French & English

What I mean by the social power of a religion is the power of enforcing conformity by the double sanction of social rewards and penalties. If the clergy can improve the social position of one who submits to them, and if they can inflict upon the nonconformist any, even the slightest, stigma of social inferiority, then I should say that such a clergy was socially powerful. It would be still more powerful if it did not appear in the matter in any direct way, but was able to attain the same ends through a laity influenced and educated by itself, a laity acting under the illusion of perfect freedom like a hypnotised patient under the influence of “suggestion.”

We have seen that there is a plurality of established religions in France, that Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Jews are equally recognised by the State. The political equality of these religions is perfect, but is their social equality of the same kind?

Certainly not. The Church of Rome, having been formerly the one State Church allied for many centuries with the monarchy and the aristocracy, has preserved in these days of nominal equality an almost unshaken social preponderance. Quite independently of the odium attached to Jews, which is as much a question of race as of religion, the Church of Rome has been able, in France, to produce a general impression that a gentleman must be a Roman Catholic, and that a Protestant, though he may follow his religion even more faithfully than most Catholics follow theirs, is not likely to be “un homme du meilleur monde.”

If an English boy were told to translate “He is a Protestant” into French, he would probably write “Il est Protestant,” and the translation would be accepted as correct. It is technically but not socially accurate. The French word has a nuance of social inferiority that the English fails to convey, and when used by a genuine French Catholic it implies in addition a nuance of reprobation. Is there any English word that would carry these meanings with it? Certainly there is. The word “dissenter” carries them quite perfectly.

I remember that Mr. Voysey, the English freethinking clergyman, warned the dissenters some years ago against the idea, illusory according to him, that by disestablishing the Church of England they would attain to social equality. “You will do nothing of the kind,” he said, in substance if not in words; “Anglicanism will still be the fashionable religion, and you will be just as unfashionable and inferior as you are at present.” Nor is it probable that any mere legislative enactment would procure the abolition of the term “dissenter,” any more than of what is implied by it.

France may afford to English nonconformists an excellent opportunity of comparing legal equality with that social inequality which the justice of the law is unfortunately impotent to redress.

The French Protestants form a little world apart, which (except, perhaps, in the most Protestant districts, and they are of small extent) appears to be outside the current of the national life. Just as, in England, you may live in the upper classes for a lifetime without having once been inside a dissenter’s house, or seen a dissenter eat, so in France aristocratic people go from the cradle to the grave without having seen the inside of an “evangelical” home. I am not speaking of real religious bigotry, of that evil-spirited intolerance which hates the Protestant as a schismatic, and would revive the old horrible penalties against him if it could; I am speaking only of the mild modern objection to people who are under the ban of a social prejudice.

A ban of this kind falls with very different effect on different persons. It scarcely troubles elderly people in comfortable circumstances, who are content with a retired life, but it weighs heavily on the young. A Protestant girl in a French country town may have admirable virtues and a good education, but the simple fact that she belongs to an inferior religious community restricts her chances of marriage. In both England and France a young man may suffer both in that and in other ways from his connection with an unfashionable sect. A young Englishman may come to turning-points in his career where an Anglican will be preferred to a dissenter, even although no question of religious belief may avowedly be involved. A valuable office may be given to merit when the qualities of a dissenter would not be taken into consideration. I am thinking of a real instance when a man of great merit received a private appointment which would certainly not have been offered to a nonconformist, yet the work to be done had no connection with theology. In France I know several successful men who, if they had been Protestants, would have been left out in the cold. If this may still be the case in an age that has made such very real advances in justice, what was it two or three generations since? Then the dissenter was literally an outlaw;[37] to-day he is so only in a social and metaphorical sense. A Frenchman once said to me, “Un Français qui n’est pas Catholique est hors la loi,” but the law of good society was understood, not the law of the land.

In both countries alike, it is but fair to admit that a merely nominal orthodoxy is accepted, and that a man is not required to believe anything in his own intellect and conscience, if he will only conform to certain outward ceremonies. In France the Church has become so accommodating that it is not now any harder to be a Catholic than a fashionable Anglican. The Church requires hardly anything that can be unpleasant to the upper classes (the fasts are only a variety of good eating), and conformity now consists in little else than attendance at a weekly mass. In some respects French orthodoxy is more compatible with freedom than its English counterpart. After mass, and an early low mass is sufficient, a French gentleman is free to amuse himself on Sunday as he pleases. There is, indeed, a rather stern French puritanism which objects to theatres on Sunday, but it objects to them equally on all other days of the week.

But if a nominal orthodoxy is accepted, a nominal heterodoxy is still regarded with aversion. It is a mere question of names. Here is a case in which the persons concerned were known to me. A young gentleman asks a young Catholic lady in marriage and is accepted. He is perfectly well known to be a freethinker, as he is entirely without hypocrisy, never even going to church. Some enemy sets in circulation a sinister rumour to the effect that he is a Protestant. This might have broken off the marriage if he had not been able to prove his Catholic baptism. If people were to put realities before names, it clearly could not be of any importance to what religion a freethinker nominally belonged when he was a baby. It is not the baby who is to be married, but the man. The anxiety in this case was to avoid the objectionable word “Protestant.” The reader may wonder if libre penseur would not be infinitely worse. Perhaps, but it is ingeniously avoided by saying, “Monsieur X est Catholique, mais il ne pratique pas.”

It would be an omission to close this chapter without recognising the existence of a quite unforeseen source of strength for dominant and fashionable religions. That is, the preferential support of well-educated unbelievers. It is not an active or a visible support, but it exists extensively, and the value of it steadily increases with the growth of cultivated doubt. What the unbeliever most dreads and detests is to be worried by rude religious enthusiasts. He does not dislike a priest or a parson who is discreet, and ready to sink religious differences in personal intercourse; nay, he may even be attracted to the wise clergyman, as to a man of intellect and education, who has an ideal above the level of the Philistine vulgar. The experienced unbeliever is generally of opinion that discretion and liberality are more likely to be found in an ancient Church that is bound up with the life and experience of the great world, than in the narrower and more inquisitorial strictness of the minor sects. Hence the curious but unquestionable fact, that in England the cultivated unbeliever prefers the Anglican Church to the dissenting bodies, and does not wish to see them become predominant, whilst in France he dislikes the Protestants more than the Romish priests. This preference arises simply from the unbeliever’s knowledge of the state of things most conducive to his personal comfort, and has nothing to do with theological doctrines, which are a matter of indifference to him in any case. In France, he especially congratulates himself that the dominant religion is not Sabbatarian, the reason being that Sabbatarianism is much more than a theological doctrine, as it passes so easily into legislative domination over all men.