In 1818 a new priest arrived in the parish of Ars, 35 kilometres north of Lyon on the inhospitable plateau of Dombes, a treeless region, flecked with stagnant pools, the poor population living in clay huts. Religion had scarcely been practised in the parish since the Revolution. The former curé had broken faith by taking the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the church was in a state of disrepair, the church bells had been removed and melted down, and Sunday observance was at a low ebb, with the menfolk spending most of the day in the tavern and young people indulging in dances which frequently subsided into orgies.
The priest who arrived in the parish was no callow youth and today he might be called a late developer. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney was thirty-two, but had been ordained only three years previously, in August 1815. Of peasant origin, his parents had a small 12-hectare farm at Dardilly, just outside the north-west suburbs of Lyon. He had worked on the farm from the age of seven, the Revolution having interrupted his prospects of a regular education. After the 1801 Concordat, which re-established organized religion in France, Vianney attended the vicarage school in the neighbouring village of Écully, where the curé saw him as a prospect, and he was confirmed at the late age of twenty in 1807. In 1809 he was called up to fight in Napoleon’s armies, but avoided military service first by falling sick, then by going into hiding and lastly by having his younger brother François go in his stead, in return for signing over the 3,000-franc portion of the inheritance due to him. His brother died on campaign in 1813 while Vianney attended the petit séminaire and graduated to the grand séminaire, but his grasp of Latin was so weak that he was expelled in 1813 and finished his theological education at the feet of the curé d’Écully. The shortage of priests after the Revolution was so severe that Vianney was duly ordained, served as a curate at Écully for three years, and was then sent out to rechristianize the forgotten parish of Ars.
Vianney was not a learned priest and his sermons were cobbled together from theological cribs. However, he set a powerful example of personal piety, at prayer in the church from 4 a.m., was always available for confession, and visited his parishioners in their homes. He was uncompromising in his campaign to impose religious observance in the parish, clamping down on what he saw as the three evils of Sunday: labour, taverns and dancing. He allied himself with a core group of pious women in the parish, spinsters or mothers of priests, and a number of influential families. He trained a body of young girls, recruited into the guild of the Rosary, who recited the chapelet after vespers on a Sunday evening, and sent two of them, Catherine Lassagne and Benoîte Lardet, to train for a year in a community of nuns in order to open a school for girls in the village, which doubled as an orphanage for girls at risk. He mobilized the support of the chatelaine, Mlle Garnier des Garets, known as Mlle d’Ars, aged sixty-four when he arrived and with perfect Ancien Régime manners. Her brother the Vicomte François, who lived in Paris and was childless, became a major benefactor of the parish, rebuilding the church with a number of side-chapels, confessionals and larger choir, having a new bell-tower and bells made, and providing reliquaries, a tabernacle for the holy sacrament, and a dais and banners to carry in processions.
The influence of Vianney was not confined to his parish. In 1823 he assisted the Carthusians of Lyon who were preaching a mission in nearby Trévoux, gaining a reputation as a great confessor, and later that year led a pilgrimage which brought out two-thirds of his parishioners, travelling by boats drawn by horses along the Saône to the chapel of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, on a hilltop above Lyon, to give thanks for the benefactions of the vicomte. The July Revolution, which was in part an anticlerical revolt against the close alliance of Church and reactionary monarchy, affected Ars as elsewhere. A minority on the municipal council tried to unseat him, appealing to the subprefect against the mayor’s banning of dancing on the church square on the festival of the village’s patron saint. Vianney replied by keeping the young girls in the church after vespers, doing their rosaries as usual, and sabotaging the ball. Despite his campaign against popular vices, he was prepared to make use of popular religion too, especially saint-worship, in order to further his crusade. When Pauline Jaricot, a silk-merchant’s daughter known to him in Écully, returned in 1836 cured of her heart condition from the Naples shrine of St Philomena, he begged her for a relic and placed it in a side-chapel at Ars, dedicated to the saint. Of ninety-four girls he baptized between 1836 and 1855, thirty-nine were christened Philomena. Not only the saint cult but also his personal reputation led to pilgrims and penitents coming from all over the region to be confessed and set on the right course by the curé d’Ars. In 1845 there was an eight-day waiting list for the confessional, even though he might be confessing up to fifteen hours a day, and he remained a curé in the same parish until his death in 1859.1
The curé d’Ars was exceptional, a parish priest who was beatified in 1905 and canonized in 1925. And yet he was in many ways representative of the parish clergy who were faced by the challenge of rechristianizing France after the Revolution. France was desperately short of priests after a decade of persecution during which virtually no training or ordination had taken place. In 1809 there were only 31,870 secular priests compared to 60,000 in 1789, of whom 10,613 or a third were over sixty, and in 1814 numbers were down to 24,874.2 In the diocese of Guéret (Creuse department) in 1820, to take one example, they were either old, born before 1770, aged over fifty, or young, born after 1785, and under thirty-five; there were virtually none in the generation born between 1770 and 1785.3 Whereas priests in the eighteenth century were overwhelmingly of urban and bourgeois origin, in the nineteenth century they were overwhelmingly rural and of peasant or artisan stock. In the diocese of Rennes in the early nineteenth century 84 per cent of the population were of rural origin and so were 82 per cent of the priests, while between 1803 and 1869 in the diocese of Guéret 42 per cent of priests were sons of peasants, 42 per cent sons of artisans or small traders, and only 16 per cent were bourgeois.4 The abolition of tithes and the confiscation of church lands made the priesthood a far less attractive career than before the Revolution. Under the Concordat priests to the level of cantonal capital or deanery were paid a stipend by the state of 1,200–1,500 francs, but rural curés were paid only 500 francs by the state, rising to 700 francs in 1816 and 800 francs in 1830, the parish or commune being expected to make it up to a living wage.5 Only for those of rural or peasant origin did the parish priesthood offer any degree of stability or respect; indeed, as in the case of Vianney, it might provide a solution to the question of too many heirs chasing a farm that was too small to be divided further. Yet the curé de campagne could exercise great authority as an intermediary between the parish from which many people rarely moved and the outside world, as a notable alongside the notary and doctor but speaking the language, literally, of the peasants, as an ally of the chatelain but not necessarily ‘the château’s man’, as a figure vested with local authority like the mayor but also a spiritual leader, healer and protector of the parish at time of crisis, such as the cholera epidemic of 1832.6
