CHAPTER 11

Engaging the Gallican Church and the Vatican

IN 1789 FRANCE was 85 percent rural. Twenty-two million out of 28 million French men and women lived in the countryside, the overwhelming majority engaged in agriculture and agriculture-related work. At least one-third of them were poor or destitute. Their households and communities were trapped in inertia and were untouched by the lumières. Illiteracy was very much the norm. Peasant traditions and attitudes were inseparable from religious beliefs and practices in which magic at once reinforced and alleviated the fear of famine and plague, as well as of the Last Judgment. The houses and representatives of God were as omnipresent as the landed nobles who were the masters of the seignorial system.1

There were, of course, considerable variations in landholding, welfare, literacy, and religiosity. But these do not invalidate this general portrait of a fixed rural society, all the more striking when counterposed to urban France. At the time France counted about sixty towns with over 10,000 inhabitants, Paris towering over all of them with a population of 600,000. Starting in 1789, “the city was opposed to the countryside just as the revolution was opposed to the ancien regime.” As we will see, citadins and peasants only rarely marched to the same beat. Not infrequently city and revolution made common cause against rural France and the old order.²

On the eve of the Revolution, however, both city and country were still spanned by the enormous institutional power of the Church. The Gallican Church was the “eldest daughter of the Catholic Church” by virtue of France being Europe’s premier Catholic country in terms of population and religious vocations. France’s paramount church probably was also Europe’s wealthiest, thanks to its income from tithes and donations and its ownership of 10 to 15 percent of the nation’s land. Throughout the length and breadth of the country, cathedrals and churches, monasteries and convents were the commanding focal points of communal life. The clergy occupied a prominent position in the ruling and governing class in both city and country, especially because of the large number of institutions it managed.

The Church establishment counted about 140 dioceses, close to 40,000 parishes, and about 1,000 monasteries and nunneries, as well as hundreds of welfare and educational institutions. In addition to one priest per parish, or a total of 40,000, appointed for life, there were again as many vicars and auxiliaries, plus tens of thousands of monks and nuns. The higher priesthood of 8,000 included some 140 archbishops and bishops, all of them of noble birth. Of course, France’s cities had many parishes, both large and small. In addition, they boasted a variety of ecclesiastical institutions along with a wide variety of clerics other than the workaday curés. For a population of about 600,000 Paris had fifty parish churches and monasteries, owning a quarter of the capital’s land area. Amiens, a city of 35,000 inhabitants, counted 1,200 churchmen and churchwomen for fifteen parish churches, fourteen monasteries, and nine nunneries. And when the Estates-General met in 1789, the First Estate of some 170,000 churchmen sent 296 representatives to Versailles. This delegation included forty-seven bishops, twenty-three abbots, twelve canons, and six vicars, most of them wellborn, along with 208 parish priests, most of them semi-educated and of humble and rural origin.3

Rooted in a long-standing alliance with the Roman Catholic Church, the French monarchy itself was in essence Christian and Catholic. His “Most Christian Majesty,” the King of France, was king by the Grace of God. He was at once only too human but also sacred and inviolable, with thaumaturgical powers. The millennial ceremony of the sacre, or anointment and coronation, of Louis XVI—the fifth Bourbon, the thirty-third Capetian—which renewed the alliance of throne and altar, took place in the cathedral of Rheims on Trinity Sunday, June 11, 1775.⁴ Attended by the princes of the blood and preceded by the archbishop of Rheims, Cardinal de La Roche-Aymon, the king entered the cathedral at 7:30 in the morning. He took his seat, his back to the high altar, in the fauteuil du souverain standing alone on the dais in the middle of the sanctuary. The assembly in the cathedral was drawn from the apex of the Establishment. Once the archbishop had sung the Veni Creator and the holy vessel containing the oil of anointment was brought forward and placed on the altar, he approached Louis XVI to take his promise that he would continue to protect the integrity of the Church and its privileges. As part of this oath Louis XVI pledged to defend the “church against the wickedness of infidels,” to “expel heretics from his kingdom,” and to live and die in the Catholic faith. Thereupon La Roche-Aymon held high and consecrated first the sword and then the scepter of Charlemagne before handing them to the Bourbon to hold. The twenty-year-old Bourbon and the seventy-three-year-old cardinal then prostrated themselves on a purple velvet carpet while four bishops recited the litany of the saints. Next, Louis XVI rose to kneel on the steps of the altar in front of the archbishop, who was now seated before him. Having anointed his head and body with sanctified oil, the archbishop proclaimed Louis XVI to be consecrated king.

The climax of the ceremony was the moment of coronation: after entrusting Charlemagne’s scepter to the king, La Roche-Aymon, assisted by the six great peers of the realm, held Charlemagne’s crown over his head. There were several additional prayers and benedictions as the king continued to kneel at the cardinal’s feet. Finally, with the scepter and the main de justice in his right and left hand, respectively, the king, wearing the “ordinary” crown, ascended the throne. With cannons booming and bells ringing, the general public was admitted through the main portal of the cathedral to join in the acclamation and participate in the closing Te Deum. On June 13–14, after resting from the six-hour ceremony, the king touched, one after another, several hundred ragged wretches afflicted with scrofula, thereby reaffirming the miraculous powers proclaimed in the legendary proverb, “the King touches, God heals.”

In the normal order of things, and very much in the spirit of the sacre in Rheims fourteen years before, a grandiose religious ceremony preceded the opening of the Estates-General on May 5, 1789. Michelet’s penetrating eye was drawn to it as glaring evidence that throne and altar remained inextricably linked. Although he did not deem it a premeditated provocation, he did note the “odious detail of this Gothic ceremonial” intended, even if unintentionally, to perpetuate “class distinctions … [and] social hatreds” as well as to “humble and humiliate” the common people.5 The democratic persuasion that inspired Michelet’s comment does not invalidate his judgment on the ancien régime’s last apotheosizing self-celebration, nor his vivid rendering of it.

On April 29 Louis XVI instructed the archbishop of Paris, Leclerc de Joigné, to plan a general procession of the Holy Sacrament for May 4 in Versailles in which “the King, the Queen, the royal family, the princes of the blood, and all court officers would participate.” Its purpose would be to ask God’s guidance for “the grand and notable assembly of my Kingdom’s Estates General.”⁶ In fixing the order of precedence and dress code for this solemnity, the court’s master of ceremonies took the arrangements of the opening of the Estates-General of 1614 as his model.

On the appointed day, following the singing of the Veni Creator, 1,200 members of the Estates-General wended their way from Versailles’s church of Notre-Dame to the Cathedral of Saint-Louis for the celebration of the Mass of the Holy Spirit. Some forty Franciscan friars and the priests of the local diocese marched at the head of this imposing processional, followed by the 550 deputies of the Third Estate. Representing the least esteemed of the three orders, they were kept at the greatest distance from the king. They wore black woolen costumes with white muslin ties and three-cornered hats without braids or buttons. But despite their “modest dress,” the people’s delegates, over 300 of them lawyers and magistrates, were “resolute in both step and demeanor.” Having been spurned by the nobility, Mirabeau was among them, carrying a sword and “attracting much attention.”⁷

There followed the “small but grand body of deputies” of the Second Estate, among whom the ninety leading noblemen stood out for their striking attire.⁸ Dressed in black coats with golden facings and wearing white stockings and lace ties, the magnates cut a dash with their swords and plumed white hats in the style of Henry IV.

In the procession the First Estate of churchmen was in third place, but with the privilege of marching immediately ahead of Louis XVI and his notable entourage. The cloth was as if divided into two separate orders. Some 200 priests wearing cassocks and square caps were in the lead. They were separated from the upper clergy by several hundred “vocal and instrumental musicians of the King’s royal chapel clad in black, with swords at their sides.”9 Not unlike the preeminent nobles, the nearly fifty cardinals and archbishops of the upper clergy impressed the crowds with their blazing vestments.

