FALSE
773
FALSE
account of ill-health, the law bears his name, and
rightly, for it was his work.
The aim of this law was twofold. It dealt with both primary and secondary education. In the first case, to conduct a primary school, a Frenchman had to be at least twenty-one years of age, with three years' experience in an elementary school, or a certifi- cate from a commission appointed by the Minister of Education. For members of religious congregations in girls' schools the lettres d'obcdience took the place of this certificate. In the second case the law required the candidate to be twenty-five years of age, to have had five years of experience, and a degree of Bachelor of Letters, or a diploma from a ministerial commission. The new council of the university represented the leading philosophical opinions of France; besides a commission composed of university men proper it in- cluded 3 bishops, 1 rabbi, 1 Protestant minister, 3 councillors of the high court of appeals (cour de cassa- tion), 3 councillors of state, 3 members of the insti- tute, and 3 members of the board of free education. In two years' time 257 free schools sprang up, and it is from this law, the last remnants of which the French Parliament is now (1908) preparing to abrogate, that dates the development of the Catholic teaching orders in France. In a consistoria! address (20 May, 1850) Pius IX praised it as a measure of progress. Those Catholics who opposed, as a matter of principle, all State education were disappointed at the passage of the law, and their views found an ardent exponent in Louis Veuillot. In the Constituent and in the Legis- lative Assembly, as minister and as deputy, de Falloux always maintained that France was obliged to protect Pius IX as a temporal ruler; he was one of the prime movers of the expedition de Rome. During the .Second Empire, he withdrew from public life. In 185(5 he was elected to the French Academy. In the discus- sions which took place in royalist circles during the early years of the Third Republic, de Falloux invari- ably declared in favour of the national flag (the tri- color) and in an article in the " Correspondant " (1873) he insisted that neither as a policy nor as a party cry should the monarchists put forth the idea of a coun- ter-revolution. SpuUer, however, declared that be- cause of his conspicuous ability as a statesman de Falloux was one of the most dangerous opponents the Revolutionary party had to encounter during the nineteenth century. It was on the basis of liberty that de Falloux desired to combat the false principles of the Revolution. He believed that politics should take into consideration not only the "thesis" or prin- ciple, but al.so the "hypothesis" or actual conditions, and that certain too extreme formulas or too exacting claims were sure to prejudice rather than help the cause of the Church and the monarchy. The posthu- mous publication of his "Memoirs" in 1888 revived earlier controversies between the "Correspondant" and the "Llnivers" and provoked a sharp reply from Eugene Veuillot.
De Falloux, Mt'moires d'un roualistc (Paris, 1888); de Ma- ZADK, ^opposition Toyalisle: Berryer, Vitlile, Falloux (Pari.*', 1874); De Lacombe, Lf.i debuts de la loi dc 1850 (Paris. 1901); Veuillot, Le comle de Falloux et scs memoires (Paris, 1888). Georges Goyau.
False Decretals, or The Decretal-s op the
PsKiiio-lsiiiDRE, is a name given to certain apoc-
ryphal papul letters contained in a collection of canon
laws composed about the middle of the ninth century
by an author who uses the pseudonym of Isidore Mer-
cator, in the opening preface to the collection. For
the student of this collection, the best, indeed the only
useful edition, is that of Hinschius, " Decretales
Pseudo-Isidoriana;" (Leipzig, 1803). The figures in
parenthesis occurring during the course of this article
refer the reader to the edition of Hinschius. The
name "False Decretals" is sometimes extended to
cover not only the papal letters forged by Isidore, and
contained in his collection, but the whole collection,
although it contains other documents, authentic or
apocryphal, written before Isidore's time.
The Collection of Isidore falls under three headings: (1) A list of sixty apocryphal letters or decrees attri- buted to the popes from St. Clement (88-97) to Mel- chiades (311-314) inclusive. Of these sixty letters fifty-eight are forgeries ; they begin with a letter from Aurelius of Carthage requesting Pope Damasus (366- 384) to send him the letters of his predecessors in the chair of the Apostles; and this is followed by a reply in which Damasus assiu-es Aurelius that the desired letters were being sent. This correspondence was meant to give an air of truth to the false decretals, and was the work of Isidore. (2) A treatise on the Primi- tive Church and on the Council of Nicsea, written by Isidore, and followed by the authentic canons of fifty- four councils. It should be remarked, however, that among the canons of the second Council of Seville (page 438) canon vii is an interpolation aimed against chorepiscopi. (3) The letters mainly of thirty-three popes, from Silvester (314-33.5) to Gregory II (715- 731). Of these about thirty letters are forgeries, while all the others are authentic. This is but a very rough description of their contents and touches only on the more salient points of a most intricate literary ques- tion.
Their Apocryphal Character. — Nowadays every one agrees that these so-calleti papal letters are for- geries. These documents, to the number of about one himdred, appeared suddenly in the ninth century and are nowhere mentioned before that time. The most ancient MSS. of them that we have are from the ninth century, and their method of composition, of which we shall treat later, shows that they were made up of passages and quotations of which we know the sources; and we are thus in a position to prove that the Pseudo-Isidore makes use of documents written long after the times of the popes to whom he attri- butes them. Thus it happens that popes of the first three centuries are made to quote documents that did not appear until the fourth or fifth century; and later popes up to Gregory I (590-604) are found employing documents dating from the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, and the early part of the ninth. Then again there are endless anachronisms. The Middle Ages were deceived by this huge forgery, but during the Renaissance men of learning and the canonists gen- erally began to recognize the fraud. Two cardinals, John of Torquemada (1468) and Nicholas of Cusa (1464), declared the earlier documents to be forgeries, especially those purporting to be by Clement and Ana- cletus. Then suspicion began to grow. Erasmus (d. 1536) and canonists who had joined the Reformation, such as Charles du Moulin (d. 15(i8), or Catholic canon- ists like Antoine le Conte (d. 1586), and after them the Centuriators of Magdeburg, in 1559, put the question squarely before the learned world. Nevertheless the official edition of the "Corpus Juris", in 1580, upheld the genuineness of the false decretals, many frag- ments of which are to be found in the " Decretum" of Gratian. As a partial explanation of this it is enough to recall the case of Antonio Agustin (d. 1586), the greatest canonist of that period. Agustin seriously doubted the genuineness of the documents, but he never formally repudiated them. He felt he had not sufficient proof at hand, so he simply shirked the diffi- culty. And it is also to be remembered that, owing to the irritating controversies of the time, anything like an impartial and methodical discussion of such a sub- ject was an utter impossibility. In 1628 the Protest- ant Blondel published his decisive study, " Pseudo- Isidorus et Turrianus vapulantes". Since then the apocryphal nature of the decretals of Isidore has been an established historical fact. The last of the false de- cretals that had escaped the keen criticism of Blondel