The work of Vianney at Ars mirrored what went on to a greater or lesser extent in a thousand parishes. Everywhere the destruction wrought by the Revolution had to be set right. In the diocese of Angers over 200 churches were built or rebuilt in a diocese of about 360 parishes before 1870, with neo-Gothic and stained glass all the rage.7 The restoration of church bells, slowly under the Empire, faster after 1830, was of immense significance. Ringing the bells of Notre-Dame on Easter Day 1802 to celebrate the Concordat symbolized for many the end of the Revolution. The bell was at the centre of the parish’s religious life, although bell-ringing remained an issue between the government and the parish, which constantly tried to multiply the occasions on which bells could be rung, and trusted in them to ward away thunderstorms, disease and evil spirits.8 The Restoration period saw a vast movement of purificatory missions, preached by a regular clergy back in harness, inviting penitence for sins committed during the Revolution and a return to the true faith in order to recover God’s protection of France, culminating in the raising of huge mission crosses, many of which were knocked down by anticlericals after 1830.9 For nearly a generation after 1792, however, the apparatus of organized religion in the form of churches, parish priests and popular education had been sorely deficient, so that local populations had fallen back on traditional popular practices, many of which smacked of magic and superstition. While pushing forward the official religious revival, parish priests also had to accommodate the popular rites of their flock, as a means of bringing them back to more orthodox practices. So while they did what they could to eliminate the profanity of drinking and dancing, they blessed candles at Candlemas to guard against storms and take dead souls to heaven, blessed box-tree sprigs on Palm Sunday (preferred to palm leaves) to protect homes and stables from illness, and holy water at Easter to sprinkle on beds and in farmyards, led the Fête-Dieu or Corpus Christi procession across the fields to bless the crops and accompan ied popular pilgrimages to local shrines which were said to cure one ailment or another, ensuring that they remained orderly and sober.10
The raw material of Vianney’s parish was not promising, and his achievements were exceptional. That said, what most parish priests and the Catholic hierarchy in general could achieve was very much conditioned by the intensity of religious faith in the locality or region, which varied greatly from one part of France to another. Why this varied so much may be debated. One theory is that growing urbanization and industrialization progressively detached the working classes from organized religion, while the backward and traditional countryside remained more religious. Another is more historical and looks to the impact of events such as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the ill-fated Church reforms of 1791, for an explanation. A third is geographical and contrasts religious practice in the outlying areas of France with those in the core. A fourth looks to the coexistence of competing religious communities, Catholic and Protestant, or Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, where rivalry between faiths may have pushed up religious practice. A final explanation brings in the question of linguistic barriers, suggesting that minority languages may have acted as a dam against anticlericalism and impiety carried by the French language.
A study of the population of Paris, published in 1863, seems to provide evidence for the theory that urbanization and industrialization undermined religious practice.
The immense majority of the Parisian working class is Catholic by baptism [but] Catholic ceremonies are a dead letter for the people. Only women and above all children preserve a few feeble ties between the people and the Church… People are so anticlerical that the few faithful on whom the Church can rely are the targets of sarcasm as much as the few who oppose democracy. The typical Paris worker is an apprentice freethinker.11
This explanation blamed not the growing exploitation in large factories or the atomization of communal life in the large cities but politics: the alliance of the Church with reaction. The Revolution of 1848, according to this account, had provided the Church with a great opportunity to link religion and liberty. Initially the clergy had blessed liberty trees and baptized the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, but then fear had driven them, once again, into ‘the camp of adversaries of the Revolution’ and the people and religion were forced apart.12
This political interpretation suggests that sociological factors were not the most important when it came to explaining religious practice. Indeed, low religious practice was a phenomenon observed not only in Paris but across the Paris basin and central France, not only in urban areas but in rural ones too. ‘In the regions near the capital of the kingdom,’ noted the bishop of Chartres in 1842, ‘religion is practically abandoned by the menfolk; for many, their first communion is also their last.’13 When Félix Dupanloup was appointed to the bishopric of Orléans in 1850 he greeted it as a ‘terrible cure of souls’ with ‘500 indifferent parishes’. ‘Faith is declining visibly in this unfortunate region,’ reported his archdeacon of Pithiviers, responsible for the Beauce region, where the rate of Easter communion among women was 12.5 per cent and among men 2 per cent.14 The central French area of low religious practice extended as far as the Limousin in the Massif Central. The main factor here was the high rate of priests swearing the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy – 75 per cent in the Creuse, 65 per cent in the Haute Vienne, which may have reflected some attempt by priests and their parishioners to find common ground between religion and Revolution.15 However this attempt failed, ending up with the persecution of priests and the closure of churches and, unlike at Ars, these populations did not return to the churches when they reopened.
