Georges CLEMENCEAU - Autograph manuscript - Secularism and Dominicans.

Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)

Autograph manuscript – Secular teaching by the Dominicans.

Six pages in-4° on the back of leaves with Senate letterhead.

Without place or date [January 1906]

Autograph manuscript of the article published on the front page of L'Aurore on January 7, 1906.

_____________________________________________________________

« The Minister of Public Education having not yet dared to appoint a Dominican to the chair of Assyriology at the Collège de France, the Berthelot family is in tears. What vest is more conducive to receiving these tears than the surplice of the Free Word ? But Mr. Marcellin Berthelot, academic president of all free thoughts, suffers too much from suffering the misfortunes of the Congregation to cry with his own eyes over Dominican Father Scheil, where he sees the purest representative of secularism. It is through the orbits of his son, Mr. Daniel Berthelot, that he judges it preferable to pour out the purest flow of his tears. A touching spectacle whose effect cannot fail to be irresistible on Mr. Bienvenu-Martin's tear glands!

Among the heartbreaking gasps and sobs, the editor of La Libre Parole was able to distinguish these words interspersed with tragic silences:

[The following passage, in red, reproducing the declarations of Daniel Berthelot, undoubtedly cut out from La Libre Parole and which was to be attached to the manuscript, has not been preserved:]

“My father, in fact, proposed the candidacy of Father Scheil and voted for him. He considers him the first Assyriologist in France and is of the opinion that his place is in our first chair of Assyriology.

He does not even understand that questions of opinion or religious or other convictions could be raised in such a matter.

He sees the man, the scholar, without taking into account any other consideration.

Father Scheil is a man of very high learning: he has done remarkable work on Assyriology, and my father has known him for a long time.

“You are no doubt aware that archeology has many points in common with chemistry. This is how, for example, by analyzing bronze objects we can determine their chronological succession by the proportions and materials of the alloy. My father therefore had to collaborate with Father Scheil, and it was then that he learned to know him and appreciate him.

– And do you believe that Father Scheil will be appointed?

– I don't know: we know that the minister is strongly urged to the contrary. But my father hopes that Mr. Bienvenu-Martin will be able to free himself from these influences and, aware of his responsibility, will be able to do a work of justice and common sense by entrusting Father Scheil with the chair to which he has more right than any other .”

May the great chemist forgive me for telling him this, but before awarding the Dominican Father a patent of Assyriological aptitude, he would have done well to ask himself by what title he was appointing himself a judge in a field to which he is foreign.  Whether he grotesquely adorns himself with green palm fronds and a wooden sword to collaborate on the dictionary that the Academy does not produce is his business. Every man, even if he is highly intelligent, is free to ridicule himself at his leisure to the extent that it suits him. But if he considers us so devoid of sense to let ourselves be influenced by his sorbonnific robe and his square cap when he pronounces on matters where the whole world likes to recognize his ignorance, he is committing an unforgivable error.

The magister dixit is no longer of our time. We must give reasons, and Mr. Berthelot's reasons are worthy of Purgon when Mr. Berthelot explains to us that it was by analyzing Assyrian bronzes that he discovered the superior capacity of the Dominican in the discipline of Assyriology. If the Dominican Father claimed to judge the chemistry of Mr. Berthelot on his own ability to decipher Assyrian characters, that would make even the Academies laugh.  When it is Berthelot who discovers through the composition of a bronze the genius of a son of St Dominic in matters of Assyriology, it still makes us laugh, but not at the expense of the Dominican.

It is Mr. Barbier de Meynard, administrator of the School of Oriental Languages, who presents himself to help Mr. Berthelot in distress, through a conversation with an editor of L'Éclair . Mr. Barbier de Meynard does not need an intermediary. He speaks, he even discusses. But in what way! “Father Scheil is criticized,” says Mr. Barbier de Meynard, “of having made a reading error in a text where he wrongly included King Chedorlaomer. I would like to see his detractors decipher some ideographic writings: that would perhaps change their confidence a little. This confusion has also been reported as perfidy: it has been claimed that it was voluntary and that Father Scheil had knowingly perpetrated it, in order to corroborate chapter XIV of Genesis, where it is precisely question of this Chedorlaomer. However, the good faith of Father Scheil is beyond doubt, and we must leave the benefit of this indelicacy to those who invented it.”

Admit that we must be short of arguments to seek the justification of Father Schell's “errors” in the incapacity of the generality of humans (including Mr. Bienvenu-Martin and Mr. Berthelot himself). to decipher the texts of Hamurabbi [sic]. I do not read Assyrian, so I am not a candidate for the chair of Assyrian at the Collège de France. The Dominican Schell is a candidate and he commits such gross errors in his readings of documents that he provides tendentious, absolutely erroneous translations whose only advantage is to agree, by chance ! with the sacred book of the congregation. Mr. Barbier de Meynard does not want there to be any trace of “perfidy.” I couldn't ask for anything better than to say like him. However, I will then have to concede that the teaching of Father Schell is too questionable for us to decide to deliver our young lay people to the fanciful interpretations of this very fallible Dominican.

