Singing through Anticlerical Storms: The Choir School at Moulins Cathedral, ca. 1880–1905

The study of French choir schools intertwines the history of liturgical musical practice with that of education, both musical and general, and with the history of French oversight of all three areas. Maîtrises educated boys from around the age of seven or eight to puberty, teaching a combination of music, literacy, and arithmetic in a Catholic liturgical context where they sang daily services. Thereafter, there were three common pathways: to attend the local municipal music school, perhaps as a stepping-stone to the Paris Conservatoire; after 1853, to be recommended by the bishop for entry to the École Niedermeyer (Paris’s school of church music); or to enter a petit séminaire (a private Catholic secondary school), from which to progress to the grand séminaire and ordination. In differing degrees, each track could lead to a paid post as a cathedral organist or maître de chapelle.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, maîtrises received government support on the basis that they existed to train musicians who happened to be pursuing their studies in church. For anticlerical French Republicans, however, who were in the ascendant from the elections of 1879, maîtrises appeared increasingly problematic for a number of reasons: firstly, because they had expanded in unregulated ways over the preceding decades; secondly, because they seemed capable of undermining a national project to secularize school education; and thirdly, because the most celebrated of them were linked to bishops who promoted unacceptably anti-Republican politics. The choir school in Moulins, a small working-class town of around 22,500 residents according to the 1891 census, was emblematic of all three problems and proved to be the main catalyst for decisive anticlerical action at the turn of the century; hence its centrality to the present study.⁵ Having become celebrated in the 1870s for the quality of its choral service music, it had to battle to survive defunding attempts in 1882 (national) and 1892 (local). The eventual loss of its grant in 1902 helped bring all state funding for sacred music education in France to a close, presaging the terms of the end of the Concordat via the Separation of Churches and State in 1905.

After their eradication during the French Revolution, cathedral maîtrises were only gradually and haphazardly reestablished across France. As their numbers increased (there was a surge in the 1820s and 1830s), they garnered additional public funding piecemeal.⁶ Concordat support for church music was initially directed toward the bas-chœur, meaning that it guaranteed only a skeleton staff: a bell ringer, a beadle, a few salaried singers (chantres) and altar boys, and someone to play serpent or double bass. Later, an organist and bellows operator would be added. This funding was for plainchant and its harmonized derivatives; it was not designed to facilitate large-scale choral music, whether within or outside the liturgy, or to support music tuition from a salaried maître de chapelle. Nevertheless, adding a cathedral maîtrise to the bas-chœur was administratively easy: it involved no government application process, and at least until the middle of the century maîtrises had special status, in that they could avoid visits from the government’s educational inspectorate so long as they taught nothing beyond music.⁷ The early Third Republic was more attentive, supporting maîtrises from 1871 with opt-in visits from the newly appointed music inspector Charles Vervoitte, and offering grants, library gifts, and prizes paralleling those for the government’s provincial conservatoire branches.⁸ Musical excellence and need were the only criteria for favorable treatment. Astonishingly, and as distinct from the conservatoire or theater sectors, there were no contractual obligations, requirements to prove public utility, or designated teaching methods.⁹ Maîtrises became an official part of the funding landscape, a situation of which Moulins took full advantage over the next decade.¹⁰

As an undercurrent to these musical developments, anticlerical suspicion was a constant from as early as the 1830s. When cathedral authorities tried to expand the size of their choir schools in order to sing large-scale choral music or even just fill the cavernous space of their buildings with sound, they were often prevented from doing so. Reports to government from regional academies linked to the University of Paris (the national inspectorate) explain why this was so, articulating fears that unregulated primary or even secondary schools would evade government strictures by masquerading as choir schools.¹¹ The maîtrise at Lyon Cathedral was investigated on these grounds in 1829–31; from 1841 to 1843 it was the turn of the Marseille Cathedral maîtrise.¹² Musico-liturgical splendor was all well and good, but bringing together large numbers of boy choristers and teenagers whose voices had broken rang alarm bells. Maîtrises were customarily referred to as musical “pépinières” (nurseries); the concern was that they were merely a front for early clerical training.¹³ In 1882, in the wake of the secular restructuring of French education under Jules Ferry, then Minister of Public Education and Fine Arts, a devastatingly simple solution emerged: remove all funding from cathedral choir schools and reallocate it to an expanded network of secular provincial conservatoires. This measure nearly worked, reducing to six the number of government-funded maîtrises across France’s eighty dioceses (Moulins was among them) while increasing the number of provincial conservatoires from five to eight and promoting to national status fourteen elementary music schools run by town councils.¹⁴ Defunded maîtrises did not necessarily close, as Philippe Lescat has suggested; instead, many launched fundraisers.¹⁵ The new, consolidated, music education system ran from 1884 but lasted two decades at most for the half dozen funded maîtrises. The aftermath of the 1905 Separation brought a hiatus because the state requisitioned maîtrise buildings; but many choirs, if without their attendant schools, were on the way to recovery by 1908.¹⁶

