Conservatives and Conservatism

The years from the Dreyfus Affair to the outbreak of the first world war were the years which saw the Action Fran aise (founded by Henri Vaugeois and Maurice Pujo in 1898) change from being a small intellectual coterie, whose common denominator included neither royalism nor Catholicism but was simply nationalism and antisemitism, into a fully-fledged extra-parliamentary political movement which enjoyed a large sympathy among the electorate of the parliamentary right and one of whose main distinguishing marks was a widely advertized and forceful clericalism. Underlying this evolution were the changing politics of the Third Republic itself as well as the changes in the Republic's relations with the Vatican. Thus of consequence for the growth of the Action Franqaise were Combes's wholesale dissolution of the religious orders in 1903 in virtue of his spirited application of Waldeck-Rousseau's right-of-association law enacted two years earlier, the severing of diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1904, the passing of the law providing for the separation of Church and State in 1905, the inventories' conflict and Pius X's intransigent encyclicals in 1906, and, after an interval of some years, the tide of nationalist and patriotic revival that stirred the country from about 1911 onwards and whose political animators were Poincare, Millerand and Barthou

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