It is not, moreover, that Mr. Barbier de Meynard does not realize the false situation of a Dominican Father in a pulpit where the control of his sacred myths is offered to him: “Suddenly Certainly, he observes, if the vacant chair had been that of biblical exegesis, or another similar one, we would never have thought of putting a religious there. But the chair of Assyriology has only very distant connections with the Bible, and the professor's philosophical ideas have nothing in common with the studies he directs.”

Thus Mr. Barbier de Meynard ingenuously confesses that the idea would not have occurred to him to entrust the chair of biblical exegesis to a religious person, whose mind, in this case, does not seem sufficiently liberated to him. But how can he then maintain that “the chair of Assyriology has only very distant connections with the Bible” when everyone [ knows] that the mythical character of Genesis has been highlighted by comparison with Babylonian traditions , and when his candidate Father Schell was precisely caught in the act of forgery – in all innocence! – the reading of Assyrian texts, thus placed by his pious care in a state of biblical concordance entirely for the edification of the faithful?

Of what weight can it be, in this case, that Father Schell made “a very categorical and very liberal declaration” to his lawyer Mr. Barbier de Meynard whose bias certainly did not need the case of this insurance. The clearest part of his liberalism is that he remains, he said, “completely son of St Dominic,” glory of the Inquisition. That says enough. Father Schell is so free that he does not have the right to publish a line without the imprimatur of the general of the Dominicans, and so little suspected of heresy that he happened to sit on the censorship commissions responsible for examine the works of his brothers in St Dominic.

Time it is true, has made a discovery which resolves all the difficulties. Mr. Combes, having dissolved the order of St-Dominique in France, there is no longer a Father Schell, since there are no more Dominicans. Without doubt the order of the Dominicans survives with its general to whom obedience of body and spirit is due and Father Schell publicly professes this obedience by declaring that he remains “completely a son of St Dominic.” But it is enough, in fact, to deny the evidence for the appointment of the Dominican to the Collège de France to be justified by this trick of evasion. We would thus have struck the congregations and separated the Church from the State only to remove the barriers which could hinder the progress of teaching clericalism, to facilitate, by means of a simple change of costume, the entry of the Congregation into the secular education of the State.

It sometimes happened to me that I had a severe friendship for Mr. Bienvenu-Martin. I must say, however, that those who approached him declared him incapable of any clerical compromise. We'll see. Because it is Mr. Bienvenu-Martin who is Minister of Public Instruction, not Mr. Liard, not Mr. Barbier de Meynard, not Mr. Berthelot, not the general of the Dominicans, a motley troop of apologists for the “Reverend Father. ” It is Mr. Bienvenu-Martin who has the authority, and therefore the responsibility. He will pronounce on himself as much as on the Dominican . »

________________________

Supported by several leading figures, including Marcellin Berthelot, Father Scheil (not Schell as Clemenceau writes), Dominican, was a candidate for the chair of Assyriology at the Collège de France. While the law separating Church and State had just been passed (December 9, 1905) and continued to fuel passions, the stakes in the appointment of the holder of the chair of Assyriology went beyond the limits of scholarly circles.

In an article entitled Saint Dominique au Collège de France published in L'Aurore a few days earlier, on December 30, 1905, Georges Clemenceau already summarized them: “ We know how closely Assyriological studies are linked to biblical exegesis. It is now established, for example, that the Genesis stories of creation, the fall of man, the flood, were borrowed from the cycle of Babylonian legends. Such discoveries necessarily show the Holy Books in a slightly different light from that in which an ecclesiastic is required to view them. Catholic dogmas occasionally encounter terrible problems. […] It is therefore necessary that a serious Assyriologist be an absolutely independent mind . » A Dominican father cannot therefore hold a chair of Assyriology which is not a branch of theology, but a science, as he emphasizes again here.

As for Combes' attempt at justification explaining that there are no longer any Dominicans in France, the order having been dissolved, Clemenceau calls it "a trick of evasion".

The affair took on such importance that it was the subject of a debate in the House…

Georges Clemenceau bluntly attacks Marcellin Berthelot, active support of Father Scheil, denying the chemist any authority over a science that is foreign to him. Berthelot had been convinced of the Dominican's competence after analyzing the chemical composition of an Assyrian bronze; his scientific conclusions corroborated Father Scheil's historical assertions. Burst of laughter from Clemenceau: “ If the Dominican Father claimed to judge the chemistry of Mr. Berthelot on his own ability to decipher Assyrian characters, that would cause laughter even in the Academies. » And the judgment is final: “ Whether he grotesquely adorns himself with green palm fronds and a wooden sword to collaborate on the dictionary that the Academy does not produce, that is his business. Every man, even if he is highly intelligent, is free to ridicule himself at his leisure to the extent that it suits him. But if he considers us so devoid of sense to let ourselves be influenced by his sorbonnific robe and his square cap when he pronounces on matters where the whole world likes to recognize his ignorance, he is committing an unforgivable error. » (In the printed text, the adverb “grotesquely” was removed and the “Sorbonnific dress” was replaced by the “Sorbonne dress”: the text gained in sobriety what it had lost in drollery.)

For the record, the square located in front of the Collège de France is now named Place Marcellin Berthelot.