I THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
The Estates General opened on a bright May morning in 1789. The event was preceded by a procession to the church of Saint-Louis, with each Estate ranged in ascending order towards the royal party at the rear. Nearest the king, the bishops and clergy of the First Estate were themselves separated, to the obvious chagrin of the curés, by a troupe of musicians.
The painter Couder captured the opening session. Louis XVI, his queen and the princes of the blood were seated on the upper steps of a raised dais. According to an American visitor, every gesture they made or word they uttered was keenly scrutinised for its possible meanings. The clerical First Estate, with a scarlet-robed cardinal marking their position, and the aristocratic Second Estate in their cloaks, white stockings and fine shoes, were physically separated by an ocean of gold and magenta carpet from the ranks of the sombrely dressed Third Estate.
The precise number of those present is hard to establish, since deputies were still arriving from remote regions in June. Survivors of hurricanes and shipwrecks only straggled in from the colonies in February 1791. There were about thirteen hundred deputies in total, with twice as many from the Third as the other two Estates combined. Although the deputies were not bereft of administrative, judicial or political hinterlands, after a gap of 175 years the Estates General was a learning process in how to exercise power for all concerned. Each deputy was subject to the magnetic forces of group and regional interests, patriotism and public opinion on this new national stage. Right from the start their role was ambiguous. So was the notion of a constitution. This could simply mean how best to redistribute power between the executive, legislature and judiciary. But it could also signify a much deeper attempt to ‘regenerate public order’, a potentially limitless root-and-branch reform of society and its institutions in accordance with utopian imaginings.
Once the opening ceremonies were concluded, questions of naked power arose. The king wanted the deputies’ credentials verified according to their separate orders; the Third Estate challenged this attempt to divide and rule, taking the momentous step on 12 June of verifying its deputies’ own credentials.
Clerical and noble defections from the First and Second Estates thwarted the king’s desire for each Estate to deliberate and vote separately. Each accession of the higher orders to the Third Estate was greeted with emotional scenes of recognition and rejoicing. The lower clergy were the first to break ranks, presuming an identity of aims, background and outlook with the men of the Third Estate.1 About 150 clergy crossed over from the Salle des Cent-Suisses to the Third Estate’s Menu-Plaisirs. On 17 June the combined delegates went with abbé Sieyés’ call to dub themselves the National Assembly, swearing three days later in the Tennis Court Oath not to disperse until they had given France a new constitution. In the painter David’s rendition of what was an intensely fraternal moment, clerics were very prominent, for as yet there had been no breach, and abbé Grégoire was central to the emotional occasion David depicted.2 Let’s go behind the scenes and look at the deputies in more detail. Under a ruling in late January 1789, bishops and curés were given a single vote in the election of the First Estate. Over two hundred parish priests were returned, together with about fifty bishops under the presidency of cardinal La Rochefoucauld, the amiable and respected archbishop of Rouen. Hierarchy and a desire for a more collegial, Richerist, reform of the Church were thus uneasily combined within the clergy’s representation. Some noble bishops regarded the large number of curés as little more than clod-hopping peasants; the curés muttered about the haughtiness of bishops whom they refused to call ‘Monseigneur’. Only 3 per cent of the clergy were regulars, which immediately presaged their vulnerability, should both the laity and the seculars decide to gang up on them in order to suppress what both had come to regard as the uselessness of contemplation.3
The lower clergy had managed to stamp their views on the general cahiers of grievances that they and the other Estates drew up during elections to the Estates General. Essentially they sought a more collegial management of the Church, and an episcopacy that led by moral example rather than by virtue of birth. In this their aims overlapped with those of the Third Estate, as expressed in their cahiers, there being little disagreement, for the moment, on such fundamentals as the need to preserve and reform the Gallican Church or Roman Catholicism as the predominant faith of France. This alliance against privilege would prove evanescent.4
The lay estates were also not free of inner tensions. Aristocratic sophisticates in the capital or Versailles were sometimes snooty towards their rough-mannered and unkempt noble country cousins. Bourgeois deputies were simultaneously repelled and tantalised by aristocratic soldiers whose idea of a rational debate was to draw swords from their scabbards in a combustible mix of anger and outraged honour. Since sword rage was an upper-class vice, a number of intra-aristocratic duels added the colour of blood to the weeks of the Estates General. Noblemen who regarded themselves literally as a separate ‘race’ did not contribute to smooth relations between the Second and Third Estates. Actually, aristocratic hauteur doubly rankled because one in twelve of the Third Estate deputies were from recently ennobled families, with a few from commensurately grand lineages. Otherwise, many of the bourgeois flushed with pride to find themselves in close proximity to the grandest noble names in the kingdom, writing gossipy letters back to their wives and friends in the provinces.5
