I ELDEST DAUGHTER OF THE CHURCH
We begin with the illusory stability of a Church with venerable roots but whose spiritual dynamism arguably lay in the past too. Since the time of St Louis (1226–70) French kings have been ‘the most Christian’, a term extended to France itself. Since the reign of Philip the Fair (1285–1314), France was known as ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’ and the French as God’s chosen people. The Church and the French monarchy were linked in a hierarchy that reached down from God in His heavenly kingdom. Throne and altar were inseparable, with senior clerics omnipresent at solemn public occasions well into the French Revolution.1
Higher clergy dominated the coronation ceremonies at Rheims. On the afternoon of 10 June 1774, Louis XVI attended vespers to prepare him for the following day’s long proceedings. The cathedral had already filled at four in the morning for ceremonies that commenced at six a.m. Louis took several oaths, silently praying as he carefully emphasised each word in Latin. He promised to protect the Church and to extirpate heretics, dipping his voice for this part since it did not accord with the sentiments of the late eighteenth century. The regalia were blessed and Louis was girded with the sword of Charlemagne, with which he was obliged to protect the Church, widows and orphans. He prostrated himself on a square of violet velvet, while the litanies of the saints were said over him. Kneeling before the aged archbishop la Roche-Aymon, Louis was anointed with six unctions, his gloves and ring were blessed, and he was handed Charlemagne’s sceptre. He could touch people for scrofula, which he did a few days later.
The coronation proper was attended by the massed peerage. As the crown was held just above Louis XVI’s head, the archbishop proclaimed: ‘May God crown you with the crown of glory and of justice…and you will come to the everlasting crown.’ Sitting on his throne in his new blue robe with the fleur-de-lis, Louis was now the ‘rex christianissimus’, the most Christian King of the Church’s ‘eldest daughter’ of France. The doors were opened to enable the people to see the new king. Birds were released and trumpets blew as the archbishop declaimed: ‘Vivat rex in aeternum.’ The ceremonies finished with a mass and the Te Deum.2
Clergy were very visible in eighteenth-century France, especially in the towns. To take one not untypical example, there were twelve hundred in Toulouse, a city of about fifty-three thousand people. In Angers, one in sixty of its thirty-four thousand inhabitants were clerics, not counting seminarians and the like. Clerics participated in all major public occasions, singing Te Deums to celebrate a royal birth or military victory; they interceded with God to avert man-made and natural disasters. Chaplains accompanied the fleets on dangerous voyages and administered the last rites to soldiers dying on the battlefields. Dedicated religious orders negotiated with pirates and Islamic rulers who had enslaved Christian captives. Unfortunates condemned to death received sacramental consolation even if they did not want it. Since we have been effectively deafened by ambient noise it is easy to forget that this was a sensitive auditory culture. The peal of church bells marked sacred days, invasions, fires and storms.3 The feasts of the Church gave the year articulation and meaning. The French clergy were not like Lutheran pastors in Frederick the Great’s Prussia, who had become little more than state officials, but they had various quasi-governmental functions.4 In the countryside, priests relayed government pronouncements after the Sunday sermon, often literally interpreting the high French of officialdom into the low patois (or foreign languages such as German or Spanish) spoken by their parishioners. Priests recorded the most rudimentary information on the lives of the king’s subjects. Religious orders virtually controlled education, with many future revolutionaries indebted to Jesuit or Oratorian schoolmasters for their easy Latinity and knowledge of the politics of Roman antiquity.
The clergy were responsible for setting the moral tone in society in general, with these functional merits of religion being blindingly obvious even to sceptics such as Voltaire. There was virtual unanimity on the need for Hell to stop the servants stealing the spoons: anyone who cast doubt on the reality of eternal torment was certain to experience it.5 The clergy tried to enforce Sunday as a day of rest and prayer and the Lenten fast, fighting back the pernicious influence of village tavern-keepers who offered men rival consolations. They denounced games of chance, loose women and rotten literature. They had to walk a fine line between curbing practices that made the Church look ridiculous to smart opinion in an age so concerned with reconciling reason and revelation, and alienating their flocks by outlawing customs which made abstract belief meaningful and tangible to them.
Historians have made various attempts to test the depth of religious conviction, an exercise as precise as encountering warm and chilly areas while swimming in an ocean. There seems to have been an increase in bastards born to servants, judging by the numbers of foundlings left outside the church doors. This was probably more indicative of rising grain prices than what these servants believed. Likewise, more and more couples resorted to contraception, but this may have reflected an upward valuation of children. The diminution in testamentary demand for masses for the repose of one’s soul may speak to changes in how people regarded their own deaths, with the Church failing to convince them of the imminence of hellfire. It has been equally well argued that, urban sophisticates apart, most people may have had a more intelligent and personal comprehension of their faith than at any time since the Middle Ages.6
The clerical Estate was self-administering and self-taxing. Its 130,000 members were exempt from taxation, instead voting ‘free gifts’, amounting to up to 12 per cent of their revenues, at its five-yearly General Assemblies to bellicose or spendthrift monarchs. Between 1715 and 1788 this gift amounted to 3,600,000 livres, rising to an annual average of 5,700,000 livres under Louis XVI. Land and tithes meant that the Church was immensely rich, although this wealth was so unevenly distributed as to cause widespread resentment. The incomes of the 135 bishops varied immensely, from ten thousand livres per annum to two hundred thousand. One bishop in 1789 was from a bourgeois background; the rest were aristocrats, 65 per cent of them from families whose nobility emerged in illustrious mists before the year 1400. Bishops from leading aristocratic dynasties started well up the income scale, making a couple of strategic leaps to achieve the big money on offer at Rheims or Strasbourg. They pursued a variety of vocations according to their class, inclinations and temperaments. A few, such as Bernis or Brienne, continued the tradition of Mazarin, Richelieu and Fleury as first-rate administrators, diplomats and politicians. Brienne was sufficiently indistinguishable from his enlightened friends that in 1781, when his candidacy for promotion was being canvassed, Louis XVI famously averred ‘that it was necessary that an archbishop of Paris should at least believe in God’.
