L'Affaire des Fiches de délation (“affair of the cards of denunciation”) was a political scandal in France in 1904-1905 in which it was discovered that the militantly anticlerical War Minister under Emile Combes

Émile Combes

Émile Combes was a French statesman who led the Bloc des gauches's cabinet from June 1902 – January 1905.-Biography:Émile Combes was born in Roquecourbe, Tarn. He studied for the priesthood, but abandoned the idea before ordination. His anti-clericalism would later lead him into becoming a...

, General Louis André

Louis André

Louis André was France's Minister of War from 1900 until 1904. Loyal to the laïque Third Republic, he was anti-Catholic, militantly anticlerical, a Freemason and was implicated in the Affaire Des Fiches, a scandal in which he received reports from Masonic groups on which army officers were...

, was determining promotions based on a huge card index on public officials, detailing which were Catholic and who attended Mass

Mass

Mass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...

, with a view to preventing their promotions. It is also called in French "L'Affaire des casseroles"; casserole being slang for spy.

Both Combes and André were Freemasons, and much of the information had been collected by the Masonic Grand Orient de France

Grand Orient de France

The Grand Orient de France is the largest of several Masonic organizations in France and the oldest in Continental Europe, founded in 1733.-Foundation:...

. Discovery of this by the media undermined the government.

Further reading

Porch, Douglas The March to the Marne: The French Army, 1871-1914, Ch. 6 "The affaire des fiches" pp. 92-104, 1981 Cambridge University Press