Curiously, it was in the Republican Senate that Ferry encountered insurmountable resistance, the main representative of which was Jules Simon, the former council president of May 16, an illustrious irremovable senator. at the same time as a notorious spiritualist philosopher. Jules Simon, who was from the Republican left and who was hailed as one of the most respected fathers of the regime. raised. as rapporteur for the disputed project. a protest motivated by the tradition of freedom, the very soul of the Republic.
You have no right, he says, to impose any doctrine. You have only one right:to love freedom, to propagate it_
He reproached the republicans ferries for wanting to make a prison of the Republic. Article 7 was:unnecessary, dangerous and supremely impolitic. Dangerous, because the Republic could not without peril give itself the appearance of restricting freedom; and it was singularly restricting it to create a category of excluded people, whom the law struck as suspects” and not as culprits.
This debate between Jules Simon and Ferry threw the Upper House into a state of turmoil difficult to describe. And Jules Simon could say to his adversary:
Judge what you do in France by the state where you put the Senate.
In France, passions raged. Ferry paid in person. During a ministerial tour from Bordeaux to Lyon. by Toulouse, Montpellier, Marseilles, in September 1879, he was delighted to observe on the spot the end - it was his word - of the populations of the south and even of Lyon in the article 7. It is, he wrote to Mrs. Ferry a word, a republican saint, that article 7. Long live article 71 this cry is really, I believe it, the cry of France.
It was during this epic struggle that one of Ferry's top lieutenants. Paul Bert, made the famous Auxerre toast which is often cited as a colorful sample of a certain combative and anticlerical turn of mind of the time. Paul Bert, a learned physiologist, was a solid Burgundian with a radiant face and speech. easy, with a mind without nuances, and that one would have taken, according to J. Dietz, for some M. Homais (the pharmacist of Madame Bovary) who had risen in rank from the pharmaceutical dispensary to the laboratory of the Sorbonne. /P>
Noble character, ardent patriot. he was endowed with all the illusions of the most naive scientism Here is the choice piece of the toast he gave to the Minister of Worship. as Deputy for Yonne:
I drink to the destruction of phylloxera, the phylloxera that hides under the vine, and the other, the phylloxera hiding under the vine leaf. For the first, we have carbon disulphide; for the second, article 7 of the Ferry law. When we have article 7, we will try it, but if it does not meet our expectations, we will not hesitate to seek another more energetic insecticide to save France.
These were the undeniably humorous terms with which Lieutenant de Ferry expressed the anticlerical energy that inspired the whole team.