Most bishops were efficient administrators of their dioceses, keeping their clergy up to the mark, or improving the local infrastructure with canals and roads. A few had the stereotypical vices of their class, preferring feasting, hunting or loose women, the stock-in-trade of anticlerical jibes over the centuries. Some of them never condescended to visit their dioceses, with a fifteen years’ absence being a record many thought scandalous, although that did not mean they were not profitably employed, just that they did not like life in the provincial boonies or sticks. However, the majority organised diocesan seminaries or clerical conferences and routinely visited their clergy with sufficient investigative rigour as to be widely resented. The remainder of the six thousand or so higher clergy consisted of cathedral canons. These were aristocratic oligarchies, of say fifty canons per cathedral, whose function was to ensure that worship there was appropriately magnificent. This left them with much time on their hands for such hobbies as antiquarianism, botany, charity or visiting relatives, which, taken together with combined incomes of, say, the 3,500,000 livres that ninety canons shared at Chartres, caused envy.
Half the French clergy were regulars, that is, monks or nuns, indeed 60 to 70 per cent of regulars were women. After 1768, monks had to be over twenty-one, nuns aged over eighteen. There was a decline in entrance to the traditional orders, some of whose houses were inhabited by fewer than ten monks. Across eighteenth-century Europe monarchs cast a beady eye over religious orders whose wealth might be used to extend the network of parishes, provide education, once the monks had been converted into teachers, or boost the state’s revenues in general. In France a commission on the regulars led to the suppression of eight orders, and the closure of 458 monasteries out of the three thousand or so in the country. The very wealthy abbeys and convents of France represented a supplementary source of income for aristocratic bishops. The bishopric of Orléans brought in forty-two thousand livres per annum, but two abbeys added a further sixty-five thousand livres to the bishop’s income.7 Apart from being the source for bread doles to the indigent, abbeys and convents were useful places to beach an illegitimate daughter or a libertine uncle. Many monks had abandoned habits for coats, stockings and the pleasures of very well-laid tables. Monks and nuns came in for the special scorn of the philosophes, the incipient intelligentsia of their day, although the regular clergy were rationalised and reformed during the late eighteenth century. Much eighteenth-century pornography was set in abbeys and convents. Indeed in French slang ‘abbaye’ is still a synonym for whorehouse. Pornography could also simultaneously be philosophy; notably the novel Thérése philosophe (1748) in which the heroine is so appalled by a lascivious Jesuit that she abandons her faith and embarks on a life of copulation and discussions of ontology with an equally libidinous philosophic count. The anticlerical philosophe–pornographers had less to say about pious women who led exceptional lives as nurses in non-conventual communities, without whose ministrations the lives of the blind, foundlings, orphans, the sick and the elderly would have been unfathomably wretched.8
The sixty thousand parish curates or curés and their insecure and often indigent vicars were the real clerical workhorses, exempt from the opprobrium that enlightened opinion heaped on their sybaritic superiors and idle regulars. Since every candidate for priestly ordination had to have a minimum of a hundred livres independent income, these men were usually the sons of affluent artisans, manufacturers or such professional people as lawyers and notaries. The curés admonished, advised and consoled their parishioners, and as learned men brought a little agricultural or medical knowledge to places bereft of it. They promoted vaccination for smallpox, or lightning conductors on their village’s tallest structure. Dominique Chaix, a country cleric in the Gapençais who was too poor to own a horse, was an authority on alpine plants, which he sold to buy the occasional book. This background enabled him to practise herbal medicine. Almost imperceptibly the clergy’s role shifted from the care of souls to improving the brutish manners of their parishioners, although the artistry involved working with, rather than against, the grain of the old Adam. From here it was but a short step to offering opinions on what to do about such social issues as begging. Keeping parish records often led to an interest in local history, as they livened up their registers with events and happenings. The clergy were part of the intellectual culture of their time. Twenty-nine per cent of elite Academicians were clerics; and so were seven hundred of the twenty thousand freemasons, whose lodges were often the hubs of local intellectual activity. By the eighteenth century many of them had quite considerable libraries, of a hundred books or more, the majority being liturgical manuals or collections of sermons rather than anything as unearthed as theology. Some of them were notorious drunkards or gluttons, although standards had markedly improved since the previous century, due to the institution of diocesan seminaries. Reports on pastoral visits and the records of diocesan courts in the seventeenth century revealed any number of drunken, brawling, whoring secular clerics; by 1720, the roll-call of such delinquents had fallen to 5 per cent of the total. In fact, most secular clergy had spent about sixteen months in a seminary, and took their Counter-Reformation inspired status as part of a strict hierarchy watched over by God-as-judge seriously.
The majority were overworked and underpaid, and were respected by many philosophes for their work with the poor, with whom the latter rarely made any acquaintance. Clerical incomes derived from tithes and ancillary sums from land or surplice fees. Where he did not hold tithing rights, the priest received a much more meagre handout from the bishop, chapter or monastery which did, called the ‘portion congrue’. Reformers thought that fifteen hundred livres would represent a living commensurate with the dignity of the clerical office. While some received over four thousand livres, the majority had to make do with about eight hundred, and sometimes considerably less. Demands on their slender resources were constant. They had to maintain a housekeeper and a horse to reach outlying areas, to contribute to the pension of the previous incumbent, and to anyone seeking emergency sustenance. The number of ordinations fell, especially among young townsmen, the result being the creeping countrification of the parochial clergy. By 1770, some 70 per cent of the clergy were from villages or small country towns.9
II JESUITS, JANSENISTS AND PHILOSOPHES
We need to go back to the exalted heights where Church and state met. The French monarchy enjoyed a supremacy over the Church that was as real as that exercised by Henry VIII in England, but without the deeper social support that came with Protestant nationalist messianism. The French monarchy negotiated rather than seized these rights. Gallicanism, as it is known, was the complex of agreements and traditions that served to limit or repulse the papacy’s pretensions to power in France, beginning with the Concordat of Bologna in 1516 that enabled Francis I to nominate appointments to the most senior ecclesiastical positions. His successors never looked back. This monarchical ascendancy characterised several other Catholic countries in the eighteenth century. The substantial spectre of Henry VIII haunted the papacy’s increasingly fraught dealings with an exceptionally independent-minded array of eighteenth-century Roman Catholic sovereigns. The popes had nothing to say anywhere about who should be king, that being a matter of dynastic lottery. By contrast, the ambassadors and crown cardinals of the major European Catholic powers could frustrate the election of candidates to the throne of St Peter, if they were thought unsympathetic to their respective national interests. In extreme circumstances they could exercise their right of veto.10 In France, the pope had no power to intervene between king and clergy, usually approving the appointment of abbots and bishops, who were routinely aristocratic beneficiaries of royal patronage. Publication of a papal bull on doctrinal questions was dependent upon royal approval.