Moulins was celebrated for its singing of Counter-Reformation polyphony, a repertoire it foregrounded from the mid-1860s and that was of a piece with the diocese’s return from the Gallican (national) to the Roman (international) liturgy by 1853.¹⁷ This was also the music featured at its inspections, although a music album containing repertoire composed between the 1870s and the mid-1890s shows a more eclectic range, including “messes brèves” by Charles Gounod and Théodore Dubois and mass and motet settings by the cathedral’s three maîtres de chapelle during this period, Charles Duvois (ca. 1860–74), Auguste Chérion (1874–96), and Francis Magnasse (1896–1932); the album also contains contrafacta on the opening chorale of Bach’s motet “Jesu meine Freude” (as a “Tantum ergo”) and on Wagner’s Tannhäuser march (as a cantique for the consecration of a church, “Salue à toi, noble edifice”).¹⁸ In addition, we know from press reports that the choir sang occasional pieces for civic events and community masses, such as the farewell service for military recruits in this garrison town. Some of these works seem to have been more operatic or “mondaine” in nature in that they involved a solo soprano (female) or a violinist and sparked periodic qualms about their appropriateness as liturgical fare.¹⁹

The Moulins maîtrise was a late bloomer in France. Its beginnings lay in 1860 as a school for altar boys; it became more of a choir school from 1863, and its specialism in Counter-Reformation polyphony was sealed from 1865 when its then maître de chapelle, Charles Duvois, and his maîtrise director encountered this repertoire at Autun Cathedral during a pilgrimage to Paray-le-Monial.²⁰ The Moulins maîtrise promoted and retained local talent. Chérion, born in the town, was educated at the local Catholic school of Saint-Gilles, at the maîtrise, and then at the Jesuit petit séminaire at neighboring Yzeure. Originally Duvois’s composition pupil, Chérion succeeded him in 1874 at the extraordinarily young age of twenty before moving to the church of La Madeleine, in Paris, in 1896. Magnasse, also a product of the Moulins maîtrise, took Chérion’s place.²¹ Between them, the three maîtres de chapelle served two bishops: the famously intransigent Legitimist Pierre-Simon de Dreux-Brézé, who died in 1893 after over forty years in post, and the conciliatory Auguste Dubourg. Like most of the pupils at the maîtrise, which by partnering with the neighboring petit séminaire at Yzeure included adult singers, both Chérion and Magnasse followed the “ordination” pathway outlined above—a fact that apparently ruffled feathers among Paris Conservatoire graduates who felt snubbed when Chérion was nominated for the Madeleine.²²

In the 1890s, Moulins was one of only two towns in France in which a state-subsidized cathedral choir school coexisted with a state-subsidized provincial music school.²³ The latter was founded in 1893 as an extension of music literacy teaching at the Lyre Moulinoise, itself a combination of a male-voice choir (orphéon) and a prize-winning wind band, both founded in the mid-1860s and conducted by the composer and singing teacher Marius Boullard.²⁴ That a small working-class town known for its radical sympathies should additionally boast a state-funded church music school is surprising, and the mismatch was undoubtedly behind an 1892 attack on the maîtrise by the town council, recounted below.²⁵ Despite achieving “national” status from the outset, the secular school did not flourish as hoped. It became, to quote the Director of Fine Arts in 1904, “undoubtedly the worst of all our schools,” and was run mostly by amateur musicians whose day jobs included clockmaking and photography.²⁶ By that stage, the maîtrise’s fortunes had declined politically and financially: in 1902, when the religious orders came under attack from anticlerical legislation following the Dreyfus Affair, and the end of the Concordat seemed only a matter of time, a coalition of radical Republicans in the Chamber of Deputies succeeded in wresting it from government favor. Locally, however, the seeds of that decision were sown ten years earlier.

At a meeting of the town council in Moulins on February 6, 1892, deputy mayor Henri Péronneau presented a committee report arguing that the Lyre Moulinoise needed to be refinanced as a municipal and nationalized music school. Noting that the Lyre took its recruits from within the state education system and that by contrast everyone at the maîtrise came from schools run by religious orders, he proposed the following motion:

Péronneau’s language was steeped in ideas of Republican citizenship: “public service,” “utility,” fulfilling the wishes of the populace, and participation in “national festivals.” As he pointed out, the Lyre was already fulfilling these ideals, teaching solfège and harmony to working-class pupils, and thus functioning as “a truly popular music school.” By contrast, the cathedral maîtrise, he said, was little more than the bishop’s private plaything, its contribution to citizenship and public utility precisely nil.²⁸ The council passed the motion unanimously and it was recorded in a minute whose title referenced a vote on the cathedral maîtrise rather than a decision to find funding for a municipal school. The emphasis, then, was squarely on the loser of this zero-sum game, and it replicated, in miniature, the funding transfer of a decade earlier from maîtrises to secular schools.²⁹ Moulins was, in fact, the last school to be nationalized on the back of this legislation.

Following a visit from Henri Maréchal, one of the government Inspectors of Music Education, Moulins set up its secular music school in 1893, staffed by members of the Lyre Moulinoise and directed by Boullard until 1903, when failing health forced his retirement.³⁰ While state funding and national status were duly granted,³¹ however, the subsidy did not, in the end, come at the expense of the cathedral.³² The council’s anticlerical money grab failed, and it was thus that a small town in deepest provincial France ended up with two state-sponsored music schools—one secular, the other religious.

