Note 46 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In France, however, the freethinking tradition from the eighteenth century never passed away, at least as regards the life of the great towns. And while Napoleon III made it his business to conciliate the Church, which in the person of the somewhat latitudinarian Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, had endorsed his coup d’état of 1851,46 even under his rule the irreversible movement of freethought revealed itself among his own ministers. Victor Duruy, the eminent historian, his energetic Minister of Education, was a freethinker, non-aggressive towards the Church, but perfectly determined not to permit aggression by it.47 And when the Church, in its immemorial way, declaimed against all forms of rationalistic teaching in the colleges, and insisted on controlling the instruction in all the schools,48 his firm resistance made him one of its most hated antagonists. Even in the Senate, then the asylum of all forms of antiquated thought and prejudice, Duruy was able to carry his point against the prelates, Sainte-Beuve strongly and skilfully supporting him.49 Thus in the France of the Third Empire, on the open field of the educational battle-ground between faith and reason, the rationalistic advance was apparent in administration no less than in the teaching of the professed men of science and the polemic of the professed critics of religion.