The sessions of the Estates General did not occur in a void, although at times there was a vacuum of authority. Some noble deputies deplored a minority of their liberal fellows who seemed to be making common cause with the Third Estate for opportunistic reasons. As noblemen they had direct access to the king, which could be construed as the exercise of undue influence. By contrast, when a deputation from the Third Estate tried to breach etiquette in order to render their condolences for the death on 4 June of the child dauphin, they were turned away.6 Then there were the crowds of ordinary people who hung upon the deputies’ every word. Heckling from the galleries of the Assembly was occasionally backed up with violence towards unpopular deputies, as when archbishop de Juigné, who had advised the king to dismiss the Estates General, was dragged from his coach and would have been killed, had not deputies of the Third Estate intervened to protect him. Some deputies developed demagogic talents, and confused enthusiastic Parisian crowds with the national will, while others persisted in identifying mass democracy with tyranny.7
The loyalty of French troops came under strain as their orders conflicted with the crowd’s exhortations to side with the self-styled patriots. Each hostile movement of foreign soldiers in or around Paris generated increased trepidation. The governor of the Bastille and the chief magistrate of Paris were hacked to pieces and decapitated, followed by the city’s intendant and his father-in-law. Across the country revolutionary committees and citizen militias came into being to contain worsening urban food riots. The ‘Great Fear’ swept the countryside as people there construed grain shortages as part of an aristocratic plot to starve them into submission. These ‘plots’ took a more sinister turn as indigent gangs, and the armed bands of farmers tracking them, were themselves mythologised as invading aristocratic armies.
Villagers turned on the ‘source’ of the conspiracy, partly continuing a long tradition of rural uprisings, partly using the new political vocabulary of ‘people power’. They raided the châteaux, burning the written traces of their subjection, and such symbols of noble privilege as dovecots, wine presses and weathervanes. In Alsace the Great Fear took the form of attacks on Ashkenazi Jewish money-lenders in about seventy places. Taxes and tithes ceased to be paid. Both rural uprisings and urban mob violence terrified the National Assembly and the classes they represented. Some deputies literally had their ears to the ground, in terrified anticipation of the mob’s trampling footfalls heading towards them.
Thoughtful people felt they were being dragged along by events whose outcome they dreaded. Writing to an English aristocrat, the bishop of Chartres revealed: ‘I find myself in the way, without having sought it, of playing a role myself [in the Revolution]…At present therefore, the torrent pulls me along like everyone else because it would be too dangerous to oppose it. But I give way with repugnance and with a disquiet too well founded that all this excess may force us back to the other extreme.’8 Hitherto uncommitted clerical deputies, like the diarist Rouph de Varicourt, curé of Gex, began to take exception to the secular mentality that appeared to dominate their Third Estate colleagues, and hence turned cool towards the Revolution.9
Anticlericalism began to emerge in the Assembly over the issue of renouncing feudal privileges. To regain mastery over a country slipping out of control, without using an army that might defect, the deputies decided to renounce their own privileges in a sort of orgy of self-repudiation. Spokesmen of every corporate interest vied to sacrifice their historic privileges. The bishops surrendered their feudal dues, the curés the casual fees they received from their parishioners. The annates which each new bishop owed to Rome were abrogated. There was also a tit-fortat element. When the bishop of Chartres suggested abolition of hunting rights, an angry duc de Châtelet responded by calling for the end of the tithe, adding, ‘I’m going to take something from him too.’10 Although only one in ten of the cahiers of the Third Estate had called for the abolition of tithes, these were abolished without much thought to an alternative system to replace them.
The modalities of abolition were announced on 11 August when it was declared: ‘The National Assembly entirely destroys the feudal regime.’ In fact, along with dovecots and hunting rights, much of what was abolished was not ‘feudal’ at all, but the venal office-holding which a cash-strapped monarchy had encouraged since the early seventeenth century. The tithe was abolished, although it would continue to be collected pending the introduction of some new mechanism for supporting the clergy. These were momentous decisions, wiping out a host of intermediary bodies that made the ancien régime what it was.11
A once zealously defended clerical interest suffered implicit derogation as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, promulgated on 26 August, located the origin and source of all authority in the French nation. The idea of societies functioning without the aid of religion, or of a separation of Church and state, would have struck almost everyone as absurd. The social utility of religion was recognised in Articles 16 and 17, but Article 18 did not entirely reassure the clergy: ‘No one can be disturbed for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their expression does not infringe the public order declared by the law.’ The idea of including explicit recognition of the predominance of the Roman Catholic Church into the opening of the Declaration was rejected. Exemption of ‘bad books’ from the article on freedom of the press did not quite compensate for this glaring omission.