Despite his rousing call for reform, Péronneau’s polarized image of February 1892 bore little relation to reality. In the decades preceding the town council’s decision, the Lyre Moulinoise and the cathedral had worked together or alongside each other seemingly without acrimony, and the maîtrise had operated without run-ins with the town council. Ironically, it was the Lyre’s relationship with the council that was fraught—invariably for financial reasons and because Boullard repeatedly overreached, pitching his band as the obvious municipal provider of music for public festivals,³³ requesting attachment to the National Guard of the Allier,³⁴ or simply informing the authorities that the Lyre had added the servicing of public events to its statutes.³⁵ The society’s financial demands exasperated councillors, and an anonymous detractor, writing to the town hall on June 25, 1871, complained that they performed too infrequently to be worth the public funding they received.³⁶ In December 1882 the society was refused money because, as the council reporter noted, the Lyre “has never, in any way, sought to be generous to the municipality.”³⁷

As part of its self-proclaimed function as an official music provider, the Lyre also contributed to religious life, participating in special cathedral masses and occasional services from around 1869 up to the eve of the 1902 debacle. These included forming an 120-strong choir (orphéon and maîtrise together) for a service of thanks for the 1869 agricultural show, and then participating in a mass composed by Boullard himself at the annual St. Cecilia’s Day service, when cross-society musical participation of this kind was typical throughout France.³⁸ In the choir for the St. Cecilia’s Day mass was a priest who identified himself as a paid-up member of the Lyre but for whom decorum demanded anonymity in his report for the Catholic weekly the Chronique bourbonnaise.³⁹ It is entirely plausible that the author was the journal’s director, Mgr. Jean-Adrien de Conny—also a founding father (and funder) of the maîtrise at the cathedral—who placed Lyre Moulinoise news alongside diocesan updates on his front pages and cheered their every competition triumph.⁴⁰ At the agricultural show, town dignitaries would have seen the cathedral choir, orphéon and band work together during a closing mass, and would have witnessed an explicitly pro-Catholic gesture on the part of the Lyre’s members:

There is little sign that local reciprocity weakened after 1870 or even after 1879, when the Republic was cemented and anticlerical reforms began in earnest. In fact, the two institutions sometimes seemed joined at the hip: in 1876 the Préfet was convinced that part of the council grant for the Lyre Moulinoise was actually a contribution to the cathedral’s music funding.⁴² Within the local press, the Catholic and royalist paper the Messager: Mémorial de l’Allier offered almost complete support for the Lyre. Throughout the 1880s it issued regular publicity, printing the Lyre’s forthcoming programs, advertising its free courses in solfège, and reporting on its grant successes with the council. Just one disapproving taxpayer fretted that as a condition of its council grants the Lyre was being allowed to perform at pro-Republican events only.⁴³ Finally, in the local Semaine religieuse, collaborations between the maîtrise and the Lyre Moulinoise were recorded until at least 1901.

Better grassroots evidence for solidarity comes courtesy of the 1882 anticlerical and financial crisis. Two prominent musicians—one Parisian and one local—offered the embattled maîtrise unsolicited support. The Parisian, whom I shall discuss below, was Charles Vervoitte. The local musician was Marius Boullard. On June 7, 1883, Boullard wrote an emotional letter to Auguste Chérion, applauding the maîtrise with the very Republican descriptors Péronneau would withhold from it a decade later, and exhorting courage:

Boullard wrote, perhaps naively, as though both he and Chérion were still living in the 1870s, when a moderate Republican administration supported the church. But more important for my argument is that the maîtrise’s ostensible rivals of 1892 turn out to have been friends at an earlier moment of need, with Boullard doing his utmost to defend it against the 1882 budget cuts and underscore the public utility of the maîtrise as a feeder school for his band. What Boullard thought of the events of 1892 and 1902 is, alas, unknown.⁴⁵ Equally, what he would have done had Péronneau’s planned transfer of funds actually happened remains a tantalizing counterfactual. His continuing relationship with cathedral music, however, suggests he might have protested.

My final example of local accommodation between Catholics and Republicans involves politicians rather than musicians and illustrates the openness to Catholic educational environments that officials could display when it suited their purposes. Among the professional music teachers at the Lyre and at the new École Nationale at the turn of the century were two members of the Belin family, each employed in religious and secular institutions at the same time. The violinist Aristide succeeded Marius Boullard as director of the Lyre in 1903, stood in for him at the school when Boullard’s health failed, and was then nominated in his own right. The cellist Charles was nominated at the École Nationale the same year. Both freelanced locally: Aristide at the Pensionnat Saint-Gilles, run by the lay order of Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes (where Chérion had received his initial education) and Charles at the Collège Bellevue-Yzeure, formerly run by the Jesuit order.⁴⁶ Standard Republican vetting processes, which tended to foreground clerical politics, criminality, and moral standing, picked up on all these roles, but the anonymous authors of the vetting reports for the Belins downplayed any implication of clerical sympathies. Both nominations were confirmed.⁴⁷ Aristide must nevertheless have realized that he was on thin political ice: the mayor of Moulins gave assurances that he would stop teaching at Saint-Gilles if he became director of the École Nationale and that his Republican politics had not been weakened by his professional work.⁴⁸ Then, two months later, Joseph Chaumié, Minister of Public Education and Fine Arts, who was still hesitating, received a joint letter of support for Aristide from none other than Péronneau (now a parliamentary deputy) and Pierre Ville (Péronneau’s former boss as mayor of Moulins and now a senator).⁴⁹ Clearly, working across both educational sectors was not impossible. In an anticlerical climate, however, such flexibility worked in only one direction: as we shall see, it was Péronneau and Ville who spearheaded the parliamentary decision to withdraw funding from the Moulins maîtrise in 1902, ostensibly on account of the congregational taint of its teachers.

