Politics
Growing discontent with respect to the influence of the Catholic Church in education and politics led to a series of reforms during the Third Republic reducing this influence, under the protests of the Ultramontanists who supported the Vatican's influence. Anti-clericalism was popular among Republicans, Radicals and Socialists, in part because the Church had supported the Counterrevolutionaries throughout the 19th century. After the 16 May 1877 crisis and the fall of the Ordre Moral government led by Marshall MacMahon, the Republicans voted Jules Ferry's 1880 laws on free education (1881) and mandatory and laic education (1882), which Catholics felt was a gross violation of their rights.
Read more about this topic: Roman Catholicism In France
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“His talk was like a spring, which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses:
It slipped from politics to puns,
It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
Beginning with the laws which keep
The planets in their radiant courses,
And ending with some precept deep
For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.”
—Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839)
“The newspaper reader says: this party is destroying itself through such mistakes. My higher politics says: a party that makes such mistakes is finished—it has lost its instinctive sureness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)