The lands of the Church were one major casualty of the radicalisation of the public mood. Archbishop Boisgelin of Aix vainly offered a major loan that would have forestalled outright confiscation. While the nationalisation of Church property to liquidate the national debt had been canvassed many times before, paradoxically it was one of the staunchest erstwhile defenders of the privileges of the clerical Estate who proposed it.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand came from one of the grandest noble dynasties in France. A clubfoot excluded him from following the family tradition of a military career. He may have resented having to pursue a priestly vocation, for which his long-standing liaison with the comtesse de Flahaut suggested he had little aptitude. Family connections ensured a rapid rise up the clerical hierarchy. He served for five years as agent-general of the Assembly of the Clergy, distinguishing himself as a dogged defender of clerical privileges against the Crown, before becoming bishop of Autun at the relatively young age of thirty-five. Since he was a newcomer to Autun, the clergy lacked any personal grounds not to elect him as a delegate to the Estates General; lavish fish banquets cooked by his personal chef for the local clergy further inclined them to vote for him. The fact that Talleyrand had intimate connections to a declining faction at Louis XVI’s Court may have led him into liberal–patriotic political circles. Talleyrand challenged the received view of the nature of clerical property: ‘It is evident that the clergy is not a proprietor in the same sense that others are, since the goods of which they have the use and of which they cannot dispose were given to them not for their personal benefit, but for use in the performance of their functions.’12
In other words, the wealth of the Church was not property in the normal sense, but something the Church had been given with which to do good works. Since the state would now assume responsibility for the poor, the assets of the Church should be transferred to the state, which would henceforth pay clerics a salary in payment for their activities in morally educating the public. The clergy strenuously argued against this view. Their lands had been assembled incrementally through pious donations of great antiquity. Some clergy used a more utilitarian line of reasoning. Their predecessors had toiled for centuries to turn remote and unpromising lands into fertile fields and vineyards. They were part of their communities, sharing in the ups and downs of living by or from the land. They were no more immune to hailstones, fire and flood than anyone else. If they became state-supported salaried functionaries (and salaries in this society bore a certain stigma signifying lack of independence) these bonds would dissolve. Sequestration would result in an unseemly speculative orgy conducted by businessmen and Jews. The abbé Maury warned that it was rash to speculate about the origins of property rights.
A cash-strapped Assembly first identified four hundred million livres of Church property which it then sold in order to back the new paper assignats it was printing. On 2 November 1789 the Assembly voted 568 to 346 to sequestrate ecclesiastical property, in a decision that dwarfed the more modest depredations of Henry VIII. The bishops decided not to respond. As one explained to the pope: ‘Our silence demonstrated how we were inaccessible, personally, to all the temporal interests whose possession had drawn on us hatred and envy.’13 Henceforth bishops were to receive not less than twelve thousand livres per annum (and not more than fifty thousand livres), while the curés would be paid not less than twelve hundred livres per annum plus their lodgings and gardens. An immediate fiscal crisis had led the Assembly to lay hands on the resources of the Church. It was logical that the Assembly should next seek to eradicate any remaining fat. A popular engraving showed the desired way forward. The pencil-thin black-garbed abbé of today was contrasted with the pantophagous abbé of yesteryear.14 Since the state was now responsible for clerical salaries, all sources of alleged excess had to disappear. On 13 February 1790 a decree abolished all but hospital and teaching orders. In the course of these debates Bonal, bishop of Clermont, muttered that the Assembly was exceeding its competence, ineluctably trespassing into what the clergy believed to be spiritual matters. Contrary to the widespread view that monks were idlers, Bonal argued that the monastic state was ‘the most fitting for the support of the nation, because of the influence of prayer on the success of human affairs’.15
Self-abnegation was not high among the virtues celebrated by either the philosophes or those who had ingested their disdain for the regular orders, a disdain shared by many regular clerics. In his novel La Religieuse (not published until 1795), Diderot had highlighted the problem of coerced religious vocations and the psychological and sexual deviations resulting from the monotonous intensity of the celibate cloistered life. The novel is also a rather daring piece of soft-core pornography, abounding with flagellation, undone habits, fondling and Richter-scale orgasms. This distracts from the novel’s more serious point. A young illegitimate girl called Suzanne Simonin is despatched to a convent to enable her parents to concentrate their slender resources upon the dowries of two older daughters. Suzanne is subjected to the close attentions of a scatterbrained lesbian mother superior and is raped by a Benedictine confessor who facilitates her escape from the former.16 While Diderot concentrated on the malign psychological environment of single-sex religious communities, others took a more economistic view, although Diderot does allude to the ex-nun Suzanne’s complete unemployability save as either laundress or prostitute. Modern man was supposed to engage productively and usefully with the world, and that included what some regarded as ‘his’ national duty to have children. During the discussions in the Assembly, Barnave (who was from a Protestant family) articulated the dominant view, skilfully locking the deputies in the logic of their own idealism:
I do not believe it is necessary to demonstrate that the religious orders are incompatible with the rights of man. A profession that deprives men of the rights you have recognised is incompatible with those rights. Obliged to undertake duties that are not prescribed by Nature, which Nature reproves, are they not by Nature herself condemned to violate them?17
At a stroke in February 1790, monasteries and convents not engaged in useful work were dissolved and forbidden to accept novices. Monks and nuns were relieved of their vows and offered a pension if they left their houses. Those who refused were concentrated in fewer institutions, where having to rub shoulders with men from a variety of orders soon inclined them to pack up and leave the monastic life. Barbers and tailors did a roaring trade with those who had abandoned the habit. It is safe to assume that monks and nuns living in dysfunctional houses were the first to pack up and leave, along with those whose vocations were tepid or who were young enough to contemplate a different career. Some former monks became prominent revolutionary terrorists. Made anxious by these developments, the bishop of Nancy asked for confirmation that Roman Catholicism was the state religion. No confirmation came.