The royal party was like a world unto itself. It was headed by the grand officers of the crown and the gentilhommes d’honneur of the princes of the blood. Each of these—the Duc d’Orléans, the Duc de Berry, the Duc d’Angoulême, the Comte d’Artois, the Comte de Provence—was surrounded by scores of attendants, some on foot, others in carriages. While each prince had two or three equerries, Louis XVI had fourteen. The king walked immediately behind the Holy Sacrament, carried by the archbishop of Paris, while the chief royal chaplain held His Majesty’s candle. He was surrounded by the princes and noblemen of the court. The queen was to the left of the king, her candle carried by her personal chaplain. She was attended by, among others, Madame Elisabeth, the duchess of Orléans, and the Princess de Lamballe.¹⁰

At the Cathedral of Saint-Louis the Mass of the Holy Spirit was celebrated by the archbishop of Paris, assisted by the archbishops of Toulouse and Bourges, and sung by the royal musicians. The bishop of Nancy, Monseigneur de la Fare, delivered a sermon in keeping with the logic and mystique of the occasion.¹¹

The solemn proceedings showed that even now there were no serious fissures in the pretense of sacralized political power. The attending crowds, which included many Parisians, were awed by the grandeur of the spectacle. There were scattered cheers for the representatives of the Third Estate, and for the king. Apparently the nobility, flaunting privilege and vanity, elicited few plaudits, and the queen was viewed with a scornful eye. But overall, reverence for the Establishment seemed intact. Neither the order of precedence nor the mise en scène was questioned, and during the early dawn of the revolt the continuing centrality of the Roman Catholic Church and religion was taken for granted by the upper ten thousand as well as society at large. Apparently, few if any delegates of the three estates ever even considered boycotting, let alone publicly opposing, the archaic pageant of sanctified and hegemonic power.

The fact that in June the lower clergy of the First Estate backed the incipient reform movement by voting to join with the Third Estate in no way weakened the union of throne and altar, all the less so since the rebel priests aimed to reform and regenerate the church without undermining its peculiar preeminence. The embryonic National Assembly sought to reshape and loosen rather than sever the bonds between God and Caesar as part of a general renewal of political and civil society. Characteristically, the spectacular abolition of seignorial rights, including those of the Church, during the notable night of August 4–5, 1789, was capped, late that night, with a solemn Te Deum in the royal chapel of Versailles, in the presence of the king and the deputies. This unhoped-for reform also called forth many a Thanksgiving mass in different parts of France in which the old clergy and the emergent political class joined together. Thereafter clergymen, considering the Gospel the perfect foundation for the rebirth of France, consecrated the tricolor flags of newly formed National Guard units.12 They also officiated at ceremonies centered around maypoles and freedom trees, and until 1792 many of the newly invented and staged civic festivals included solemn church services. Not a few clergy and laity seized the hour, in the words of Kierkegaard, “to introduce Christianity into Christendom.”

Precisely because in France the relationship of state and church was not challenged, let alone recast, before August 4–5, it had to be taken up soon afterward, and this involved “reforming the one and the other” simultaneously. The very strength of the bond meant that it was impossible to reform the government without making major changes in the status of the Gallican Church in both civil and political society; and soon these changes began to be driven also by the contingencies of the Revolution and the Enlightenment views of its leaders. But—again, because of the very ubiquity of church and religion in all spheres of life—there was no way of making or forcing such changes without doing violence to deep-felt interests, sensibilities, and passions. Presently the religious question became a major catalyst of the friend-enemy dissociation, despite the efforts of moderate bishops in 1790 and of Robespierre in 1794 to prevent the rift.¹³

A relatively small number of the Third Estate’s cahiers de doléances called for reform in the Church, notably for a curtailment of fiscal privileges and a redistribution of the extravagant wealth of religious orders and prelates in favor of the parish priests. Scores of the lower clergy harbored similar reformist notions, and these worldly concerns made for a common ground with the Third Estate in May–June 1789. Of course, while for the former ecclesiastical reform was the key to the regeneration of Church and ministry, for the latter it was an essential precondition for the reform of the commonweal. But even if a vanguard in the Third Estate proposed to press reform within the awe-inspiring Gallican Church as part of a curtailment of the powerful “state within the state,” it considered neither questioning its eminent institutional sway nor attacking the Catholic religion per se.14

In any case, at the creation of the French Revolution the Third Estate and the reformists within the Church needed each other. Numerically the delegation of the First Estate at Versailles “was dominated by parish priests … [and] out of this body came the crucial [if narrow] majority which on June 19 voted to join with the Third Estate.” To be sure, nearly 20 percent of the upper clergy finally rallied as well, and so did a liberal fraction of forty-seven members of the nobility. Still, without “the discontent and ideals of the lower clergy,” the Revolution “might well have been stillborn.”¹⁵

But politics knows no gratitude. Presently the First Estate found itself confronted with several changes that went alarmingly beyond its ill-defined intentions. In the wake of August 4 and 11, 1789, the priests and, above all, the bishops faced the problems stemming from the renunciation, without compensation, of feudal prerogatives and the tithe. This surrender of economically valuable rights dealt them and the religious orders such a severe material blow that the hierarchy was compelled to rethink and restructure the finances of the Church. Would the men and women of the cloth have to become, as Mirabeau suggested, salaried public functionaries? With the aggravation of the state’s budgetary deficit, on November 2, 1789, the National Assembly, by a large majority, voted to have the property of the Church placed at the disposal of the nation, to serve as collateral for the assignat. This measure further increased the Church’s dependence on the state—or, rather, on the ill-defined new regime.¹⁶

Ever more churchmen became alarmed about not only this ominous dependency but also other unforeseen consequences of their alliance with the Third Estate. As early as August 1789 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen unequivocally defined civil rights and liberties to include religious freedom for non-Catholics. The following April the Assembly defeated Dom Christophe-Antoine Gerle’s motion to proclaim Roman Catholicism France’s dominant or state religion. This rebuff was all the more politically divisive because nearly the entire clergy had taken for granted that the Gallican Church would continue to be paramount, with Protestants and Jews held in an inferior status, exposed to discrimination.17 No less troubling for the hierarchy, about this same time the Assembly decreed the dissolution of all monasteries and convents except those with a charitable and educational mission. The bulk of the clerical deputies in vain protested what they considered the would-be temporal state’s unwarranted intrusion into the inviolate ecclesiastical sphere. Although the majority of the Assembly viewed the reformation of the Gallican Church as a normal part and consequence of the reform of France’s public institutions, for ideologically charged political reasons, militant reactionaries opposed the decree of dissolution, while reformers pressed it, thereby feeding the incipient polarization of forces opposed to compromise.

The new men of power may be said to have shown greater resolve in dealing with the monarchy and nobility than with the Church. Admittedly, they were critical of the excessive weight of the priesthood and hierarchy in state and society. But they were also daunted by the men of the cloth, not least because they had a sacred aura about them. To challenge the Church head-on was to move into uncharted and treacherous waters. As Quinet suggested, the Enlightenment did not provide legislators and Jacobins with either a canon or guidelines for the separation of church and state, of religion and politics.¹⁸

Without following a master plan, during the first year the Revolution gradually eroded the autonomy of the Gallican Church: “politically, by associating the bons curés with the Third Estate; socially, by abolishing feudal privileges; economically, by nationalizing church property; and [finally] religiously, by enacting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.”¹⁹ This new status for the clergy, voted on July 12, 1790, was inseparable from the intensifying struggles over the future directions of the Revolution in the Constituent Assembly and beyond, and hence stirred the embers of religious strife. From now on, for all sides, but especially for the fundamentalists of the right and left, positions on the church-religion issue became a crucial touchstone of political orientation and engagement: revolutionaries denigrated all critics and opponents of the Civil Constitution for their medieval clericalism and obscurantism; the anti- and counterrevolutionaries at home and abroad traduced their opponents for being enemies of God and the Catholic faith.

