Émile Combes

Émile Combes
Émile Justin Louis Combes (6 September 183525 May 1921) was a French statesman and freemason who led the Lefts Bloc's (French: Bloc des gauches) cabinet from June 1902 to January 1905.
Career
Émile Combes was born on 6th September 1835, in Roquecourbe, Tarn, the sixth child of Jean Combes, a dressmaker, and Marie-Rose Bannesborn.
He first learned Latin from his public schoolteacher and then from his godfather and cousin, a priest named Jean Gaubert. Gabriel Merle, biographer of Émile Combes, describes Jean Gaubert: "He has the prestige and authority of the priesthood and education. He is obeyed. And if he demands sacrifices, he also imposes them on himself. His insistence that one of his younger cousins should become a priest is astonishing. Having failed with Philippe around 1840 and Émile in 1847, he missed his last attempt with Henri around 1860."
Thanks to his knowledge of Latin, twelve-year-old Émile Combes entered the fourth year of the minor seminary in Castres. His godfather supported him financially through his studies, first at the seminary; then at the École des Carmes, an ecclesiastical school where future priests wishing to study at the Sorbonne were trained; and finally at the Grand Séminaire d'Albi, where Émile Combes wore the cassock and was tonsured. Here, his vocation to the priesthood was seen as unserious, and despite initial efforts to persist, he would abandon the idea before ordination.
His anti-clericalism would later lead him into becoming a Freemason. He was also in later life a spiritualist. He later took a diploma as a doctor of letters (1860). He then studied medicine and graduated in 1867, and setting up in practice at Pons in Charente-Inférieure. In 1881, he presented himself as a political candidate for Saintes, but was defeated. In 1885, he was elected to the senate by the département of Charente-Inférieure. He sat in the Democratic left, and was elected vice-president in 1893 and 1894. The reports which he drew up upon educational questions drew attention to him, and on 3 November 1895, he entered the Leon Victor Auguste Bourgeois cabinet as minister of public instruction, resigning with his colleagues on 21 April following.
Prime minister
He actively supported the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry, and upon its retirement in 1902, he was himself charged with the formation of a cabinet. In this, he took the portfolio of the Interior, and the main energy of the government was devoted to an anti-clerical agenda. The parties of the Left united upon this question in the Bloc republicain, supported Combes in his application of the law of 1901 on the religious associations, and voted the new bill on the congregations (1904). Under his guidance, France took the first definite steps toward the separation of church and state. By 1904, through his efforts, nearly 10,000 religious schools had been closed, and thousands of priests and nuns left France rather than be persecuted.
Combes was vigorously opposed by all the conservative parties, who saw the mass closure of church schools as a persecution of religion. Combes led the anti-clerical coalition on the left, facing opposition primarily organized by the pro-Catholic party Action libérale populaire (ALP). ALP had a stronger popular base, with better financing and a stronger network of newspapers, but had far fewer seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
Among people who looked with favor on his stubborn enforcement of the law, he was familiarly called le petit père. In October 1904, his Minister of War, General André, was uncovered 'republicanizing' the army. He took the promotion process out of the hands of senior officers and handled it directly as a political matter. He used Freemasons to spy on the religious behavior of all 19,000 officers; they flagged the observant Catholics and André made sure they would not be promoted. Exposed as the Affaire Des Fiches, the scandal undermined support for the Combes government. It also undermined morale in the army, as officers realized that hostile spies examining their private lives were more important to their careers than their own professional accomplishments.
Finally, the defection of the Radical and Socialist groups induced him to resign on 17 January 1905, although he had not met an adverse vote in the Chamber. His policy was still carried on; and when the law of the separation of church and state was passed, all the leaders of the Radical parties entertained him at a noteworthy banquet in which they openly recognized him as the real originator of the movement.
Later life
The campaign for the separation of church and state was the last big political action in his life. While still possessed of great influence over extreme Radicals, Combes took but little public part in politics after his resignation from the premiership in 1905. He joined the Aristide Briand ministry in October 1915 as one of the five Elder Statesmen, but without portfolio.
According to Geoffrey Kurtz, the years of Émile Combes' administration were a period of social reform "without equal" during the era of the Third Republic, which included such reforms as an eight-hour day for miners, a ten-hour day for many workers, the lowering of mandatory military service from 3 to 2 years, the elimination of certain middle-class draft exemptions, and some modest public assistance for the chronically ill, the disabled, and the elderly. In 1903, safety standards were extended to shops and offices. In addition, a 1904 law “pioneered assistance to the children of single mothers, ignoring invidious distinctions between married and single mothers, in order to prevent abandonment.”
Combes died on 25 May 1921 in Pons, Charente-Maritime.
Combes's Ministry, 7 June 190224 January 1905
Émile Combes – President of the Council and Minister of the Interior and Worship
Théophile Delcassé – Minister of Foreign Affairs
Louis André – Minister of War
Maurice Rouvier – Minister of Finance
Ernest Vallé – Minister of Justice
Charles Camille Pelletan – Minister of Marine
Joseph Chaumié – Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts
Léon Mougeot – Minister of Agriculture
Gaston Doumergue – Minister of Colonies
Émile Maruéjouls – Minister of Public Works
Georges Trouillot – Minister of Commerce, Industry, Posts, and Telegraphs
Changes
15 November 1904 – Maurice Berteaux succeeds André as Minister of War
Notes
Further reading
Akan, Murat. The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey (2017).
Arnal, Oscar L. "Why the French Christian Democrats Were Condemned." Church History 49.2 (1980): 188–202. online
Coffey, Joan L. "Of Catechisms and Sermons: Church-State Relations in France, 1890–1905." Church history 66.1 (1997): 54–66. online
McManners, John. Church and State in France, 1870–1914 (Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 125–55.
Mayeur, Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux. The Third Republic from its Origins to the Great War, 1871-1914 (1984), pp. 227–44
Merle, Gabriel. Emile Combes (1995), p. 1, 662 p.; standard biography, in French
Partin, Malcolm. Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes, and the Church: the Politics of Anticlericalism, 1899–1905 (1969)
Sabatier, Paul. Disestablishment in France (1906) online
External links
Cartoons
1835 births
1921 deaths
Catholicism and Freemasonry
French Freemasons
French interior ministers
French senators of the Third Republic
French spiritualists
Government ministers of France
Honorary Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
People from Tarn (department)
Politicians from Occitania (administrative region)
Politics of France
Prime Ministers of France
Radical Party (France) politicians
Senators of Charente-Maritime
State ministers of France