The anticlerical hesitation contained within the Aristide Belin story was fueled at the Préfecture of the Allier. Everything went across the desk of the Préfet, the state’s local representative, who was nevertheless often called on to act as a broker between local interests and those of central government.⁵⁰ The proposal in 1892 to transform the Lyre Moulinoise into a municipal school turns out to have come from Préfet Pierre Vincent himself, when advising Mayor Ville on how to stabilize the society’s precarious finances.⁵¹ (There is no suggestion, though, that the idea of transferring funding from the maîtrise came from him.) Following the town council meeting, whose zero-sum game might have taken him by surprise, he had to try to adjudicate between the Lyre and the maîtrise. Although he found both deserving in different ways, as a good Republican working in anticlerical times he nevertheless recommended that if there were just one grant available, it should go to the Lyre.⁵²

A decade later, the process by which Aristide Belin was considered for the post of director of the École Nationale revealed the perils of miscommunication and the confusion that could ensue, both within the Préfecture and beyond, when an official anticlerical policy suddenly ceased to be followed. Writing in December 1903 in the absence of his boss, Préfet Léon-Édouard Briens, the secretary-general of the Allier recommended ministerial rejection of the mayor’s nomination of Belin, partly because the school’s inspections had produced adverse reports but also because the nominee was working at an institution run by “parties hostile to the Republic.”⁵³ When Préfet Briens’s own recommendation arrived, however, dated January 6, 1904, it supported Belin’s nomination and rested on information that Briens claimed to have gathered himself. Perhaps Briens did not realize that a response had already been sent on his behalf; in any case, he said nothing about the inconvenient Saint-Gilles connection, noted that locals would resent the imposition of an outsider, and praised Belin for starting to turn the school around.⁵⁴ The minister, foxed, demanded clarification, meaning that Briens now had to explain how his office had provided two diametrically opposed recommendations in the space of three weeks.⁵⁵ It was doubtless this heightened tension that caused Péronneau and Ville to intervene on behalf of their favored candidate, whose connections with a congregational school they too discounted.

If the Belin story illustrates the relativism of anticlerical policy in respect of secular music education, it is possible to find analogues within ecclesiastical settings, though for an earlier period only. Moulins was a trouble spot, mostly on account of the leadership of Bishop Dreux-Brézé, who picked innumerable fights with the secular authorities and whose reputation for anti-Republicanism was well deserved.⁵⁶ In the 1880s and 1890s the main bone of contention, musically, involved the reorganization necessary to turn the cathedral maîtrise into a compliant institution receiving “provincial music education” funds from central government. Chérion’s professional status was an obstacle. According to the formal agreement signed with the Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts in 1884, in order to direct any teaching beyond the choir school’s music he required formal university accreditation as specified in the law of June 16, 1881, ultimately overseen by the deanery of the University of Paris. He did not possess this accreditation. The full implications are laid out most clearly in a briefing note of January 1893 sent by Préfet Pierre Vincent to the Director of Religion at the now expanded Ministry of Public Education, Fine Arts, and Religion:

Two points are worth noting here. Firstly, the decisive intervention of Armand Fallières as Minister of Public Education and Fine Arts in late 1883, overruling the Public Education officials within his own ministry to ensure exceptional acceptance of Chérion as a generalist teacher.⁵⁸ Secondly, the intransigence of a clerical maître de chapelle toward academy inspectors who were simply trying to do their job. Technically, the nationalized maîtrises were beholden to two ministerial offices: Fine Arts for their specialized music funding, and Public Education for inspections of general teaching.⁵⁹ Chérion tried to select his overlords and likely had his bishop’s support in so doing. Préfet Vincent refrains from speculation as to why, but his next subject of discussion offers contextual clues.

Having been asked questions about “the maîtrise” by the Director of Religion, Vincent explained that there were in fact two institutions known by this name at Moulins Cathedral: the choir school with added general lessons, and a private primary school attached to the cathedral and including altar boys who received occasional tuition in singing. This latter was run initially by the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes and then by cathedral clerics with a lay teacher. In 1893 it was being inspected without hitches by the same academic authorities toward whom Chérion had shown resistance.⁶⁰ To my knowledge, Vincent’s report is the only contemporary document that explains the existence of this second “maîtrise,” which prioritized primary education and religion over music.⁶¹ In 1893, and consistent with a generally nonjudgmental approach, Vincent expressed no qualms; however, concerns over congregational influence had been evident in the Chamber of Deputies discussion that led to the 1882 budget cut, and they would reappear twenty years later in 1902 when Moulins’s fate was decided.⁶² The question of what a maîtrise was for, what its relationship should be to clerical education and religious orders, and therefore who should fund it became increasingly combustible.