The preceding two centuries had experienced terrible religious civil wars between Catholics and Protestants and international wars with a powerful religious dimension.11 Memories of these conflicts haunted enlightened opinion, rather in the way that the ghosts of recent genocides help shape the contemporary imagination if not international conduct. As the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 brought major inter-state religious wars to an end, rulers still had to decide the fate of religious minorities within their own borders. In 1731 the archbishop of Salzburg scandalised Protestant Europe by giving all Protestants over twelve years of age eight days to pack up and go, which resulted in twenty thousand people being resettled by the Prussians.12 The empress Maria Theresa also believed in confessional homogeneity and was prepared to deport Protestant ‘heretics’ to achieve it. But in England Christianity had ceased to be a compulsory society. Its state Church had a genius for accommodating a variety of opinions, while formal sanctions against religious dissenters were flouted with official connivance. This more tolerant atmosphere spread to what had been bastions of orthodoxy. Joseph II, Maria Theresa’s heir, argued that ‘with freedom of religion, one religion will remain, that of guiding all citizens alike to the welfare of the state. Without this approach we shall not save any greater number of souls, and we shall lose a great many more useful and essential people.’ His 1781 Edict of Toleration allowed dissenters to worship privately, and Calvinists, Lutherans and Greek Orthodox Christians to have churches without steeples. Frederick the Great of Prussia thought that the best way of integrating his burgeoning territories and of enhancing their prosperity was to tolerate Jews, Catholics and Calvinist immigrants in his predominantly Lutheran polity, one of the reasons why there are so many French surnames in the Berlin telephone book.
In France the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed a monopoly of public worship, but there were Lutherans in Alsace and a croissant-shaped scattering of Calvinists, stretching southwards from Poitou towards the Languedoc and then upwards again into the Dauphiné. The wealth of Protestant bankers, shipbuilders and traders in cities such as Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Marseilles and Nîmes, and their utility to the crown in raising its improbable loans, militated in favour of grudging toleration, provided Protestants were not too ostentatious in practising their faith. Wealth and religious difference combined were powerful incentives to resentment. The Edict of Toleration in 1787 legitimised Protestant marriages, inheritance and burial in exclusive or mixed cemeteries, while forbidding Protestants to worship in public. France’s small Jewish community of forty thousand people consisted of Sephardim in places like Bordeaux and Carpentras or Paris, who hankered after integration, and yiddish-speaking Ashkenazis in Alsace, who wished to retain their communal independence. Enlightened opinion about the Jews ranged from Voltaire, who saw Judaism as the source of religious backwardness and fanaticism, to the abbé Grégoire who sought to ‘reform’ the Jews by opening up to them a range of professions including farming in return for their abandonment of their particularisms.
Censorship, lax in practice but all the more resented in theory, as well as ferocious blasphemy and sacrilege laws, sought to compel orthodoxy. The philosophes tended to highlight the most extreme cases, often omitting crucial details that might have modified their starkly contrived contrasts. In 1765 the chevalier François-Jean de la Barre was arraigned for defacing a crucifix on the bridge at Abbeville and various other instances of blasphemy and sacrilege, such as not doffing his hat to passing Capuchin friars on the ground that it was raining. The first charge did not stick, but that he had worn his hat in the presence of the sacrament, mocked priestly practices and had illicit books was proven. After the parlement of Paris confirmed his sentence, executioners spent twelve hours tormenting La Barre before striking off his head. In fact, individual malice by a lay legal official had led to his prosecution, with the parlement of Paris going the whole way in order to counter the reputation for anticlericalism it had accrued from its vindictive pursuit of the Jesuits. Senior clerics had actually intervened to commute La Barre’s sentence; the Assembly of French clergy requested clemency, and the papal nuncio said a year in jail would have sufficed.13
The Gallican Church faced several threats. They were live or latent, from within as well as from without. Across Europe Catholic rulers in the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Portugal and Tuscany were bent on conforming ‘their’ respective Churches to their enlightened definitions of national interest. A sort of Reformation from above took place, driven by reason rather than Protestant theology. Under the emperor Joseph II, half the monasteries in Austria were suppressed, with the financial dividend passing to a central fund designed to increase and upgrade the secular clergy and to boost popular education. Joseph’s brother Leopold carried out an equally sweeping reform programme in Tuscany, crushing the Inquisition and turning hospitals over to laymen.14
Despite the absence of a successful Protestant Reformation, the French Catholic Church experienced something similar in spirit. In response to the challenge of Protestantism, Catholic reformers, many of them Jesuits, had re-emphasised the efficacy of good works and priestly intercession. The Jesuits’ mission was in the world, to which they brought an optimistic faith that could find a solution to any spiritual crisis. They were adaptable and modern. But to many people the Jesuits were suspect on several levels and not only in Protestant countries where they had long acquired quasi-demonic status as crafty, fanatical conspirators. Since a high proportion of French Jesuits were from Normandy, this image dovetailed with the Normans’ proverbial reputation among Frenchmen for a certain guileful shiftiness. As is implicit in what follows, some of the paranoia that attaches to Jews and freemasons was also evident in the case of the Jesuits.
