The secular, free, and compulsory School ranks among the greatest achievements of bourgeois society and undoubtedly constitutes a remarkable historical advance. Although primary education above all consolidated and sanctioned the triumph of democracy, that is, the social form of capitalist domination, it nonetheless provided the exploited masses with the technical instrument that was indispensable to them in order to assimilate socialist doctrine, to understand and turn to account their own experience as a class in struggle, and to spread its lessons.

But just as bourgeois democracy could offer no genuine solution to social misery, since it replaced the privileges of blood and rank with the privileges of capital; so too did the secularisation of education merely supplant religious alienation with atheist alienation. The new morality lavished in public schools set the Rights of Man and of the Citizen against the Commandments of God, but in just as absolute a manner sanctioned the immutable character of property, which, in a society dominated by mercantile-capitalist relations, can only lead to the class monopoly of the means of production and the exploitation of labour power.

The position of the genuine proletarian party on the question of the defence of the secular school cannot, therefore, differ from the attitude it must adopt towards any other challenge to the conquests of bourgeois society. Whether it concern political freedoms, the right of association and assembly, or the principle of the separation of Church and State, this attitude is determined not by the so-called absolute values of democratic ideology, but according to the real and practical demands of the class struggle and always in accordance with the proletariat’s own ultimate aim: the socialist revolution.

At a time when the pseudo workers’ parties are once again flouting this fundamental principle by rallying behind a ‘defence of the secular school’ conducted under the banner of national unity and social peace, it is necessary not only to recall that the phase of defending democratic reforms is definitively closed in the era of totalitarian and imperialist capitalism, but also to show that the workers’ participation in such a crusade can only serve to sap what remains of their class energy.

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During the parliamentary debate on the bill concerning relations between the State and private education, both supporters and opponents of the bill agreed on this point: since the heroic era of militant atheism, ‘times have changed’. This is a truth which certainly needed no official confirmation. Virulent anticlericalism, just as much as the Church’s anti-Masonic and anti-democratic rancour, undoubtedly belongs to the past. Mr. Debré even gave the true causes of this, clearly and concisely: ‘We are no longer in the days when the State fought against religion in order to be the State’, he declared. ‘Today, the Catholic religion represents merely a method of thought that answers the wishes of many families’. Whilst nothing warrants the belief that religion is now nothing more than a ‘method of thought’ – which would, contrary to the evidence, deny it any political role and any social influence – it is, on the other hand, true that the Church is no longer hostile to the bourgeois State, and that, consequently, a genuine struggle against religion can no longer be waged, either by the bourgeoisie or alongside it. Now what Mr. Mollet reproached the Prime Minister for was precisely that he had abandoned ‘one of the fundamental principles of the Republic’ – the separation of Church and State – and effectively forcing him and his friends to take up the old struggle again: ‘You are resurrecting’, he said, ‘the old antagonisms’. And he went on to brandish all the risks of disorder that this reopening of the ‘school war’ entails...

Times have changed, that much is certain. But in what way, and in what sense? It is this, above all, that needs to be clarified. As the Church ceased to be anti-republican, has religion – which the bourgeois Radicals expected to lose its social influence and political strength in the face of the progress of science and democracy – has it, by becoming a ‘private matter’, ceased to be that ‘opium of the masses’ denounced by the socialists of the good old days? Has its hierarchy, in making peace with the bourgeois order, thereby renounced its own inquisitorial and narrow-minded approach to the political arena? Faced with this persistence, has atheism pursued and intensified its struggle against ‘obscurantism’?

None of this came to pass. Quite the contrary. The Second World War, having failed to give birth to a social revolution, channelled all the despair and misery of five years of crime and destruction back into religious superstition. Where revolt does not spring up, there is room only for religion. Religion emerged strengthened from the storm, regaining in it a prestige for charity and humanity long since lost. It has recovered its age-old influence in the Latin countries. It has consolidated it in the Anglo-Saxon democracies, where opting for a ‘godless social system’ is grounds for indictment. It has regained it in the people’s democracies and even in deeply communist Russia, where the latest official reports point to the resurgence of religious practice as a ‘survival of capitalism in people’s consciousness’. With major political parties in several States acting as the arbiters of governmental stability, it has even achieved what it had previously been unable to attain: a genuine following amongst the working class and within trade union confederations officially defined by their adherence to the doctrine of Christ.