At the Moulins maîtrise, the best insulation against anticlerical attack came courtesy of French systems of inspection for music education. The second supporter of the Moulins maîtrise against the 1882 budget cut was Charles Vervoitte, former maître de chapelle at Rouen Cathedral and at the church of Saint-Roch in Paris, and specialist architect of the first, 1870s system for government inspection of maîtrises. In a reversal of the intended power relationship, soon after his first visit (1872), Vervoitte asked Jean-Adrien de Conny for an account of maîtrise organization at Moulins, which he considered to represent best practice.⁶³ In the wake of the 1882 budget cut, on May 31, 1883, Vervoitte wrote to Dreux-Brézé to offer help. He wanted evidence that would bolster the support he had already offered Moulins during official hearings intended to lead to a new allocation system for music education funding. While Vervoitte’s letter was specific—he wanted the names of musically successful former pupils—it also indicated a much closer relationship than might be expected of a mere inspector. A decade of visits had resulted in something akin to institutional friendship, as we can see from the way Vervoitte slipped seamlessly from business to social networking:

Vervoitte’s chummy deference might seem like a relic of the past, but its positivity was actually a harbinger of the future. The post-1882 process to redesign music education funding included a report on specialist music provision authored by Henri Régnier on behalf of a ministerial committee.⁶⁵ The report called for a technical survey of both municipal schools and maîtrises, including an appraisal of their staff and (where possible) evaluation of their musical performances—all during the late summer of 1883. Four Prix de Rome composers were deputed to the task: Théodore Dubois, Ernest Guiraud, Charles Lenepveu, and Émile Paladilhe.⁶⁶ Maîtrises were not originally in the committee’s remit, their funding having already been axed, but the committee wrenched them back into the frame on the grounds of the system’s “real historical worth.”⁶⁷ Dubois inspected Moulins.⁶⁸

Thereafter, the Office of Fine Arts appointed a team of inspectors for all nationalized music education institutions in the provinces. Of the 1883 team, Dubois, Guiraud, and Lenepveu were now confirmed long-term, with Ernest Reyer as figurehead. Vervoitte was also appointed, in 1884, but died shortly afterward.⁶⁹ Subsequent inspectors included Henri Maréchal, Victorin Joncières, Gustave Canoby, Gabriel Fauré, André Gédalge and Paul-Véronge de La Nux. Collectively those who visited were enthusiastic supporters of musical standards at the Moulins maîtrise. It was the pride of the department and the town, wrote the 1889 inspector: “the performances draw a significant crowd.…For early music, they are remarkable: Palestrina, Victoria, Allegri are the object of special devotion and there is real historical worth in these great demonstrations of a style that has fallen into disuse, but which has held such an important place in the annals of music.”⁷⁰ For Ernest Guiraud in 1891, Renaissance polyphony at Moulins was “always performed with the greatest care, in the best style, and a cappella, as tradition dictates.”⁷¹ Perhaps none of this positivity should surprise us too much: it was a small world. Chérion’s own teachers, engaged privately after his tuition from Charles Duvois at the Moulins maîtrise, included both Gounod and Fauré.⁷²

The biggest test of inspector loyalty came in 1902, at the moment of existential crisis that resulted from withdrawal of the Moulins grant. This time it was former inspector Dubois, now director of the Paris Conservatoire and one of the most influential musical administrators in France, who spoke out. Quoted in the Semaine religieuse de Nevers and again in the cognate journal for the Moulins diocese, Dubois was reported as protesting “energetically against the cutting of the budget because…the maîtrises contribute effectively to forming the people’s ideals, and to raising the musical level of those from the working classes.”⁷³ Arguments of this kind were designed to appeal to Republican principles of popular education (along the lines of Boullard writing to Chérion in 1883) and of support for the advancement of deserving individuals lacking financial or social capital. This rhetorical register is absent from all inspection reports, whether written by Dubois or others, perhaps because there was no existential threat to any single institution or because of the strictly “technical” remit of the inspections. In 1902, however, Dubois’s words were a response to a highly politicized decision, and they represented an attempt to underscore the idea of a maîtrise as a training ground for music on a par with the conservatoire, an institution with impeccable Republican credentials where free education opened career pathways for working-class children.

In terms of inspections, the year 1892, however, brought something of a shock. Henri Maréchal wrote the most laudatory opening statement of any inspection report extant:

Like others before and after him, Maréchal was enthusing here about the performances of Counter-Reformation polyphony that the Moulins maîtrise invariably prepared for its inspections. But Chérion and his staff never saw this text. The reason: ministerial intervention.

