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MONUMENTS, MARTYRDOM, AND THE POLITICS OF RELIGION IN THE FRENCH THIRD REPUBLIC

Neil McWilliam
17,650 words
1 June 1995
The Art Bulletin
p186
ISSN: 0004-3079; Volume v77; Issue n2
English
Copyright (c) 1995 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT 1995 College Art Association

French political life, in the decades preceding World War I, was characterized by an instability and polarization which infected virtually every aspect of the nation's culture. The Dreyfus Affair proved all the more traumatic for occurring at a time when the institutional foundations of the state were so persistently contested.(1) Not only did the Affair lend added momentum to a radical right disdainful of parliamentary democracy and aggressively inclined toward a bellicose authoritarianism, it further strained relations with the Catholic Church, many of whose leading members had shown scant regard for the prevailing regime in their onslaught against Dreyfus and his supporters.
By the late 1890s, the ralliement through which Leo XIII had reconciled his often reluctant clerics to the new republic seemed dangerously fragile.(2) In a climate peculiarly responsive to racial and religious prejudice, provocation against various confessional groups - Jewish and Protestant, as well as Catholic - could serve as an effective catalyst to political militancy on left and right. While anti-Dreyfusard reactionaries questioned the patriotism of French Jews 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 frequently 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 resurrected as symbols of a continuing struggle against opponents 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 century is happening again today, for we are in the midst of a religious war."(3) Battle lines were drawn up around a number of key figures over whom Catholics, Protestants, and freethinkers all struggled in an effort to discredit their opponents and consolidate their own place in civil society.
In an age so 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 outlet in the potent symbolic arena of monumental sculpture. Across the confessional spectrum, factions celebrated martyrs whom they claimed as spiritual mentors cruelly sacrificed by their opponents' forebears. The printer and humanist Etienne Dolet, accused of promoting heresy by the Inquisition in 1546 and commemorated in 1889 on the site of his execution in the Place Maubert, not only became the virtual emblem of anticlerical freethinkers, but also served as a rallying point for Parisian militants, who paraded before his monument 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, was recalled in the shape of the Spanish doctor and theologian Michael Servetus, burnt at the stake in Geneva in 1553.
Yet Servetus, the subject of no less than three monuments between 1908 and 1911, defied easy appropriation. Not only were his theological speculations as hostile to Geneva as to Rome, he had also been condemned to death by the Calvinist authorities within weeks of escaping a French Inquisitorial tribunal which itself passed a capital sentence on him in absentia. Described by a modern theological historian as "the complete heretic,"(6) Servetus broke through conventional confessional dichotomies in his radical reformulation of Christian dogma.
Because of such ambiguities, these contending sculptural projects, with their conflicting ideological ambitions, provide eloquent testimony both to the period's religious antagonisms and to the highly charged politics of memorialization during the Third Republic. The present study's focus on monuments to Servetus by the sculptors Jean Baffier (1851-1920), Joseph Bernard (1866-1931), and Clotilde Roch (b. 1867) aims to elucidate the particular historical pressures which could lend such currency - and such contradictory meanings - to a relatively obscure religious controversialist some three hundred years after his death. In each instance, firm ideological commitment colored the artists' involvement in their respective projects, ranging from Baffier's militant nationalism to the liberal Protestantism of Roch and Bernard's libertarianism. For each sculptor, and for the groups 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 study treats the public monument as an element in a struggle for symbolic hegemony within the shifting political landscape of the Third Republic. Such an address sees the object itself not as the privileged subject of inquiry, which reveals in its immediate fabrication and reception the parameters of a unified meaning. Rather, the present 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 subsequent 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 study examines a significant facet of fin-de-siecle political culture through the analysis of a category of objects frequently disdained within the canonical roll call ordered by hierarchies of putative quality. Though - with the exception of Bernard - the artists discussed here enjoy little art-historical regard, their works command attention through the vivid insights they allow into a symbolic field crucial to an understanding of both the visual and political cultures of the Third Republic.
Nationalism and Anti-Protestantism: Jean Baffier's Michel Servet
Appropriately enough, it was a display of national unity which went horribly wrong that provided the foundations for the most controversial and provocative of the three monuments to Servetus - the statue by Jean Baffier, inaugurated in Paris in 1908. Its genealogy can be traced back to one of the symbolic highlights of the 1900 Exposition Universelle, a gargantuan banquet attended by mayors from every commune throughout France and its overseas colonies. As a display of republican solidarity, this culinary rerun of the revolutionary Fete de la Federation seemed ill-starred from the first. The summer's municipal elections had seen substantial gains for the nationalists, who had taken control of Paris barely a year after Paul Deroulede's attempted coup against the "comedie parlementaire," which he accused of betraying the French people.(9) Conservative opinion had been inflamed by the official pardon granted Dreyfus in September 1899 following the stalemate of the Rennes trial, and was further antagonized by moves against the Catholic Church by the Waldeck-Rousseau administration. Yet the Exposition was supposed to be different, a moment of harmony and reconciliation to calm overheated passions and restore France's battered reputation abroad.(10) Yet, for the dignitaries who assembled in a giant marquee in the Jardin des Tuileries on September 23, 1900, ideological antagonisms remained too visceral to ignore, and dinner was marred by several unpleasant incidents. The worst of these was provoked by Max Regis, mayor of Algiers and alter ego of the notorious anti-Semite Edouard Drumont. As the evening drew to a close, Regis rose to his feet and proposed a toast to "one of the founders of the Republic, thanks to whom we are here, and who merits a place at our table of honor. . . . I drink to that great citizen Henri Rochefort."(11) Rather than raising their glasses, the assembled diners erupted in cries of anger. A bottle was thrown and Regis was hastily removed by the police.
Rochefort's name provoked such a violent response since this former Communard and radical Blanquist had been reincarnated as a staunch nationalist and virulent anti-Dreyfusard. Exiled after 1871 and exiled again as a result of his associations with Boulanger in 1889, Rochefort had returned to France in 1895 to become one of the right's most formidable polemicists in his journal L'Intransigeant.(12) A maverick populist, Rochefort epitomizes the complex and contradictory texture of fin-de-siecle nationalist ideology, clinging to an aggressively anticollectivist socialism even as he consorted with the ranks of royalists, reactionaries, and antirepublican malcontents who found common cause in their fanatical campaign against Dreyfus. It was his alliance with conservative anti-Semites that prompted taunts at the mayoral banquet that Rochefort had sold out to reactionary Catholicism, a charge he promptly refuted in a furious assertion of his credentials as a militant atheist and longstanding supporter of the separation of church and state.(13) Characteristically, Rochefort turned the tables on his attackers, questioning their own credentials as freethinkers by arguing that their anticlericalism confined itself to condemnation of the Catholic Church and was opportunistically indifferent to instances of Protestant or Jewish "clericalism." Challenging the Protestants' reputation for tolerance, consolidated through their prominence in Dreyfusard pressure groups such as the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, Rochefort recalled the persecution of Michael Servetus by Calvin. Why, he asked, when militant anticlerics were so eager to preserve the memory of the Inquisition's victims, was liberal opinion so reluctant to remember Servetus and his fate? It was only a true anticleric such as himself, Rochefort maintained, who was dedicated and consistent enough to condemn all instances of religious intolerance, no matter what their origin.(14)
It was only a short, if extremely provocative, step to suggest that Servetus was worthy of commemoration in the same way as Etienne Dolet had been remembered - at the Paris council's official behest - some ten years before. In early December, the council received a proposition from Gustave Poirier de Narcay, one of the beneficiaries of the nationalists' recent electoral landslide and secretary of Rochefort's Parti Republicain Socialiste Francais,(15) calling for official authorization to raise a statue in memory of Servetus in the Place Maubert, opposite Guilbert's memorial to Dolet [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. "On the brink of the twentieth century," he claimed, "these two monument will protest against all forms of fanaticism and all attacks upon liberty and freedom of conscience."(16) Poirier explicitly acknowledged his indebtedness to Rochefort for the idea, which not only draws upon the polemicist's championship of this "victim of the Protestant inquisition,"(17) but also recalls a caricature by L'Intransigeant's staff cartoonist Belon [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED], in which both martyrs are juxtaposed to underscore their common fate as victims of religious intolerance.