As the Counter-Reformation Church’s most militant representatives, the Jesuits epitomised papal interference in national affairs. They were easy to portray as meddlesome foreigners, as when in his famed fifth Provincial Letter the seventeenth-century Jansenist mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal has his imaginary Jesuit interlocutor reel off the names of theologians he used to confound the Church Fathers. “‘They are very able and famous men,” he said. “There is Villabos, Coninck, Llamas, Achoker, Dealkozer, Dellacruz, Vera-Cruz, Ugolin, Tambourin, Fernandez, Martinez, Suarez, Henriquez, Vasquez, Lopez, Gomez, Sanchez, de Vechis, de Grassis, de Grassilis, de Pitigianis, de Graeis, Squilanti, Bizozeri, Barcola, de Bobadilla, Simancha, Perez de Lara, Aldretta, Lorca, de Scaria, Quaranta, Scophra, Pedrezza, Cabrezza, Bisbe, Dias, de Clavasio, Villagut, Adam a Manden, Iribarne Binsfeld, Volfangi a Vorberg, Vosthery, Strevesdorf.” “Oh Father!” I said, quite alarmed, “were all of these men Christians?”’ Of course, there was not a name readily identifiable as being French among them, a trick that would also be used by antisemites in subsequent centuries.15
As Pascal showed, the Jesuits’ fabled casuistry seemed like a convenience designed to exculpate the sins of the rich, who could leave the confessional for a masked ball without over-straining their consciences. The philosophes of the Enlightenment refined Pascal’s sceptical position on this issue. In his fifty-seventh Persian Letter Montesquieu has a confessor ‘dervish’ explain to an Usbek: ‘I am telling you the secrets of a trade in which I have spent my life, and explaining its finer points. There is a way of presenting everything, even things which seem the least promising.’16 Pornographers, such as the author of Thérése philosophe, gave this a sexual twist, in the sense that the Jesuit villain of the story uses the Cartesian dichotomy of body and spirit to persuade a young woman to indulge his sadistic fantasies in order to liberate her spirit from the body he is flogging. The Jesuits were also too keen to educate the elites, in such colléges as Louis-le-Grand in Paris that had queues of bourgeois applicants keen to follow in the footsteps of Voltaire. The educational establishment in the hidebound universities did not like them. For all but six years between 1604 and 1764 the Jesuits provided all the confessors to the kings of France. Some of these men, like Louis XIV’s confessor, a Norman called Michel Le Tellier, actually looked sinister, or as someone remarked: ‘you’d have been scared if you met him in the corner of a wood.’ This tendency to haunt the corridors of power suggested untoward political influence. Physical proximity to power became ominous once disparate, and rather routine, Jesuit writings by the Italian Bellarmine and the Spaniards Suarez and Mariana justifying tyrannicide in the case of heretical rulers were said to have guided the hands of French assassins–from Ravaillac, who killed Henry IV, to Damiens whose knife went three inches into Louis XV, for which crime Damiens died an excruciatingly painful and protracted death.17
The Jesuits tried to prove that the servant Damiens had been motivated by quasi-republican ideas he had ingested in the houses of Jansenist magistrates for whom he had worked; the magistrates responded by highlighting Damiens’ two years as a servant at Louis-le-Grand, where the Jesuits had indoctrinated him for a mission designed to discredit their enemies in the parlements. If the Jesuits were accused of expanding their influence at home, overseas they were thought to be running their own satrapies. Happenings in exotic places further tarnished the image of the order in Europe. In China, Jesuit missionaries tried to incorporate as much Confucianism as possible to smooth the path of conversions. This outraged less doctrinally elastic missionaries, notably their old foes the Dominicans, and fuelled the Jesuits’ European reputation for amoral expediency.
In faraway Paraguay, the Jesuits seemed to have created their own proto-totalitarian state, although the reality was that they were trying to subtract the indigenous Indians from the oppressions of their Creole masters. The local bishops were aggrieved since their writ did not run in these Reductions, which rumour claimed were an excuse secretly to mine precious metals. A 1750 treaty altering the borders between Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America involved shifting some of the Indian settlements. They rebelled and the Jesuits were associated with their defiance. The Jesuits did not help their cause by calling the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake divine retribution upon the king of Portugal. An attempt to shoot king Joseph I in 1759 provided the Portuguese state with a pretext for outright war. The ruthless reforming ministry of the marquis of Pombal struck at the Jesuits in Portugal, deporting over a thousand Jesuits to the Papal States. The French Jesuits were the next to suffer when they were deemed corporately liable for debts accruing from ill-judged trading operations in the West Indies by a maverick member of the order. Thousands more French Jesuits joined their Portuguese brethren in exile. In Spain, the Jesuits were used as a scapegoat for riots against Charles III’s attempts to force the Spanish to look like Frenchmen by wearing wigs under three-cornered hats. More shiploads of disconso-late Jesuits headed for Civita Vecchia, where the Pope refused to accommodate them. Further expulsions followed from Naples and the little duchy of Parma. Clement XIII baulked at the clergy being pushed around by this upstart midget. Parma’s decrees were declared null and void and its officials excommunicated. Bourbon armies occupied papal territories in response. They also engineered the election of a new pope, Clement XIV, whom they then prevailed upon to abolish the Jesuit order. Whenever the pope prevaricated in this course, a tough Spanish ambassador reminded him that ‘Toothache can only be cured by extraction.’ On 21 July 1773 Clement XIV signed the brief Dominus ac Redemptor suppressing the order. Anticipating Stalin’s dictum by nearly two centuries, an English commentator observed that ‘The Pope has no fleet to support his Jesuits.’ Paradoxically, the only monarchs to extend a welcoming hand to the Jesuits were the Protestant Frederick the Great of Prussia and the Orthodox Catherine the Great of Russia, who valued the Jesuits’ role as teachers, or at least the part they might play in pacifying their Roman Catholic minorities.
These multiplying animosities, culminating in Catholic monarchs press-ganging the pope to suppress the order, explain why the Jansenists, the Jesuits’ main theological opponents within the Catholic Church, were regarded sympathetically. The seventeenth-century cardinal Giovanni Bona once described Jansenists as Catholics who disliked Jesuits. The future Benedict XIV thought that Jansenism was a ghost invented by the Jesuits. Jansenism began as a theological tendency and ended up as a quasi-political programme.