The pope grudgingly acknowledged these measures, as he had earlier accepted Joseph II’s dissolution of the Austrian monasteries in order to expand useful education. But the potential for a major clash over the right of the temporal power, in this case ‘the people’, to interfere in a quintessentially spiritual matter, had obviously increased. Yet it would be untrue to claim that most clerics were appalled by these measures. On the contrary, they could just as easily regard them as a return to the apostolic simplicities of the early Church, and as a salutary renunciation of sources of potential corruption and temptation. Optimists might almost have said that the National Assembly was doing the work of a reforming Church council. There were also clerics prepared to take this line to its logical conclusion by advocating a sort of national religion posited on the union of an egalitarian national Church and a democratised nation. The great religious truths had found their social expression through the Revolution.
The abbé Claude Fauchet, author of De la religion nationale, and proud owner of a soutane rent by shot during the storming of the Bastille, was one of the most fervent advocates of this fusion of radicalised religion and radical politics. Originally from the central Niévre,
Fauchet was a brilliant preacher and author of Life of Jesus, Man of the People, in which he blamed ‘aristocrats’ for the crucifixion. He wanted such things as restrictions on wealth, including reform of inheritance laws, and state promotion of egalitarianism through encouragement of marriages between different social classes. Vice was to be suppressed, freedom of the press curbed, and the theatre given over to moral instruction: ‘Thus will legislation conform to the spirit of the Gospels, to the inherent morality of brotherly love, which is the basis and the crowning glory of the public weal in a nation which is wisely governed for the happiness of all its citizens.’ Subsequently as constitutional bishop of Calvados, Fauchet signed himself ‘Claude Fauchet, by the grace of God and the will of the people, in the communion of the holy apostolic see and in the charity of the human race, bishop of Calvados’.
The prospects for a national religion, centred upon Christian egalitarianism, as advocated by Fauchet or the abbé Grégoire, faded while old animosities were reactivated, or unexpected solidarities arose when the room for manoeuvre diminished.
In some regions sectarian tensions lay just beneath the surface. Majority Catholic resentments were triggered wherever already economically powerful Protestant manufacturers and merchants assumed the reins of local political power. Savage communal sectarian violence broke out in Montauban or Nîmes, whose Protestant dominated National Guard shot down over three hundred Catholics during the bitterly contested departmental elections.18 Intelligent aristocratic counter-revolutionaries began to espy a potential mass constituency among those who were starting to associate the Revolution with Protestantism, irreligion or the return of religious persecution, views being put about abroad by clerical–intellectual members of the emigration.
By some irony, the National Assembly inadvertently managed the considerable feat of transforming the staunchly Gallican Church into what would emerge as one of the most fiercely ultramontane Churches in nineteenth-century Europe. For it continued to be much less tentative in its reform of relations between Church and state than it had so far been in its handling of the problem of the increasingly marginalised but symbolically important king. How amity developed into schism brought about by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy will occupy the rest of this chapter. The schism lasted for nearly two hundred years.19
II OATHS
As the embodiment of the nation, the Constituent Assembly felt itself responsible for issuing constitutions regarding local government, the armed forces and so forth. In keeping with this, it issued a ‘Civil Constitution’ of the clergy; that is, a constitution governing those aspects of the Church that came within the ambit of the secular power. The Assembly could claim, with some justification if one thinks of Joseph II, that it was not ‘innovating’ in its policies towards Church affairs, but merely continuing what Catholic monarchs had done virtually everywhere else in eighteenth-century Europe. In August 1789 it established its own fifteen-man Ecclesiastical Committee, consisting of two bishops, Mercy of Luçon and its chairman Bonal of Clermont, three curés and ten laymen. The bishops managed to quash the madder recommendations. But by February 1790, aggressively Gallican lawyers on the Committee cleverly argued that its numbers were not adequate to its daunting tasks. Fifteen laymen of a more radical disposition were then co-opted to ensure that proposals went ahead by majority vote. On 29 May 1790 the Committee presented a draft Civil Constitution of the Clergy to the Assembly, although there was little ‘civil’ about it since in the eyes of many it was a presbyterian diktat regarding issues that were ultimately spiritual.