It was, of course, disingenuous for such confirmed anti-Semites as Poirier and Rochefort to parade as champions of toleration, as opponents in the press were quick to point out.(18) Yet Rochefort's counterattack was characteristically cunning, repulsing those who accused him of compromising his anticlerical credentials by invoking Servetus - ostensibly in the name of consistency, though more fundamentally as a means of deflecting religious antagonisms back upon his attackers. In highlighting a discreditable episode from Protestant history, Rochefort not only threw down the gauntlet to his critics, but also appealed to a seam of anti-Protestant sentiment which had become increasingly conspicuous in France over the previous twenty years. The roots of this antipathy, widely promoted in nationalist circles, arose from perceptions that Protestants enjoyed disproportionate influence in public life at the same time as being less wholeheartedly patriotic than their Catholic fellow citizens. Their conspicuous role in government -five premiers between 1879 and 1890 had been Protestant, for example(19) - together with their prominence in higher education, fostered accusations of a "diabolical alliance" through which they sought to subvert the nation with Jewish and Masonic help.(20) Such attitudes had first emerged in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and Anglo-French rivalry over Madagascar in 1883-85,(21) but had hardened only with the Dreyfus Affair. Not only had Protestants such as Senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner and the historian Gabriel Monod played leading roles in reopening the case in 1897; several of their coreligionists, such as the deputy Francis de Pressense, had also been central to founding the Dreyfusard Ligue des Droits de l'Homme the following year. Such initiatives had provoked angry condemnation of the Protestant doctrine of "libre examen," which conservatives argued was incompatible with the respect owed to authority in an ordered society. It unleashed, too, a polemical assault on a religion accused of being "an anti-French German import,"(22) professed by a community of "deracines,"(23) and dedicated to the destruction of Catholicism. Protestant support for Waldeck-Rousseau's government of republican defense and for the "bloc republicain," which pursued its anticlerical policies under Emile Combes,(24) merely reinforced nationalist antipathies and fueled lurid conspiracy theories.
By invoking Servetus, Rochefort also evaded the central issue of his anticlericalism. Though he had, indeed, been a celebrated freethinker, his campaign against Dreyfus had forced Rochefort into alliance with militant traditionalists and left his libertarian credentials distinctly threadbare. In common with many other nationalists, Rochefort had made common cause with royalists and anti-Semites in claiming that the government's anticlerical legislation was part of a conspiracy to promote socialist, Jewish, and Masonic interests.(25) As he was to claim shortly after Combes's accession to power in 1902:
The Association Law, and the government's application of it, have but a single aim: to avenge the guilty man of Rennes, in other words to offer the Jews the superiority of which Christians are being deprived.
The Dreyfus Affair is behind this anti-Catholic crusade as it is behind everything.(26)
Servetus thus served to deflect the central issue of Rochefort's fidelity to, his former convictions back on his opponents, by questioning the consistency of their own beliefs when faced by evidence of Protestant, rather than Catholic, religious intolerance.
The close relationship between the campaign for a monument to Servetus and government moves against the church clearly emerges in its advocates' somewhat fickle enthusiasms. Rochefort's initial journalistic assault and Poirier's formal proposal coincided with parliamentary discussion of Waldeck-Rousseau's controversial Association Laws, which imposed firm restrictions on the activities of ecclesiastical organizations in France. After this initial flurry, interest seems to have waned, and the project reemerged only in November 1904, precisely at the moment when Combes had begun to steer his highly contentious proposals for the separation of church and state through the Chamber of Deputies.(27)
The monument's entanglement in the politics of anticlericalism is further underscored in the circumstances surrounding Poirier's renewed advocacy of the project at a Paris council meeting on November 21, 1904. His intervention came in the midst of a violent debate over the perennially controversial issue of the Sacre-Coeur basilica, which radicals had decried as a provocative emblem of reaction ever since its inception in 1873. Emboldened by their erosion of nationalist influence in Paris during recent municipal elections, the left, in tile shape of Anatole Le Grandais, councillor for Montmartre, returned to the attack, accusing the Catholic authorities of illegally appropriating land in front of the basilica for the storage of building material. In the face of heated right-wing opposition,(28) Le Grandais went on to propose that the council should provide a subsidy for a statue to the chevalier de La Barre, burnt at the stake for blasphemy in Abbeville in 1766, to be erected on the esplanade in front of the basilica with the inscription: "Au chevalier de La Barre, la libre pensee et la France reconnaissantes."(29) As the chamber erupted in clamorous dispute at Le Grandais's splenetic anticlericalism, Poirier de Narcay profited from the situation to reintroduce his proposition for a memorial to Servetus. Shrewdly affecting a calm disinterest in sharp contrast to his opponents' impassioned polemic, Poirier insisted on the moderation of his approach to questions of faith: "I consistently abstain on every religious vote, believing that these disputes have always damaged our country. It is even distasteful to recognize that they can still exist in our own day."(30) Letting slip this Olympian detachment, he went on to propose that Servetus should be positioned on the Butte Montmartre alongside La Barre, but reverted to his earlier preference for the Place Maubert when this provoked opposition.(31)
Any doubts as to Poirier's motives were almost immediately dissipated when Rochefort jubilantly proclaimed that the councillor "vient de jouer une bien mauvaise farce aux blocards du protestantisme."(32) His success was relished all the more by Rochefort since the circumstances of Servetus's persecution offered fortuitous parallels with a political scandal which threatened to topple the administration - the so-called "Affaire des fiches" which had recently embroiled General Andre, Combes's hated minister of war.(33) The revelation that Andre had been compiling dossiers on the political reliability of army officers through information supplied by their superiors had been damaging enough. Far worse was the discovery that a member of the general's staff had shared these findings with the Masonic chief, Vadecard, secretary of the Grand-Orient de France. The right-wing press as a whole, and Rochefort in particular, had exploded in indignation over such treachery, which fueled accusations that Combes's government was a Judeo-Masonic front.(34) Exploiting the situation to the full, Rochefort recalled how the treacherous Calvin had been prepared to reveal his private correspondence with Servetus to the Catholic authorities when the Spaniard had appeared before the Inquisition before escaping to Geneva. Declaring Calvin an "abominable miscreant, thief, and pederast," Rochefort claimed that "he was no more tolerant of opposition than is Father Combes" and compared his denunciation of Servetus to the treachery of Vadecard and Andre.(35)
Apparently enthused by Servetus's renewed capacity to discomfort his opponents, and invigorated by the promise of 5,000 francs from the Paris council, Rochefort established a committee under his own presidency to raise further funds. All three vice-presidents were closely identified with L'Intransigeant and had impeccable nationalist credentials. Apart from Poirier de Narcay, Rochefort conscripted his editorial second-in-command, Leon Bailby, and the journalist Henri Galli, a veteran of Boulangism, founder member of Deroulede's revanchiste Ligue des Patriotes, and an uncompromising antiparliamentarian.(36)
The sculptor whom they selected for their project was also a familiar figure on the radical right as well as a respected, if contentious, artist particularly known for his attachment to regionalist themes inspired by his native Berry. Jean Baffier enjoyed a colorful reputation as a pugnacious nationalist who actively courted controversy.(37) He had first achieved notoriety in 1886 through an assassination attempt on his local depute, and since then had regularly been in the news over such works as his Marat - the center of parliamentary debate in 1891 - and his openly revanchiste war memorial for the town of Bourges, first exhibited at the Salon in 1901. A curious ideological hybrid like Rochefort, Baffier displayed many of the contradictions of his generation, embracing an idiosyncratic national socialism following a political apprenticeship during the 1880s in Gambettist and syndicalist circles, with occasional anarchist links.(38) The sculptor's devotion to his provincial roots fostered aggressively xenophobic views expressed in his prolific journalistic output and in membership of organizations such as the Parti National Antijuif and the Ligue de la Patrie Francaise, under whose auspices he stood for election in 1902. Among his heady cocktail of prejudices, Baffier shared Rochefort's distaste for Protestants, whose doctrines he dismissed as "purely Jewish," and whose patriotic instincts he regarded as unreliable.(39)
Baffier worked quickly and, despite persistent uncertainties over funding for the project, had completed a nude study of Servetus by spring 1905.(40) The sculptor's well-known political views had prompted attempts by members of the municipal council to impose conditions on the agreed subsidy. In February 1905 news that moves were afoot to deprive him of the commission reached Baffier from Poirier de Narcay, a close friend and local councillor for the Petit-Montrouge area in the 14th arrondissement, where the sculptor had his studio:
It seems as if the statue must be made by someone other than me at any price, because I am a reactionary. And to achieve this end both Servetus and La Barre are to be opened to competition to every artist in France. Apparently they are particularly aiming at me in this affair. . . . Things are hotting up! I don't believe that the Servetus committee in general or Rochefort in particular will be swayed, for it seems as if they will forgo the council's five thousand francs if need be.(41)
Rochefort angrily accused a municipal cabal of "youpins, huguenots et casseroles" of attempting to revoke their grant in favor of the Servetus committee,(42) and successfully repelled attempts to have Baffier removed. By early summer, Rochefort was able to boast that, despite the best efforts of "la secte dreyfusarde," the committee had raised 10,000 francs which, when added to the council subsidy, left only 5,000 francs still to be found.(43)