Since during the springtime of the Revolution the majority of the National Assembly had “recast vast areas of French secular life unresisted and … removed the Church’s material foundations without much outcry,” it did not expect inordinate opposition as it set about redefining the Church’s place in the embryonic new order.20 To be sure, the majority of bishops in league with die-hard secular notables had seized every opportunity to decry the disestablishment drive for being inherently ungodly. Be that as it may, the immediate purpose of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was to recast the materially and politically weakened Church in the same spirit and intention as the other institutions of the commonwealth. For reasons of economy and efficiency, the number of dioceses was reduced from 139 to one diocese for each of France’s newly drawn eighty-three departments, with one parish for every 6,000 inhabitants. In the future, priests would be popularly elected and adequately paid, with the higher clergy commanding less generous incomes than heretofore.

Clearly, even though the lawgivers professed that with the Civil Constitution they were not exceeding their temporal authority, they certainly did so in the eyes of the clergy. Quite apart from never as much as consulting the hierarchy about the redrawing of France’s ecclesiastical map, the brazen secular state presumed to institute an electoral regime for the priesthood and to loosen the Gallican Church’s ties to Rome by stripping the Pope of his time-honored prerogative of investiture.²¹

The vast majority of the clerical deputies as well as much of the clergy and laity at large took umbrage and hurled defiance at the Civil Constitution, insisting that such drastic changes in the internal organization of the Church—which they perceived as encroaching on the sacred—called for prior consultation with either a national church council or the Pope in Rome, or with both. Forthwith the decree became a boon for the rearguard of hard-line bishops and noblemen at home and émigrés abroad, and, as we shall see, for the Pope as well. Unintentionally and unexpectedly, anti- and counterrevolutionaries were presented with a salient issue, a fiery battle cry, and a ready-made audience. The sixty bishops and scores of priests who lost their posts and the countless churchgoers who were disconcerted by the diocesan and parochial reorganization were the most natural embodiment of this oppositional potential.22 With time the countryside in particular was teeming with countless individuals who felt offended, disenchanted, betrayed, or terrified by the Paris-centered Revolution. Among them religious and ecclesiastical concerns ran deep. Although these concerns were on the whole inseparable from political and social discontents, as often as not “unprofane” preoccupations provided the spur to active opposition.

On August 24, 1790, Louis XVI gave the Civil Constitution his royal sanction, albeit reluctantly. He did so as part of the search for a constitutional monarchy, which was still very much a historical possibility, and because he was convinced of broad support for the new arrangements at all levels of the priesthood. But the moderates of both camps, who sought a timely termination of the Revolution, were increasingly hampered by their respective zealots. France’s smoldering religious war fostered polarization and, in turn, was fueled by it. When the National Legislative Assembly convened on October 1, 1791, the anticlerical Mountain carried even greater weight than in the Constituent Assembly. In the meantime, a year before, all except two of the thirty-two bishops who had been deputies in the Constituent Assembly had issued an “Exposition of Principles Regarding the Civil Constitution of the Clergy” which was endorsed by all the other bishops, making a total of 120 signatories.²³ Drafted by Jean-de-Dieu Raymond de Boisgelin de Cucé, the archbishop of Aix, it set forth the episcopate’s criticisms of what it took to be the new Assembly’s intention to make the established church and religion subservient to the state. With an eye to avoiding a schism, this episcopal predication left some room for accommodation. But the patriots read it as a call to disobedience by a Church determined to maintain its privileged status outside and against the regenerate nation. Both sides were preparing for another showdown in an atmosphere of soaring mutual suspicion, with the bishops attentive to Rome and the Mountain to the streets and the Commune of Paris.

On November 27, 1790, with the die-hards boycotting the session, the Constituent Assembly adopted a decree requiring clergymen, like all public functionaries, to take a loyalty oath within two months. They were to swear not only “to be loyal to nation, law, and King,” but also “to defend, with all their power, the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by the King.” Any cleric refusing to take this oath would forfeit his post. He would, in addition, be liable “to prosecution for disturbing the peace” should he persist in exercising his ministry.24

The effect of the oath was to widen and intensify the growing schism within Church and clergy, as well as in society at large. The prelates construed and represented the oath as a vote for not only the separation of altar and throne but also the establishment of a church subordinate to the state and on a par with other religious communities, notably Protestant and Jewish. They admonished that to take the oath would be to approve a break with Rome as well as to sanction government interference in matters of doctrine and ritual.

Beyond the highly controversial issue of content, there was that of form. The oath was to be sworn, for all to witness, in the Assembly, in churches, and in broad daylight. Certainly to make the oath-taking public was to give reign to intimidation and rehabilitate an ancient but contested practice. Not unlike the Tennis Court Oath, exalted in David’s dramatic painting, the clerical oath epitomizes “the performance of archaic but still meaningful rituals” in support of radical change. At the same time, it “evinces the extent to which the Revolution tried or pretended to be a religion that used collective rites to forge disparate individuals into a communion of the faithful.”²⁵

While the law-givers fully expected the bishops to be up in arms, they were taken unawares by the scale and intensity of the parish priests’ defiance. This resistance was all the more perturbing to them because it took form without clear guidance from either Pope Pius VI or Louis XVI, who had countersigned the decree of the clerical oath on December 26, 1790.

The ecclesiastical deputies were to take the lead in the Assembly, the central theater of power. On December 27 Abbé Grégoire stepped up to the tribune to affirm that the Civil Constitution in no way “violates the holy truths which we must believe in and teach,” and solemnly swore the oath. Characteristically, however, in the chamber all but two of the forty-four bishops and nearly two-thirds of the priests were unwilling to follow his example. Outside the Assembly, only an additional two bishops fell in line, so that 156 out of 160 bishops stood their ground.²⁶

Nationwide barely one-third of the clergy took the oath, including only slightly over one-half of all parish priests. Obviously, there were enormous regional variations, running from over 90 percent non-jurors in the Vendée to over 90 percent jurors in the Var. In general the zone of widespread defiance comprised the north (including much of Normandy), the west, the mountainous regions of the center, Alsace, and Lorraine. As for the zone of above-average compliance or “constitutionalism,” it took in much of the center, including the Ile-de-France, and the southeast, with Lyons, Marseilles, and Nice.27

In both zones, and indeed throughout France, a complex mixture of factors bore on the clergy’s reasons and motives for taking or refusing the oath: local and regional history and culture; confessional strife; ecclesiastical density; social structure; and political conjuncture. But whatever the interplay of collective and individual considerations, there was a constant “dialectic … between the perspectives and attitudes of the clergymen confronting the oath and the opinions of the laity among whom they lived and served.”²⁸ There were strong positive correlations between, on the one hand, refusal of the oath and, on the other, unquestioning loyalty to the bishop, enduring local or regional distrust of the outside world, and deep-running hostility for nearby Protestant communities. There is reason to believe that insofar as the decisions of priests were swayed by parishioners moved by profane considerations, to that extent the oath-taking became in effect a referendum on reform not only in state-church relations and in church organization but in all other spheres as well.²⁹

With few of the defiant clergymen reconsidering their position, the rift between the embryonic revolutionary state and the refractory church kept widening. The majority of the Assembly and episcopacy viewed each other in increasingly Manichaean terms: whereas the former could not conceive of placing their trust in a Gallican Church unbound from the state and tied to Rome, the latter, with a majority of bishops now in exile, could not fathom a profane state and a society sworn to religious pluralism and toleration. This hardening of positions coincided with the king’s flight to Varennes in June 1791, which exacerbated tensions, all the more with the Jacobins exploiting it to discredit one and all champions of compromise. Had this escape been successful, it might well have brought the “reinstatement of the Church of the Old Regime” as part of a general “restoration.” After all, in the public justification for his escape, Louis XVI invoked, above all, religious motives.30

On November 29, 1791 the Legislative Assembly proceeded to force the issue. It passed a decree giving clerics one week to swear loyalty to the Constitution. To refuse was to risk not only salary and pension but also two years of prison for standing against the patrie and public order. Increasingly hopeful of help from abroad, and tempted by the politique du pire, Louis XVI vetoed the measure on December 19, thereby adding fuel to the fire.³¹

During the next six months the church-religion question became ever more entangled with the politics and diplomacy of the foreign war which “revolutionized the revolution.” With the first military setbacks, the declaration of la patrie en danger, and the Brunswick Manifesto, the patriots intensified their vilification of the refractory priests, who were now charged with the additional and not totally imaginary sin of being subversive agents in the service of foreign powers. On May 27, 1792 the Legislative Assembly passed a decree making refractory priests subject to summary deportation abroad on being denounced for disloyal activities by twenty registered citizens of their canton. Three months later, on August 26, yet another and even harder decree ordered the forcible deportation overseas, within a fortnight, of all refractory priests refusing to leave the country of their own accord.³² They now had no choice other than to emigrate or go underground. Less than a month later, the escalation of the religious conflict culminated in the killing of about 300 refractory priests in the avenging September prison massacres.³³ Meanwhile the pace of the exodus of clergymen quickened to eventually reach close to 30,000.