By contrast, how pale is the flame of militant atheism in the face of this impressive progress! Anti-religious propaganda has all but disappeared. The anti-clerical argument has faded away, even in electoral debates. The ‘secular spirit’ is now nothing more than a mere formality in the programme of atheist parties, and we have even witnessed its official banishment in the historic cradle of Social Democracy ⁽¹⁾. These are, moreover, organisations that are prepared to enter into any electoral alliance with Christian Democracy, that sit alongside it in coalition governments, and that shared responsibility for power with it during the nationalist orgy of the ‘Liberation’. With such a political pedigree, can their parliamentary representatives seriously envisage ‘taking up the challenge’ thrown down to them by the clerical offensive? Will they succeed in making people forget the web of betrayals and failures that makes up their recent history? The SFIO last came to power in 1956. Just as it had promised peace in Algeria and waged war there, so it had pledged to repeal the Barangé law, that first encroachment on the principle of secularism, and maintained the status quo. Who would take it seriously today as part of an opposition which, whilst denouncing the offensive of religion, has no battle cry other than this: above all, do not undermine national unity!

Whilst private education hastens to capitalise politically on the importance it has acquired thanks to the failings of the public education, and the right wing vows to bring to heel a profession guilty, in its eyes, of failing to instil sufficiently blind submission to the sacred values of capitalism, the spiritual heirs of Jaurès and Guesde adjure the head of government and the head of State not to commit a ‘grave and even tragic error’ because it ‘would sow the most terrible ferment of discord at a time when the unity of the French people is indispensable’. Faced with such pusillanimity, it is not only the spirits of the great southern orator or of the doctrinaire who, alongside Lafargue, accepted Marx’s programme for the French socialists, that must shudder, but even those of ‘le petit père Combes’ who, though a bourgeois, and a Radical, but not merely in words, knew how to have the Christian Brothers expelled manu militari, without heeding the barking of reaction. A ‘ferment of discord’? This socialism of renegades no longer merely dreads it when it develops as a result of the proletariat’s class struggle; it now takes pains to ward it off even when it may arise from the bourgeoisie’s own internal contradictions!

What has therefore changed since the turn of the century is, on the one hand, the political alignment of the Church, formerly an auxiliary of landed property and big capital, today gone over into the service of the capitalist State, and, on the other hand, the rise of Christian reformism and the decline of the Radical and atheist petty bourgeoisie, which has renounced any contest other than the oratorical and parliamentary, dragging with it in this abdication the workers’ opportunism that claimed to take up the mantle in the defence of secularism. Just like its ‘far-left’ (a rival to Gaullism in matters of ‘French grandeur’), the loyal manager of capitalism can offer nothing but futile protests against a rival which, under the guise of saving souls, is perfectly capable of safeguarding capitalism’s worldly possessions, and can, in this regard, display a historical certificate of ‘good and loyal service’ that puts to shame the record, though rich in baseness and betrayals, of the two degenerate Internationals. Until the last war, ‘republican civic-mindedness’ was the private preserve of the secular parties: radical, social-democratic and ‘communist’ of the Moscow school. During the Resistance, the ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ bond between believers and atheists was sealed, and the anti-fascist united front of reformists, opportunists, and Christian Democrats was forged. From then on, it is the entire Catholic hierarchy that has earned its stripes in civic-mindedness, as the Prime Minister was keen to point out to the socialist opposition when, invoking the conduct of certain denominational schools during the German occupation, he emphatically asserted that private education had earned ‘its republican patent of nobility’. This clearly means that secularists can no longer bolster their republican merits against the foil of a religious education once tainted by a reactionary and anti-democratic tradition. From now on, atheists and believers, the secular and the ‘confessional’ belong to the same family: all brothers, not in Jesus Christ, but in the holy bourgeois republic. We can safely bet that there is not a single ‘extremist’ in the current opposition who would take it upon himself to spoil such a fine harmony!