Presented with what was only the second opportunity in his career to produce a major monument for the capital, Baffier set to work with enthusiasm.(44) An undated drawing [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED] suggests that the sculptor initially referred to Christoffel van Sichem's engraving of Servetus, probably as reproduced (in reverse) in Allwoerden's eighteenth-century biography of the Spanish theologian [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. Though similar in conception to the definitive marble, his accompanying sketch of Servetus's martyrdom evokes a slight, almost effete, figure whose somewhat vacant pose contrasts sharply with the intensely concentrated, hieratic stance of the finished work. It was this intensity to which critics most readily responded when a plaster after the maquette [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED] was featured in the 1907 Salon. The defiance embodied in Servetus's unflinching rigidity and serene expression was interpreted by such sympathizers on the right as Jean Drault, Drumont's militantly anti-Semitic associate on La Libre Parole, as "splendid and avenging,"(45) while for Baffier's long-standing disciple Louis Lumet:
Michael Servetus is a hero. Calm and dignified, his arms crossed, weighted down by chains and with his book at his side, he has a rugged face, his lip swollen with contempt for his executioners as he stands proudly without swagger, stoical without ostentation, an example to us all.(46)
While Baffier expressed satisfaction that even political opponents had judged his work sympathetically,(47) Rochefort was not slow to claim due credit as the inspiration behind the project and its most energetic promoter.(48) His enthusiasm was firmly grounded in the hope that Baffier's statue would help him regain the initiative in his tactical assault upon an anticlerical movement with which he was increasingly at odds. As socialist input into groups such as the Association Nationale des Libres Penseurs de France fostered pacifist and internationalist leanings,(49) so Rochefort dismissed their activities as factionally suspect and antipatriotic. The explicitly antimonarchist sentiments underpinning commemoration of Etienne Dolet - "victime de l'intolerance religieuse et de la royaute," as the inscription on Guilbert's monument declared(50) - had formerly provided a place for Rochefort and his Ligue de Propagande d'Atheisme. Yet L'Intransigeant's reporting of the annual parade in the Place Maubert grew steadily more hostile as groups such as the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme and socialist supporters of Jaures edged out Rochefort's nationalists in a display increasingly antimilitarist and Dreyfusard in tone. While anticlerical propaganda presented the Dolet monument as a beacon against obscurantism [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED], L'Intransigeant typically lamented that "true revolutionaries despising the hypocritical clericalism of the ministry" had been eclipsed by "le syndicat Dreyfus,"(51) for whom the parade merely provided "a pretext to shout 'Down with the nation!' and 'Down with France!' as well as 'Long live Germany!' "(52) A monument to Servetus, Rochefort asserted, would vividly expose the inconsistency of self-proclaimed freethinkers for whom the anticlerical battle cry "A bas la calottel" meant nothing other than "Down with those who are neither Jews, Calvinists, nor Lutherans!"(53)
This strategic use of Servetus to question the consistency of opponents in the anticlerical movement also shaped Rochefort's assault on the La Barre project, which he falsely claimed had been dreamt up only in response to his own initiative.(54) In fact, Le Grandais's proposal stands within a well-established tradition of anticlerical attacks on the Sacre-Coeur, ranging from calls in 1880 for the council to erect a colossal statue of Liberty in front of the building,(55) to an 1899 initiative for an allegory on the Buttes-Chaumont of Free Thought trampling Superstition [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED]. As early as 1885 a street neighboring the Sacre-Coeur had been rechristened in memory of La Barre,(56) while the committee promoting a statue of the chevalier had been formed in 1897. Initiated by the journalist Jacques Pausader, a former anarchist turned republican socialist who went under the striking sobriquet Prolo, the monument had backers drawn overwhelmingly from working-class militant circles with Dreyfusard sympathies. Former Communards such as Henry Bauer and Emmanuel Chauviere lent their support, as did revolutionary socialist and radical deputies such as Victor Dejeante, Gaetan Albert, and Jean Allemane. Prominent, too, on the steering committee was the Radical Republican senator Auguste Delpech, a founder member of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, leading Freemason and Dreyfusard.(57) This was precisely the constituency Rochefort hoped to outflank by commemorating Servetus.
Dispute over the circumstances surrounding La Barre's execution in 1766 was exploited by Rochefort as a means of discrediting the project. The chevalier had been arrested in Abbeville in 1765 on suspicion of having mutilated a crucifix on one of the town's bridges and, with the approval of the Parlement de Paris, had been beheaded before his body was publicly burnt. As their publicity makes graphically clear [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED], the monument's sponsors were in no doubt that blame for La Barre's torture and death lay unambiguously with a cruel and tyrannical clergy. Rochefort (in common with most modern historians) challenged this version, however, asserting that La Barre had been put to death by the civil authorities and would thus be more appropriately commemorated outside the Palais de Justice than the Sacre-Coeur.(58) The fact that the statue to La Barre [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED] was commissioned from the sculptor Armand Bloch - a prominent member of the Association des Artistes Libres-Penseurs(59) - and initially unveiled as part of an international Congress of Freethinkers, prompted the inevitable slur of Judeo-Masonic influence.(60) Accusing the La Barre campaigners of being "huguenotisants" and Dreyfusards,(61) Rochefort questioned their consistency by highlighting their contempt for Joan of Arc,(62) a nationalist heroine and authentic victim of the clergy, and argued that their true affiliations would be revealed by their embarrassed absence from the inauguration of the Servetus monument.(63)
It was, however, political opportunism rather than historical equity or philosophical fellow feeling which shaped Rochefort's own account of Servetus and his fate. The story retailed in the pages of L'Intransigeant followed a rousing symmetry of fanatical intolerance, in the guise of Calvin, crushing unfettered intellectual inquiry - of clericalism, crucially of the Protestant variety, stifling Free Thought. For the radical right, the condemnation of Servetus discredited contemporary Calvinists' reputation for openness by exposing the inherent intolerance of their faith. As Georges Montorgueil wrote of Servetus in L'Eclair:
There has never been a spirit whose reason was freer, whose faith was wider, whose knowledge fuller or more rich, no one more completely given over to free inquiry [libre examen] than Michael Servetus.
Calvin killed him.
Calvin, the pope of Protestantism, jealous of an influence which threatened his own, fearing that the antique beauty of Servetus's pantheism would erode the haughty empire he had carved out, waged a cowardly and hypocritical war against him which, once the gentle dreamer fell into his hands, became refined in its cruelty.(64)
Indeed, Servetus's fate offered some Catholic commentators the paradoxical opportunity to suggest that it was Protestant liberty of conscience that sowed the seeds of an individual tyranny impossible under the hierarchical authority of Rome.(65) Yet, however enthusiastically Calvin was berated as "the dictator of Geneva" whose "doctrine is the denial of human freedom,"(66) apologists were obliged to acknowledge that it had been the Catholic authorities who had initiated proceedings against Servetus following clandestine publication in 1553 of his magnum opus, the Christianismi Restitutio. This inconvenience was negotiated by claiming that the Inquisitorial authorities had colluded in the Spaniard's escape from custody, a claim given added polemical bite when contrasted with the harsh conditions of Servetus's detention in Geneva.(67) Similar liberties were taken in accounts of Calvin's pursuit of Servetus in an exercise designed more to discredit the father of French Protestantism than to glorify his victim. Predictably, the theological complexities of Servetus's thought and the doctrinal implications of his dispute with Calvin were reduced to a Manichean struggle between liberty and authoritarianism. Yet, as the Journal de Geneve was to point out, "To turn Servetus into a freethinker, in the modern sense of the term, or a forerunner of toleration in France, would be to commit a historical heresy of the first order."(68)
In many ways, Servetus was an oddly inappropriate hero for the various factions of the radical right, whether staunch believers or outright aetheists. Though Rochefort and other reactionaries latched on to Calvin's condemnation of the Spaniard's antitrinitarianism to suggest that abstruse questions of theology could provoke allegedly open-minded Protestants to extremes of violence and oppression, such a construction unsurprisingly fails to capture the complexities of the two men's debates. Indeed, for some, the clash between Servetus and Calvin represented an intense and energizing dispute engaged on the highest level of faith.(69) The issues at stake certainly struck at the doctrinal core of Calvin's system, raising as they did such fundamentals as the divinity of Christ, the role of free will in salvation, and the presence of God in the phenomenal world.(70) As "the veritable effigy for Catholic and Protestant alike of all that seemed execrable in the Radical Reformation,"(71) Servetus mounted the period's most comprehensive challenge to prevailing orthodoxies. Though he was dismissive of Calvin and regarded the pope as Antichrist, Servetus was no atheist. Rather - in an irony which highlights the superficiality of Rochefort's acquaintance with his ideas - he sought the basis for a new, inclusive religious orthodoxy which would make Christianity acceptable to both Arabs and Jews. Far from being the harbinger of a new tolerance, Servetus was every bit as convinced of his own infallibility as those who condemned him. As Jerome Friedman has remarked:
Servetus' vision of heresy was far reaching, encompassing just about everyone whose views of the Godhead differed from his own. Being a good son of the sixteenth century and imbued with the positive religious spirit of the Reformation, Servetus believed there was but one truth conveniently explicated in the corpus of his own writings.(72)
Such considerations paled into insignificance, however, when balanced against the potential damage that could be inflicted on the Protestant church by indicting Calvin for having an opponent burnt at the stake. However elaborate the smoke screen, however heartfelt the professions of high-minded admiration, Baffier's statue was meant to be provocative, a reactionary "J'accuse" hurled back in the face of Protestant liberals with their concern for tolerance and human rights. The confrontation implicit in commemorating Servetus - at least under the auspices of this particular monument's sponsors - provoked a running battle with the authorities, which Rochefort and his allies naturally exploited to the full for polemical effect.
