In the 1860s, alongside his virulent opposition to the Second Empire, Gustave Courbet produces paintings, pamphlets and illustrations in the service of his anticlericalism. Echoing the Return from the Conference, refused because of its immorality both by the 1863 Salon and by the Salon des Refusés – the painting depicts a group of drunken priests along a country road – the painter published in 1868 a booklet entitled Les Curés en goguette (Priests on a spree) with six illustrations he thought of as extensions of the original painting as well as polemical interventions, of a satirical nature, in the tradition of anticlerical caricature. But this series of images, which has not been much studied, intersects with other Courbet preoccupations : realism, truth, religious freedom, the hold of religion on the State, the intransigence of the Ultramontanes. In many ways, Courbet participates of an on-going movement secularising society, the start of an organised anti-Church militancy.