If many rural areas were irreligious, there were many industrial areas where religious practice among the working classes was surprisingly high. When coal mines began to be sunk in the Pas-de-Calais, where only 17 per cent of clergy had taken the oath to the Civil Constitution, local clergy worried that religious life would suffer from women dressing up as men and going down mines alongside them, leading to ‘the corruption of girls and boys, infidelity among spouses and a diabolical life in households’. However, miners were overwhelmingly of rural origin and retained the religious practice they brought from their home regions, albeit combined with a certain occupational superstition. Thus they crossed themselves before descending the pit, kept the box-tree sprigs from Palm Sunday in the house, celebrated St Barbe, the patron saint of miners, on 4 December, and took funerals extremely seriously.16 In the Nord, up against the Belgian frontier, religious practice was high not only in the rural, Flemish-speaking part of the department, but in the huge textile towns of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, while the rural south of the department around Cambrai was much less fervent. This was partly because of the rural, Belgian origin of many textile workers, but also because of the ex perience of the department during the Revolution. The reorganization of dioceses under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy deprived the bishop of Ypres of his parishes in France, and he protested, anathematizing those who took the oath and continuing to appoint priests to French Flemish parishes. Only 15 per cent of the clergy took the oath in the Nord, and only 5 per cent in the Flemish-speaking arrondissement of Hazebrouck, and many non-jurors who exercised their ministry from beyond the frontier returned to France in the wake of the Austrian army in 1792.17
The proximity of a frontier beyond which there was a strongly practising region offered a good deal of protection to religious practice. Franche-Comté, which like Flanders had been part of the very Catholic Habsburg Empire before 1678, was divided up into three departments and dioceses by the Civil Constitution. The diocese of Besançon (Doubs department) was particularly fervent in its religious practice, and the upper Doubs a fertile area for the recruitment of priests. Only 29 per cent took the oath to the Civil Constitution and the non-juring bishop of Besançon, Mgr de Durfort, organized his non-jurors from the Catholic canton of Fribourg over the border in Switzerland. When he died in 1792 responsibility for French non-jurors was taken over by the bishop of Lausanne, who was resident in Fribourg, and fifty-nine Franc-Comtois priests were ordained in Fribourg during the revolutionary period. The first bishop appointed under the Concordat, the former constitutional bishop of Rennes, Claude Le Coz, remained in place from 1802 to 1815 but had little authority in his diocese.18 The non-juring priesthood was ready to jump back into harness and the upper Doubs around Pontarlier, perched high in the Jura, where only 18 per cent of priests took the oath, resumed its role as a nursery for priests.19 Not for nothing did Montalembert, who was elected deputy of the Doubs in 1849, call it the ‘French Tyrol’.
Just north of the Franche-Comté, Alsace-Lorraine offered another example of a region that was far from being dechristianized. The working population of the textile town of Mulhouse, which was mainly Catholic, noted Armand Audiganne in 1860, ‘has maintained a religious observance which, if it has little influence on their morality, has a powerful hold on their minds. Each Sunday morning men and women crowd into a church which would have been large enough at the beginning of the century but was now thronged by a thousand Catholics.’ This religious fervour, which did not prevent them from being dead drunk on Monday morning, may have owed something to the confessional mix of the town, 40,000 or 73 per cent Catholics, 12,000 or 22 per cent Protestants, and 3,000 or 5 per cent Jews.20 In Strasbourg the confessional mix was more balanced, with 50 per cent Catholics, 46 per cent Protestants and 3 per cent Jews in 1806, and again religious observance was sharpened by religious rivalry.21 Catholics were antagonized by the triumphalism of the Protestant celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Reformation in 1817, while Protestants reacted against the Jesuit mission of 1821 and that of 1825, which ended with a ‘gigantic cross’ being raised near the cathedral. When mixed marriages took place the Catholic clergy insisted that the children be brought up as Catholics, and at Boux-willer (Bas-Rhin) in 1833 the priest refused to bury a Catholic doctor who had married a Protestant and allowed his children to be brought up as Protestants. The shortage of churches until after 1850 meant that a ‘simultaneum’ system operated, with the Catholics using the choir and Lutherans the nave at different times of day, but conflicts often arose. At Gundershofen (Bas-Rhin) in 1842, for example, the Catholics erected a balustrade at the entrance to the choir which the Protestants pulled down. Between 1840 and 1870, however, such rivalry stimulated the building of 200 churches, mostly in a powerful neo-Gothic style, and Alsace sustained its reputation as ‘the land of organs’ with 600 of them in 1844.22
The presence of a Jewish minority which was emancipated at the Revolution and had acquired an economic grip over non-Jews stimulated an anti-Semitism which may be interpreted as a kind of religious fervour. Alsace-Lorraine had 26,000 Jews in 1818, which was 79 per cent of the Jewish population in France.23 Emancipation allowed them to move from village communities not unlike the Polish shtetl into the towns, to move from being pedlars, horse- and cattle-merchants and moneylenders to owning land and taking up trades previously closed to them. However, they were now criticized for remaining middlemen and declining the opportunity to exercise ‘useful trades’ such as crafts or farming, charging extortionate interest to peasants who borrowed from them to buy biens nationaux, while continuing to speak a separate ‘Judaeo-Alsatian’ language and marrying only those of their own faith.24 A popular hostility to Jewish usury was reported in January 1806 by the prefect of Bas-Rhin at Strasbourg to Napoleon, as he returned from Austerlitz. Napoleon fumed that he ‘could not consider Jews who suck the blood of true Frenchmen to be French themselves’, and called both a Jewish assembly of notables and a Sanhedrin of rabbis later in 1806 to incite the Jewish population to reform its practices.25 While the assembly of