Ministers’ relationships to the administration of the country’s maîtrises were complex. Their actions represented implementation of government decisions, but the tone of their internal memoranda and the relative ease of their relationships with government colleagues were variable. In 1884, a dispute had erupted between the old ministry (Justice and Religion, which had allocated funding according to Concordat principles) and the new one (Public Education and Fine Arts) in respect of Moulins and the other handful of maîtrises selected for nationalization through funding. Their premises were different, and they found themselves at odds over the extent to which politics mattered. At Justice and Religion there was horror that the six winning maîtrises included those under the aegis of “militant” and obstructive bishops, and Moulins was singled out in an internal memorandum sent from Félix Martin-Feuillée, Minister of Justice and Religion (the Keeper of the Seals), to Armand Fallières, Minister of Public Education and Fine Arts, in January 1884. It undermined stability and consistency, argued Martin-Feuillée, if another government department acted in ways that could be seen as “an encouragement to the systematic hostility of the clergy.”⁷⁵ Waspishly, he added, “I agree that art in general is deserving of government protection, and music in particular, but a far superior principle is that all government favors should contribute to the same goal of [maintaining] public order.”⁷⁶ As might be expected, at Public Education and Fine Arts it was the music and the heritage that counted, but the challenge goaded Fallières into an unusually explicit defense of his position and its rationale. Art was to trump politics, even where troublesome clerics were concerned:

With this explanation, Fallières expressed support for the conclusions of the Régnier report, which insisted that the maîtrises that had retained funding should specialize in plainchant and the “great masters” from Palestrina to Marcello.⁷⁸ This aesthetic preference rendered the 1884 ministerial spat almost a foregone conclusion. It was ultramontane bishops such as Dreux-Brézé who had most eagerly moved from the Gallican liturgy to the Roman; and where they could, they changed their musical repertoire accordingly. Moulins had adopted the Roman rite by 1853, swapping its Gallican chant books for the floridity of the new (1851) Reims-Cambrai edition of Gregorian chant; as we have seen, the choir switched to singing sixteenth-century polyphonic repertoire in the mid-1860s.⁷⁹ The Régnier musical desiderata, then, could not have been better designed if the intention had all along been to reward the most conservative bishops.

The question of who should oversee religion proved problematic for the early Third Republic government, with ministerial responsibility shuffled several times between “arts and education” and “law and order.” Maîtrise funding was anomalous, in that from 1884 it rested with Fine Arts as a strictly musical phenomenon, while the rest of “religion” was overseen by another ministry.⁸⁰ These shifts, overlaps, and complexities of oversight indicate the difficulty of dealing with an organization such as the Catholic Church, which constituted a world in itself. By the early 1890s, however, ministerial patience with Moulins was wearing thin. Ironically, the Ralliement year of 1892 saw an especially chill wind blow at inspection time, when, in a move that appears unique within the inspection regime, someone at the Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts, then headed by the radical Republican Léon Bourgeois, took an editorial pen to the effusive report by Henri Maréchal quoted at the head of this section. The rough draft prepared by the Office of Fine Arts has an entire paragraph excised (see fig. 1). The draft fair copy suggests that the passage was reinstated and then, after a temporary change of heart, was progressively cut back to reflect the original decision (see fig. 2). Maréchal’s compliments about the quality of the singing, the mastering of rare historical repertoire, and Chérion’s talents as a maître de chapelle all disappeared.⁸¹

What remained of Maréchal’s report was almost entirely critical, focusing on music teaching standards and methods. Moreover, quality of performance was now mentioned only in the negative, at the end of the report and in relation to Chérion’s overemphasis on rehearsal for the purposes of liturgy, as opposed to rehearsal for purely musical or music-theoretical benefit.⁸² Maréchal’s framing of the document, with excellence foregrounded before critique, was rendered null and void, but at the same time the idea that the maîtrise was just another kind of music school was exposed as fallacious (or worse) by ministerial censorship in ways that Maréchal seems to have wanted to mitigate.

It is unlikely that Maréchal ever knew how his views had been misrepresented. Neither can it be proven that censorship of his report was punishment for Chérion’s continued resistance to inspections from the “public education” half of the ministry (although the episode of February 1892 would have been fresh in the minds of all involved). Given the rarity of an inspection report as negative as this one, however, the possibility should not be discounted.

On March 4, 1902, Péronneau brought his fabricated church-state rivalry between the two music schools in Moulins to a national stage, and this time the maîtrise lost its grant. The official landscape had deteriorated markedly in the intervening decade, with polarization of Republic and church entrenched by the ongoing Dreyfus Affair and the impact of the July 1, 1901, “Loi des Associations,” which liberalized secular societies while doing the opposite for religious orders. Discussion in the Deputies (lower house) underscored both the power of historical actors who can reach across from local to national spheres of influence, and the powerlessness of local institutions when weaponized to political ends in a national parliament. Teaming up with his former mayor Pierre Ville and with Alfred Massé, a deputy from the neighboring department of the Nièvre (which also had a funded cathedral maîtrise), Péronneau forced a vote to save 8,000 francs by canceling funding for the maîtrises at both Moulins and Nevers. Unsurprisingly, this decision made the front page of the Messager: Mémorial de l’Allier, where the vote and the summary minute appeared.⁸³ On behalf of his colleagues, Péronneau proposed an amendment to chapter 18 of the budget for Fine Arts, concerning provincial music education. His speech to the Deputies started with familiar musical questions relating to public visibility and utility, moving on to reference the 1892 town council vote in Moulins. The summary minute reads as follows:

Losing the zero-sum game of 1892 still rankled with Péronneau. He was careful, however, to distance himself from the council’s protest and decision. Indeed, presenting them as though he had nothing to do with either was a move as inspired as it was disingenuous.