Controversy initially focused on selecting a site. Following Rochefort's openly inflammatory suggestions of the Place Maubert, the Sacre-Coeur, and the Protestant Temple de l'Oratoire opposite Crauk's memorial to Coligny [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED],(73) an application was made to the council in June 1905 for authorization to erect the statue in the Place de la Vieille-Estrapade.(74) This central site, close by the Pantheon, was favored by Rochefort, Poirier de Narcay, and Baffier himself. Little attention seems to have been paid to the request until the council's formal acceptance of the statue in April 1906, when the issue was passed on to a subcommittee. Baffier seems to have submitted scale drawings of the statue, together with its elaborate base, in early June [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED], prompting Formige, the municipal "architecte des promenades," to express reservations over its suitability for the relatively restricted space in the square. Politically, too, the site's appropriateness was challenged by the local councillor, Lampue, who unsuccessfully recalled the Place Maubert option in an attempt to offload the potentially embarrassing memorial onto a neighboring ward.(75) By November, Baffier was pestering the authorities for a decision, but still nothing was done. In exasperation, in June 1907 he finally contacted Paul Escudier, rapporteur of the subcommittee responsible for siting, relinquishing the Vieille-Estrapade location and suggesting as an alternative the Place de Montrouge, around the corner from his studio in the 14th arrondissement.
Though the Montrouge site certainly lacked the prestige of the committee's initial proposal, it was not without its particular attractions. For Baffier, it carried strong personal associations, not only because of his notoriety as a leading figure in local nationalist politics, but also through its proximity to his bust of the Republic which stood in a park opposite the mairie. More than this, however, the Montrouge site had the capacity to annoy. On the one hand, it served as a sly riposte to Jean Boucher's nearby statue of Ludovic Trarieux, a leading Dreyfusard and founder of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, whom Rochefort had long upbraided for his Protestant connections.(76) In addition, it cocked a snook at the local depute, the radical socialist Theodore Steeg, scion of a prominent Protestant family, who had frustrated Poirier de Narcay's parliamentary bid in 1906. As an unexpected bonus, the resiting also offered potential for blackmail, as Poirier discovered in March 1908 when he threatened to revoke his agreement if the council went ahead and erected Meunier's monument to Zola outside the Palais de Justice in the Place Dauphine, against the wishes of Le Menuet, the nationalist councillor for the St.-Germain-l'Auxerrois ward.(77)
Siting Servetus was, however, only half the battle. Though the statue received presidential authorization on February 1, 1908,(78) the authorities had still to approve the inscriptions decorating the base. These were submitted by Baffier only at the end of the month, whereupon Brown, municipal inspector of fine arts, forwarded them to the prefect of the Seine, noting that their "political and philosophical character" necessitated his approval.(79) As the brisk blue-pencil strokes defacing Baffier's drawings eloquently attest [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED], this was not forthcoming. The provocatively anti-Calvinist nature of the texts largely explains this refusal. The two lateral inscriptions were both quotations - one from a letter by Servetus to his judges complaining at the insanitary conditions in which he was held, the other from a letter by Voltaire, which Rochefort had purchased at a sale in 1905,(80) remarking on Calvin's sadistic treatment of the Spaniard. The rear panel prominently recorded Rochefort's part in erecting the monument on behalf of "friends of liberty of conscience," while the front bore the uncompromising dedication: "A Michel Servet[,] brule vif par ordre de Calvin. MDLIII," an inscription apparently visible when the plaster version of the statue had been exhibited in the 1907 Salon.
These relatively wordy texts were intended for the panels embedded in the massive stone base of the finished monument [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED]. This elaborate and rather inelegant rendition of the pyre upon which Servetus had perished drew attention to an aspect of the story of which Calvin's critics never tired. As Rochefort retailed it: "Calvin, who witnessed the torture hidden behind a window in the Place du Mollard, had himself lent a hand in constructing the pyre of damp, green wood to prolong the agony."(81) The statue's base, carved to resemble tightly packed logs covered with leaves, is itself flanked by four granite pylons topped with patinated bronze flames encircled by writhing serpents. This integration of the pedestal into the overall narrative conception of the work, whatever its shortcomings, remains unusual for the period, though it is a feature of Baffier's projects for public sculpture.(82) The elaborate structure of the support, its bulk contrasting with the intensely centered body of Servetus, projects the figure high above the spectator [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED]. The martyr - whose ample frame and bushy beard irresistibly recall Baffier himself - is shown erect and defiant, though burdened with chains, a copy of the Restitutio hanging below the waist on his left side. Though eager to exploit the drama of the scene to the full, Baffier avoids the potentially distracting crown of leaves and straw which Servetus had placed upon him before his execution, and replaces the voluminous culottes of the early drawing [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED] with a shapeless and torn garment which follows the contours of the body.
The inauguration of the monument - minus inscriptions - was scheduled for July 5, 1908, coinciding with the anniversary of the chevalier de La Barre's execution, an event commemorated by the Federation Internationale de la Libre Pensee with a major demonstration in Abbeville.(83) In an act of defiance, Baffier carved the incomplete dedication of the monument - "Michel SERVET/BRULE VIF/MDLIII" - in such a way as to draw attention to its truncated state. The right-wing press made the most of what they claimed was government appeasement of Protestants and freethinkers, arguing that a deliberate attempt had been made to mislead the public into assuming that Servetus was a victim of the Inquisition.(84) Rochefort claimed that censorship had been authorized at the highest level, proving that the "ministry is with Calvin against Servetus and gives its full and unqualified approval to his torture." This final blow, he fulminated, was nothing but "ineptitude complicated by the most scandalous imposture. What's more, it is a shameful act of cowardice, through which the government admits the fear inspired in it by Freemasons, both Protestant and Israelite."(85) Occurring only weeks after Baffier's highly public dispute with the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, following removal of his medal honoring the anti-Dreyfusard General Mercier from the 1908 Salon, this new incident reinforced nationalist suspicions of systematic official censorship.(86) Indignation was all the more intense in the wake of the recent unveiling in the Paris suburb of Suresnes of Emile Derre's bust of Zola, which had been cast from bronze salvaged by the local council from the bells of a disused church.(87) Incensed by this anticlerical and antimilitary gesture, the right had attempted to disrupt the heavily policed inaugural ceremony, at which several arrests were made.(88) Now, official moves against Baffier's work merely amplified reactionary claims that the government was in thrall to covert forces intent on undermining the French spirit.
Such paranoia was briskly rebutted in the liberal press, which regarded the whole affair as a rather pathetic and distasteful attempt by an increasingly beleaguered group of nationalists to deceive the public. As the anticlerical La Lanterne commented on the inauguration: "It was truly curious to hear these orators, who have fought unceasingly against freedom of conscience, celebrating the martyrdom of Michael Servetus with such enthusiasm. This audacious bluff shows that friends of the clergy [les gens de sacristie] will stop at nothing to deceive public opinion."(89)
Though at the unveiling Poirier de Narcay vehemently denied that his support for the project had been inspired by anti-Protestant sentiment, the whole ceremony clearly advertised the nationalist affiliations of the initiative. The official party included such prominent rightists as Henri Galli and Adrien Mithouard, city councillor and editor of the literary review L'Occident, as well as the Catholic royalist Georges-Eugene Faillet, better known as the poet Fagus. Commander Driant, a former Boulangist who had lost his commission during the "Affaire des riches," evoked the detested General Andre, while Admiral Bienaime, nationalist deputy and veteran of the Madagascar campaign, recalled a founding episode in the growth of anti-Protestant feeling. The inaugural speeches effusively claimed that the monument had grown solely from a fair-minded desire to chastise intolerance whatever its source, at a time when, as Poirier noted, "other religions, acting behind a mask of freethinking austerity, were having a field day with the Catholics." Attacks on "so-called freethinkers, whose reason is no higher than that of Calvin or Torquemada,"(90) and lurid descriptions of Calvin's persecution of Servetus, in which Rochefort had become an unrivaled specialist,(91) revealed less conciliatory motives, however. While the left dismissed the event as being masterminded by "the fine flower of Parisian nationalism, or at least what remains of it,"(92) the reactionary press exulted in the absence of the local deputy, the Protestant Theodore Steeg, and of those "so-called freethinkers who faint from tenderness in speaking of the persecution of Etienne Dolet."(93)
Yet, as La Lanterne had noted, the whole occasion was distinctly odd. The police were out in strength,(94) yet Rochefort and his friends seemed anxious to dispatch events with the minimum of fuss, and the ceremony was complete in less than half an hour.(95) This indecent, almost furtive, haste seems consistent with Rochefort's essential ambivalence about the whole affair. Though he had been all too ready to exploit Servetus for polemical effect, his practical commitment to the monument seems less certain. Apart from his sluggishness in getting the project under way after the first burst of enthusiasm in 1900, Rochefort's fund-raising efforts seem to have been rather tepid throughout. The Servetus committee was a curiously shadowy organization, whose full membership was never revealed during the campaign. Only the most halfhearted efforts were made to elicit support from the nationalist readership of L'Intransigeant, and no application seems to have been made for state funding - perhaps unsurprisingly, given Rochefort's relations with the ruling bloc republicain.(96) At the time of the plaster's display in the 1907 Salon, money was still significantly less than required, forcing Baffier to undertake "prodigious economies."(97) By early the following year, the sculptor was approaching potential benefactors in desperation,(98) and was left by the committee with substantial debts following the work's completion, As he recalled with some bitterness to Georges Ducrocq:
