The Falloux Law (1850)
From Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), pp.142-143.
In the 18th century the Enlightment emphasis on rationality came into conflict with the traditional teachings and powerful political and economic position of the Catholic Church. Intellectuals like Voltaire questioned religious faith and argued that the religious superstition was holding back human progress. During the 1790s many of the leaders of the French Revolution viewed the Church as part of an old social order that was oppressing the people and took steps to weaken it. As a result of their loss of property and position many aristocrats and some wealthy members of the bourgeoisie began to have second thoughts about their skepticism concerning religion and started to look to the Church as a bulwark against the lower classes. It was believed that religious faith would keep the poorer classes less dissatisfied with their position in society. As Emperor, Napoleon worked out an arrangement with the Pope for the return of Catholicism as a government sponsored religion, but the tension between liberal-minded skeptics and conservative Catholic traditionalists remained. This tension became a major element -- in many ways the major element -- in French politics in the decades following the passing of the Falloux laws, which historian Gordon Wright describes below.
[The Falloux Law], a major event in the nineteenth-century religious, educational, and political history of France, marked the successful conclusion of a ten-year 
Catholic campaign to secure greater influence in education. It gave the church the right to operate secondary schools (colleges) alongside those of the state, and it increased church influence in the supervision of state primary schools. Similar bills had been defeated four times during the
1840's by the skeptical Orleanist politicians. In 1850 many of those same politicians (Thiers, for example) swung over to join the conservatives in its support.
The motives that produced this change of mind were not all admirable ones. The hysterical red scare produced by the June Days led Voltaireans like Thiers to acclaim the church as "the last bulwark of the social order." "Every Voltairean in France with a few thousand pounds of income," remarked Ozanam bitterly, "wants to send everybody to Mass, provided that he himself doesn't have to go." Thiers even talked of giving the church a total monopoly of primary education. The mood of the moment benefited Catholic reactionaries like Veuillot and led even a mildly liberal Catholic like Montalembert to declare: "There is only one recipe for making those who own nothing believe in property-rights: that is to make them believe in God, who dictated the Ten Commandments and who promises eternal punishment to those who steal." The trend in France was furthered by a swing toward reaction in the Vatican Pius IX, after recovering his lost throne in 1849, abandoned his earlier liberal inclinations. It was clear by the end of 1848 that the Christian democratic current, so prominent in the early months of the revolution, had in fact touched only a small elite within the church. Not until the twentieth century was it to know a significant revival.
The Falloux Law has been described as the greatest clerical victory of the nineteenth century. Although the confirmed Voltaireans among the bourgeoisie remained skeptics, they nevertheless began to send their sons to Catholic colleges; within a generation, half of the secondary students in France were enrolled in Catholic schools. The return to the faith that had revealed itself within the aristocracy after 1814, and that had begun to affect the middle classes in the 1840's, now made rapid progress among the bourgeoisie. This process of rechristianization was to give Catholicism a solid bourgeois base in twentieth-century France. The church's problem henceforth would be to check the trend toward unbelief that had already set in strongly among the urban workers and that was to make serious inroads among the peasantry as well after the mid-nineteenth century.
If the Falloux Law was a victory for the clericals, it was in some ways a costly one. Its effect was to intensify the anticlerical spirit of the left and to infect the whole republican movement with an almost unreasoning suspicion of the church. It was no accident that the next generation saw the conversion of Freemasonry from its mildly deist and liberal outlook to a mood of violent republicanism and bigoted anticlericalism, or that an obscure politician in 1863 coined the durable battle cry, "Clericalism, there is the enemy!" Anticlericals became convinced that the church's purpose was to achieve a complete monopoly of education in order to tighten its grip on the state; they believed that church schools were brainwashing machines whose influence would divide French youth into two irreconcilable camps. The Falloux Law became a kind of symbol of the conflict, a bogey to frighten the left. Thus the Second Republic, which at the outset had brought republicans and Catholics together in a flush of fraternity and good will, ended by making the religious problem a major political issue destined to poison the atmosphere in France for generations.
Objectively, the Falloux Law scarcely deserved such opprobrium, for it was a compromise that infuriated Catholic extremists like Veuillot as much as it aroused the anticlericals. The real tragedy for France was that this relatively moderate Catholic victory came at a moment when passions were building up on both sides. During the subsequent generation the loudest Catholic voices were to be those of the Veuillot faction, while the most vocal republicans would be turning to a dogmatic and materialistic doctrine called positivism. Neither faction was inclined toward peaceful coexistence or was ready to let the Falloux Law, in either its original form or a revised version, be given a fair trial.