This escalation is all but universally deemed to have been the inevitable result of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and, above all, the mandatory loyalty oath. As Quinet was the first to point out, nearly all commentators and historians took these measures to have been the grande faute or supreme and fatal political blunder of the infant French Revolution, and this judgment remains uncontested to this day.³⁴ Insofar as this position suggests that the church-religion question could and should have been circumvented, downplayed, or ignored, with a view to depriving the upward spiral of polarization and violence of essential fuel, it runs counter to the logic of the struggle over the redefinition of church-state relations in prerevolutionary (and revolutionary) France. As noted above, the age-old interpenetration of the two spheres was so far-reaching that it was impossible to reform the one without the other. This is not to deny the drastic nature of the Legislative Assembly’s intervention in the reorganization of the Church, which quite naturally was widely perceived and decried as an attack on both the faith and the faithful. But the escalation of the friend-enemy dissociation was not a one-sided affair: it was spurred on not only by the actions of the revolutionary leadership but also by those of the clerical intransigents and the Holy See.

Pope Pius VI could hardly have been expected to welcome the Revolution. Indeed, from the outset he was incensed and alarmed by the course of events in France. He was fundamentally hostile to the ideas of liberty and equality as formulated in the to him presumptuous and perverse Declaration of the Rights of Man, which defied the Catholic creed and worldview as understood and enforced at the time. He also took umbrage at the abolition of annates and tithes, the expropriation of church properties, and, above all, the challenge to his sovereignty in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin. Like the church leaders in France, the Holy Father had both theological and ideological as well as social and political reasons for dreading the Revolution. But unlike them, his hands were not tied by the perils of having to make hard decisions in the eye of the storm.

In addition, and perhaps not surprisingly, the pontiff’s informants and counselors reinforced his animus. In France he listened to Father Jean-Siffrein Maury, an ultrareactionary in both political and ecclesiastical affairs whom he raised to the rank of cardinal after his emigration to Rome in late 1790. His apostolic delegate in Avignon, Siffrein Salamon, was of the same turn of mind. In the Vatican he gave his ear to émigrés, particularly the hard-liners among them; to the French ambassador, Cardinal François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis, an irreconcilable close to the Comte d’Artois; to the ambassadors of the Great Powers who envisaged the formation of a Holy Alliance against revolutionary France; and to Cardinal Zelada, his secretary of state, who was in accord with Maury and Bernis.

Whereas in public Pius VI moved slowly and with caution, in private he framed his position rather rapidly. Probably he kept his counsel in the belief that the French episcopate would stand fast on its own. Once he did break his silence, the Pope, backed by the Sacred College of Cardinals, breathed fire and fury. His pronouncements were wrathful and uncompromising in both letter and spirit—a locus classicus of conspiratorial reasoning, execration, and demonization. The Pope’s intemperate intervention was inspired by his apocalyptic view that with Protestantism, Jansenism, and the Enlightenment seeding the ground, the French Revolution was the linear and ultimate descendant of the Reformation, and therefore to be reined in, if not crushed, in good time.

In the wake of his forced move from Versailles to the Tuileries in October 1789, Louis XVI apologized to Pius VI for the Assembly’s recent anticlerical measures. Implying that “the new and disquieting order” could not last very long, the king reassured the Pope that as “the eldest son of the Church he would keep watch and ward over the rites of the Holy Church, the union with the Roman Church, and the respect due the ministers of the Gospel.”35

But with the situation going from bad to worse following the National Assembly’s decree against the houses of religion, on March 9, 1790, the Pope addressed the Sacred College of Cardinals, most or all of whose members shared his consternation. To his way of thinking there was “universal” agreement that the “vast and vigorous” French monarchy, Europe’s “premier great power, had … plunged into an abyss of distress verging on complete ruin.” In the beginning “this revolution” may well have been concerned with administrative and political matters. In no time, however, it began to encroach on the realm of religion, foreshadowing its “subjugation and subservience to political interests.” Indeed, the situation was growing “more alarming by the day.” In the face of heaven, the decrees of the Assembly “attack and subvert the Catholic religion, usurp the rights of the Apostolic See, and violate existing treaties.” The pontiff considered these infractions to have their “source in the false doctrines … and contagious principles of freely circulating, poisonous, and subversive writings.” The Assembly “guarantees every one the freedom not only to think as he pleases, even in religious matters, but to express himself publicly with impunity.” Even the primacy of the Catholic religion was being contested and “non-Catholics were declared eligible for municipal, civil, and military posts.” Besides, “church property was put at the disposal of the nation and … the tithe was abolished.” Even now Pius VI held that the Holy See could not continue to be silent in the face of these “sacrilegious decrees.” For the moment he was undecided, however, whether to remonstrate with the bishops, the clergy, or the beleaguered king of a nation which was “tempted by the vain phantom of liberty … and allowed itself to be subjugated by a council of philosophes.” To be sure, there was “a time to keep silent and a time to speak” (Eccles. 3:7). But having been “given the charge to speak,” there were limits to his continuing to hold his peace. In conclusion, the Pope wanted his senior advisors to know that his “silence should not be construed as indifference, and even less as approval.” Three weeks later, at the consistory of March 29, he specifically denounced the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.36

From this time forward the news from France became increasingly alarming: in April, the rejection of Dom Gerle’s resolution; in May, the bagarre between Catholics and Protestants in Montauban; in June, the bagarre in Nîmes and the petition of the Pope’s subjects in the territory of Avignon to become part of France; and finally, in July, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. All the while, Pius VI maintained his public silence, though off the record he intimated that before long he would speak out. On July 10, he wrote to Louis XVI to urge him not to approve the Civil Constitution: the king was admonished that by signing this decree he would not only lead his kingdom “into error … and a schism” but might also “ignite the savage fires of a religious war.” Pius VI served notice that although until now he had shown restraint, “should religion continue to be imperiled the Head of the Church would [have to] make his voice heard.” For special emphasis he added that although the king “had the authority to renounce certain royal prerogatives … [he] was not empowered to alienate or abandon those belonging to God and the Church”: as a matter of fundamental principle, “no purely civil and political body had the right to change the doctrine and discipline of the Catholic Church,” at the risk of endangering its edifice.³⁷ That same day, July 10, 1790, the Pope sent a letter to Archbishop Jérôme-Marie Champion de Cicé of Bordeaux. He informed this prelate, who had kept an open mind until he finally chose emigration over the oath, that he had just written to Louis XVI to reiterate that “the renovators had no objective … other than to destroy, down to its name, the Catholic cult and confirm the unbelievers in their impious system.”38 Pius VI contacted several other prelates to urge them to prevail on the king not to endorse the unrighteous decrees in order “to save their religion, King, and patrie.”³⁹

The letter to Louis XVI did not reach Paris until July 23, two days after he had announced his approval of the Civil Constitution. For reasons of political expediency, he and his advisors decided to keep the letter secret. On August 28 the king informed the Pope that he had signed in order to avoid a schism in the Church and reassured him that he remained more than ever true to his religion and loyal to the Holy Father. This did not soothe the Pope’s indignation, and on August 17 he notified the king that he had set up a special council of 20 cardinals, mostly theologians and canonists, to examine the issues raised by recent developments in France and to advise him on the course to follow.⁴⁰ On September 22, as this council was about to start its deliberations, in another letter to Louis XVI he expressed his disappointment about the king’s having signed under duress and yielded to “violence.” The pontiff repeated that the Civil Constitution was “pointed at the heart of the Catholic religion” and was nothing short of a “criminal outrage.” Nonetheless the Holy See did not want to promulgate a “doctrinal judgment” without “thorough consideration” and without the certainty that “the faithful would follow the lead of their pastors.”⁴¹

