The stand taken by the Holy See was looked upon by the French Government as a declaration of war, and it accordingly began to exercise newer methods of retaliation. On December 12, 1906, the Papal Nuncio, Mgr. Montagnini, who was then in Paris guarding the archives of the Holy See, was expelled from France, the Nunciature was surrounded, and the papers found therein were seized. It was in vain that the Vatican protested: the Government pursued its oppressive policy with all the more vigor. On December 15, Cardinal Richard was expelled from his archiepiscopal residence, and later the seminarians were driven from the seminaries. The position of the Catholics in France was thus rendered humiliating and desperate. They still continued, as they do at present, to hold divine service in the churches, but always with the eyes of a hostile Government fixed upon them, scrutinizing their actions, and criticizing their words. The clergy, deprived of their usual stipend, are forced to seek in various kinds of employment the necessary sustentation of life except when the generosity of the faithful enables them to observe the discipline of the Church which ordinarily forbids the clergy to seek their support elsewhere than from the altar. One of the effects of the separation law was that the Holy Father was liberated from the vexatious interference of the French Government in the appointment of Bishops. Accordingly on February 25. 1906, the Holy Father himself not only appointed fifteen new Bishops but even consecrated them with his own hands in St. Peter's in Rome. It was the first time that a Pope consecrated so large a number of prelates at one time. The fall of the year 1906 was marked by the creation of a new cabinet of which M. Georges Clemenceau was Premier. The new cabinet included among its members anti-clericals of the most aggressive kind, such as Briand, Doumergue, Picquart, and Viviani. It was this Viviani who, a few years previously had uttered the notorious boast: "We have at last extinguished the lights of Heaven." Georges Clemenceau has been a rabid foe to Religion and to the Church from the very beginning of his political career. In 1880 he founded for this purpose a journal, "_La Justice_," and was a powerful advocate of aggression during the Dreyfus trial. From 1883 to 1893 he was looked upon as the master of the political situation in France. In 1901 he founded a weekly paper, "_Le Bloc_." It was this paper which gave the name to the infamous party which engineered the present anti-Catholic war in France. He has been identified with all the oppressive measures by which the French Government has, of late, striven to vex the French Church. It was only in accordance with his deserts that he himself was driven in disgrace from his leadership in the fall of 1909, when he was succeeded by the no less aggressive but more hypocritical M. Briand.