Jansenists were followers of the seventeenth-century Flemish divine Cornelius Jansen, who from 1636 until his death four years later was bishop of Ypres. He has been well described as a Catholic Lutheran. Jansen’s Augustinian views on predetermined damnation or salvation echoed the teachings of Calvin, but from within the Roman Catholic Church itself. Jansenists were like puritans within the Catholic fold, exclusive and severe people. Jansenism was an austere, rigorous creed that stressed individual study of the scriptures in the vernacular, the need for sincere contrition rather than mere fear of eternal damnation, the infrequency of Communion, and the remoteness of God from a concupiscent humanity. This set Jansenism on a collision course with baroquely lax Catholicism in which the Jesuits could allegedly finesse everything this way or that. Jansenism also mutated into a theory of Church government when it subsumed the ecclesiology of Edmund Richer, who regarded councils as the highest authority in the universal Church and argued that clerical synods should elect bishops. Christ had seventy-two disciples and not just the twelve apostles. Two writers, G. N. Maultrot and Henri Reymond, were responsible for developing Richerism into a coherent body of teaching on the dignity and rights of the lower clergy, whose essence was that a more democratic Church would be a more spiritually effective Church.18
Inevitably, these obscure theological issues attracted lay supporters so that Jansenism acquired political overtones, both because it was popular among some of the lawyers in the parlements and because Jesuit and papal attempts to crush it could be construed as an assault on the historic rights of the Gallican Church. Jansenism in France was propagated by the devouts Saint-Cyran and Antoine Arnaud, whose family had a history of battling with St Ignatius’ foot soldiers. Disconcertingly, Jansenism attracted many people of immense talent, some of whom abandoned glittering secular careers to practise its solitary rigours, like the lawyer Antoine Le Maître. Jansenist genius included the mathematician Pascal, the playwright Racine and the painter Philippe de Champaigne. A decade-long vacancy in the Paris see and then an archbishop who sat on the fence enabled these doctrines to flourish among the Parisian clergy. Skilful Jansenist propaganda, notably Pascal’s Provincial Letters, in which he poured mounting scorn on Jansenism’s Jesuit opponents, was the jewel in a slew of polemics.19 Later, the formidable Jansenist propaganda machine was augmented by the newspaper Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques (Ecclesiastical News), a mine of dirt on the Jesuits. Of course, those characteristics that led intellectuals like Pascal to live on water and vegetables while wearing a spiked belt next to his skin may also have repelled lesser mortals by making the achievement of salvation seem hopeless.
The Jansenists’ independence of mind and ramified network within sections of society preternaturally inclined to defend their privileges eventually galvanised Louis XIV into taking action against them. In 1709 the aged nuns of the austerely fashionable suburban convent of Port-Royal, to which many eminent people had repaired to read and garden, were dispersed for refusing to abjure Jansenism. In 1711 the convent itself was obliterated and the bones of its three thousand former denizens disinterred and reburied in common graves to extinguish all memory of its existence. In 1713 Louis persuaded pope Clement XI to issue the bull Unigenitus, a comprehensive condemnation of 101 erroneous or heretical Jansenist propositions unearthed in the writings of Pasquier Quesnel. This simultaneously touched the nerve of Gallican autonomy, the zealously guarded prerogatives of the parlements and indeed the sympathies of plain people. The pronouncedly ascetic and intellectual faith of Jansenism had also begun to inspire popular convulsionaries who sought miraculous healing while shaking near the bones of François de Pâris, a devout Jansenist buried in the cemetery of Saint-Médard in a grim Parisian suburb. Some convulsionaries took things further, having thin nails repeatedly driven through their hands and feet. The cemetery was forcibly closed in 1732. These convulsionaries put the established Church in an awkward position vis-à-vis the philosophes, for how would it manage to discredit ‘heretical’ miracles without discrediting miracles in general?
Between 1614 and 1789 France had no national representative institution capable of challenging the monarchy. However, densely meshed local, sectional and regional privileged bodies could obstruct it. The parlements were appeal courts staffed by venal office-holders that were somewhat less than parliaments and something more than mere courts of law as a modern Briton might understand them. Responsible for scrutinising royal legislation, they could remonstrate if they found it incompatible with existing law, until the king overrode their opposition in a ceremony called ‘the bed of justice’. Clashes with the Crown were like an exquisite pas de deux passing from respectful remonstrances all the way to the ritual expulsion and temporary exile of the offending magistrates.20
The parlements objected to the manner in which the bull Unigenitus had been forced upon the Church in violation of its Gallican privileges and procedures. They also suspected orthodox bishops of trying to exclude the parlements from any say in the affairs of the Church. Hence lay magistrates aggressively supported those Jansenist clerics who appealed against Unigenitus. In 1730 the government tried to force obedience by declaring Unigenitus a law of the state that all clergy were compelled to accept by taking an oath. Clergy who refused were to be denied the sacraments, while dying laymen had to produce a certificate of orthodoxy from the last priest from whom they had received absolution. The parlements took up the torch on behalf of those facing eternal damnation, forbidding parish priests to withhold the sacraments. The faith itself had become a matter of dispute between rival clerical factions that were attached to rival political camps.
A religious dispute had become highly political; an exceptionally austere creed was on the way to becoming the religion of opposition lawyers, although there would be a mere three Jansenists in the National Assembly. Louis XIV associated Jansenism with sedition, much as his English predecessors had done with Puritanism in a Protestant context. It was no coincidence that during these conflicts leading Jansenist lawyers claimed that these parlements were actually ‘parliaments’, allegedly coeval with the monarchy. This was historically fanciful since such institutions were unknown in the times of Clovis or Charlemagne. It was but a short step to claiming that the parlements were the guardians, indeed the incarnation, of the nation’s ‘fundamental laws’ which the monarchy had flouted, despite the fact that the guardian–magistrates had themselves purchased their own offices and were hardly paragons of virtue.
These religious quarrels, which dragged on for over a century with varying degrees of intensity, undermined the claim that the Bourbon monarchy had imposed religious peace after decades of confessional warfare. They were not as lucky as their English fellow monarchs in having a Church with enough rooms to contain a broad range of clerical opinion, while finding ways of exempting Nonconformists from the theoretical rigours of legislation. Although by 1789 these were dying quarrels, Jansenist ideas persisted, albeit transformed into ostensibly secular ideologies, into the Revolution. There had been no internally generated reform of the French Church. Now it would come from outside like a whirlwind.