Despite an alliance of all the official powers against it, I was able to put up the Servetus monument. Abandoned by the committee as soon as it was unveiled, I was left with 6,665 francs to pay. Though for a moment I was flattened by this apparently inextricable situation, I bounced back and after a month of planning and plotting [marches et dimarches] was able to settle my accounts.(99)
This rather cavalier treatment seems entirely consistent with Rochefort's approach to the undertaking as a gigantic blague - an act of defiance, almost a practical joke, designed to discomfort the nationalists' ideological opponents and irritate those in power. Though a reliable source of journalistic jibes, the Servetus monument was also a practical obligation, and one which seems to have proved too tying for Rochefort and his cohort to feel particularly committed to carrying through. By the time of the statue's inauguration, in fact, the joke had fallen rather flat. Separation of church and state was now a fait accompli, anti-Protestant feeling had passed its peak,(100) and the nationalist movement in Paris was in eclipse. Any hopes that Baffier's monument, hidden in a rather sleepy square on the edge of the city, could ever rival Etienne Dolet as a focus for anticlerical agitation, of whatever political color, were to prove unfounded, though the enigmatically truncated inscription continues to inflame anticlerical passions even today.(101)
Rationalism and Anticlericalism: Joseph Bernard's
Michel Servet
Outraged by the nationalists' brazen appropriation of Servetus, the liberal press denounced the ceremony in the Place de Montrouge, and drew readers' attention to a rival project, initiated in southeast France in 1905 by a group of freethinkers in the town of Vienne (Isere), where Servetus had spent twelve years employed as a doctor by the local archbishop.(102) It was in Vienne that Servetus had been arraigned before the Inquisition and from Vienne that he had made good the escape which eventually led him to Geneva, events commemorated in the town in 1887, when the authorities named a boulevard after the thinker. Proposals for a more substantial memorial had first been made in November 1903 by Albert Monot, a young socialist employed on the local paper, L'Eclaireur de Vienne. Though his overtures to the local Societe de la Libre Pensee proved unsuccessful, the idea eventually won the support of Camille Jouffray, former mayor of vienne and radical senator for the Isere, who established a commemorative committee under the presidency of the socialist councillor Joseph Brenier in early 1905.(103)
In contrast to the Parisian initiative, sponsors of the Vienne monument sought the support of a prestigious patronage committee, whose affiliations clearly demonstrate the very different ideological connotations they wished their enterprise to project. Statesmen such as Aristide Briand, Leon Bourgeois, Henri Brisson, and Paul Brousse demonstrated solidarity across a broad spectrum of radical and moderate socialist opinion, united in its commitment to the separation of church and state. Scientific endorsement came from such eminent figures as the chemist and republican politician Marcellin Berthelot, the mathematician Paul Painleve, and the medical legist Paul Brouardel. Positivism was represented by the historian Charles Seignobos and the politicians Edouard Herriot and Antonin Dubost, while Auguste Delpech, senator for the Ariege, and the historian Alphonse Aulard provided support from the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme.(104) While the Paris committee recalls the furtive factionalism of nationalist malcontents, its counterpart in Vienne, populated by a republican elite of agnostics, atheists, libertarians, and Freemasons,(105) is redolent of the "birth of the intellectual" heralded by the Dreyfus Affair and so bitterly contested by the radical right.(106)
The subscription was officially launched in January 1906, shortly after Combes's legislation separating church and state had come into effect, and attracted support from both local and national government. The artist entrusted with the Vienne commission, the locally born Joseph Bernard, himself had radical, freethinking sympathies,(107) though no previous experience of working on a monumental scale. His initial scheme incorporated a strong allegorical element, notably in the shape of a figure representing "Religious Intolerance", though this was quickly abandoned in favor of a greater emphasis on rationalism.(108) In its definitive form [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED], the statue of Servetus, posed in isolation on a high rectangular plinth, is flanked by two allegorical groups representing, on the left, Youth protected by Reason, and Remorse on the right.(109) Eschewing all modern references, Bernard rather presents Servetus in a striking pose reminiscent of one of Michelangelo's Slaves, and evoking the scourging of Christ. Virtually naked, with a copy of the Restitutio strapped to his side, the figure was thought to epitomize "unbearable physical pain, dominated by the invincible energy provided by firm conviction."(110) Rather than explicitly recalling the circumstances of Servetus's death, as Baffier had done, Bernard opts for a more allusive approach, reflected in the laconic inscription - MICHEL SERVET/1511-1553 - which leaves the uninitiated spectator to ponder on the man and his fate.
The ambition of Bernard's design, together with the difficulty in raising sufficient funds, substantially delayed completion of the monument, inflicting political embarrassment on the local organizing committee.(111) Direct carving of three substantial groups occupied the sculptor for almost three years, placing him in severe financial difficulties alleviated only by night work in a lithographic studio. The sporadic payments which he received from the Vienne committee were solicited from a variety of quarters, and support was forthcoming from liberal Protestants and Freemasons, as well as republican groups and freethinkers' societies. A "Fete de la Tolerance" was organized in March 1907, to coincide with the regional congress of the Societe de la Libre Pensee, and delegates were entertained to a lecture on Servetus by Herriot, an orchestral concert, and a play on the martyr's cruel fate by a local tax inspector.(112) Throughout the money-raising campaign, strenuous efforts were made to appeal to a broad spectrum of opinion, and contributions were welcomed from Britain, Spain, and the United States. The inclusive nature of the commemoration was repeatedly stressed. In the words of a pamphlet which significantly describes Servetus as a "victime de tous les fanatismes": "The generous support for the Servetus monument which has come from all quarters should not be considered as an act of hostility toward any religion whatsoever."(113)
Despite these protestations, the initiative excited opposition among Catholic groups, for whom the glorification of Servetus was indelibly an endorsement of antireligious libertarianism. Warning "Catholics, let's not be fooled," a local diocesan journal remarked on the prominence of Freemasons supporting the monument and concluded: "Catholics will leave the freethinkers their hero and his statue. . . . Servetus belongs to them. Let them keep him."(114) Misgivings over insidious anticlericalism focused on the monument's inauguration on October 15, 1911, an event of which one of the town's dailies hostile to the enterprise claimed: "There was agreement on this point: that Servetus, burnt by Calvin, was a victim of Catholic clericalism."(115) The ostentatious insistence on toleration, forcefully advocated by Jouffray, as well as an unequivocal indictment of Calvin by a representative of the United Reform Church, belie such accusations, though a strong undercurrent of anticlerical feeling undeniably characterizes the ceremony and its reporting. On one level, a desire to sideline the whole issue of religion - to extol the virtues of positivist rationalism over any pluralistic impartiality toward competing faiths - is evident in the denigration of Servetus's theological speculations in favor of his medical inquiries. Placing Servetus in a long line of martyrs to truth extending from Socrates to the present, Charles Richet, of the Academic de Medecine, commended the Spaniard first and foremost for his groundbreaking research on the circulation of the blood, remarking: "All the theological nonsense accumulated by Michael Servetus in twenty or so insipid books has been justly forgotten. Of all his work, only a single, immortal page remains, because it is devoted to a scientific truth."(116)
This evident unease with organized religion of any denomination took on explicitly anti-Catholic connotations in the inaugural address of Senator Charles Debierre, president of the Grand-Orient de France, who claimed Servetus as a forerunner of Freemasonry through his commitment to "the dignity of human reason against humiliating superstition." For Debierre, the Church - by which he essentially meant Catholicism - "is fatally in its essence, its tradition, and its vital necessity, intolerant and fanatical," an assertion he sought to demonstrate in the conflicts which had riven the republic:
Did we not almost relive the wars of religion at the time of the "Affair"? And even today, are not some of our bishops boycotting workers, modest shopkeepers, and peasant farmers who refuse to take their children away from the republic's schools, which they choose to describe, with hatred in their hearts, as schools of impiety and immorality?(117)
Smoldering mistrust of Rome, following the violence and upheaval of separation, could thus color the meaning of Servetus's monument, particularly in the town where the Inquisition had begun heresy proceedings against the Spaniard. The message of tolerance, reiterated at every stage in the conception and celebration of Bernard's statue, thus carried the implicit condition of reciprocal open-mindedness, rejection of which sanctioned the more openly aggressive posture of anticlericalism.
Protestantism Divided: Clotilde Roch's Michel Servet
Barely four months after the inauguration of Baffier's monument to Servetus in Paris, the small town of Annemasse (Haute-Savoie), in the French Alps, played host to an international party of dignitaries who assembled in driving snow to unveil a statue of the martyr by the Swiss sculptor Clotilde Roch [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED].(118) The ceremony had been hastily organized, since the town had been approached as a prospective home for the monument only weeks before, following moves to prevent its erection in the nearby city of Geneva, the site intended by its backers since the announcement of the project in autumn 1907. Widely condemned in Switzerland as an act of wanton provocation, Roch's exiled monument highlights profound conflicts within contemporary Protestantism largely invisible in the French nationalists' crude attacks on the religion. For a church which itself had suffered grave internal splits over the previous half century, Servetus remained a divisive and highly embarrassing memory. This sensitivity was instinctively understood and exploited by the anti-Protestant agitators in Paris. In Geneva, where Roch's monument had first been mooted, the stakes were altogether more complex, as raw prejudice was replaced by an unstable blend of theological dissent, civic infighting, and cross-border tensions.
