Émile Combes

France state institutions Liberalism and republicanism France France 1835–1921 ○ Natural causes

Premier of the Bloc des gauches who closed congregational schools and opened the way to the separation of church and state

Born at Roquecourbe in the Tarn in 1835, the son of a tailor, he was tonsured in a seminary but abandoned the priesthood and became a doctor at Pons. An anticlerical, he became a freemason, was elected senator for the Charente-Inférieure in 1885 and served as minister of public instruction in 1895–1896. Succeeding Waldeck-Rousseau as president of the council in June 1902, he applied the Associations Act of 1901 strictly with the support of the Bloc des gauches and passed the 1904 law on the congregations, so that nearly 10,000 religious schools were closed. His years in office also brought reforms such as an eight-hour day for miners and shorter military service. The Affaire des Fiches, in which officers' religious practice was spied on, forced him out in January 1905, but the Radical leaders hailed him as the real originator of the separation of church and state.

Also known as: Émile Justin Louis Combes

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