This situation was not without its advantages to the French Clericals. Between the years 1899 and 1905, when the Bagdad Railway controversy was at its height, a serious domestic controversy was raging in France. In a bitter fight to extirpate Clericalism the Republican ministries of Waldeck-Rousseau and Émile Combes had put through law after law to curb the power of the Church and to break up the influence of the religious orders. The Clericals were waging a losing battle. But perhaps the last crushing blows might be warded off by resorting to a favorite maneuver of Louis Napoleon—the diversion of popular attention from domestic affairs to foreign policy. If Republicans and Monarchists, Socialists and bourgeois Liberals, Radicals and Conservatives, Free-Masons and Clericals, could be aroused against the German advance in Turkey, a common outburst of national pride might obscure, for a time at least, the domestic war on organized Catholicism. Therefore Clerical writers in France warned of the menace of the Bagdad Railway to the Russian Alliance, to the advance of French commerce, and to the ancient prerogatives in the East. “It is Germany, preëminent at Constantinople,” said an anonymous writer in the _Revue des deux mondes_, “which blocks the future of Pan-Slavism in the East; it is Germany, installed in Kiao-chau, which can forestall Muscovite expansion toward the Pacific; it is Germany which, in the East and Far East, seeks to undermine our religious protectorate. Faced by the same adversary, it is natural that France and Russia should build up a common defence.” That France should not desert her ally Russia or her own prerogatives in the protectorate of Near Eastern missions is self-evident. “The protectorate over Catholics is for us, in short, a source of material advantage!”[33] THE BAGDAD RAILWAY CLAIMS FRENCH SUPPORTERS