What, however, had more practical effect in turning the scale of public opinion against the Papacy, its nominees and believers as servants and paid employees of the State, was the fact that in all the practical affairs of French life the Catholic Church, as represented by its ecclesiastical hierarchy, had taken the wrong side. Theoretical or theological difficulties would never have upset the regard of the French people for the National Church. But, time after time, the Clerical party ranged itself with the reactionists, throwing over all its wisest counsellors, whose devotion to the Church had never been questioned, when they advised standing by the cause of the people, and relied solely upon the judgment of bigoted Jesuits. Zola, whom these creatures hated, showed in his "Germinal," thoroughgoing materialist as he was, what a noble part a priest of the Church could play, when the young ecclesiastic stands between the strikers who form part of his flock and the soldiers who are about to fire upon them. Individuals might thus rise up to and above the level of their creed, but the Church in France, as a whole, was represented by men of God who were a good deal worse than men of Belial. Nor was this all. They pursued a policy of relentless obscurantism. Their object was not to develop education but to stunt its growth: not to teach the truth but to foster lies. So manifest was the determination to take no high view of their duties that such a man as the venerable Dr. Leplay, a Catholic of Catholics whose religious convictions did not prevent him from becoming a master of the theories of Marx, lamented that his Church was proving itself wholly incompetent to cope with or to stem what, as a Christian, he recognised was the rising tide of infidelity. Of this infidelity, the free-thinker and champion of secularism, Clemenceau, was a type and a prominent example. He saw the Church as a pernicious influence. His feeling towards it was even more vehement than that of Voltaire or Gambetta. "_Écrasez l'infâme!_" "_Le cléricalisme voilà l'ennemi!_" If thought was to be free, if Frenchmen were to be emancipated from superstition and intolerance, the power of the Catholic Church must be weakened and, if possible, destroyed. For him, in this matter, compromise was impossible. His begettings, his surroundings, his education, his profession, his political life all made him relentless on this point. Behind the Duc de Broglie, behind the persecutor of Dreyfus, behind the pretender Boulanger, behind reaction in all its forms hid the sinister figure of the unscrupulous power, working _perinde ac cadaver_ against all that was noblest in France, against all that was highest in the ideals of the Republic. And if Clemenceau knew well that under all circumstances and at every turn of events the Catholic Church was the enemy of France and of himself, the Church had no doubt at all that Clemenceau was its most formidable foe in French political life.