What finally prompted Pius VI to speak out was not an additional provocation by the revolutionary government but the French episcopate’s own “Exposition of Principles” of October 30, 1790. Despite its outright criticism of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, this text still looked to continue the search for compromise. Above all, it hinted that there might be some way to re-form the relationship of church and state without doing violence to Catholic religious belief. Pius VI considered this stand “weak as water,” all the more so since soon thereafter, on November 27, Paris imposed the oath to the Civil Constitution on the clergy. One of the first prelates to take this oath, Cardinal Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, wrote to the Pope to explain and justify his action. In his reply of February 23, 1791, the pontiff charged Loménie de Brienne with having “greatly dishonored the purple,” since in the final analysis the Civil Constitution was “an amalgam drawn from several heresies.” The Pope made it clear that the time was past due to show the French bishops “the venom of their errors” and to spell out the “mandatory disciplinary measures.” Pius VI put Loménie de Brienne on notice that should he persist in his error he would be “stripped of the dignity of cardinal,” a warning carried out on September 26, 1791.42

The authoritative pronouncement, in the form of a papal brief, Quod aliquantum, was issued on March 10, 1791.⁴³ It expressed the Pope’s unqualified opposition to both the reorganization of the Gallican Church and the founding principles of the Revolution. For doctrinal rationale and precedent, Pius VI reached back to the condemnation of “Luther’s heresy” by the Council of Sens in 1527; to the “proscription of a captious, false, impious, and heretic text” by Benedict XIV in 1755; and to the “anathema” issued against a “defiant contravention of the Apostolic See’s decrees” by the second Council of Tours in 567. The Pope unequivocally denounced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy for seeking “to annihilate the Catholic religion and, along with it, the obedience due to Kings.” Regarding the Declaration, the Holy Father stated that it was nothing short of madness to give all men the absolute “freedom to think, speak, write, and print” in matters of religion. As for the Civil Constitution, it was intended to put an end to “the most sacred dogma and discipline of the Church”; to “annihilate” the rights of the Holy See, the clergy, the religious orders, and “the whole Catholic community”; to “abolish” all sacred rites; and to dispossess the Church of “all ecclesiastical properties and revenues.”

Pius VI vowed to “protect the sacred rights of the Church and Apostolic See against all attacks” and in so doing meant to “point up what separates such strangers to the Church as infidels and Jews from those whom the regeneration of baptism has submitted to its laws.” He enjoined all French prelates to refuse the oath, insisting that it “degrades the primacy of the Holy See” and violates the “Roman Pontiff’s prerogative to confirm the election of bishops.” It was equally important not to relax the Church’s discipline and organization, which was rooted in dogma and could be changed only by ecclesiastical authority.

The Pope claimed that in reading the Civil Constitution, in which “not a single article was free of error,” his hands “literally trembled,” and he was reminded that one of his predecessors had warned that the innovations proposed at the time of the Reformation were likely to “provoke in France, and against the Apostolic See, the same schism that afflicts Germany.” While Pius VI fully recognized man’s duty to obey civil laws, he cried out against whoever in France was so “presumptuous and delirious to think that man has the right to take the place of God.” He reproved the “new doctrine, … hierarchy, and … discipline,” forged in Paris, holding that they made for a “system that preaches and exalts unrestrained and unlimited freedom at the same time that it denies citizens the freedom of conscience.”

In the covering letter for his brief to Louis XVI, the Pope emphasized that the College of Cardinals’ examination had fully and unanimously “demonstrated that there was no escaping the charge of heresy for swearing an allegedly civic oath.” He also reminded the king of his solemn vow at his sacre in 1775 “to defend and maintain, in their full integrity, the rights of the Church and privileges of the episcopate.”44

Although the French bishops had been apprised of the Pope’s fierce objections for well over six months, they decided to keep the brief to themselves, in the hope of finding a way to temper it. But within a month, on April 13, the Holy See issued Charitas, an even more stringent brief addressed not just to the French episcopacy but to all the clergy and faithful. With this writing Pius VI took the ultimate step of declaring the Assembly’s decrees heretical and schismatic. He unequivocally condemned the “falsehearted bishops” who had taken an oath that was “criminal, illicit, illegitimate, sacrilegious, and in violation of the sacred canon,” inasmuch as the Civil Constitution would expose bishops to election by “secularists, heretics, infidels, and Jews.” The Holy Father adjured them not to “allow men impressed by the philosophy of their century to lay before the public a monstrous doctrine … contrary to the precepts of Jesus Christ … ; and not to listen to the beguiling and deathly discourse … of the new philosophes who have declared war on the Catholic religion and are leagued against the Church.” He admonished the five renegade bishops that unless they retracted their oath within forty days they “would be anathematized and denounced as schismatics.” In conclusion, Pius VI exhorted the faithful “to keep away from all usurpers,” including “false-hearted bishops, archbishops, and priests,” and to maintain “strong ties with the See of St. Peter, for to belong to the Church requires being united with its visible head.”45

Again, the French bishops held back the papal pronouncement for fear of precipitating an irreparable break, and in a vain effort to keep the Pope’s views from becoming public. On April 23, Pius VI issued another predication, this time addressed to the clergy and faithful not only of France, but of all the world. In the encyclical Adeo nota he condemned, urbi et orbi, the Declaration of the Rights of Man for “denying the rights of God over man,” leaving him “amputated” from his Maker and at the mercy of “a febrile liberty and equality which threaten to strangle reason.” All in all “freedom of thought and action … is a chimerical right contrary to the commands of the Creator.” In his righteous wrath Pius VI charged that in addition to “overthrowing the Catholic religion,” the National Assembly’s “monstrous freedoms” benefited “people who are strangers to the Church, such as infidels [Protestants?] and Jews.”⁴⁶

The bishops’ efforts to prevent publication of the Pope’s pronouncements directed specifically to France were cut short. On May 2, in the wake of rumors in the royalist press, the papal nuncio gave a copy of Charitas to Count de Montmorin, the French foreign minister. It was made public on May 4, along with Quod aliquantum. By then the war was radicalizing the Revolution: forced-draft military, economic, and ideological mobilization were giving rise to emergency rule as well as resistance to it. Caught up in the logic and dynamics of the political struggle between the forces of revolution and anti-revolution which was inseparable from the spiraling war between revolutionary France and the European powers, the Pope and the refractory Gallican Church perforce became essential agents of counterrevolution.

On the very day that he released Charitas, the Pope published a brief on the unrest in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin. From the very beginning he disregarded the demands of the population of these territories, held by the papacy since the fourteenth century, for some of the rights granted to French citizens in 1789. The Pope’s rebuff contributed to radicalizing the local disaffection, which gradually swelled into popular demonstrations in favor of accession to France, to be ratified by referendum. Rather than seek an accommodation, Pius VI castigated the remonstrants and summoned the Great Powers to stand with him, warning that France’s takeover would wreck the concert of Europe. Now, in this latest pronouncement, after characterizing the insurgence in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin as an assault on his temporal rights and on the Catholic religion, Pius VI charged the supporters of the new prophecy with following a “small cabal of perverse men” tied to a “nefarious conspiracy” determined to turn the population “against the law of God and country.” In conclusion, the Holy Father declared all recently adopted revolutionary measures “void, illegitimate, and sacrilegious” and warned that churchmen who had suffered violence would be avenged.47

