially unrighteous. She is unrighteous in willing a liberty which God has not willed, since He is the master, and since He has delegated to priests and kings a part of his authority; she is unrighteous in willing an equality which God has not willed, since He has established the hierarchy of dignities in Heaven and on earth; she is unrighteous in instituting that tolerance which cannot be the will of God, since evil is intolerable; she is unrighteous in consulting the will of the people, as if the multitude of ignorant ought to prevail against the small company of those who bow themselves before the will of God, which overshadows the government and even the details of administration, as a principle whose consequences are never-ending; in a word, she is unrighteous in proclaiming her indifference to religion—that is to say, her impiety, her unbelief, her blasphemies (of which the very smallest is mortal sin), and her adhesion to diversity, which is evil and death.”

M. BERGERET: “Did you not say just now, monsieur l’abbé, that being as republican as the Pope, you were resolved to live at peace with the Republic?”