notables, dominated by cultivated Portuguese Jews from Bordeaux, was conciliatory, the Sanhedrin refused to budge on usury and endogamous marriage, so Napoleon issued his ‘infamous decree’ of 17 March 1808 protecting Gentiles in debt to Jews, forcing Jewish traders to register each year with the prefect and subjecting them to military service.26 Such stringent measures headed off popular anti-Semitism provisionally, but in 1832 and 1848 there were pogroms against Jews in Alsace, their neighbours pillaging their homes and attacking them with forks, sticks and axes.27 Increasingly Alsatian Jews moved out of the villages to the relative safety of the city, and from Alsace to Paris. Jacob Dreyfus, a pedlar from Rixheim (Haut-Rhin), moved to Mulhouse after the pogrom of 1832, and his son Raphael married a butcher’s daughter, became a commission agent seeking clients for Mulhouse manufacturers, and in 1862 set up his own cotton mill. After the annexation of Alsace by Germany in 1871 two of his sons, Jacques and Léon, remained at Mulhouse, now part of the Reich, to look after the business, while two others, Mathieu and Alfred, went to Paris to continue their education.28
Another area of mixed confessions, and of sharp religious conflict, though here only between Catholic and Protestant, was the Cévennes hills and the lowlands around Nîmes. Here the Protestant population was Calvinist and had been deprived of civil and political rights and persecuted after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. In the early eighteenth century the Calvinists of the Cévennes had risen in revolt, the so-called Camisard wars, which provided them with a myth of resistance. Banned from office and the professions, Protestants turned to trade and a rich bourgeoisie of silk-merchants and bankers, based on Nîmes, emerged. It was this elite which benefited from the concession of civil and political rights at the Revolution, five of the eight deputies of the Third Estate from the Gard in 1789 being Protestant. An attempt by Catholics to prevent them taking over the municipality of Nîmes led to the four-day slaughter of the bagarre de Nîmes in June 1790, when the Protestant National Guard, reinforced by Protestant volunteers from the Cévennes, clashed with Catholic irregulars, after which the Protestants established their ascendancy in the administration of Nîmes and the Gard for most of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period.29
Hostility to Protestant emancipation was thus a driving force behind Catholic counter-revolution in the region, based on an alliance of landowning nobles excluded from power and poor peasants and workers who felt exploited by Protestant employers and mobilized in irregular militias, the miquelets. Their chance of revenge came after the Hundred Days, when Protestant supremacy crumbled with Napoleonic rule, and Catholic royalists unleashed a White Terror to force their way back into power.30 While the Restoration favoured the Catholics, the July Revolution brought the Protestants back into power. Now there was less violence but the rivalry was just as intense. Emmanuel d’Alzon, from a Catholic noble family in the Cévennes, one of whose ancestors had died in the Wars of Religion and another fighting the Camisards, was originally destined for a military career and when he became a priest dedicated himself to continuing the struggle against Protestants. He set up a Catholic college in Nîmes, even before it became legal under the Falloux law of 1850, staffed by priests belonging to the Assumptionist order he had founded, his intention being to ‘batter the Lycée, and gradually to draw off the whole Catholic population’, turning the lycée into a Protestant ghetto.31 Catholic–Protestant competition ensured a high level of religious commitment on both sides, even in industrial towns which might be expected to be less religious. At Lodève, a town in the Cévennes making woollen cloth for the army, Audiganne noted that ‘the Catholic religion reigns alone; its practices are observed with a remarkable fervour,’ with hooded workers belonging to societies of penitents presiding over funerals and a ‘quite extraordinary’ cult of St Fulcran, a former bishop of the town.32 At La Grand’Combe, a mining town further north in the Cévennes, between 30 and 50 per cent of miners took Easter communion in 1880, so that the bishop of Nîmes, Mgr Besson, himself a native of the very Catholic Doubs, reported that the town was one of the most fervent parishes in his diocese.33
The west of France, like much of the Midi, was a bastion of Catholic practice. In Brittany there were no religious minorities, and there was an overwhelming opposition to the Revolution, with 83 per cent of non-jurors in the diocese of Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine department).34 The diocese of Saint-Malo straddled the western part of Ille-et-Vilaine and the eastern parts of the Côtes-du-Nord and Morbihan and was a laboratory of Counter-Reformation activity. It was abolished under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but left its shadow as the part of Upper Brittany where religious practice and the recruitment of priests were highest.35 A small number of districts did see some attempt to reconcile Catholicism and Revolution. In the district of Quimper, for example, 53 per cent of priests took the oath to the Civil Constitution. This gave rise to a tension between what has been called ‘blue Christianity’, accepting the principles of 1789 but trying to christianize them, and ‘white Christianity’, which opposed the Revolution in the name of Church and king, protected the non-jurors and went as far as chouan guerrilla warfare against constitutional priests, revolutionary officials and purchasers of biens nationaux.36
Although it might be imagined that ‘white Christianity’ corresponded to the Breton-speaking western half of Brittany and ‘blue Christianity’ to the French-speaking eastern half, in fact this was far from being the case. In the Morbihan, for example, constitutional priests were concentrated in the Breton-speaking west of the department, while most non-jurors came from the French-speaking east, which had belonged to the pious diocese of Saint-Malo before 1789, and left its imprint with a score of only 10 per cent of juring priests. This may suggest that the historic weight of religious practice was more important than language in determining attitudes to the Civil Constitution and the Revolution.37 It was not, however, that the Breton-speaking areas were less religious. The Lenten address of the bishop of Quimper, Mgr Graveron, born near Brest, highlighted ‘the close ties that exist between a people’s language and its beliefs, its customs and its morals, its habits and its virtues’, and warned that the erosion of Breton by French was bringing impiety.38 In fact the whole of Brittany was religious, with a quasi-unanimous attendance of both sexes at mass, although some Bretons were more prepared to compromise with the Revolution than others.39