It proposed to abolish more than fifty sees, while conforming the rest to the boundaries of the new departments of France, of which there were eighty-three. This meant that the large diocese of Le Mans was divided into sees at Laval, Avranches and Lisieux, the inhabitants of Saint-Malo, Dol, Tréguier and Saint-Pol-de-Léon in Brittany found themselves without bishops. Parishes would also be rationalised to conform with the shifting realities of population densities, a measure that annoyed those who now had to travel long distances to their new parish. About four thousand parishes were simply abolished. Clergy who had no pastoral function, such as cathedral canons, would follow the regulars into oblivion. By stipulating that bishops should have served fifteen years in the parishes, and thus emphasising their common ministerial vocation, the Assembly drastically reduced the gulf between prelates and priests–a point underlined by the introduction of a more collegial style of diocesan administration, in which bishops were obliged to pay heed to the views of ten or twelve of their diocesan clerics. The salaries of priests were raised on a scale between twelve hundred and six thousand livres, according to the size of their flocks, while bishops had to make do with between twelve and twenty thousand livres rather than the stratospheric six-figure incomes the richest had hitherto enjoyed. Henceforth, the laity were to elect both their bishops at departmental level and priests within the parish district. Since citizenship overrode everything else, these lay electors would include non-Catholics, and not just Protestants but also Jews, who after protracted debates concerning the assimilated Sephardim in the Bordelais and the ‘foreign’ eastern European Ashkenazim of Alsace and Lorraine, had been successively granted citizenship by late September 1791.20
So far we have hardly mentioned the papacy, whose international profile was far more modest in the eighteenth century than it was in the nineteenth or than it is now. Not only were the eighteenth-century popes undistinguished, but the Papal States were a byword for governmental corruption. Joseph II had unilaterally abolished the monasteries, while the enlightened Russian tsarina Catherine the Great had rearranged the diocesan boundaries in Russian Poland. Pilgrimages to Rome declined because the enlightened ruler of Tuscany would not let them traverse his territories. The Civil Constitution went one stage further in forbidding newly elected French bishops from seeking confirmation of their election from the pope.
Pius VI maintained a public silence towards the Revolution’s handling of the Gallican Church although he was privately condemnatory of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the sacred text of the Revolution. In August 1790 he formed a congregation of twenty cardinals to advise him about events in France. Although some cardinals counselled moderation over such matters as reshaping the diocesan boundaries, most took a dim view of the subversion of ecclesiastical hierarchy. Papal silence became an impossible stance as supporters of the Revolution in the papal enclaves of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin insisted upon incorporation by France. On the day after Louis XVI assented to the Civil Constitution, he received a letter from Pius VI condemning it.
Opinion about the Civil Constitution had begun to polarise both within and beyond the National Assembly. The bishops were the first to sound alarm bells about the fact that the Civil Constitution raised issues of spiritual authority in what was still a constituent branch of the universal Roman Catholic Church. The politicians of one country could not simply legislate changes for a universal institution. Nor for that matter could they fiddle around with diocesan boundaries, or with how bishops and priests were appointed, nor dispense monks and nuns from vows of the highest solemnity. Clerics were more than ‘public functionaries’. These issues were set forth in a cool and collected manner by Boisgelin of Aixinhis Exposition des principes sur la Constitution civile du clergé, to which thirty bishops signed up.21
These clerical objections were countered by claims that the Assembly was merely restoring the Church to its ancient pristine condition, or simply continuing the traditional tough supervision that the French monarchs had formally exercised. If that past royal regimen had been legitimate, who could gainsay a new authority based on the will of the entire French people? So what if Protestants and Jews were now entitled to elect priests; was this any worse than bishops who owed their appointment to the machinations of a royal bastard or mistress? By depicting the Church as a remnant from the ancien régime, while simultaneously seeking to perpetuate that regime’s tight rein on the Gallican Church, the Assembly was blending innovation with tradition. One deputy, Camus, warned the clergy: ‘The Church is part of the state. The state is not part of the Church.’ In other words, canon law was not going to override popular sovereignty.
The Assembly rejected all clerical attempts to summon a national ecclesiastical council, since even determining the form of this would drag on into infinity, while it would also signify a return to hated corporate bodies. Since the national council was a non-starter, even prominent clerical reformers now turned expectantly towards the papacy. Throughout the summer Pius VI prevaricated, leaving the clergy and the Assembly to enjoy a prolongation of their false dawn.