Geneva had been trying to come to terms with Servetus for some time. The expiatory memorial erected near the site of the Spaniard's death in 1903 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED] came almost forty years after initial calls for an act of public contrition by the exiled French Protestant Jules-Romain Barni who, in two public lectures on Servetus in a series devoted to "martyrs of free thought," condemned the Calvinists' hypocritical intolerance:
What a strange and deplorable spectacle to see these reformers, these heretics who, having escaped persecution and death, once in their own refuge went on to persecute and kill other heretics who thought unlike them. What a strange and deplorable contradiction to see these Protestants who, having rejected certain church teachings by virtue of their freedom of conscience, claimed to control the faith of all through force and to exclude from free discussion those teachings they saw fit to retain.(119)
Violently opposed by the Calvinist establishment in Geneva, Barni spoke as a representative of a dissident current within French Protestantism which had developed in the wake of the publication of Edmond Scherer's La Critique et la foi and the foundation of Timothee Colani's Revue de Strasbourg in 1850.(120) Both Scherer and Colani had challenged biblical authority and the attendant dogmas erected upon it, promoting the role of personal conscience, or "libre croyance," as the central guide to an individual's faith. The increasingly radical questioning of Christian teaching led both men away from the church, though not before their ideas had inspired a new movement, organized within the Union Protestante Liberale, which in the mid-1860s declared its differences with the more orthodox Evangelical wing of the Eglise Reformee.(121) By 1879 a formal split had divided the two groups, which did not begin to reconcile their differences until 1906.(122)
Barni's liberal sympathies fostered a distate for Calvin's authoritarianism and a sense of affinity with Servetus, whom Protestant dissidents more generally came to regard as an outstanding exponent of "libre croyance" stifled by the atmosphere of tyranny in Geneva, the "Protestant Rome." The 1903 memorial itself bears the hallmarks of moderate liberal theology. Promoted by a committee primarily drawn from the faculty of Geneva University, and supported by leading members of the liberal community in France,(123) it proclaims a devotion to Calvin tempered by a commitment to "freedom of conscience according to the true principles of the Reformation and the Gospels." Its inauguration on November 1 - the "Fete de la Reforme" - took place days after the three-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Servetus's death, and was regarded by participants as finally exonerating Calvin's followers of further responsibility for their master's error.(124)
Such hopes were to prove unfounded, however, as enemies of Protestantism quickly rounded on the memorial and the initiative which had given rise to it. Opponents dismissed the project as a hasty and insincere response to earlier proposals by anarchists and freethinkers to honor Servetus in Geneva,(125) as well as a shabby gesture motivated exclusively by the need to exorcise the embarrassing memory of Servetus in advance of the forthcoming celebrations of Calvin's four-hundredth anniversary. Such accusations were given added force by the prominence on the Servetus committee of Auguste Chantre, professor of ecclesiastical history in Geneva, who had already proposed that the 1909 anniversary should be celebrated with a major monument to Calvin. The measured tones of the Champel memorial, with its implied mitigation of Calvin's act as "an error characteristic of his century," lent further credence to taunts that the act of expiation was cosmetic rather than real.
Perhaps the fiercest criticism of the Champel initiative and its exoneration of Calvin was leveled by a former pupil of Barni's resident in Geneva since 1889, Auguste Dide, an irascible figure whose grievances against his adopted home focused around attacks on its religious establishment. A retired member of the senate, where he had been a radical advocate of secularization during the early years of the Third Republic, Dide had formerly trained as a pastor when exiled in Geneva in the 1850s. His early liberal Protestant sympathies were gradually eclipsed by an uncompromising atheism which led him to abandon the church, rejecting all organized religion as factitious and socially divisive.(126) From such a perspective, Dide excoriated his former faith - and Calvin in particular - as authoritarian and oppressive, inflicting a cripplingly intolerant political regime on Geneva and suppressing all individual inquiry:
Despite all claims, Protestantism in no way represents the freeing of the human spirit. Rather, it marks its subjection to a new servitude. . . . Spiritual tyranny was not suppressed but multiplied through fragmentation. And often it became more petty and interfering than Catholic oppression, though just as implacable and bloody.(127)
This indictment of Calvinism as intolerant of the "libre croyance" to which liberals had laid claim positioned Servetus as an antecedent - and first victim - of the liberal cause. Ignoring the Spaniard's own impatience with dissent, Dide projected him as a spiritual forebear of Enlightenment libertarianism, as precursor to the rigorous historicism of a Renan, and as a beacon of free thought, arguing that "his call for freedom of the individual, his indictment of sectarian tyrannies make him our contemporary."(128)
Dide's appeal, in late 1907, for a statue to Servetus in Geneva more substantial in form, and less equivocal in tone, than the Champel memorial undoubtedly grew from genuine admiration. Yet it also grew from a desire to embarrass the local authorities fostered by the increasing strain in his relations with those in power in his adopted home. This antagonism acted as a catalyst for a series of tensions focusing on the city and helped to bring together the core of support around which the Servetus committee formed. Publication of Dide's trenchantly anti-Calvinist monograph on Servetus in 1907 coincided with an acrimonious legal dispute with the Journal de Geneve, which had attacked Dide over a speech delivered at a July 14 celebration in which he had made some highly critical observations on local politics. The Journal had firmly opposed recent legislation to separate church and state passed by Geneva's ruling Radical group,(129) and accused the party's leader, Oltramare, of displaying pathetic obedience to France in his sympathetic response to Dide's words.(130) After failing in attempts to engage the paper's editor in a duel, Dide took up temporary residence in France in order to bring the Journal before the French courts on a defamation charge - a stratagem whose ultimate success raised important jurisdictional issues in international law.(131)
Calling for 10,000 francs' reparation, to be paid into the Servetus memorial fund, Dide was represented in the court of appeal at Chambery (Savoie) by Fernand David, deputy for the neighboring departement of Haute-Savoie, who himself had a long history of disputes with Geneva. David's antipathy had been aroused in 1995 over the contentious issue of rail access to the Simplon Pass, but continued to simmer over his accusations that the Swiss increasingly threatened French interests through cultivating an alliance with Germany.(132) Geneva's annual expulsion of some seven hundred indigent French citizens across the border to Annemasse was strenuously attacked by David, prompting the Journal de Geneve to accuse him of a vendetta against Switzerland.(133) Indeed, relations deteriorated to such a point that David charged the journal with inspiring a murder attempt on him at the height of the Dide trial, an allegation that was strenuously denied.(134)
With Dide as its president and David as a prominent committee member, the Servetus memorial appeal thus at least partially served as a provocative rejoinder to Geneva's Calvinist establishment, for whom the Journal de Geneve was very much a mouthpiece. The gesture was all the more telling since a grouping, dismissed by Dide as "a few financiers and a coterie of backward theologians,"(135) had been established in June 1905 to commemorate Calvin's anniversary in 1909 with the construction of a colossal memorial to the Reformation,(136) an enterprise which had taken on added significance with the recent legislation separating church and state. Announcement of the Servetus monument had coincided almost exactly with publication of details for the international competition for the Mur de la Reforme, and Dide's initiative was widely viewed as a spoiling operation. While the Reformation committee was drawn from prominent members of Geneva's academic and business communities, Dide's support was far more cosmopolitan, prompting the Journal de Geneve to note that only two of its members were Swiss, one a naturalized German and the other best known as the author of a sex guide.(137) Among French backers, Dide attracted a substantial contingent of radical politicians, including Fernand Cremieux, Frederic Desmons, Henri Brisson, and Emile Favre, many of whom were Masons with strong anticlerical credentials. The appeal's secretary, the historian Otto Karmin, was also secretary of the Bureau International de la Libre Pensee, and closely identified with Dide. This coalition of forces provoked considerable suspicion in Geneva, arousing accusations that the monument was nothing other than a "machine de guerre contre la religion," inspired by malevolent freethinkers: "With no historical understanding, with no sense of generosity, [they] dream of dragging Calvin to the pillory and consigning his name to a public hatred as durable as the marble of the planned monument."(138)
The very fact that Geneva had already paid its debt to Servetus in 1903 exposed Dide's project for many as a malicious plot to "abuse the memory of Calvin and insult the past of our town."(139) There was thus warm support in the local press at the decision of the city council in May 1908 to refuse a site to Roch's statue, though the artist herself protested against the suppression of a work intended as a "lesson of tolerance and brotherhood," and complained that the projected commemoration of Calvin was "offensive to many of our fellow citizens."(140) Her protest was echoed by opponents of the Calvinist establishment, for whom the contrasting treatment of the two monuments provided eloquent testimony of how little attitudes had changed. As the Lausanne journal La Libre Pensee observed, the rule in Geneva was "Peace and respect for the killer, but exile for the victim's statue! Intolerance has its logic; it continues over contrasting ages: odious in the past, ridiculous today."(141)