The peculiar intensity of religious life in Brittany may in part be attributed to a symbiosis between official Catholicism and popular religion, the former using the latter to underpin official religion rather than attempting to crush it as ‘superstition’. Ernest Renan, brought up in Tréguier, in the Breton-speaking west, a town which nurtured the cult of St Yves, noted that there were between ten and fifteen little chapels in each parish which were ‘dedicated to a saint who has never been heard of in the rest of Christendom’, for whom masses were said once a year. These cults, he said, were ‘merely tolerated by the clergy; if they could, they would suppress them.’40 New saints were being invented right down to the Revolution. The body of a chouan victim of the republican armies, known as Le Bonhomme, buried at Le Theil (Ille-et-Vilaine), was exhumed in 1830 and found to be in a remarkable state of preservation. The burial-place became a site of pilgrimage, and a fountain near by was said to cure fevers. The clergy did not suppress the cult but in 1870 built a chapel close by, dedicated to Our Lady of Beauvais, seeking to channel popular piety into the cult of the Virgin Mary which was developing in the nineteenth century as a way to fuse popular and official religion.41
The most spectacular example of a popular cult being transformed into official religion was of course at Lourdes. In the Pyrenees, as in Brittany and elsewhere, trees, fountains and stones were widely invested with religious significance, and local shrines, the objects of local pilgrimage and prayer, were thick on the ground. The apparition of a woman in white to a fourteen-year-old shepherdess, the daughter of a ruined miller, on 11 February 1858 at a grotto outside Lourdes was nothing out of the ordinary, except that it happened on a number of occasions and crowds gathered, 7,000 strong on 4 March, to see her fall into a trance as the vision reappeared. People began to bring gifts and started to build a chapel to the Virgin Mary, much to the confusion of the local authorities, who removed the gifts and tried to close the site in the name of public order. The bishop, Mgr Laurence, might have joined the authorities in their reservations, but he was persuaded by the story that on 24 March the apparition had declared, in the local patois, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’ This echoed a doctrine proclaimed by Pope Pius IX in 1854, to the effect that the Virgin Mary was herself preserved from all trace of original sin when her mother conceived her. In 1861 he therefore bought the grotto from the commune and had a Gothic chapel erected above it, which was proclaimed the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in 1874, while Bernadette, the shepherdess, was removed as a sick pauper into the care of the Sisters of Nevers, dying in 1878. Thus a spontaneous and popular outpouring was taken over by the Church hierarchy and regularized as part of the Marian revival that was paying increasing dividends in the nineteenth century.42
The battle that was fought between religion and Revolution in the parishes was also fought in the media. It was to be won or lost not only on the ground but in the world of ideas. There was a theory prevalent in conservative circles that the Revolution had been caused not by any fundamental crisis in French society or government but gratuitously, by the inflammatory ideas of philosophes of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire and Rousseau, which had taken hold of the educated elite and percolated down, in vulgarized and perverted forms, to the people. If therefore the threat of revolution were to be dissipated, it would ultimately have to be done by winning the battle of ideas. Men of religion who wrestled with these issues nevertheless confronted a fundamental problem. Were the ideas emanating from the Revolution to be rejected lock, stock and barrel, or was there a way of christianizing some of those ideas and modernizing religion in order to combat the modern world more effectively? This was an option that was posed each time a revolution shook France, and each time a new generation wrestled with it. The main stumbling block to this strategy, repeatedly manifested, was that the Catholic hierarchy invariably opposed such accommodation, leaving Catholic thinkers to choose between following the logic of their ideas and remaining within the bosom of the Church.
When Chateaubriand returned to France in 1800 he recalled seeing ‘only abandoned churches, whose dead had been thrown out, belltowers without bells, cemeteries without crosses, statues of saints without heads, stoned in their niches’. He wanted to bring France back to religion, and he also yearned for reconciliation with his mother, who had died in 1798 as a result of her imprisonment during the Terror, while he was in exile. He himself had been seduced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, but his mother had written to him, asking him to return to the religion in which he had been brought up. ‘I cried, and I believed,’ he declared, and wrote the Genius of Christianity both as ‘a mausoleum to my mother’ and as a beacon for the faithful, seeking a way back to ‘God’s house’.43
The task Chateaubriand set himself was to rescue religion from the sarcasm of the philosophes, to demonstrate that it was ‘neither barbarous, nor ridiculous, nor the enemy of arts and genius’. He argued that the existence of God was proved by ‘the marvels of Nature’, and that Christianity had inspired art and literature, poetry and music. Forests were ‘the first temples of the Divinity’, and Gothic cathedrals were like petrified forests. Without Christianity, he wrote, we would be just like the Romans, corrupt, cruel and servile under tyranny: ‘Christianity saved society from total destruction by converting the Barbarians.’44 Published in 1802, the Genius of Christianity became the handbook of the Concordat, used by Bonaparte to reconcile the regime with Rome, and Chateaubriand was rewarded with the post of under-secretary at the French embassy in Rome. Chateaubriand later claimed that when he fell from power Napoleon declared that no other work had done more to undermine him.45 There was, in fact, little political about it, and the generation that came to maturity in 1815 needed something less rhetorical and mystical, a more doctrinal demolition of the principles of 1789.
