Singing through Anticlerical Storms: the Choir School at Moulins Cathedral, c.1880-1905

Abstract

The one thing musicologists of nineteenth-century France are sure to know about its cathedral music is that Revolutionary fervor wiped out every choir school in the country. What is less well known is what happened next: how these institutions got back on their feet, and how they fared toward the end of the nineteenth century amid another wave of attempts to clip their wings or force their closure. What was it about choir schools (maîtrises) that so vexed radical Republicans in Third Republic France? Why did they become a political flashpoint and a political football? What other forces were in play? Answers to these questions help us understand religious versus secular politics in a country where Catholic practice had been State-funded via the Napoleonic Concordat, but where radical Republicans from the 1880s onward ensured that anticlericalism—the imperative to subdue religious authority and moral leadership—prevailed over moderate Republican approaches to Church/State relations.