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If there is no fighting spirit whatever in the camp of the defenders of secularism, and if their opponents’ offensive is essentially determined by electoral considerations and a sordid appetite for State funding, can one overlook the fact that this offensive also expresses a deep class rancour? That would be to forget the reactionary virulence that every ‘prosperous’ bourgeois society holds in reserve for the bitter days that precede crises. To divert the workers from the lost cause to which an attempt is being made, once again, to bind them, it is necessary first to identify, beyond the clumsy agitation of a few noisy reactionaries, the proletariat’s true adversary, which lies in all the parties of the bourgeois conservation, and whose skill consists essentially in dividing up the task of controlling the social masses by creating political ‘conflicts’ which, in reality, are not conflicts at all.

Various indications we have noted elsewhere show that French capitalism is endeavouring to ward off the crisis threatening it by making drastic cuts to its political and social structure and by sacrificing some of the privileges and stability of the middle classes. The new school legislation is only one aspect of this determination, strongly spurred by the political crisis of 13 May – a secondary one, no doubt, but no less significant for that.

The first blow dealt to the petty bourgeoisie was the triumph of Gaullism, which simplified parliamentary procedure, stripped the National Assembly of its prerogatives, and drastically reduced the number of deputies from the petty-bourgeois parties and their acolytes from workers’ opportunism: the SFIO Socialists and the ‘Communists’ of Moscow allegiance. It is now inevitable that this purge, which struck at the ‘left-wing’ parliamentary clique in the political methods that had ensured its past prosperity, will continue in various other spheres. The ‘secular’ milieu, the teaching profession, and the electoral network with which it is linked: here, precisely, is a new target for the offensive against the petty bourgeoisie.

In addition to the economic and political necessity of reducing the influence of a social category that obstructs the profound transformation that big capital wants to accomplish, there is here a more general motive that expresses the new attitude of the bourgeoisie as a whole in the face of the historical reckoning it dreads: it has lost all confidence in its ‘democratic’ auxiliaries, the petty-bourgeois parties. Their liberal and progressive rhetoric no longer seems merely useless but dangerous at a time when it feels the very crust of its traditional historical ‘values’ cracking beneath its feet. And this explains the virulence of the right wing against the teaching body, the recognised custodian of the republican tradition of 1848, which necessitates the coalition of a whole fraction of the bourgeoisie with the clerical clique and culminates in a general offensive in favour of recognising the ‘rights’ of private education.

But what considerably blurs the class character of this offensive, which is, moreover, completely disfigured by the attitude of the ‘left’ and reduced by them to the artificial image of the eternal opposition between ‘progress’ and ‘reaction’, is the incredible tangle of political positions in a country that wishes to free itself from the political monopoly of the petty-bourgeois parties but which must draw from their ranks the very men and the majority that are to carry out this liquidation. Thus we see Mr. Mollet’s opposition proposing a nationalisation of education which, in the long run, can only lead to the dissolution of the ‘secular spirit’ it claims to defend. Meanwhile, Mr. Debré, whose attacks on this spirit remain notorious, finds himself cast in the role of moderator of the rampage of the ‘right’.

Beneath this criss-cross of parliamentary manoeuvres lies a particularly complex aspect of the current political situation in a country where the bourgeoisie, whilst seeing no challenge whatsoever to its social power or its initiative in political action, is nevertheless worried by the subterranean weakening of its forces, which it senses, more or less consciously. This is what even the most moderate supporters of the anti-secular coalition express: ‘What is really at stake is not the school, but the confrontation of the free, humanist, and Christian world with the communist world’, declared one of them. On the face of it, this hostility towards Russian ‘communism’ is little more than an electoral ploy by a right wing that is more noisy than strong; yet it nonetheless crystallises a genuine fear of social crisis and a real hatred of the proletariat. Long a mere artifice of electoral propaganda, the conflict between the two schools now offers all the reactionary political and social stench of a decomposing society; a means of expression all the more powerful given that sanctimonious conformism has continued to gain ground in the shadow of ‘social achievements’, and since religion and the Church, to the shame of atheist bragging, have not lost, in entire regions, their traditional role as direct auxiliaries of capitalist exploitation. Denominational education, which owes its survival during the heyday of the Fourth Republic to this coalition of the clergy and the sanctimonious provincial bourgeoisie, is logically led, in the current circumstances particularly favourable to it, to demand payment for its services, that is, recognition of its entitlement to subsidies from the class State. It is only natural that it should find support from the parties that serve the same masters as it does. It is inevitable that the rancour accumulated over decades against the ‘secularists’, workers and, in a jumble, reformist trade unions and the Stalinist apparatus – itself, though, also an accomplice of capitalism – will not let this opportunity pass to express, through the mouths of the ‘confessionalists’, the bourgeois hatred which the decline of imperialist France, with the threat it poses to many productive sectors, is driving to fever pitch.