Félicité Lamennais, fourteen years younger than Chateaubriand, was the son of a shipowner of Saint-Malo ennobled in 1788. His mother died when he was five and he went to live with his uncle, reading Rousseau and other philosophes in the library. Sickly and melancholic, he did not find his vocation until the Hundred Days demonstrated how close France was to succumbing again to Revolution, and may thus be considered one of the generation of 1800. ‘It is not without a kind of joy that I feel the corrupted and corrupting world shaking under my feet,’ he wrote in July 1815. He decided to dedicate himself to ‘the victory of the Church and the triumph of its head’.46 Ordained in 1816 he published the Essay on Indifference the following year. This was a direct attack on the Revolution as a narcissistic impulse by which man, ‘adoring himself as man’, usurped the sovereignty of God and set himself up as sovereign instead. This sovereign man, guided only by his own reason, treated God as a usurper and destroyed the institutions of the Church. Then, when the king was executed, ‘society as a whole perished’. ‘There is no society and no order without religion,’ he stated, and by religion he meant a law, vested in the Church, which defined the relationship between man and God, subject and sovereign.47 Lamennais defended the Church against the Revolution, but saw the revolutionary attempt to reform it as merely the last episode of the state’s attempts at control that could be traced back to Louis XIV. He was thus an ultramontane rather than a Gallican, believing in a universal Church rather than in a series of state Churches. He opposed state control of the Church, but he also saw that the use by the state of the Church as a source of legitimacy and even as a system of police drove away from it those who might otherwise remain in the fold.
The alliance of Church and state, throne and altar, was never closer than under Charles X. It was manifested in his coronation at Reims and in a spate of laws sponsored by the Villèle government: a sacrilege law which imposed the death penalty for stealing chalices and violating the sacred host, a law making it easier for male religious congregations to re-establish themselves, and bills to tighten press censorship. There was a widespread feeling that these laws were inspired by Jesuits, who were formally banned in France yet pulled the strings of the government.48 After the fall of Villèle a law of 1828 prohibited Jesuits from teaching either in petits séminaires or in the secondary schools that were part of the university, a corporation of teachers founded by Napoleon in 1808 that alone could deliver the baccalauréat and degrees. Penalizing Jesuits, however, did not solve the problems of the regime. The Catholic Church was felt to legitimate the old Bourbon monarchy so powerfully that when, on 14 February 1831, mass was said in the Paris church of Saint-Germain L’Auxerrois for the Duc de Berry, the Bourbon heir assassinated in 1820, the Paris mob sacked the church and the archbishop’s palace next door.
The July Revolution had a great impact on the thought of Lamennais. It became clear to him that by bolstering reactionary regimes in return for their support the Church would only ever attract the backing of reactionaries and provoke the hostility of the mass of people. In August 1830 he published the prospectus of a new paper, L’Avenir, the motto of which was ‘God and Liberty’. On the one hand, he said, ‘sincerely religious people have not embraced the teachings of liberty’; ‘on the other hand, ardent friends of liberty are darkly defiant of the religion professed by twenty-five million French people.’49 Events seemed to justify this new credo of meshing religion and liberty. The Belgian revolt of September 1830 against its forced incorporation into the United Netherlands was undertaken in the name of both Catholicism and freedom. The Polish revolt of November 1830 against Russian tyranny was also under the banners of Catholicism and freedom. It was a message that fired a new generation of Catholics, both clergy and lay, born around 1800. Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, who began a career as a barrister before ordination in 1827, and was a chaplain at the Collège Royal Henri IV, joined Lamennais at his Breton retreat of La Chesnaie in May 1830 and was involved in the Avenir project from the start.50 Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, the son of an émigré who had married into an old Irish-Scottish Catholic family, the Forbes, visited Ireland in 1830 to study the struggle of O’Connell and the Catholic Association against British tyranny and wrote to Lamennais professing his ‘love of Catholicism and liberty. I am only twenty.’51
Lamennais, Lacordaire and Montalembert became very close friends, as well as being involved in a common enterprise. When Montalembert lost his father in 1831 he told Lacordaire that Lamennais ‘promises to act as my father’, while Lacordaire wrote to Montalembert, ‘Be always good, tender, pious, and pray for me, please, lest I love you too much.’52 And yet a rupture was in sight. The Church authorities were hostile to the line of L’Avenir and the three went on a pilgrimage to Rome to solicit the support of the pope. They were unable to see him and were on their way home, at Munich, in August 1832, when they received the pope’s encyclical, Mirari vos, condemning L’Avenir. Lacordaire and Montalembert tried to persuade Lamennais to reconsider his doctrines, but he became even more radical, publishing Les Paroles d’un croyant, in which he argued that Jesus Christ the carpenter’s son was betrayed by ‘the scribes and the pharisees, the doctors of the law, Herod and his courtiers, the Roman governor and the priests’ princes’. It was up to the people, who had always kept faith with Christ, to build the city of God according to the gospel of liberty, justice and love.53 This was in turn condemned by Rome in June 1835, and Lacordaire and Montalembert were torn between loyalty to their master and obedience to the Church, which tolerated no heresy. ‘I would rather throw myself into the sea with a millstone round my neck’, Lacordaire wrote to Montalembert, ‘than maintain a centre of hopes, ideas, even of good works, next to the Church.’54 Montalembert in turn wrote to Lamennais, ‘I remained faithful to you, and you know with what zeal and love, as far as the frontiers of Catholicism.’55