As was to be expected, the Vatican’s intervention instantly became a catalyst of counterrevolution, all the more so because it was not merely a censure and rejection of the Civil Constitution but a wholesale condemnation of the Revolution’s philosophical and ideological premises as well. The pronouncements of the Pope sparked popular demonstrations in the streets of Paris: “near the Palais Royal a crowd burned an outsized effigy of Pius VI, with the word ‘fanaticism’ written in red across his forehead and brandishing a dagger in his right hand, a scroll representing the brief of March 10 in his left.”⁴⁸ Seizing on the French government’s failure to issue an official apology for this affront, the papal nuncio Dugnani left for Rome. A few months before Paris had dismissed Cardinal de Bernis, its ambassador to the Holy See, for refusing to take the oath. In turn, the Holy See now spurned his designated successor, the Comte de Ségur, for having taken it, with the result that “diplomatic relations between Paris and Rome were broken and … the schism was consummated.”⁴⁹

In Rome as in Paris, the friend-enemy spirit now ruled. Six months after relations were broken, on September 26, 1791, Pius VI presented a report to the College of Cardinals which revealed how extreme his opposition to the Revolution had become. The pontiff began by praising Loménie de Brienne for his past services: in the 1760s he had taken the lead in putting Rousseau’s Social Contract on the Gallican Church’s index of prohibited books and in “warning” the clergy and laity about the “dangers of the freedom of thought … [and] the press.” But then, after 1787, as one of the king’s first ministers, Loménie had balked the Vatican to champion the Act of Tolerance for Protestants, which became “a fatal source of the ills besetting and tearing apart Church and Kingdom.” In fact, Loménie was one of the trailblazers of the Revolution launched by the National Assembly: having left state office and taken charge of the diocese of Sens, in March 1790 he publicly “extolled the revolutionary system” and claimed credit for having been one of its “zealous promoters.” After all this, and insisting that he had reluctantly yielded to the force of circumstance, Loménie “shamelessly” proceeded to ask the Apostolic See to approve the Civil Constitution, which allowed “Jews, Mohammedans, Calvinists, and sectarians” to participate in the election of priests. Ignoring warnings that he would be severely sanctioned unless he repudiated his errors, Loménie sent a letter to the Pope in which, after spuriously distinguishing between “accepting and approving evil laws,” he tendered his resignation as cardinal.50

No less revealing of the Holy See’s attitude to the events in France, in a brief of March 19, 1792, Pius VI publicly cried out against the “criminal … and deplorable” actions of Catholics, especially ecclesiastics, who “foment the disastrous schism, thereby serving the conspiracy which the new philosophes have mounted in the National Assembly, where they have the majority.” The Supreme Pontiff conjured “all who were helping to deepen, spread, and prolong the ravages of this schism in France to … bear in mind ‘the terrifying wait for the Last Judgment and the fury of the jealous fires of divine vengeance which would some day consume’ them.”⁵¹

Ten months later, on January 21, 1793, Louis XVI’s execution definitely ruptured the alliance of throne and altar, leaving a phantom French monarchy in exile and the universal Roman Church dispossessed of its peerless Gallic branch. To decapitate the king was to desacralize and demystify the immemorial principle of absolute and divinely consecrated monarchy while at the same time sacralizing the untried principle of national or popular sovereignty, the regicide having been voted, even if only with a slim majority, by the Convention.

This spectacular and potentially contagious apostasy could not leave the Pope indifferent, and on June 17, 1793, he delivered a widely disseminated “Allocution on the Death of Louis XVI” to the Sacred College of Cardinals.⁵² He imputed the “cruel and barbaric spectacle in Paris … to an ungodly conspiracy,” and contested the Convention’s “legal right or authority” to judge and condemn the king. Having “abrogated the monarchy,” it had transferred all power to the people. Ironically, on one score Pius VI had a certain affinity with Voltaire, in that he, too, considered the people, in Shakespeare’s words, “a beast with many heads”: it listened to “neither reason nor counsel”; it was in no condition to have “sound and virtuous ideas”; and it judged issues not by fact but “opinion.” As for this public opinion, it was “always inconstant, easily misled, ungrateful, arrogant, cruel, and open to all excesses as well as disposed to revel in carnage, savor the effusion of human blood, and delight in the last agonies of the dying.”

At all events, Louis XVI had done ultimate penance for having “affixed his signature, despite himself, to decrees that were contrary to the discipline and canonical faith of the Church.” Indeed, like James I, his sole crime “was that of being King,” and the Supreme Pontiff saw an analogy with Benedict XIV’s judgment that Mary Stuart’s death “was due to hatred of the Catholic religion, which would have prevailed in England had Mary lived to reign.” Obviously Louis XVI, like Mary Stuart, was the victim of a furious “hatred” of the true faith. In France Calvinists had long ago started to plot and spread their subversion of Catholicism, and to this end had “leagued themselves with the perverse philosophes.” Protestant pamphlets and the writings of Voltaire—this “infamous … and irreverent individual”—were “like the natural fruit of a poisonous tree.” Pius VI invoked his own encyclical of 1775, at the start of his reign, in which he had urged the priesthood to “forcefully and vigilantly” prevent these pernicious publications from “contaminating your flock.” Had his exhortation been heeded, the “vast conspiracy … of these depraved minds against kings and empires” might have been choked off long since. By inscribing the false and specious words of liberty and equality on their banners and embracing a freethinking philosophy, the “factionalists” were “corrupting sound minds and customs as well as subverting established laws and institutions.”

As Pius VI saw it, the “sacrilegious” Civil Constitution of the Clergy had grown out of this profane counterculture. Both the recasting of the Church and the execution of Louis XVI were fired, above all, by hatred of the Catholic religion, since the king was accused of having refused to sanction the deportation of refractory priests and of having reiterated his resolve to reclaim the lofty place of the Catholic Church as soon as possible. In conclusion, the Holy Father lamented that France, which had been “a mirror of all Christianity and an unbending pillar of the [Catholic] faith,” should have unleashed, against the Holy Church, a furor whose “excesses exceed those perpetrated against it by its bitterest enemies” through the ages.

The symbiosis between throne and altar was indeed broken, and the divorce between the old religion and the Revolution was all but complete. The September massacres had already had refractory priests as their principal victims, and there would be much more of the same to come—the drownings of priests in the Loire, the intemperances of the de-Christianization campaigns, the atrocities attending the conflict with the “Catholic and Royal Army” in the Vendée—so much fuel for the doubling of the French Revolution’s struggle for political and social reform with a religious civil war. But this radical change may be said to have grown out of not only the National Assembly’s vote and enforcement of the Civil Constitution and the clerical oath but also the See of Rome’s peremptory and intransigent policies toward the French Church and its fiery execration of the principles of 1789.

Following the break with the Holy See in the fall of 1791, France had two antagonistic Catholic churches pledged to the same faith and practicing the same liturgy: the fledgling Constitutional Church, reconciled to disestablishment and religious pluralism; and the traditional but now “refractory” Gallican Church, sworn to Rome and the time-honored association with the state. Although the schism was virtually politically driven, in important respects the opposing sides proceeded to reenact the internecine struggles of the past. Whereas the renovators claimed to redeem the Church by recovering its original ethical and moral purity as laid down in the Scriptures, the last-ditchers purported to uphold the True Faith and indivisibility of the universal apostolic Church. The opposing rhetorical pretensions were necessarily accompanied by fierce reciprocal recrimination and damnation: the refractory clergy was charged with being corrupt, obscurantist, and despotic; the constitutional clergy with being schismatic, heretical, and ungodly. A holy war of other times was grafted onto the civil and international wars of the French Revolution in which organized Catholicism played a much greater role on the counterrevolutionary than the revolutionary side. As Burke saw it, “the Catholic religion … [being] fundamentally the religion of France, [it] must go with the Monarchy of France.” In Burke’s view, which on this point was similar to the Pope’s, just as “the Monarchy did not survive the Hierarchy, no, not even in appearance, for many months—in substance, not for a single hour,” so it could not “exist in the future, if that pillar is taken away, or even shattered and impaired.”53

In the showdown between the two consanguine churches the traditionalists had a distinct advantage over the constitutionalists. The former had the full weight of ecclesiastical and doctrinal tradition behind them, bolstered by the imprecations of the Apostolic See and the prelacy. Indeed, “between the two essentially similar potencies, power was bound to be with the older, the refractories expelling the constitutionals like shadowy intruders.”⁵⁴

No less important, the Constitutional Church received only limited official support. Although it was an ally and instrument of the revolutionary government, it ran into increasing hostility from the radical Mountain, above all because many of the constitutionals “sided with the Girondins and Federalists.” As it turned out, the constitutionals failed in their primary political mission, which was to help contain and defeat the non-jurors and their anti- and counterrevolutionary backers, who gathered momentum in the Vendée and at Koblenz. With time, in particular for the sansculottes, there was little to choose between the two clergies, “pro-Girondin constitutionals being as great a danger to the nation as the refractories who were leagued with the kings and émigrés.”⁵⁵ Ironically, the Constitutional Church fell victim to both traditional Catholicism and the radical Revolution, as the confrontation between these two forces reached its climax with the de-Christianization drive of 1793–94.

