The conflict between the Catholic Church and the French state dominated eighteenth and nineteenth-century French history and produced virulent anticlerical sentiment among many in France, contributing to the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 and the Commune of 1871. What were sources of French anticlericalism, and how did it come to shape political events and initiatives in the nineteenth century?

Anticlericalism grew into a powerful force in France in the years preceding the French Revolution. Traditionally, the divine right of kings meant that monarchs were set in place by the power of God, as expressed by the Church; this idea was endorsed particularly powerfully by the French monarchy because of its descent from the Holy Roman emperors, of which Charlemagne was the most famous. As such, one key source of anticlerical feeling was the fact that the clergy was so fundamentally connected to the monarchy. In "endorsing" it, the clergy was seen as contributing to the hierarchical system it imposed upon the French people.
Additionally, the eighteenth century in France, as was the case elsewhere in Europe, was marked by a growing sense that the clergy and others who believed literally in the Bible were limiting the progress of science. The Enlightenment, which characterized liberal European philosophy in the eighteenth century, led many thinkers to oppose the church's anti-scientific stance. Anticlericalism was associated with intellectualism and the pursuit of greater scientific understanding.
Anticlericalism in France exhibited itself in ways that were not dissimilar to those observed in other European nations that had opposed the Catholic church. Its confiscation of Roman Catholic property during the Revolution was similar to what had occurred in England several centuries before, although these objections had begun under Henry VIII for entirely different political reasons. But the beliefs of Martin Luther and others were echoed in the revolutionaries' claims that the church's greed was a leech on the nation and that its property needed to be redistributed among the people. For the majority of the nineteenth century, the church in France was able to survive on the understanding that it no longer controlled the French state: it obeyed with its privileges greatly diminished and its power limited. This went some way toward satisfying the anticlerical concerns about the church's abuse of power over the people.
When the Third Republic was created in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, tensions rose again, and it became clear that this subservient state of the church could no longer be sustained. On the contrary, anticlerical sentiment rose to greater heights, resulting in the suppression of the religious freedoms of groups such as the Jesuits and defining customs such as marriage as wholly secular. This was a powerful statement, as it recategorized marriage as something permitted and offered by the state, rather than having any connection to God; the privileges of marriage became entirely secular privileges. Marriages in church alone were no longer legal, which stripped a great deal of the church's remaining power away. Church and state were formally split in France in 1905.
This only marked the culmination of a force which had been set loose with the French Revolution. As soon as the idea of divine control had been stripped away, the door was opened for the interrogation of what powers the church could claim over the people and where each man's moral guidance could come from. However, the initial provisions made by Napoleon in the Concordat of 1801 would never be sufficient to satisfy the desires of Enlightenment thinkers for revolution: while it did diminish the power of the church, it did not limit its control over education, and it maintained Catholicism's status as the primary religion in France. As such, anticlerical feeling and frustration continued to ferment. Both anticlerical Christians, who opposed the church's continuing privileges, and a growing faction of atheists, fueled by the development of socialism in Europe, continued to protest against the church and campaign for further reduction of its powers. Only with the separation of church and state in 1905 was the force of anticlericalism diminished in French politics, having finally achieved what the Revolution had led it to hope for a century earlier.
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