Lamennais crossed the frontiers of Catholicism and broke with both the Church and his disciples. He cultivated a new circle of friends, and eyebrows were raised in Paris at his collaboration with the writer George Sand, who in 1837 published advice to young women in his paper, Le Monde.56 He rediscovered his Rousseauistic origins with his Livre du peuple in 1838 which argued that the people had reclaimed their liberty and sovereignty, but it was now necessary to ‘spiritualize man more and more’, to balance his rights by an understanding of duty, using the gospel’s teachings of justice and love.57 Lacordaire, on the other hand, stayed in the Church and was sought out as an intellectual leader by young Catholics who wanted to debate the role of the Church but did not want to follow Lamennais into heresy. In 1833 Montalembert introduced him to Madame Swetchine, a Russian who had left St Petersburg after converting to Catholicism in 1815 and who presided over the most Catholic salon in Paris. In 1835 she secured the consent of the archbishop of Paris both for a private chapel in her house and for permission for Lacordaire to deliver a series of Lenten sermons in Notre-Dame. This was the society event of its day, attended by 6,000 people, including Chateaubriand, Berryer, Montalembert, Tocqueville, Lamartine and Victor Hugo.58 In 1838 Lacordaire went even further on his route to orthodoxy. He went to Rome to train as a Dominican friar, took the habit in 1839, and returned to work for the liberty of religious congregations such as the Dominicans to re-establish themselves in France.59
Montalembert, meanwhile, from his power-base in the Chamber of Peers, opened a campaign in 1843 for la liberté de l’enseignement, the right of Catholics to set up their own colleges independent of the university. Although many of the teaching staff before 1830 were priests, after 1830 the university was heavily laicized and run by a lay clerisy. Montalembert argued that this monopoly violated the principle of liberty proclaimed by the Charter of 1830 and in his publicity campaign he was assisted by an up-and-coming young journalist of humble origins, a cooper’s son from near Orléans, Louis Veuillot. A fervent Catholic since meeting the pope in 1838, Veuillot was from 1844 editor of L’Univers, a paper founded by Montalembert.60 This crusade, however, was vigorously opposed by two professors of the Collège de France, of the same 1800 generation: Jules Michelet, professor of history, and Edgar Quinet, professor of foreign languages and literature. Montalembert had in fact tried to involve Michelet in L’Avenir, and introduced him to Lamennais in 1831, but since then their ways had parted. In a hugely popular lecture series in 1843 Michelet and Quinet argued that the request for freedom to teach was a trick to allow back the Jesuits, who would soon control all Catholic colleges. The Jesuits, they averred, ‘claimed liberty to kill liberty’, were the sworn enemies of free thought and intellectual life, were fundamentally opposed to ‘the spirit of the French Revolution’, and were defenders of divine-right monarchy and, indeed, of ‘counter-revolution’.61
As the 1830 Revolution had posed the question of whether Catholicism could ally with liberty, so the 1848 Revolution posed that of the alliance of Catholicism and democracy. Initially, the signs were good. Witnessing a liberty tree being blessed by a priest on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, Quinet reflected that while the Revolution of 1789 ‘thought it could save the world by its own spiritual energy’, that of 1848 ‘believed that it could save the world only with the support of the priest’.62 Lamennais, now close to Michelet, whose book Le Peuple in 1846 echoed his own Livre du peuple, brought out a paper called Le Peuple Constituant which proclaimed ‘the French and European masses’ deep love of and attachment to an ideal republic, which is synonymous with justice and fraternity’. Lamennais was elected to the National Assembly for Paris on 23 April, with 104,000 votes.63 Frédéric Ozanam, who as a student in Paris in 1833 helped form the Society of Saint-Vincent de Paul to spiritualize the elite of society through working with the poor, and was now professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, joined forces with Abbé Henri Maret, professor of theology at the Sorbonne, and won over an initially reluctant Lacordaire to launch their new paper, L’Ère Nouvelle. Their argument was that democracy was ‘the work of God’, that equality and fraternity were implicit in the gospel’s teachings of justice and love, but that democracy and the Republic would have to be Christianized if they were not to go down the same road as the First Republic to the September massacres and Terror of 1793.64 Ozanam failed to get elected in his home city of Lyon, but Lacordaire was elected in Marseille, one of twenty priests and three bishops to be elected to the National Assembly, and took his place there dressed in his white Dominican robes. Montalembert, also elected, was no part of the new project. He was hostile to democracy which, he thought, would lead only to catastrophe, and became an apologist for the monarchy and aristocracy.
Perhaps Montalembert was right. The project of reconciling democracy and Christianity was dealt a series of blows. When the Assembly was invaded by the Paris mob on 15 May 1848 Lacordaire was so upset that he withdrew from active involvement in the Assembly and in L’Ère Nouvelle. During the June Days Ozanam found himself in the National Guard but helped to persuade the archbishop of Paris, Mgr Affre, to go with a white flag to the barricades and negotiate a ceasefire. Unfortunately the archbishop was shot and died the next day, and the workers’ uprising was put down by General Cavaignac and the National Guard with great cruelty. ‘It is not blood that expiates blood,’ Lamennais cried out impotently on 30 June, ‘but forgiveness, love.’ He attacked the ‘butchery’ by the military and the imprisonment of 14,000 workers, after which his paper was banned.65 Ozanam grappled with the reasons for class war, arguing that the materialism of the bourgeoisie that had exploited and impoverished the working classes was driving them to an atheistic socialism. ‘The working class will only accept the hopes and consolations of religion’, he stated, ‘if religion is full of concern for its misery and just towards its legitimate aspirations.’66 Montalembert, for his part, argued that his former colleagues were entirely wrong to argue that ‘Christianity is democracy.’ He had fought for twenty years against the doctrine that Christianity meant the Bourbon monarchy, and ‘I would fight for another twenty years, if God gives them to me, against this new proposition.’67 He duly threw himself into the parti de l’ordre, which campaigned for the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as president of the Republic on 10 December 1848.