In the summer of 1790, these were just faint stirrings of discontent. Talleyrand and other clerics took prominent parts in the celebration of the Festival of the Federation on 14 July 1790. Draped in red, white and blue, Talleyrand celebrated the mass on the ‘Altar of the Fatherland’ set up on the Champs de Mars. All over the country, clerics were similarly generously represented at the various regional festivals. Very few clergy refused to participate.
On 12 July the National Assembly approved the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. It received the royal assent on 24 August, partly because Louis XVI was worried that he would be deposed in favour of his son, brother or cousin if he refused it. The pope had so far not formally spoken. Tempers started to fray when clergy followed the logic of approval or disapproval of the Civil Constitution. When a leading clerical reformer in the Assembly was elected bishop of Quimper, the bishop of Rouen refused him canonical institution.22 Some deputies on the police committee thought there should be a more explicit test of clerical acceptance of the new dispensation. Religion, in other words, was an aspect of public order. In some departments an oath was already being used to test whether clergy accepted the new order; if they refused to take it, like the bishop of Soissons, they were deposed. On 26 November 1790 the National Assembly debated such measures. Clergy were to be given eight days to swear an oath to ‘be faithful to the Nation, the law and the King’, and to ‘maintain with all their power the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by the King’. Those who refused to take this oath were deemed to have resigned their offices. The Assembly voted to impose the oath on 27 November 1790 and it was promulgated with royal approval a month later.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was too radical to be reconciled with orthodox Catholicism, and too traditional to assuage revolutionary idealists who sought a civic religion which would serve the interests of the revolutionary state. By denying the clergy any collective response to policies that touched on spiritual questions, the Assembly managed to bring about a dangerous religious schism, providing the disparate and incoherent forces of counter-revolution with an issue around which they could gather a genuine mass following. They managed to turn a myth into a menacing reality. A counter-revolution hitherto perhaps too facilely identified with the defence of mere privilege could thenceforth claim, with reason, to be about fundamental issues of conscience. Finally, once the refractory clergy had become identified with counterrevolution, there was always the danger that the more radical revolutionaries would apply this identification to the clergy in general, including the Constitutionals who had taken the oath, despite the latter’s porosity towards the ideas of the Revolution. This was precisely what happened and it resulted in a split between the religion and politics of the country that took two centuries to repair.23
On the afternoon of 4 January 1791 the clerical members of the Assembly were called upon to take the oath to the Civil Constitution. Attempts to prevaricate by separating its purely civil from its wider spiritual content were brushed aside by deputies who were in no mood to compromise. With the exception of Talleyrand, Brienne and two others, all forty-four bishops in the Assembly refused to take the oath. They were followed by the entire French episcopate. This gave a lead to their humbler colleagues, who, now that parasitic canons and monks were no more, rediscovered a common clerical identity with their bishops. Of the lower clergy present, only 107 swore the oath, leaving two-thirds in the dissident camp. Attempts to coerce them by calling upon each individual in a roll-call failed to intimidate–although the presence in the gallery of a baying mob already intimated that refusal to take the oath was construed as treasonable.
Oath-taking was repeated on a national scale through the remainder of January 1791. Some regions revealed a high proportion of so-called juring priests, who took the oath, especially in the capital and the Paris basin, Berry, Champagne, Dauphiné, Picardy, Poitou and Provence.
Dissent was most evident in Alsace, Anjou, Artois, Brittany, Flanders, Languedoc and Lower Normandy, which all included large numbers of refractories (as those who refused to take the oath were called). In Strasbourg, a non-juring priest refused to leave the cathedral and hit the new juring bishop. The previous incumbent, Rohan, excommunicated his successor from the safety of exile in Germany. It is difficult to generalise about the areas in either the juring or non-juring camps. Dense concentrations of clerics in urban centres ensured solidarity in numbers for those who refused to swear the oath. By contrast, isolated country clergy were easy to put pressure on. It may be the case that the clergy’s parishioners determined their stance. Where popular piety was intense, no more so than in the maritime west, clergy did not swear the oath. Here, many of them were scions of the better-off land-holding peasantry, who were both well-to-do and serious, in a Tridentine sort of way, about their religious vocations. Others, whom one might call ‘demi-jurors’, tried to hedge the oath with reservations or purely verbal protestations of loyalty to the Revolution.24
