But the Catholic right maintained its formula:school without God, which tomorrow would be, by virtue of a sort of law of political gravity, school against God:It said to Ferry:you are violating the freedom of the father of a believing family to provide its children with a Catholic education; you lead to amorality, political and social anarchy:
You'll make men who won't believe in anything, not even you.
We can see the seriousness of the questions raised by this third project. These dispositions touched the depths of souls; they brought to light a basic and seemingly irremediable misunderstanding between two Frances, aggravated as it was by the ulterior motives that the Catholics fatally lent to Ferry and his team, by virtue of their very philosophy.
The project adopted by the Chamber in December 1880 was rejected by the Senate in June 1881. We saw in the Upper Chamber the Duc de Broglie, a monarchist and Catholic, who denounced school neutrality as an enterprise against freedom of conscience, finding as an ally the former President of the Council of 16 Niai, the victim of Mac-Mahon and the right:Jules Simon. the illustrious republican spiritualist who had already been the opponent of article 7. Jules Simon tabled an amendment which demanded in primary school the teaching of duties towards God and towards the Fatherland.
Compulsory and secular schooling was, says Jules Simon, an excellent thing, but there were some its republican proponents of the tendencies which alarmed the public:certain suspicions had been born, had spread, which it was appropriate to dissipate...
The name of God does not scare you, I think. Well, why not say so?
Such was the boot brought to Ferry by Jules Simon. Ferry parried it very cleverly, asking which God it was:was it the God of the Christians, the purely spiritualist God (that of Jules Simon), the God of Malebranche or the God of Descartes? How, continued Ferry, could the teaching of the teacher remain parallel, on this question of God, with the teaching of the priest of the Church?
Did Jules Simon hope to make the 50,000 or 60,000 public teachers as many Savoyard curates in the manner of Émile de Rousseau? Public teachers were not prepared for this, but they were perfectly prepared to teach positive practical morality, drawn from everyday incidents and from the history of France:
Ferry concluded incisively, it's not about voting for or against God, we don't vote for God in assemblies