Beneath its apparent prosperity, the Fourth Republic concealed the ideological corruption of the industrial proletariat in the major urban centres, in contrast to the powerlessness and misery of the underpaid and underfed workers in the provinces; beneath the geniality of democratic discourse on ‘social progress’ lay the super-exploitation of young people and women, and the tyranny of the small-time boss; and finally, behind the epic, grotesque, petty, and lamentable war between the village schoolteacher and the parish priest, the resurgence of clerical ideology, which the government has no choice but to recognise officially by granting it access to public schools... All the while, the tirades, lamentations, and homilies of the chorus of ‘secularists’ have had no effect other than to widen the gulf between the proletariat and that class struggle without which it is no longer possible not only to defend one’s livelihood but even, simply to resist the religious mumbo jumbo that the self-righteous seek to impose.

Well, today, in the wake of the proletariat’s total defeat, should we lament the fact that, one way or another, the farce of ‘freedom of thought’ is drawing to a close and that the batteries in the class struggle now brewing are being unmasked? A century of opulent and parasitic bourgeois ‘prosperity’ now presents its historical bills for payment. Faced with the Algerian crisis and the competitive demands of the European market, Capital is prepared to put an end to the electoral charade and the ‘sham quarrels’ of the sort concerning secularism. Clochemerle will no longer be the scene for imprecations against clericalism, but denominational education is, for its part, being called upon to rationalise its methods and rise to the level of its secular rival. In the new status offered to it, there are no longer merely prebends designed to retain an electoral base. This is a serious attempt to put an end to one of the most significant bastions of the democratic rhetoric to which the bourgeoisie no longer wishes to entrust its fate. Even though the current majority displays, on the school question, an intransigence and impudence that could cause it difficulties were it to face an organised proletariat rather than the histrions of the French ‘left’, it is nonetheless acting in line with the logic of a decadent capitalism whose balance of payments is favourable, whose turnover is staggering and whose monopoly on social peace is intact, but which, in order to survive, must shatter all its democratic traditions, its entire ideology, in a word, everything that constitutes its chief armament against the revolutionary threat of the proletariat.

The ruling circles act as though there were need for haste, rushing to capitalise on the workers’ apathy in order to enshrine in law and institutions the imperative of austerity, obedience, and conformism that the classic apparatus of democracy no longer has the strength to impose. The ‘ultras’, surviving their own ridicule, lambast the ‘sell-outs’ of the colonial empire. But they too will eventually have to accept its liquidation and ensure others accept it as well. For their own sake, this will have to be accomplished in a climate of national unity; and the aim is to prepare for this by fostering a neo-nationalism all the more ambitious for being devoid of any foundation. In this endeavour, religious conformism finds itself better placed than secular conformism, encumbered as the latter is with scruples, nuances, and a dangerous passivity. But it is only natural that the former should be blind and clumsy, for it expresses not clear-sightedness but blindness, not certainty but anxiety. The French bourgeoisie cannot, as a class, bring itself to accept a decline of which the colonial crisis has been the catalyst. Unable to admit that this downfall is historical and not human in nature, it attacks not the causes but the effects. In the democratism that secularism symbolises it sees not flickering reflection of its past splendour, but rather the element destroying the ‘values’ it feels are slipping away from it. Unable to take on that intangible protagonist known as history, it chooses a scapegoat in the form of this pusillanimous ‘left’ which, together with its allies in the ‘workers’ organisations and that teaching profession, with its still-powerful trade union confederation, represents, if not a genuine adversary, at least a ready-made target, the expiatory victim for the failure of those it has served.

