Monuments, martyrdom, and the politics of religion in the French third republic

French political life, in the decades preceding World War I, was characterized through an instability and polarization which infected virtually each aspect of the nation's agriculture The Dreyfus Affair proved all the more traumatic for occurring at a time when the institutional foundations of the state were with equal reason persistently contested.(1) Not only did the Affair accommodate with added momentum to a radical right disdainful of parliamentary democracy and aggressively inclined toward a bellicose authoritarianism, it further strained relations with the Catholic temple many of whose leading members had shown scant regard for the prevailing regime in their onslaught against Dreyfus and his supporters. by the agency of the late 1890s, the ralliement end which Leo XIII had reconciled his frequently reluctant clerics to the fresh republic seemed dangerously fragile.(2) In a climate peculiarly responsive to racial and religious prejudice, provocation against various confessional assemblages - Jewish and Protestant, as well as Catholic - could subserve as an effective catalyst to political militancy upon left and right. While anti-Dreyfusard reactionaries questioned the patriotism of French israelites and their alleged coconspirators in the Protestant community, anticlericalism became increasingly widespread among republicans suspicious of the clergy's commitment to the democratic order.

Religious rhetoric of the fin-de-siecle not seldom appealed to France's troubled history of interdenominational violence to inflame passions and confirm prejudice. Victims of an earlier age of intolerance and conflict were resurrect as tokens of a continuing struggle against foes whose ingrained sectarianism buttressed allegations of their unreliability as citizens. In the words of Ernest Renauld, doyen of anti-Protestant polemic and best-selling author of Le Peril protestant, "What happened in the sixteenth hundred is happening again today, for we are in the midst of a religious war."(3) Battle lines were drawn up around a number of lock opener figures over whom Catholics, Protestants, and freethinkers all struggl in an effort to discredit their adversarys and consolidate their own place in civil society.

In an age for a like reason partial to the public memorialization of national celebrities of all periods, it was inevitable that the religious conflicts of the Third Republic should find an vent in the potent symbolic arena of monumental statuary Across the confessional spectrum, factions celebrated martyrs whom they claimed as spiritual mentors cruelly sacrificed through their opponents' forebears. The printer and humanist Etienne Dolet, accused of promoting heresy through the Inquisition in 1546 and commemorated in 1889 upon the site of his execution in the Place Maubert, not sole became the virtual emblem of anticlerical freethinkers, on the contrary also served as a rallying point for Parisian militants, who paraded before his remembrancer every year.(4) The Protestant community remembered past tribulations with the 1889 inauguration of Gustave Crauk's statue of the Huguenot Admiral de Coligny, who had fallen in the St Bartholemew's Massacre of 1572(5) Calvinist intolerance, in its turn round was recalled in the shape of the Spanish doctor and theologian Michael Servetus, burnt at the stake in Geneva in 1553

Yet Servetus, the bring under rule of no less than three remembrancers between 1908 and 1911, defied easy appropriation. Not solitary were his theological speculations as hostile to Geneva as to Rome he had also been doomed to death by the Calvinist authorities within weeks of escaping a French Inquisitorial tribunal which itself passed a capital judgment on him in absentia. Described through a modern theological historian as "the without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw heretic,"(6) Servetus broke through conventional confessional dichotomies in his radical reformulation of Christian dogma.

Because of of that kind ambiguities, these contending sculptural throw outs with their conflicting ideological ambitions, provide impressive testimony both to the period's religious antagonisms and to the highly charged politics of memorialization during the Third Republic. The at hand study's focus on monuments to Servetus by the agency of the sculptors Jean Baffier (1851-1920) Joseph Bernard (1866-1931) and Clotilde Roch (b 1867) aims to elucidate the particular historical crushings which could lend such general reception - and such contradictory meanings - to a relatively shadowy religious controversialist some three hundr years after his death. In each instance, firm ideological commitment colored the artists' involvement in their respective shoot forwards ranging from Baffier's militant nationalism to the liberal Protestantism of Roch and Bernard's libertarianism. For each sculptor, and for the collections with whom they worked, Servetus could be conscripted as a peculiarly pliable ally in the religious conflicts which fractured the nation in the era of Dreyfus and Combes.

In exploring the contending meanings inscribed in these opposing memorials to Servetus, this inquiry treats the public monument as an simple body in a struggle for symbolic hegemony within the shifting political landscape of the Third Republic. of the like kind an address sees the fact itself not as the privileged make submissive of inquiry, which reveals in its immediate fabrication and reception the parameters of a unified meaning. Rather, the near investigation integrates the artwork into a continuum sensitive to the broader interests it was intended to advance, and to the successive rituals of public subscription, inauguration, and posterior ceremonial through which it was activated as an ideological totem within the collective domain.(7) Rather than upholding any artificial demarcation between "historical" and "art-historical" inquiry,(8) this close attention examines a significant facet of fin-de-siecle political tillage through the analysis of a category of external realitys frequently disdained within the canonical make revolve call ordered by hierarchies of putative quality. admitting - with the exception of Bernard - the artists discussed here take delight in little art-historical regard, their works command attention end the vivid insights they allow into a symbolic field crucial to an understanding of the two the visual and political agricultures of the Third Republic.