The reasons why individuals took the oath cannot simply be reduced to their need for a salary overriding their principles, a stance neatly expressed by the curé who said: ‘In order to live, I’d gladly take as many oaths as there are threads in my wig.’ Some lower clergy sincerely identified the Civil Constitution with the more presbyterian forms of Church government they had advocated for years. Like Fauchet they believed that a synthesis of reformed (or regenerated) Christianity and revolutionary politics was possible. In fact, many juring or Constitutional clergy may have had respectable theological reasons for taking the oath. A drawing of a Constitutional cleric celebrating mass shows him simply attired as a cloud of mitres and croziers fly away from him, the caption being ‘Vanity of vanities, all nothing but vanity’. Others went with the local flow, listening to the arguments of family, friends and neighbours who supported the Revolution. A few took the oath to spite ambitious subordinates eyeing up their benefice, like the priest who took the oath, telling his ambitious juring vicaire: ‘Ah, canaille, you think you’ll get my parish. But you won’t!’25
The bishops who refused to swear the oath had to be replaced by others. Elections took place between January and May 1791. Many of these elections were poorly attended, as at Rennes where only 60 per cent of eligible electors voted for bishop Claude Le Coz. The papacy was forced to abandon its hitherto cautious public response to these events when Talleyrand, who had resigned his see on 13 January 1791 to pursue an administrative career, was recalled to consecrate two so-called constitutional bishops in Paris. That opened the way for the creation of a parallel hierarchy, and what amounted to a schismatic Church consisting of priests willing to take the oath of the Civil Constitution. On 18 April the king made his sympathies explicit when he and the queen vainly sought to reach Saint-Cloud in order to take communion from a non-juring priest, a gesture which resulted in them being confined in their coach for over two hours by a hostile mob.26
By omitting the obligatory oath of fidelity to the pope from the consecration, Talleyrand made a confrontation with the papacy virtually inevitable. The deputy Camus added another layer of provocation when he referred to the pope as ‘a minister of Christ like the others’. This was a challenge to its right of investiture that the papacy could not ignore. On 10 March 1791 Pius VI issued a brief that gave juring priests forty days to recant the oath they had taken. This was followed up by a declaration that the Civil Constitution was heretical, sacrilegious and schismatical. Elections of the new bishops were null and void. By the end of the month, Pius had broken off diplomatic relations with France, after an effigy representing ‘the ogre on the Tiber’ had been burned in the garden of the Palais-Royal. The pope figured in any number of revolutionary caricatures. One image showed Pius VI being turned away by St Peter at the gates of heaven; another had the pope blowing bulls, in the manner of a child’s bubbles, towards a figure of France who repelled them. Cruder images showed a revolutionary wiping his arse with the papal letter.27 Ironically, the pope’s firm stance coincided with a newfound spirit of compromise in the Assembly. Fundamentally, the problem was that a coerced oath sat uneasily with the guarantees of liberty contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Despite their refusal to swear the oath, non-juring clergy remained as members of the National Assembly. Attempts were made to fudge the graver consequences of dissent by separating disqualification of non-juring priests from public office from performance of their religious functions. On 7 May the Assembly decreed that non-juring priests could still conduct masses in what had become Constitutional churches, provided the laymen who rented the building for the occasion had sought prior official permission.
This spirit of compromise was not reflected in the new Legislative Assembly that met for the first time in October 1791. The greatly diminished clerical component now consisted of twenty-eight oath-taking clergy, while the number of radicals had increased dramatically in comparison with its Constituent predecessor, whose members had disqualified themselves from the successor chamber. The new Assembly included twenty-eight physicians, twenty-eight clergy, including two Protestants, about a hundred businessmen and landowners, some professors and journalists, and four hundred lawyers. On 9 October this more radical Assembly heard a report about the westernmost departments. Insofar as there were any Constitutional clergy, they were having a hard time of it. They were being ostracised by their parishioners who continued to respect the old priests. Those who attended the churches of the former were called ‘patriots’; those who went to non-juring clergy were dubbed ‘aristocrats’. Juring clergy found that bell-ropes were smeared with malodorous materials or that distressed cats sprang out of chests and cupboards. Supporters of both sides depicted the other’s clergy with comically elongated noses, and as more or less bound straight for hell.