The more damaging aspect of Péronneau’s speech, though, and one that whipped the radical Republicans of the chamber into a frenzy, was his claim that the Moulins maîtrise was actually a private school run by a religious order, masquerading as a site of musical training (with just one music teacher as against ten generalist teachers) and therefore receiving government money under false pretenses. He mentioned the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes and then, in a passage dealing with more recent history, referenced the college at Bellevue-Yzeure. As proof of the complicity of a government-funded maîtrise with this college, Péronneau cited the Jesuits’ choice of the “director of the maîtrise,” Charles Senevey, to “replace” them in 1901 after the order’s expulsion from France.⁸⁵ He could not, he said, speak in detail for Nevers, but he understood the situation there to be similar. These charges were incendiary. In its closing section on congregations, the tone of the Loi des Associations shifted from positive to punitive: religious congregations became illegal unless decided otherwise by the state (Article 18), and no member of a congregation could teach in or direct an educational establishment (Article 14). Quite apart from their stubborn refusal to be stopped in their teaching vocation, the Jesuits had been implicated as ostensible coordinators of a military cover-up against Dreyfus that had so grievously undermined France’s probity and the legitimacy of its military courts.⁸⁶ In short, if there was a moment when an attack on Jesuits could be weaponized in the service of a secondary religious target, this was it.

In the Deputies, when the Minister of Public Education and Fine Arts, Georges Leygue, said he had no knowledge of this matter and promised an inquiry, Péronneau was unmoved: “The Minister can pursue his inquiry. I shall confidently await the results: they will not contradict what I have set out. But I must insist on the budget cut; there will be time to ask for its reinstatement in the Senate, if necessary. (Hear, hear! on the left [of the chamber]).”⁸⁷ Given the attendance that day, 246 votes would have been enough to pass the motion; it gained 255. In the Senate, the comte de Blois defended his home cathedral, Nevers, but the counterargument of fellow senator Élisée Deandréis prevailed—that the maîtrises had run their course, superseded by an extensive national network of secular music schools. Asked (sarcastically) whether all the maîtrises should be defunded, he replied, “Why not?”⁸⁸

After the 1902 Deputies vote, there was shock in the musical press and in some of the general newspapers. Moderate Republicans were aghast. In Le Temps, in an unusual front-page editorial on music, dripping with sarcasm, the writer warned against the conflation of religion and clericalism:

These were strong words that brought the politics of musical Catholicism to the breakfast tables of over thirty thousand households.⁹⁰ The author continued his assault: the government wanted to destroy the maîtrises and was determined (“s’acharner”) to finish the job; doing so was antidemocratic (meaning anti-Republican) because it would deprive needy children of a chance at social mobility; and it was anti-artistic because of the foundational nature of maîtrises for professionals in secular musical life. (He cited the opinion of Pierre Gailhard, opera singer and now director at the Palais Garnier, who had started out in a maîtrise.) The author’s implication was that the amendment constituted mere anticlerical point scoring in that the money was paltry but the artistic and social damage potentially great, the aim also being to deny the maîtrises of both Moulins and Nevers legitimacy as “national” institutions.

These arguments, like those of Dubois, appeared threadbare by 1902. Their premises had been significantly undermined by Charles Beauquier in the Deputies back in December 1883, when he objected to funding even a rump of six maîtrises. Beauquier’s tack was highly ironic: he adopted the hard-line musical aesthetics of the most intransigent church reformers—those who argued that nothing beyond plainchant had a place in the liturgy—and fired it back at the moderate reformists and moderate Republicans alike, who wanted to hold on to church music in situ as a purified form of liturgical practice or as a living museum displaying French heritage. Radical Republican colleagues Georges Graux (Deputies) and Victor Schoelcher (Senate) had agreed in 1882 that the funding from the Ministry of Justice and Religion should be given to Fine Arts, but Schoelcher was equally determined that the best maîtrises should be included among recipients.⁹¹ The public rationale for the transfer was a fudge: “to encourage the development of music study.”⁹² Beauquier refused to accept the legitimacy of this addition of maîtrises to the budget. The only truly “religious music,” he said, was plainchant, which the state had no business supporting. Everything else was simply “music,” even when set to religious texts, and was therefore covered by the secular education system.⁹³ Maîtrises were, accordingly, surplus to official requirements as musical training grounds.