These, then, were the circumstances which led to the inauguration of Roch's monument over the border in France, barely three weeks after the Calvin memorial committee had exhibited the submissions to its prize competition. The municipal council in Annemasse, at the heart of David's constituency, had accepted the statue in July, amid protestations that the gesture implied no ill will toward Geneva. The inaugural ceremony, on October 25, attracted criticism in the city for its hostile tone, however, and the Journal de Geneve expressed resentment that the fine arts minister Dujardin-Beaumetz should have graced a ceremony motivated principally by "hatred of Protestant Geneva, of Calvin, and all Christian religions."(142) The inauguration was indeed notable for the uncompromising tone of its speeches, while the monument itself carried a series of inscriptions every bit as inflammatory as those suppressed by the authorities in Paris. Beneath the abject figure of the imprisoned theologian, a dedication read: "To Michael Servetus, apostle of free faith [libre croyance] and martyr of free thought." Calvin's denunciation of Servetus to the Inquisition was recorded, while a quotation from Voltaire on a lateral panel described the Spaniard's arrest in Geneva as "an act of barbarism and an insult to the law of nations." Further inscriptions referred to the sordid conditions under which Servetus was held in Geneva and cited Barni's 1862 lecture on the martyr. Finally, the inauguration was recorded with an emphatic reminder that the statue had found refuge in Annemasse only after having been refused by the authorities in Geneva.(143)
While orators such as Dide and Karmin made much of Servetus's fate as a "crime of Calvinism," Dujardin-Beaumetz performed rhetorical pirouettes to praise reason and tolerance - in the distinctive guise of republican humanism - without the merest mention of Calvin, much to the amusement of the nationalist press.(144) Interventions from a local Reformed Church pastor, and a speech by Clotilde Roch extolling Servetus as "un des martyrs de la libre croyance,"(145) injected an unequivocal liberal Protestant subtext, but in the end the dominant tone was one of "libre pensee," borne out by the staging of a congress of the regional Societe de la Libre-Pensee in the mairie, and by the rousing rendition of Charles Fulpius's "Hommage a Michel Servet" by a juvenile choir from the Cours de Morale Sociale in Geneva. Proclaiming "La Raison pure a remplace la Foi!" they intoned:
Michel Servet, douce et triste victime, D'un etre dur, cruel, intolerant! Croire autrement, ce fut la ton seul crime . . . Il t'en punit, Calvin, en te brulant! En t'entrainant a ton dernier supplice, Il supposait pouvoir te supprimer . . . , Mais en mourant, supreme sacrifice, Tu l'as vaincu, l'allumeur de buchers!(146)
Servetus, though, was not the only victor - if, indeed, some of his champions ever regarded him as much more than a useful stick with which to beat the Protestants. The real hero of the hour was Auguste Dide, whose life was "a moving and perilous crusade for free thought," as his friend and defender Fernand David declared, maintaining that "this triumphant demonstration in honor of Servetus is also the reward and apotheosis of M. Dide."(147)
Yet if this was Dide's revenge - the term seems more appropriate than David's encomium - Calvin was eventually to prevail. The anniversary celebrations of 1909, celebrated throughout the Protestant world, climaxed in Geneva on July 6, when the foundation stone was laid in the old Botanical Gardens for the grandiose Mur de la Reforme by the French sculptors Henri Bouchard and Paul Landowski [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 18 OMITTED]. This hugely ambitious work, incorporating ten figures in the round and eight historical reliefs, was a supremely Genevan achievement. By the time of its belated inauguration in July 1917, local residents had donated some two-thirds of the massive budget of 712,000 Swiss francs, in an assertive display of the continuing vitality of the church with which the city was so intimately associated.
Conclusion
The celebration of Michael Servetus in the early years of the century serves as an index for the fluctuating tensions in the politics of religion under the Third Republic. In common with a number of other figures, including Dolet, Coligny, and La Barre, he provided a remarkably versatile cover for a symbolic war of attrition between confessional groups, as well as offering a rallying point for those who were implacably opposed to religion in any form. In all of this, the historical actor disappears behind an aura of myth - or, more precisely, of myths pitted against each other in an opportunistic attempt to discredit opponents holding contrary political and confessional ideals. Admiration for Servetus, or for the other martyrs competing for strategic preeminence in the new wars of religion, was thus a far weaker mobilizing force than the cold calculation of the discomfort they could inflict on opponents if properly used. This potential for divisiveness, concealed behind a facade of open-mindedness, was recognized by contemporaries, as the struggles in Paris and Geneva clearly suggest. As the Catholic writer Claude Bouvier remarked in 1908: "It is to be hoped that, behind the pretext of tolerance, the cult of Servetus never leads to a new explosion of intolerance and antireligious feeling."(148)
Yet, in essence, this is what Servetus and others were good for and what they were used for. In the age of Sorel and Le Bon, the power of myth as a galvanizing force was clearly understood and shrewdly exploited. In the final analysis, it was less important whether Servetus was an anti-Trinitarian, a Unitarian, a Socinian, or an atheist than whether he could be used as an effective rallying point, either as a historical figure, a statue, or a slogan. The point was well taken by Laurent Tailhade, a committed anticleric, who looked at that other great emblem in the religious struggle, Etienne Dolet, and acknowledged that his credentials as a model for freethinkers scarcely bore scrutiny. "There is nothing so useful in constructing martyrologies," he conceded, "than an ignorance of history. It is a great strength not to worry about realities, to replace documents by enthusiastic declamations which rouse crowds and provide orators with an ecumenical success."(149)
Yet if such a principle served well in the vicious factionalism of religious conflict, it proved equally apt in the broader mechanisms of commemoration as they developed under a liberal republican regime. Once again, the sublimation of history into myth served as a focus, a means of transmuting the inert, disenchanted mass into a sleekly unified polls, cajoled into an enthusiastic sense of oneness through the rituals of inauguration, elevated and engaged by the benevolent gaze of the grand homme. Agulhon's association of statuomanie with liberal humanism encapsulates this fashioning of the monument as edifying totem.(150) Yet what is missing, or at least underestimated, is the potential for friction as groups alienated from the ideological mainstream appropriated the rituals for themselves and activated their own myths, profoundly destabilizing to an order whose authority was so probingly challenged throughout the prewar years. The celebrity of that haut lieu of reactionary dissent, Fremiet's Jeanne d'Arc in the Place des Pyramides, tends to have overshadowed other sacred places of the right - the memorials to defeat by Prussia at Buzenval, Le Bourget, and Champigny, Pradier's allegory of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde, Mercie's Quand meme! Nor must we forget that other powerful indicator of symbolic contestation, the iconoclastic attack, a tactic much favored amongst nationalists, who disfigured effigies of such betes noires as Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, and Bernard-Lazare. As much as an index of social solidarity, the statue could also serve as a barometer of disenchantment, a rallying point of refusal which could become a flash point of violent rejection. As the varying histories of the monuments to Servetus suggest, historical memory was all too susceptible to manipulation, myth all too vulnerable to the distorting force of rhetoric in a political culture enfeebled by a crisis of confidence in the institutions with which liberal humanism identified so closely.
1. In the vast literature on the Dreyfus case, see Jean-Denis Bredin, L'Affaire, Paris, 1983; and, for a general overview of its impact, Pierre Birnbaum, ed., La France de l'Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1994.
2. See John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870-1914, London, 1972; and Guy Chapman, The Third Republic of France: The First Phase, 1871-1894, London, 1962, 292-98.
3. Renauld, 285, quoted in Jean Bauberot, "La Vision de la Reforme chez les publicistes anti-protestants (fin XIXe-debut XXe)," in Philippe Joutard, ed., Historiographie de la Riforme, Neuchatel/Paris, 1977, 220.
4. See Jacqueline Lalouette, "Du bucher au piedestal: Etienne Dolet, symbole de la libre pensee," Romantisme, no. 64, 1989, 85-100; Guenola Groud, "Le Monument a Etienne Dolet," in Quand Paris dansait avec Marianne, exh. cat., Petit Palais, Paris, 1989, 140-49; and Hargrove, 140, 145.
5. On Crauk's monument, see Jean-Claude Poinsignon, Sortir de sa reserve: Le Fonds de sculpture XIXe et XXe siecles au Musee des beaux-arts de Valenciennes, Valenciennes, 1992, 168; and Hargrove, 140.
6. Friedman, 133.
7. For an interesting survey, see Chantal Martinet, "La Souscription," in La Sculpture francaise au XIXe siecle, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 1986, 231-38.
8. Such a distinction is drawn in the separate agendas outlined in Chantal Martinet's otherwise excellent "Les Historiens et la statue," Le Mouvement social, no. 131, Apr.-June 1985, 121-29; and is implicit in much of Maurice Agulhon's seminal discussion of public sculpture in works such as his "Imagerie civique et decor urbain dans la France du XIXe siecle," Ethnologie francaise, IV, 1975, 33-56.
9. See Pierre Birnbaum, "La France aux francais": Histoire des haines nationalistes, Paris, 1993, 221-36; and D. R. Watson, "The Nationalist Movement in Paris, 1900-1906," in David Shapiro, ed., The Right in France, 1890-1919, London, 1962, 49-84.
