We must add that the schoolmaster is urged in this same direction by sentiments of a less general character, which nevertheless have an influence of their own. He is placed in his commune in direct opposition to the priest, the only person very often who is, like himself, in that place a man of some little education. Hence rivalry and a struggle for influence. Now the priest, by a series of historical incidents, is a more or less warm partisan sometimes of monarchy but almost always of aristocracy. He is a member of a body that once was an estate of the realm, and he is persuaded that his corporation is still an estate of the realm, notwithstanding all that has happened. If the existing order is regulated by the _concordat_, the existing order recognises his corporation as a body legitimatised by the State, since it treats it on the same terms as the magistracy and the army. If the existing order is one based on the separation of State and Church, his corporation appears to him still more to be an estate of the realm, because being forced into an attitude of solid organisation, and recognising no limitations of frontier, it becomes a collective personage which, not without peril, but also not without a certain measure of success, has often ventured to cross swords with the State itself.
As the priest then belongs to an order endowed with an historic authority which is nevertheless distinct from, and in no wise a delegation from, the authority of the people, the priest cannot fail more or less definitely and consciously to adopt an attitude of mind favourable to aristocracy.
The school teacher, his rival, is thrown then all the more inevitably towards the adoption of democratic principles, and he embraces them with a fervour into which enters jealousy quite as much as conviction. They mean more to him than even to an eighteenth century philosopher, because he has a much greater personal interest in believing them, the interest of personal dislike and animosity; for it is his belief that everything taught by the priest is the pure invention of ingenious oppressors who wish to enslave the people in order to consolidate their own tyranny; and that is his reason for professing philosophical ideas resuscitated from the teaching of Diderot, and Holbach. For the school teacher it is almost inconceivable that the priest should be anything but a rascal.