Nineteenth-century state-church conflicts were bourgeois-democratic struggles against reactionary residues
Evidence
“Kulturkampf ” was the name given to the struggle waged by Bismarck, in the 1870s, with Liberal support, against Catholic opposition to Prussian hegemony. The Dreyfus case in France, which lasted from Dreyfus’ first condemnation in 1894. to his final acquittal in 1906, coincided with a major battle fully to laicise the French educational system and had the effect of polarising French society into a militaristic, pro-Catholic, anti-Semitic Right, and an anti-Catholic Liberal and Socialist Left. Both Kulturkampf and Dreyfus case can also be seen as aspects of the bourgeois-democratic struggle against the residues of reactionary social forces. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1830
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to Foucault’s genealogical method and to how religious institutions function as reactionary residues — relevant for later Islamophobia readings on secular state and religious minorities.