In October 1791 the new Assembly passed a decree declaring non-juring clergy ‘suspects’. France’s deteriorating international position, culminating in war with Austria and reverses on the battlefield in the summer of 1792, further radicalised the mood of the Assembly, as did the urban radicals who repeatedly intimidated it. By a decree dated 27 May 1792, refractory priests who were denounced by a minimum of twenty active citizens (those wealthy enough to vote) were liable to deportation without prior judicial proceedings. Priests caught hiding faced a minimum of ten years’ imprisonment, and those who aided and abetted them had to defray the costs of these search-and-arrest operations themselves. The suspension, on 10 August, of the king from all his functions served to radicalise the Assembly still more. No one knows the name of the deputy who proposed an oath for all public functionaries and pensioners, a measure that applied to the salaried Constitutionals and the pensioned-off refractories alike. On 14 August all clergy were compelled to take the oath: ‘I swear to be faithful to the Nation, to maintain with all my power liberty, equality, the security of persons and property, and to die if necessary for the execution of the laws.’ Non-jurors were given a fortnight to leave metropolitan France or face deportation to New Guinea. If they returned to metropolitan France they faced ten years’ imprisonment. Only the ailing or elderly were exempted from these draconian measures, and they had to be concentrated in departmental capitals for close observation. Finally, on 20 September, in its final session, the Assembly laicised the state and sanctioned civil divorce.28
In late September 1792 the Prussian army captured the frontier fortress of Longwy and threatened Verdun too, the last line of defence before Paris. Fearing a fifth column, many non-juring clergy were incarcerated, until the prisons were so overcrowded that ad-hoc jails were established in abbeys and convents. Panic then spread among the Parisian plain-dressed popular militants or sans-culottes that ‘counter-revolutionary’ detainees were planning simultaneous uprisings. Violent mobs fell upon these places of incarceration, knifing the detainees to death. Between two and three thousand prisoners were murdered, including three bishops and 220 priests.29
The Constitutional clergy were left between the rock and hard place of revolutionaries whose anticlericalism had developed into calls to ‘de-Christianise’ France and a refractory clergy that was falling into the embrace of various counter-revolutionary forces. The Constitutional clergy were effectively state officials, although such functions as registering the rites of passage had been hived off from them to civil servants in September 1792. Inevitably, with something like half of the clergy refusing to swear the oath and hence expelled from their livings, there was a vast amount of movement within the clergy, with new faces popping up in unfamiliar settings. A manpower shortage ensured that many Constitutional or juring priests were former monks needing an income and housing.
Whereas large parts of the clergy had been on hand to bless secular political events, by 1791–2, the newly elected Constitutional bishops sometimes needed an armed escort even to enter their sees, leading bishop Pouderous of Béziers to be known as ‘Bishop of the Bayonets’. Despite the fact that many of these men were highly talented, and not cynical opportunists like Talleyrand, they often met a rough reception in their dioceses. Thus bishop Minée of Nantes was met by jeering women who shouted, ‘Minée, you’re a mouse, you’re a mouse!’ Bishops and priests whose election and installation owed much to respectively the vote-rigging skills of the local Jacobin clubs and the bayonets of the National Guard lived a lonely life amid their hostile parishioners. They were ‘intrus’ (intruders) who were installed in ceremonies usually dominated by republican guards and functionaries, where the curé might be the only cleric present. Installation was the easy part. Life among villagers who detested them was tough on the Constitutionals. Guns were discharged outside their windows late at night; dead cats, excrement or in some cases coffins were left on the rectory doorstep. They discovered that the pool of lay goodwill necessary for the upkeep of their churches had abruptly emptied as bell-ropes or the keys to the door or treasure literally vanished. In some parishes people would not even sell them life’s necessities or perform routine repairs.30
So far from revolutionary radicals resting content with the complete subordination of Church to state that the Civil Constitution signified, the new Convention, which replaced the National Assembly in September 1792, introduced measures which began to affect clerics in general rather than just those who refused the oath. Citizens could henceforth choose their own names, while only one bronze bell per parish was spared the state’s crucibles. From February 1793 onwards, the Convention introduced measures that encouraged clerics to marry, not least by punishing those bishops who might try to stop them. These measures affected Constitutionals and refractories alike. Between 4,500 and 6,000 clergy married, often formalising earlier arrangements with their long-standing partners. Nuns faced an especially grim time after being forced out of their convents, since unlike monks they could not easily find work as administrators, soldiers or teachers. Of those who married, about a quarter married former priests. A few claimed to have been influenced by ‘philosophic persons’ or by the temptation of being ‘a Jacobine, a worldly girl, frequenting balls and societies’.31
Many clergy were coerced or fell eagerly into apostasy, adopting ‘natural religion’ and abjuring ‘priestcraft’. Nearly half of the Constitutional clergy simply gave up their vocations, with some of them volunteering for the Republic’s armies or turning to secular school teaching. It amounted to a process of ‘civic baptism’. As a priest from Hérault announced: ‘Now that the state of priesthood contravenes the happiness of the people, and hinders the progress of the Revolution, I abdicate from it and throw myself into the arms of society.’ By 1794, only 150 of France’s 40,000 pre-Revolution parishes were openly celebrating mass.
We turn next to the fate of the refractories and attempts to make the revolution itself a religion. For about the necessity for a religion there was little or no doubt. A Jacobin writer a little conversant with history wondered:
How was the Christian religion established? By the preaching of the apostles of the Gospel. How can we firmly establish the Constitution? By the mission of the apostles of liberty and equality. Each society should take charge of the neighbouring country districts…It is enough to send an enlightened and zealous patriot with instructions which he will adapt to the locality: he should also provide himself with a copy of the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution, the Almanack du Pére Gérard [by Collot d’Herbois], a good tract against fanaticism, a good journal and a good model of a pike.
Armed missionaries were despatched into France profonde as well as across the length and breadth of Europe to propagate the new tidings as Reason militant went on the march.32