The alliance of Church and state was now not between Church and monarchy but between Church and Republic, under Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. It was consecrated by the appointment as education minister of the Comte de Falloux, whose law of 1850 enshrined the liberté de l’enseignement for which Montalembert and Veuillot had crusaded, and by the 1849 expedition of French troops to expel republicans from Rome and restore the pope to the Holy City. This recovery of state power by Catholics, however, provoked an equal and opposite reaction from republicans who firmly believed that the Republic should be neutral in matters of religion, not the secular arm of the Catholic Church. They reverted to the argument that Catholicism and liberty were irreconcilable. Victor Hugo opposed French support for the pope in Rome on the grounds that the Papal States were a medieval and barbaric theocracy which had brought back the Inquisition, and denounced the ‘clerical party’ behind the Falloux law as having ‘a history that is written in the annals of human progress, but on the reverse side’.68 Michelet was at the time writing the passage of his History of France that chronicled the attempt by Catholicism and royalism in the Vendée to stab the Revolution in the back.69 Quinet concluded that Catholicism and liberty were indeed irreconcilable, and set a new agenda to separate Church and state, with the state no longer paying the stipends of bishops and priests, and the separation of Church and school, with religious instruction no longer given there.70
Montalembert supported Louis-Napoleon’s coup of 1852 which ‘routed all the revolutionaries, all the socialists, all the bandits’, but soon realized that the Empire was not a friend of liberty in the political sense and refused the offer of a seat in the Senate.71 In 1859–60, like all Catholics, he was shocked by the support given by the Empire to Italian unification under the leadership of Piedmont, which took place at the expense of the Austrians, the Bourbons of Naples and the Papal States. His ideal, he told Piedmont’s first minister, Cavour, was ‘a free Church in a free state’, which included the independence of the pope himself, based on the Temporal Power, but what he witnessed was ‘the Church despoiled in a spoliating state’.72 Others, such as Louis Veuillot, were even more pronounced in their commitment to the cause of the Papacy. In 1864 Pope Pius IX published the Syllabus of Errors, which declared that a whole confection of modern ideas, from control of the Church by the state to liberalism, socialism and nationalism, had led to the disaster in which the universal Church now found itself. There could now be no negotiation between the Church and modern ideas, which were roundly anathematized. Catholics such as Montalembert, who had defended a compromise between Catholics and liberty, were left swinging, while the likes of Veuillot, who had defended orthodoxy against error and held that ‘God is the unique truth and the Catholic Church is the unique Church of God’, were vindicated.73
Lamennais had died in 1854, Ozanam in 1853, but there was now no room for Catholics who argued that Catholicism endorsed democracy. Democracy had led to civil war, then to authoritarian empire. A new generation of republican opponents of the authoritarian Empire, born around 1830, understood that it was not enough to found democracy, but that universal suffrage had to be educated in order to perpetuate the Republic for more than the four years it had lasted after 1848. Rights would have to be balanced by duties in order to ensure a cohesive society and avoid another lapse into violence, but those duties could not be sanctioned by the Church, which had declared itself the enemy of modern ideas. The influence of the Church had to be cut back in state and society, and citizens would have to be educated in a manner fit to underpin a free, equal, fraternal society.
One approach was to separate Christianity from the Catholic Church, to take the example and teachings of Jesus Christ, leaving behind the paraphernalia of magic, mystery and authority. Ernest Renan, who left the Church in 1845 and was appointed professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France in 1861, saw his first lecture course suspended because he denied the divinity of Christ.74 The lectures were a foretaste of his Life of Jesus, published in 1863, and which sold 50,000 copies in French in the first six months. This was not a celebration of the son of God but a biography of the historical Jesus, who came ‘from the ranks of the people’, inspired a millenarian sect like many others, was ‘in some senses an anarchist’, had no visions, performed no miracles and was not resurrected but was a spiritual genius who preached that ‘the kingdom of God is within you’. ‘Jesus planted religion in humanity,’ concluded Renan, ‘as Socrates planted philosophy and Aristotle science.’75
Another approach was to extract from all the great world religions, setting aside different doctrines, the kernel of morality that they all taught. Ferdinand Buisson, a Protestant who parted from the fundamentalist wing of his Church, was a disciple of Quinet, also a Protestant, whom he visited in his Swiss exile and who sponsored him for the post of professor of philosophy at the Academy of Neuchâtel. In 1869 he published a Manifesto of Christian Liberalism in which he argued that it was ‘a right and a duty to free our piety and moral activity from belief, which is as enervating as it is treacherous, from divine intervention… and to secularize religion. We take root in the whole human tradition, without chaining ourselves to the letter of a particular past, be it Jewish, Catholic or Protestant.’76 This was a moral core that could be used in the schools, separated from the Church, of which Quinet dreamed.
The idea of a residual morality taught by all the great religions was entertained by many freemasons. Jean Macé, a republican teacher who had to go into hiding after the failed Montagnard rising of 13 June 1849 and could not teach in the state sector because he refused to swear an oath to the Empire, took a job in a girls’ boarding school in Alsace and promoted the cause of adult education through local libraries. In 1867 he founded the Ligue de l’Enseignement, and used the network of masonic lodges to propagate branches across the country. The task was to educate the people for democracy, a democracy that had been hijacked by the Empire but which at a future date would sustain the Republic. This would require free, compulsory elementary education and would have to be underpinned by a morality that owed nothing to organized religion. In February 1870 Macé described the philosophy of the Ligue as the same as that practised by freemasonry. At the core of all religions was ‘a law of voluntary sacrifice to the ideas of human justice and fraternity’, ‘the fulfilment of a universal duty of love and justice’.77 This philosophy fed through into the programme of free, compulsory and lay elementary education that was implemented by the Republic in 1881–2 in the hope that this time the Republic would endure.