10. See Stephen Wilson, Experience and Ideology: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair, London/Toronto, 1982, 33-34. Wilson cites a police report dated Jan. 20, 1901 (A.N. [F.sup.7] 12870), which optimistically forecasts: "La periode de paix obligatoire, cree par l'Exposition . . . a aide beau-coup au refroidissement des adversaires de la Republique, qui, endormis maintenant, auront peine a s'eveiller" (ibid., 45, n. 188). See also Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, "L'Exposition universelle de 1900: Gloires et ambiguetes d'une celebration fin-de-sicle," in Laurent Gervereau and Christophe Prochasson, eds., L'Affaire Dreyfus et le tournant du siecle, Paris, 1994, 228-33.
11. See Adolphe Possien, "Le Festin des Tuileries," L'Intransigeant, no. 7376, Sept. 24, 1900. According to Drumont's journal, La Libre Parole, Sept. 23, 1900, Regis included Drumont in his toast.
12. On Rochefort's style, see Richard Griffiths, The Use Of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and Its Aftermath, New York/Oxford, 1991, 90-94. On Rochefort's radicalism, see Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864-1893, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1981, 131-32. On his nationalist affiliations, see Leon Daudet, Souvenirs et polemiques, Paris, 1992, esp. 16-17, 584; and Zeev Sternhell, La Droite revolutionnaire: Les Origines francaises du fascisme, 1885-1914, Paris, 1978, esp. 132-48.
13. Henri Rochefort, "Tas de charlatans!" L'Intransigeant, no. 7,377, Sept. 25, 1900. Regis asserted his and Rochefort's credentials in "Republicain et libre penseur," L'Intransigeant, no. 7,378, Sept. 26, 1900.
14. Henri Rochefort, "Ou est l'ennemi?" L'Intransigeant, no. 7,380, Sept. 28, 1900.
15. On Poirier de Narcay, see Ernest Gay, Nos Ediles, 1901-1902, Paris, n.d. [1902], 243-44,
16. Proposal dated Dec. 8, as reported in Anonymous, "La Statue Michel Servet," L'Intransigeant, no. 7,452, Dec. 9, 1900.
17. Henri Rochefort, "Pour une grande victime," L'Intransigeant, no. 7,430, Nov. 17, 1900.
18. See, e.g., from a pro-Protestant perspective, Jean d'Arvey, "Le Monument Servet," Le Signal, no. 2,087, Jan. 13-14, 1901.
19. See Stuart R. Schram, Protestantism and Politics in France. Alencon, 1954, 71-73.
20. Renauld, 1.
21. See Jean Bauberot, "L'Antiprotestantisme politique a la fin du XIXe siecle," Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses, LII, no. 4, 1972, 457. See also Steven C. Hause, "Anti-Protestant Rhetoric in the Early Third Republic," French Historical Studies, XVI, no. 1, 1989, 183-201.
22. Renauld, 29.
23. X., "La Question protestante," Annales de la Patrie francaise, I, 1900, 423. See also "Enquete sur le protestantisme," L'Action francaise, II, May 15, 1900, 842-89; and Charles Maurras's celebrated "Les Monod peints par eux-memes: Histoire naturelle et politique d'une famille protestante" in the same journal and reprinted in C. Maurras, Au signe de Flore, Paris, 1931, 155-246.
24. See Samuel Mours and Daniel Robert, Le Protestantisme en France du XVIIIe siecle a nos jours (1685-1970), Paris, 1972, 333.
25. See Malcolm O. Partin, Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes and the Church: The Politics of Anti-Clericalism, 1899-1905, Durham, N.C., 1969, 64.
26. Henri Rochefort, "La Croisade anti-clericale," L'Intransigeant, no. 8,040, July 20, 1902.
27. Legislation was introduced on Nov. 10, 1904, and passed by the deputies on Jan. 18, 1905. See Partin (as in n. 25), 258-60.
28. see Lucien Brunswick, "A l'Hotel de Ville: Le Sacre Coeur. Une Seance orageuse," L'Action, no. 605, Nov. 23, 1904, 2, which refers to "les hurlements de la droite."
29. See CMPV, 2e semestre 1904, XXXI, proces-verbal du 21 novembre 1904, 679. The wording echoed the basilica's inscription "Au Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, la France repentante." On the monument to La Barre, see Poisson.
30. CMPV (as in n. 29), 685.
31. Ibid., 690-91.
32. Rochefort (as in n. 17). The expression means: "has put one over on the Protestant supporters of the republican bloc [i.e., blocards, the governing parliamentary group]."
33. For a full account, see Francois Vinde, L'Affaire des fiches, Paris, 1989.
34. See, e.g., Henri Rochefort, "Complot contre la patrie," L'Intransigeant, no. 8,874, Oct. 31, 1904: "ce Grand-Orient qui deplace, revoque et met en disponibilite les meilleurs chefs de l'armee, generaux, colonels, capitaines et lieutenants, est un nid de conspirateurs, une societe secrrete fondee pour la desorganisation de notre defense nationale. Son programme de libre pensee est un simple paravent destine a dissimuler ses complots, les juifs et les protestants qui font partie de l'affiliation etant infiniment plus clericaux que les catholiques." Taunts about the affair were a conspicuous feature of the municipal council meeting of Nov. 21, with the nationalist Gaston Mery countering the La Barre proposal by proclaiming: "Il faut elever un monument aux officiers mouchardes"; CMPV (as in n. 29), 678.
35. Rochefort (as in n. 17). The sobriquet "pere" refers to the fact that the staunchly anticlerical Combes had trained for the priesthood during his youth.
36. For the identity of committee members, see Charles Fegdal, "L'Inscription du monument a Michel Servet a Paris," L'Intermediaire des chercheurs et curieux, LXXVII, no. 1,476, Feb. 20-28, 1918, col.
151. On Galli (whose real surname was Gallichet), see Gay (as in n. 15), 85-86.
37. Little has been written on Baffier since his death in 1920. See the catalogue Oeuvres de Jean Baffier, 1851-1920, au Musee municipal de Nevers, 1981; and Gilbert Perroy, "Nos Artistes: Jean Baffier, sculpteur-statuaire (1851-1920)," Revue d'histoire du quatorzieme arrondissement de Paris, XXV, 1980-81, 74-85, which contains a brief discussion of the Servetus monument. The present author is working on a full-length study of Baffier.
38. On Baffier's early politics, see Edouard Achard, Jean Baffier, Paris, 1887, 18; Gaston Mery, "Un Gas du Berry," Journal du Cher, Apr. 6, 1902; and Jean Baffier, Le Reveil de la Gaule ou la justice de Jacques Bonhomme, Paris, 1886. For anarchist links, see, e.g., Baffier's preface to Louis Lumet, Contre ce temps, Paris, 1896, i-ix, and his contributions to Lumet's pro-anarchist review L'Enclos (1895-99).
39. see Jean Baffier, "A nos lecteurs," Le Reveil de la Gaule, ser. 4, no. 1, Apr. 1904, 1.
40. Jean Baffier to Georges Ducroq, May 10, 1905, archives of the Musee du Berry, Bourges. The study referred to in this letter is probably the plaster currently in the Maison Artistique Jean Baffier, Sancoins.
41. Baffier to Ducroq, Feb. 22, 1905, Musee du Berry.
42. Henri Rochefort, "Voltaire et Michel Servet," L'Intransigeant, no. 8,974, Feb. 8, 1905. "Casseroles" was common slang at the period for Freemasons.
43. Henri Rochefort, "Servet et La Barre," L'Intransigeant, no. 9,102, June 16, 1905.
44. "J'ai espoir . . . que ma statue de Servet aura quelque valeur sculptural [sic]. Je suis emballe pour cette oeuvre"; Baffier to Ducroq, May 10, 1905, Musee du Berry.
45. Jean Drault, "Le Salon de la Societe nationale des beaux-arts," La Libre Parole, no. 5,471, Apr. 13, 1907. Drault had published the anti-Protestant La Vieille Gaite protestante in 1903.
46. Louis Lumet in the journal Messidor, as quoted by Poirier de Narcay at a meeting of the Paris city council, in CMPV, II, 37, seance du lundi 8 juillet 1907, 110.
47. "Les critiques des partis adverses n'ont pas trop tente la demolition de l'oeuvre. A part deux puristes qui trouvent que la statue est traitee a la diable, ou trop calme pour un homme qu'on brule. La generalite s'interesse a la composition d'ensemble de l'oeuvre qui s'impose comme adaptation au sujet special. Il est un fait certain, [c'est] que si j'etais du parti victorieux, j'aurais un succes eclatant"; Jean Baffier to Emile Martial, Apr. 29, 1907, Baffier papers, Archives du Chef, Bourges, 23 F 7, p. 71.
48. Henri Rochefort, "Michel Servet," L'Intransigeant, Apr. 14, 1907.
49. See Pierre Leveque, "Libre Pensee et socialisme (1889-1939): Quelques Points de repere," Mouvement social, LVII, 1966, 109-12.
50. See also the unveiling ceremony recorded in BMOVP, 8th year, no. 137, May 20, 1889, 1131-35, at which Emile Chautemps, president of the left-dominated municipal council, justified the city's subsidy of the monument "afin que les generations futures eussent sans cesse presente a la memoire l'horreur du regime a