III DARING TO KNOW
This more serious challenge to the Church coalesced from several existing tendencies and novel developments that are known as the Enlightenment. At the height of the parlements’ battles with the Jesuits, the philosophe d’Alembert had the temerity to claim credit for their destruction. This outraged Jansenists, one of whom observed: ‘What is a true Jesuit if not a disguised philosophe, and what is a philosophe if not a disguised Jesuit?’ Actually, the Jansenists and philosophes had more in common than this suggests. There was not a great gulf between Jansenists who believed that God had turned away from a corrupt world and philosophical Deists who claimed that, in the absence of providential intervention after the initial act of creation, the natural world functioned like a clock according to laws which science might uncover.
By the 1740s an identifiable family of thinkers had emerged across Europe and North America. Modern secular intellectuals like to trace their lineage to its luminaries, although as Carl Becker implied in 1932 that may be to overlook the former’s limitless credulity towards irrational creeds, not to speak of that of the philosophes of the eighteenth century who may have been less secular-minded than we or they imagine.
Up to the early eighteenth century writers either had another source of income, as aristocrats, clerics or men of affairs, or depended upon a wealthy patron if their means were modest. Voltaire had silk-and watch-manufacturing operations on his estate at Ferney in Lorraine and lent money at interest to individuals and governments. His cadaverous, toothless face also enabled him to take out multiple life annuities at favourable rates even though–to the chagrin of his actuaries–he lived to eighty-three.21
Neither of these types disappeared, but their ranks were swelled by people who lived by the pen, whether compiling entries for dictionaries and encyclopaedias, or journalism and translation. Literary contracts could be enforced at law, ensuring that pirate editions would not appear so freely. The business of writing became professional. While censorship still existed, it was not thought prudent to exercise it too heavy-handedly, and books could always be printed and smuggled in from Britain or the Netherlands after having been written by authors who lived anywhere and everywhere. Only the advent of the internet and ‘bloggers’ has released such subversive potential upon complacent oligarchies.
The controversy and esteem these writers enjoyed presupposed something called public opinion, semi-detached from, and poorly controlled by, the traditional sources of cultural and intellectual authority, such as the Court, the Church and the universities. Eventually, public opinion, figuratively depicted as enthroned and dispensing laurel leaves, would displace the actual authority of the person occupying the throne.22 Fame, the opinion of posterity, displaced the judgement of God. As Diderot wrote: ‘Posterity is to the philosopher what the next world is to the religious man.’ Academies, cafés, lodges and salons were where the intellectual action was, breeding grounds for a sort of lateral intellectual solidarity detached from the hierarchy represented by the Court. The authorities could, and did, try to meet like with like by hiring their own propagandists, but these had to compete in a market of rival ideas. Of course, the literary world had its own pecking order. Beneath the cosmopolitan and successful luminaries of the Enlightenment lay a subterranean world of literary journalists and hack writers, who vulgarised the ideas of the former, just as the major figures were very often doing no more than popularising the thought of their seventeenth-century British or Dutch precursors. Below them was an underworld of purveyors of outright libels and salacious gossip who may have done much to discredit established authority through smears, smut and scandal, which resurfaced as a mania to cleanse, persecute and purify during the Revolution, that singular accomplishment of moralising lawyers, renegade priests and hack journalists.23
The Enlightenment was described by Immanuel Kant as man’s coming of age, a freeing of the mind from external controls. Sapere aude or ‘dare to know’ is as good a definition as any. It meant a belief in man’s natural goodness, an optimistic faith in reason and a confidence in empirical research, whose enemies were political tyranny, religious fanaticism, moral hypocrisy and prejudice. Notwithstanding the existence of a Catholic Enlightenment, which was ready to reform abuses within the Church and to condemn superstition also with the aid of reason, it is undoubtedly the case that the philosophes often combined anticlericalism (itself no invention of the eighteenth century) with Deism, materialism or in some cases atheism. While the clergy might have been at one with the philosophes on the need to extirpate popular superstition or to reform ecclesiastical institution, they could not easily accommodate the mocking tone and outright scepticism that Voltaire and others brought to their fundamental beliefs. This was difficult for Catholic apologists who often lacked the fervour and moralising self-righteousness that characterised opponents gripped by the belief that the winds of change were with them. One could try to rewrite a ‘reasonable’ Christianity, one of the central preoccupations of the age, but where did enlightened insistence on the natural goodness of mankind leave original sin, or science the Christian miracles? Comparative religion, as we would call it, also brought other dangers.
Most modern readers will find little shocking in the entry ‘Abraham’ in Voltaire’s 1764 pocket Philosophical Dictionary: ‘Abraham is one of the names famous in Asia Minor and in Arabia, like Thoth among the Egyptians, the first Zoroaster in Persia, Hercules in Greece, Orpheus in Thrace, Odin among the northern nations, and so many others whose fame is greater than the authenticity of their history.’24 Actually, that flourish of anthropological erudition is deadly enough, before it delivers the sting in its tail by juxtaposing legend with ‘history’.
As the products of recent centuries during which pagan antiquity was ‘rediscovered’, and of a fine classical education at the hands of Jesuit or Oratorian clerics, the philosophes were keen on those parts of the classical heritage that Christianity had discarded as surplus to doctrinal requirements.25 Regarding nothing as being beyond rational scrutiny, except their own deepest prejudices, the philosophes were interested in the construction and social functioning of religion. Several classical authors had taken an instrumental, utilitarian view of religion, merely going through the motions of cults, whose primary function was to integrate conquered peoples and to keep their own lower orders quiescent. As Gibbon put it: ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.’26
The Scots philosopher David Hume devoted his Natural History of Religion, published in 1757, to the social and psychological exploration of the origins of religious belief. It is worth reiterating what he had to say in this elegantly learned essay. Arguing that primitive polytheism preceded sophisticated monotheism, Hume claimed that ‘the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind’. These ‘gross apprehensions’ included:
the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature…men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.