De-Christianization was not a Ding an sich, but part and parcel of a revolutionary configuration and dynamics. It was far from a systematic campaign: there was no overall project, nor was there a high command. Some actions—notably, the majority of the iconoclastic happenings, including carnivals and autos-da-fé, which at once animated and discredited de-Christianization—were spontaneous and local. Others, such as the taking down of church bells and the collection of valuable sacred objects, were government-mandated. The resignation and marriage of priests fell between these two extremes. The adoption of the Republican calendar, with its non- or anti-Christian overtones, as well as the promulgation of the cult of the Supreme Being, had government authority behind them. And the revolutionary field agents and armies in the provinces played an important and often counterproductive role in forcing de-Christianization, here and there running amok.

Furthermore, de-Christianization was not simply a product of radical revolutionary ideology, but also of the desperate situation of the revolutionary regime. No doubt Alphonse Aulard overloaded the contingency thesis when he argued that de-Christianization was the “necessary and indeed political consequence of the state of war into which the Revolution had been plunged by the ancien régime’s resistance to the new spirit.”56 But it is to distort its enabling or defining conditions to minimize the domestic and external dangers facing the infant Republic during the second half of 1793: federalism was spreading like wildfire; the peasant rebellion in the Vendée was at its height; and Marat was assassinated in Paris. Abroad, the First Coalition was draining off scarce military and economic resources needed to deal with this domestic time of troubles, which the counterrevolution, including the Church, exploited for its own benefit. It was in these months that the policies of the regime of public safety were put in place: levée en masse, “total” war in the Vendée, the Law of Suspects, the Maximum. On October 10 the government was declared “revolutionary until the conclusion of peace,” in keeping with the merciless resolve driving the avenging fury following the “liberation” of the rebel cities and the defeat of the Vendée militaire.

It was at almost exactly this moment that de-Christianization got under way, with the adoption on October 5, 1793, of the republican calendar, proposed and fashioned by Philippe Fabre d’Eglantine. Hereafter time was to be counted no longer from the birth of Christ but from the birth of the Republic on September 22, 1792. Just as the rebaptism of cities was intended to refigure space for the new age, so the republican calendar, with its new nomenclature and holidays, was meant to refigure time by extricating it from the grip of revealed religion and by marking the categorical break in historical continuity.

The promulgation of the new-made calendar coincided with the officially encouraged start of the seizure of church bells and church valuables, including sacred objects, for the war effort. Some churches were set on fire or demolished; others were turned into stables and arsenals. Now and again these profanations were accompanied or followed by the ideologically motivated desecration or burning of religious paintings, statues, and crosses, usually on the square in front of the church. Here and there this iconoclasm was part of improvised rituals mocking religious obscurantism. There was also a rush to desacralize everyday life by changing the names of towns and cities and, above all, of streets and squares, the objective being to cleanse the toponyms of “everything which might recall the ancien régime (kings, castles, …) or previous superstitions (names of saints).”57

But the single most salient and far-reaching aspect of de-Christianization may well have been the resignation and marriage of priests. Nothing could match the high drama, on November 7, 1793, in the Convention, of the public renunciation of Jean-Baptiste Gobel, the constitutional deputy-bishop of Paris. Several hundred clerics followed his example, including most of the other constitutional deputy-priests. Ironically, Abbé Grégoire, who the year before had boldly stepped forward to take the clerical oath, now refused to resign, insisting that “I am a bishop and I will remain a bishop.”⁵⁸ A week later the Convention voted to empower all duly constituted authorities to accept letters of resignation, and held out a financial reward for priests forswearing their sacred calling. But the vast majority of the 17,000 to 20,000 priests who resigned and the 4,000 to 6,000 priests who married were moved to do so by a combination of pressure, intimidation, and duress. Most of them were parish priests, and a clear majority of them had previously sworn the oath. But not a few constitutionals as well as refractories were imprisoned, deported, or executed for refusing to compromise or betray their ministry. In any case, by Thermidor the Gallican Church was seriously weakened. In addition to those who had resigned, 20,000 to 25,000 clerics had emigrated or had been deported—including 118 of 135 bishops and archbishops; some 3,000 to 5,000 had been executed; and many others had gone underground, often to join the counterrevolutionary resistance.⁵⁹

The de-Christianization movement’s principal theater of action was in “the departments rather than in Paris, and the plat pays was more affected by its brutalities than the towns.”⁶⁰ It was this that made de-Christianization such an effective stimulus for the friend-enemy dissociation. The ecclesiastical and religious renovationists, both moderate and radical, came face to face with the time-honored religious beliefs, practices, and symbols of an essentially illiterate laity in a predominantly rural and peasant society. Indeed, there was a vast chasm between, on the one hand, the reformist intentions and executives in Paris and major cities, and, on the other, the dead hand of the past in the countryside in which tradition-bound parish priests were the officiants of a popular religion whose liturgies and rites were heavy with mystery, magic, and superstition. A change in any one aspect of the life of church or religion could only be experienced as the derangement of an all-embracing cosmology, all the more so since it tended to be perceived as imposed by agents of an alien and hostile outside world. Accordingly, even if de-Christianization was not entirely dictated and organized from the center and from above, it was bound to run into much more resistance than collaboration or accommodation through most of rural France. The intention was less to de-Christianize a nation that in vital respects had never been Christianized than to break open a “primitive” world which the Catholic Church and religion at once mirrored and sustained.

Even the slightest act of de-Christianization could stimulate resentment and defiance fraught with obstruction, resistance, and even revolt. Opposition was fueled by the violation not only of deep religious sensibilities but of age-old customs and habits in small towns and villages, particularly wherever the representatives on mission and the soldiers of the revolutionary armies were, or were alleged to be, in the vanguard of de-Christianizers. Townsmen and villagers readily conflated their long-standing aversion for the outside world with their current grievances against the revolutionary government, making the agents and carriers of de-Christianization scapegoats for their cumulative discontents. There is no separating or closely weighting the profane and sacred elements in the actions and reactions of the opposing sides. The desecration of churches and resignation of priests, not unlike the conscription of soldiers and requisition of provisions, formed a seamless web of encroachments charged with reciprocal violence. Probably many but not all militant revolutionaries were de-Christianizers, just as many but not all fervent counterrevolutionaries were soldiers of God. That true-believing revolutionaries wound up assailing the Catholic Church and religion in rural France was a measure of the overreach of an essentially urban and urbanizing project. In town and village, to attack church and religion was to lash out at the vitals of traditional society.61

Actually, at the revolutionary epicenter in Paris the de-Christianizers were themselves split into two main factions, one of whose chief discussions concerned the wisdom of this frontal assault on traditional belief. On the one hand, there were the zealous antireligionists, not to say atheists, with Hébert as their emblematic spokesman. They championed the instant excision of religious feelings and rites by means of a furious but spontaneous anti-Christian campaign to be carried by the sansculottes of urban France as part of a populist upheaval from the bottom up and designed to radicalize the Revolution socially.

On the other hand, there were those de-Christianizers who simply wanted to consolidate the separation of state and church while at the same time completing the defusion of the Church’s anti- or counterrevolutionary sway. Robespierre emerged as the leading voice of this prudent position. He cautioned against any head-on assault on religion, insisting that it was both untimely and impolitic. In addition to considering it unwise to alienate the constitutional clergy, he feared, above all, that “to affront the peasantry’s deeply held religious prejudices” was to risk feeding a groundswell of antirevolutionary resistance.62 He was no less concerned about de-Christianization benefiting the foreign powers, which were poised to seize on it to justify their call to arms.

