Challenging the Republic from the Provinces: An Analysis of Crowd Action after the French Separation Law (1905)

Abstract

The Separation Law of 1905 is widely considered a defining moment in modern French political culture and an enduring legacy of the Third Republic. Whereas scholars have mostly concentrated on the political and intellectual genesis of the law, this article asks how ‘ordinary Catholics’ reacted to separation. It concentrates on crowd action in response to the so-called inventories of 1906, during which State officials audited all property that the Church either possessed or of which it had rights of use. By analysing the forms, motives and legitimation strategies underlying popular resistance against the inventories in Brittany, this article highlights the importance of space for structuring protest and violence in early twentieth-century France. It argues, first, that crowd action heavily drew on concepts of homeland, alternately understood as the local commune, the Breton region or the international community of Catholic believers. Secondly, the article demonstrates that these protests targeted the Republic itself and not, as had been the case during the 1890s and the post-1907 period, individual republicans. Finally, by analysing how crowd action sought to defend the homeland against the encroaching power of a State poised for change, the article reveals the persistence of reactive protest in post-1848 France.