There were gods for everything, as each new event demanded a separate supernatural explanation. Some of these gods were allegorical personifications of vice and virtue; others the apotheosis of once living kings and heroes. Having no scriptures, ancient religions could cope with inconsistency, and were fundamentally tolerant. The emergence of one dominant ruler in human society was echoed by the elevation of one god above the host of lesser divinities who were in any case all too human. A remote God, supported by scriptural authority, encouraged the abasements of monks and persecutory intolerance. Hume did not see this as a simple progression. Since everything is ‘a flux and reflux’, the remoteness of this sole divinity from human concerns in turn led to worship of lesser gods: ‘The Virgin Mary, ere checked by the reformation, had proceeded, from being merely a good woman, to usurp many attributes of the Almighty: God and St Nicholas go hand in hand, in all the prayers and petitions of the Muscovites.’ All Gods, including the Judaeo-Christian God, combined mixed moral characteristics–here Hume cites a Catholic author who traduced Protestants by comparing them with anthropomorphising pagans: ‘The grosser pagans contented themselves with divinising lust, incest, and adultery; but the predestinarian doctors have divinised cruelty, wrath, fury, vengeance, and all the blackest vices.’ Likewise, formal religious zeal may not be incompatible with the grossest cruelty: ‘it is justly regarded as unsafe to draw any certain inference in favour of man’s morals, from the fervour or strictness of his religious exercises, even though he himself believe them sincere’. Family or friendship engender one set of moral obligations; some then add more austere virtues ‘such as public spirit, filial duty, temperance, or integrity’. Religion is irrelevant to this: ‘a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery’. Hume ‘happily’ made his escape ‘into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy’.27
Enlightened thought was haunted by the bloodshed of the Wars of Religion (1569–94). The desire, fanatically pursued, to eradicate the infamy of fanaticism was a reflection of these collective memories. Voltaire, who awoke from his sleep in a feverish state every anniversary of the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day, constantly contrasted what he imagined to be the reasonableness and toleration of Roman antiquity with the bloodshed and irrationalism of the succeeding Christian centuries. Here he is on the subject of ‘martyrs’:
Thinking to make the ancient Romans odious they made themselves ridiculous. Do you want good, well-attested barbarities; good, well-authenticated massacres; rivers of blood that really ran; fathers, mothers, husbands, women, children at the breast really butchered and piled up on each other? Persecuting monsters, seek these truths only in your annals: you will find them in the crusades against the Albigensians, in the massacres of Mérindol and Cabriéres, in the appalling day of saint Bartholomew, in the Irish massacres, in the valleys of the Waldenses. It well becomes you, barbarians that you are, to impute extravagant cruelties to the best of emperors, you who have inundated Europe with blood, and covered it with dying bodies, to prove that it is possible to be in a thousand places at once, and that the pope can sell indulgences! Stop slandering the Romans, who gave you your laws, and ask God’s forgiveness for the abominations of your fathers.28
The Revolution simplified these battle lines, in ways that were not especially typical of how sinuous Catholic apologists had reacted to the philosophes during the eighteenth century. One could argue by using the techniques of empirical scholarship to support biblical truths, or one could vacate that terrain, where the philosophes excelled, falling back instead to arguments based on faith, revelation and tradition.29 Others of a less serene disposition pummelled the philosophes in their own books and tracts, in some respects providing the conceptual building blocks for what after 1789 would be the ideology of the conservative counter-revolution. Decades before the Revolution, anti-philosophes indiscriminately bundled their enemies together, accusing them of conspiring to subvert throne and altar and of undermining public morality. Some of these writers prophesied the onset of anarchy, and congratulated themselves when it duly reared its monstrous head. The anglomania of many leading philosophes, such as Voltaire, and their deference towards such British progenitors as Locke enabled their opponents to draw upon the poisoned well of Counter-Reformation anti-Protestant polemics, for example, when they portrayed the philosophes as a fanaticised cabal or sect of conspirators, a discourse easily adapted to antisemitism.30
What the religious of the time found impossible was to explore what the philosophes owed to the Christian tradition without being conscious of it. Like the Christians, the philosophes ransacked the past to illustrate a story whose outcome they knew in advance. Christianity, with its Garden of Eden, the Fall and Judgement Day, replicated each man’s individual passage from innocent infancy, via the vale of tears of middle years, and on to the uplands of resigned old age. Judgement Day would finally right real wrongs and the rich man would not easily pass through the eye of a needle. The philosophes made large claims to the empirical nature of their philosophical history. But in reality they transposed their own Garden of Eden on to the classical Golden Age, from which a mankind haunted by priests and demons was then expelled into the long night of the Middle Ages. Like the Christians they also wanted a happy ending, but could not believe in a transcendental heaven. In the new religion of humanity, heaven would be the perfect future state that a regenerated mankind would create through his own volition. The ultimate arbiter would no longer be a divine judge, but rather future generations of happier mankind vaguely defined as ‘posterity’. Self-fulfilment became a form of atonement, love of humanity a substitute for love of God.31
Conservative contemporaries were so traumatised by the French Revolution and its repercussions that they thought more about its relationship with the antecedent Enlightenment than they did about what the latter may have owed to religious modes of thinking. Because the Enlightenment preceded the Revolution, it was tempting to ascribe paternity. Counter-revolutionaries, such as the abbé Barruel, were quick to think along those lines, combining divine punishment of a decadent France with dark conspiracies by philosophes in the classical temples of the freemasons. Edmund Burke gave this literature a peculiarly British emphasis, though he shared many of the local assumptions of French counter-revolutionaries. Burke was not an unqualified supporter of the French ancien régime; he approved of the reforms it had undergone in 1787–8 and thought it had equipped itself for peaceful constitutional progress. After 1789 his key insight was to realise that ‘a theory concerning government may become as much a cause of fanaticism as a dogma in religion’.32 Here Burke’s thoughts drifted to an earlier English historical analogy. He drew upon an Anglican discourse about ‘enthusiasm’ as applied to the dissenting sectarians of the mid-seventeenth century. Although the following extract from Burke is, superficially speaking, a routine denunciation of the philosophes (in other circumstances Burke might have been one himself), it also draws upon the vocabulary of High Anglican disdain for the religious precursors of modern ideological ‘fanatics’:
The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy progress, with spirit of persecution according to their means. What was not to be done towards their great end by any direct or immediate act, might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To command that opinion, the first step is to establish dominion over those who direct it. They contrived to possess themselves, with great method and perseverance, of all the avenues to literary fame…These Atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct, it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life.33
Writing from beyond the Revolution, its greatest historian Alexis de Tocqueville was similarly appalled by the dangerous hubris of the secular intelligentsia:
Every public passion was thus wrapped up in philosophy; political life was violently driven back into literature, and writers, taking in hand the direction of opinion, found themselves for a moment taking the place that party leaders usually hold in free countries…Above the real society…there was slowly built an imaginary society in which everything seemed simple and coordinated, uniform, equitable, and in accord with reason. Gradually the imagination of the crowd deserted the former to concentrate on the latter. One lost interest in what was, in order to think about what could be, and finally one lived mentally in that ideal city the writers had built.34
He added: ‘What is merit in a writer is sometimes vice in a statesman, and the same things which have often made lovely books can lead to great revolutions.’
