Premier Herriot announced in Paris that in October he would pay a visit to Alsace and Lorraine (those two long-lost daughters that were returned to the bosom of La Mere Patrie in 1918) in order to study how legislation can be modified progressively and French law introduced into the restored Provinces.
Behind this innocent little statement lies a wealth of detail, much burning resentment, the most, difficult of French domestic problems, principally religious in nature.
From 1918 until the present, the Government of France has supported Roman Catholicism. Relations were established between Paris and the Holy See. The congregations (religious bodies) excluded by laws passed at the beginning of the present century, began to return. Catholic Alsace and Lorraine were permitted to retain their own laws and customs which had been granted to them under the Hohenzollern regime.
Not even the most rabid Nationalist dared to foist French laws upon the people of those Provinces; religious privileges, denied to French men and women in France, were freely exercised in Alsace and Lorraine.
Then came the election of May 11, 1924 (TIME, May 19), and the political face of France was radically altered. Anti-Clericalism had supplanted Clericalism. In a ministerial statement M. Herriot declared:
"The Government is persuaded that it will interpret faithfully the wishes of the dear population at last restored to France by hastening the day on which will be effaced the last differences between the legislation in the recovered departments and the rest of the territory of the Republic."
A hue and cry was raised throughout the liberated Provinces. People who had enthusiastically acclaimed the French as their long-lost brothers after the Armistice, were now driven to unconcealed dismay. On the one hand was the clear impossibility of maintaining German laws in French Provinces; on the other hand was the fervid determination of the Catholic population—a large majority—not to submit to anti-Catholic laws of the French Republic.
The situation is best summed up by the people of Colmar:
"The Catholics of Colmar, gathered together to protest against the religious war that the present Government has declared upon them, raise their voices against the project of unchaining religious strife in Alsace and Lorraine, without taking heed of the extremely difficult political situation of France both in the interior and in the foreign domain.
"They declare that the project in the most brutal fashion ignores the inalienable rights of the members of the Catholic religion and the imprescriptable rights of believing parents. They consider it as the shameful breaking of a pledge given by France to the Alsatians and Lorrainers to respect their liberties and their traditions.
"They energetically demand the maintenance of the laws which governed the schools and the relations between the Church and the State at the moment of their return to France. They demand the withdrawal of the teaching personnel and the withdrawal of the scholastic books which do not respond to the spirit of the confessional schools. This personnel and these books have been surreptitiously introduced in the schools by the educational authorities.