Beauquier was a formidable opponent: while not a professional musician he was well respected for his Philosophie de la musique of 1865 and a raft of other specialist writings.⁹⁴ Moreover, the Régnier committee’s idea that the best maîtrises functioned as sites of apprenticeship backfired because Beauquier was anti-religious as well as anticlerical and the idea of “training” cut both ways: was its target church music or liturgical understanding and spiritual awakening?⁹⁵ More generally, though, parliamentary arguments quickly trapped the pro-maîtrise lobby into a double bind: if, like Dubois, they tried to render maîtrises Republican-friendly by saying that they aided secular careers and social mobility, the riposte was that these needs were now being addressed sufficiently via different means; if they argued for maîtrises’ distinctiveness, then their ecclesiastical (or, worse, closet congregational) character overwhelmed all other considerations. Jean-Adrien de Conny had written in 1875 that the secret of musical success at Moulins was that maîtrise pupils stayed on after their voices broke because the cathedral gave them the opportunity to pursue their secondary education externally—which in practice meant the petit séminaire run by the Jesuits in Yzeure.⁹⁶ Before the 1880s and after the Separation, it was uncontentious to opine that daily life at a maîtrise helped set young boys on the path to priesthood. But from 1884, government funds were for music alone and were itemized as such as a condition of grant payment.⁹⁷ The more anticlerical the environment, the more unacceptable any overlap between these aims. Perhaps this is why the author at Le Temps avoided the Jesuit question in 1902: it was toxic.

As to whether Péronneau’s charge had any foundation: for the moment, the jury is out. After the law of March 29, 1880, had banned Jesuit education and thereby forced the closure of the Yzeure college, wealthy Catholics set up a replacement institution at Bellevue, and Jesuit priests returned to staff it. This was the college at which the cellist Charles Belin was teaching in 1903 and where any whiff of clericalism would be expediently waved aside at the town hall and by Préfet Briens. By 1901 students apparently included some from “the maîtrise,” but after promulgation of the Loi des Associations the teaching staff was replaced, now headed by Charles Senevey, to whom Péronneau referred in 1902.⁹⁸ Nothing in inspection or ministerial reports for the maîtrise in 1901 suggests a problem with Jesuit influence or misuse of government funds for clerical, rather than musical, purposes. Moreover, Senevey seems to have had no connection with the musical maîtrise, whose staff in 1901 included Magnasse as maître de chapelle, four music teachers, and the director (rather than the single musician of Péronneau’s claim).⁹⁹ One piece of direct evidence links the musical maîtrise with this college and its unauthorized Jesuits: a concert and sung mass of 1897 in celebration of Bernardin Realino.¹⁰⁰ There is no evidence of association, however, in the period after 1901. It is accordingly possible that, for whatever reason, Péronneau referenced the wrong Moulins maîtrise, linking the nonmusical one to the government grant for music. But even if true, in the heat of anticlerical debate such details would probably have had no impact on the outcome. Thus was the former councillor and then deputy mayor of a small French town able to finish at national level what he had started locally ten years earlier.

Following the Separation, in the Chamber of Deputies on February 19, 1906, Charles Beauquier sought reassurance that budget lines for all maîtrises—not just Moulins and Nevers—had been closed definitively in 1902. The answer was in the affirmative but the evidence of compliance is inconclusive.¹⁰¹ Neither the apparent clean cut of this moment, nor the industrial scale of the 1882 cuts, nor even the Separation itself should lull us into thinking that musical anticlericalism operated everywhere, or as a blanket policy.¹⁰² When it was present at all, anticlericalism aimed at Catholic music worked at different intensities in different orbits. The Moulins story is extreme because the axing of its funding entailed three attempts (1882, 1892, and 1902) amid increasing public exposure, and because in 1892 and 1902 Henri Péronneau held the institution to ransom as a model of anti-Republican practice, whether as a futile and elitist luxury (the bishop’s music) or as a training ground for clerical insurrection. Nothing suggests that practicing musicians, whether national or local, saw its activity in this light at any time between the 1860s and the Separation of 1905. They were perhaps naive in concentrating narrowly on music rather than on the precarity of the maîtrise network amid changing clerical politics; in any case, their voices in defense of the maîtrise as an institution were progressively crowded out of the conversation, whether through censorship (Maréchal) or through political outgunning in parliamentary chambers, where they could not even attempt to respond.

Nevertheless, if the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, venues for the final Moulins showdown, kept Republican/Catholic binaries firmly intact, more contingency and nuance is to be found backstage, between rival ministries, within combined ones, or at the Préfecture. These are the sites where we find anticlerical principles being bent and stretched to accommodate more immediately important or pragmatic concerns involving real people rather than institutions or abstract concepts (Chérion in 1883, the Belins in 1903–4). In addition, the instabilities of perpetually reorganized ministries seem to have benefitted the Moulins maîtrise more than they threatened it (Chérion’s behavior of February 1892). Its position was strong enough to resist all but the final parliamentary assault of 1902, which itself required the turbocharge of the Jesuit question to seal the matter. In the interim, at a national level Moulins had enjoyed a measure of insulation from those same anticlerical educational disputes because the 1884 system acted as a firewall, folding maîtrises into the uncontentious domain of secular music education and rewarding them according to exclusively artistic criteria. So long as this fiction was upheld by both clerical and governmental parties, stability reigned. Péronneau refused to play the game, exposed the fiction, and ensured that music experienced some of the destabilizing effects of the Separation before the Separation had even been decided. Meanwhile, however, the Moulins maîtrise began a new round of fundraising…