But it is too easy a triumph, for there is no real fight. The opponents are mere figments. This is not the struggle of a century ago between landed property and industrial capitalism. It is not the reaction of high finance against bourgeois radicalism. It is not the capitalist counter-revolution seeking to crush proletarian pressure. This exacerbation of a nationalism that invokes God, family, and nation to save a crumbling imperialism can hardly fool anyone. Just as the democratism that makes a show of fighting it has little chance of usurping the violent face of the atheism of yesteryear. The real struggle will resume with the reawakening of the proletariat, of which it will be but one of many aspects, all converging towards the destruction of the sole driving force behind all ‘reaction’: the capitalist mode of production.

Under what historical conditions did the working class actually have to support democratic reforms and demands? It is to this that we must return in order to elucidate the ‘false problem’ of secularism. It was a time when conservatism still relied essentially on the clergy and the monarchist reaction, when financiers and industrialists, in their narrow outlook and blinded by their social prejudices, feared ‘republican freedoms’ above all else, seeing them as attacks on the established order and on the ‘values’ that guaranteed their privileges. In the context that concerns us, the Falloux law of 1850 placed primary school teachers under the supervision of parish priests. It was not until 1886 that the law on free and compulsory secular education was finally enacted, and not until 1905 that the separation of Church and State was fully realised in all areas. Faced with this persistence – in the very land of Jacobinism! – of clerical influence, one can understand how easy it was for bourgeois radicalism to draw the working masses in its wake, against whom the clergy and the employers, reaction and religion, in close coalition. A reflex among the workers that was all the more inevitable because, on the political front, the genuine proletarian party was slow to form. From this situation there was to remain, within the trade union movement in general, and in the teaching body in particular, a tradition of struggle of a specific character: courageous and radical, because its non-conformism was coupled with an energetic rejection of colonialism and militarism, yet indelibly marked by petty-bourgeois republicanism.

The latter, in the wave of opportunistic decay that has ruined the trade union movement, has stripped its generous nineteenth-century tradition of the last barbs of revolt that still gave anticlericalism a social meaning. Once the secular ideology of reform fulfils the same role as the religious ideology of resignation – the latter promising happiness in the hereafter, the former in a future every bit as fantastical – the defence of secular education is of interest to the proletariat only as an element of social agitation, as a springboard allowing it to put forward its own historical demand: the seizure of power and the revolutionary dictatorship. But this prospect presupposes a decisive prerequisite: that of a total break between the workers and the republican, democratic… and secular ideology. The bloody adventure of the anti-fascist crusade, which ended in the deaths of millions of proletarians sacrificed, ultimately, in the social, if not political, triumph of the very totalitarianism it claimed to be bringing down, has since come to confirm for us that, in any event, the loss of these conquests of the atheist bourgeoisie and the destruction of the old democratic mechanism that guaranteed them would have been preferable – even if it had come about not under the blows of proletarian insurrection but under those of the single party of capital – to the mobilisation of the workers under the banner of ‘republican values’.

It is quite clear to us that if a genuine class party existed, it would no doubt spare no sarcasm for this society, which is forced to undermine the very structures and principles that made it strong; it would ridicule both those ‘ultras’ who rely on the good Lord to preserve their place in the hierarchy of imperialisms and the defeatism of those ‘left-wing’ parties, who no longer even know how to fight for the democratism they claim to stand for; it would denounce their sordid concern to ‘win votes’ that is the sole foundation of their secularism, just as it would unmask, behind the sacrosanct principles of ‘parental rights’ invoked by their opponents, the most narrow-minded sermonising on behalf of social conservatism. In a word, it would brand the decadence of a bourgeoisie even more odious now, when it refuses its historical downfall, than in the days when it crushed in a bloodbath the troops of its former proletarian ally against absolutism, the monarchy, and religion.

But it would not call on a single worker to join the ‘sacred union of all republicans’... not even to prevent the crucifix from making its furtive return to the public-school classroom.