This may have been to exaggerate the lines of division and the importance of the philosophes. To begin with, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, clergy and laity shared a taste for the same authors. In 1778 Marie Antoinette attended the opening night of Voltaire’s last play, doubtless disappointing the gaggle of clerical demonstrators. Her consort, Louis XVI, read Montesquieu and Voltaire, along with Corneille and La Fontaine, in the Temple where he was imprisoned. Clerics were avid readers of the philosophes, and mixed easily in the provincial academies and masonic lodges, which, together with salons, were the institutional hubs of enlightenment. The Jesuit monthly Journal de Trévoux included admiring and intelligent reviews of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, archly indicating which entries had been lifted from a Jesuit encyclopaedia and a Jesuit philosopher without appropriate acknowledgement. Counter-Englightenment authors were not slow to adopt Rousseau when it came to challenging the icy supremacy of reason over faith and feeling.
Any political movement, including those that seek to abolish the past, sooner or later seeks to fabricate a lineage. The French Revolution was no exception. The Revolution adopted Voltaire and Rousseau as its intellectual parents, translating their earthly remains to the Pantheon, in 1791 and 1794 respectively, with elaborate ceremonies that echoed religious processions. One can see this crude appropriation in low-grade revolutionary catechisms:
Question: Who are the men who by their writings prepared the revolution?
Answer: Helvétius, Mably, J. J. Rousseau, Voltaire, and Franklin.
Question: What do you call these great men?
Answer: Philosophers.
Question: What does that word mean?
Answer: Sage, friend of humanity.35
In politics, the philosophes were interested in enlightened reform rather than violent revolution. Since Voltaire, friend of monarchs, had written supporting chancellor Maupeou’s 1771 ‘coup’ against the parlements, and was contemptuous of literary hacks, it is improbable he would have viewed the brief rise to power of the pockmarked gargoyle Marat with equanimity. He had a very exclusive view of who might be safely enlightened. Writing to Frederick the Great he argued: ‘Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal service in extirpating this infamous superstition [he meant Christianity] I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say among the well-bred, among those who wish to think.’36 The philosophes wanted rulers to see the world as they saw it and to act accordingly although their role was as unimpressive as that of most intellectuals in politics. Anne-Robert Turgot, the only physiocrat, the economist sub-species of philosophe, briefly to exercise political power, triggered so-called flour wars after the institution of a free market in grain led to massive price rises.37
In a sense, the philosophes were the beneficiaries of those Calvinists and Jansenists who had propelled an infinitely good God further away from this corrupt world. The latter became autonomous, observable and potentially malleable, its links with the celestial hierarchy attenuated to invisibility.38 Some philosophes thought that their ideas could only be implemented in small city-state republics, others by enlightened rulers, or on the vast blank canvas of North America. The philosophes were divided about whether it would be best to constrain monarchical power to lessen the likelihood of despotism and tyranny, or to increase it so as to brush aside vested interests, such as the aristocracy, Church or guilds, that frustrated their modernising reforms. Only two issues brought complete unanimity and promised worthwhile reforms: the need for religious toleration, and the need for a less barbaric criminal law not reliant upon judicial torture or cruel and unnecessary punishments.
The assault on the Church served to undermine one of the essential supports of monarchical authority, namely the supernatural element we began with. Incessant criticism, some of it well below the belt, led to gradual disenchantment with both throne and altar. Louis XIV had filled France with a huge sun-lit cloud of power. Neither Louis XV nor Louis XVI could occupy that space. A family monarchy in which children were slow to appear, while the king required sexual counselling by the Austrian emperor to connect penetration with ejaculation, was a contradiction in terms. A pornographer’s delight too, for where did the Austrian queen satisfy her allegedly voracious carnal appetites? Over time, the very language of political debate shifted, so that notions like ‘the nation’ came to be contested between a patriotic family monarchy (the alternative to Louis XIV’s cosmic display of power) and patriotic opinion as embodied in the embattled parlements, vying to be that nation’s sole incarnation.
These were the incipient battle lines as a bankrupt monarchy was forced to resort to an Estates General after the failure of short-term solutions and a 175-year interval. Almost effortlessly, much of the Gallican Church switched tracks, like a train gliding over points, aligning itself with the moderate constitutional revolution. But the irreconcilable residue was permanently identified with counter-revolution, an identification which led to spoliation and persecution as moderation ceased to be the Revolution’s watchword. Even those clergy who sought to collaborate with the Revolution were eventually persecuted too. As the Revolution embarked upon building a secular republic as the prelude to the messianic regeneration of mankind, a Church whose own history provided the only known exemplars for the compulsory imposition of a creed posited upon ‘rebirth’ was almost destroyed. This remarkable turn of events will occupy the following two chapters. The first looks at the Church during the opening phases of the Revolution; the second at the attempt to convert the Revolution itself into a form of religion. The results were disastrous, leaving the Church deeply hostile to any future invocations of equality, liberty, nation or people.