It would appear, then, that whereas Hébert, with his Paris-centered vision, incited the anti-Christianism of the underclasses and valued its revolutionary potential, Robespierre was skeptical of it and worried that its excesses would trigger a dangerous backlash by the silent majority. Nor was Robespierre prepared to give up on the freedom of religious worship, which the Convention reaffirmed with his strong support on December 5.

Meanwhile some of the de-Christianizers coupled their destructive charge against church and religion with the search for a substitute secular religion with its own scripture, symbolism, and liturgy. Although anti-Christian and anti-sectarian, Robespierre was, as we saw, nevertheless drawn to deism, to be practiced and celebrated in the form of a civil religion. But in November 1793, with urban de-Christianization reaching a peak in Paris, where many churches were now closed down, the Hébertists and their sympathizers, including ex-bishop Gobel, stole the march by arranging for the first civic celebration of the Festival of Reason to be moved from the Circus of the Palais Royal to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. For the occasion the organizers built, within the cathedral, a small mountain topped by a Temple of Philosophy flanked by busts of Voltaire and Rousseau. On November 10 the ceremonial procession which set out for Notre-Dame was headed by the Goddess of Reason. This deity appeared in the form of a living person, the well-known opera star Mlle Maillard, presumably to avoid a statue that would call to mind the Virgin or invite idolatry. Inside the cathedral the participants were witness to a ceremony of rebaptism. Following the emergence from the Temple of Philosophy of a young woman representing the Triumph of Reason over Fanaticism, Notre-Dame was renamed the Temple of Reason to the accompaniment of a hymn of liberty composed by François Joseph Gossec with words by Marie-Joseph Chénier.

The ceremony, like its reenactment in the provinces, was prosaic rather than liturgical: Michelet deemed it “chaste, sad, dry, and boring”; Quinet judged it “distressingly sterile … and empty” and a mere “coup de théatre.” Both historians deplored the absence of novel ideas or sentiments to replace traditional ones, at the same time that they asked for indulgence for the “generous error” of those patriots of 1793 who had rushed to overturn a church and religion that had shackled humanity for centuries. In any case, more than likely, and regardless of intention, the embryonic and stillborn Cult of Reason aroused strong and conflicting passions less through the form, substance, and purport of its ceremony than through the grandeur and fame of its venue.63

For all the obvious reasons, Robespierre looked askance at the Cult of Reason. But it took several months for him to begin putting in place the no less hastily improvised Cult of the Supreme Being, which was not intended as yet another articulation or intensification of de-Christianization but as an alternative national religion. The winter and spring of 1793–94 saw, of course, the full horror of the revolutionary paroxysm with the colonnes infernales and the liquidation of the Hébertists and Dantonists. But the nascent cult, even if it marked the apogee of Robespierre’s reign, was less a part of the climax of this convulsion than of its ebb tide or remission. It was instituted on May 7, 1794, following a speech by Robespierre proclaiming the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. The first—and only—grand festival of the Supreme Being was celebrated four weeks later on June 8, or about six weeks before Robespierre’s own fall.

Once again Jacques-Louis David, ever understanding of the vagaries of the Revolution, was charged with the mise en scène. Attuned to the idea of inventing a vicarious religion and liturgy, and unsympathetic to the spirit and staging of the ceremony of the Cult of Reason, he designed the rites of the nascent religion of nature to be held in the open, on the Champ de Mars. The participants consisted of both citizens and the members of the Convention. As “sad and dry” as yesterday’s ceremony in the Temple of Reason, this celebration had, in addition, something official if not forced about it, as was also the case with the satellite ceremonies in the provinces.64

But there was also something truly distinctive about this second would-be alternative religious service, in that it was braced by a would-be creed. Jacobins were circulating a “Gospel of Liberty,” addressed to the Supreme Being. In these teachings they thanked the “Père de Lumière … for giving us the courage to break our chains and to punish crime,” insisting that they did so not kneeling but “standing up, so as not to debase your work.” The Jacobins expressed their gratitude to the new divinity for guiding them to victory and for “visiting vengeance on the heads of the hydra” which was forever seeking to reproduce itself in order to strangle “equality and fraternity.” In a “confession of faith” embedded in this gospel, the votaries of this new cult proclaimed their belief “in the new French Republic, one and indivisible, as well as in its laws and the newly received sacred Rights of Man.” They also felt sure “that the sans-culottes who had sacrificed their lives for these sacred rights and the patrie are seated to the right of the father of us all and bless all their brothers who are wreaking their vengeance on the tyrants.” In conclusion, the true believers, certain that the “holy Mountain of the French has purged itself of all traitors,” expressed confidence that “the legislators of the French people would continue to hurl thunder and lightning on Europe until all the tyrants who are making war on us are crushed.”⁶⁵

Robespierre’s reasons for pressing ahead with the Cult of the Supreme Being remain obscure. To some extent he may have done so in the belief that as yet the people could not dispense with God and religion, atheism being a matter for the educated classes. Accepting Voltaire’s tenet that “if God did not exist he would have to be invented,” notably for the benefit of ordinary people, Robespierre assumed the new society to need a religion and church of its own, all the more so in its founding moment. But there may also have been a political calculus: to counter and marginalize what remained of militant de-Christianizers, so as to appease the mass of traditional believers as well as the European powers, as he envisaged bringing the Revolution to a close. Then again, however, Robespierre, the consummate “logicien politique,” may have been looking to put in place a civic religion as a moral foundation for a continuing terror. In any case, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assess his motives and purposes, not least because the Cult of the Supreme Being was every whit as evanescent as the Cult of Reason.66

Quinet exaggerated the historical possibility of breaking, overnight, the cake of inherited religious beliefs and practices, notably in rural France. Even so, he shrewdly perceived that in the end Robespierre left France unevenly divided between two cults which were “diametrically opposed and of necessity repelled and spurned each other.” One was Catholicism, which was bound up with the counterrevolution. This old belief system and church were an “enormous force” because they were anchored in the “mass of the nation” and in harmony with the “deep-grounded folkways of a countryside intimidated by the Terror.” The other was the Cult of the Supreme Being, which rallied at best a “tiny minority,” many of them “official votaries.” The built-in weakness of this alternative religion was intensified by virtue of its “own founders having condemned the cult based on reason.” As if to appropriate a variant of Robespierre’s charge that atheism and de-Christianization were for the classes, not the masses, Quinet judged the cult of the Supreme Being to have been “purely rationalist” and addressed to “enlightened minds.” In sum, Robespierre had built a “fragile philosophic chapel … on enduring Gothic foundations.” His “small temple of Greek or Roman inspiration, fated to cave in by reason of its inherent fragility,” was overshadowed by the “immensity of the medieval cathedral,” custodian of the “soul of the past.”⁶⁷

Significantly, when calling attention to the “ideological character of the French Revolution, … [which was] its principal if transitory characteristic,” Tocqueville stressed that it took the form, in the main, of “antireligious fanaticism.” Indeed, the revolutionaries hated the priesthood and religion “with the ardor of proselytes and even of martyrs; a dedication which previously only religion could evoke.” In Tocqueville’s reading, anti- or irreligion became “the most vivid and persistent of the revolutionary passions.” Characteristically, “the learned,” who execrated the terror, continued to be driven by the “irreligious, Voltarian, Encyclopedist impulse” to write and speak in this impious idiom long after “the masses” ceased to hearken to it.68 The centrality and fanaticism of anti-religion in the revolutionary ideology needs to be considered together with the centrality and fanaticism of the defense of religion in the anti- and counterrevolutionary worldview and ideology. Certainly the attack on and defense of religion, rather than developing separate from each other, were thoroughly interrelated, and their reciprocation contributed not only to their achieving salience and primacy within their respective ideological constructs, but also to the general hardening of the friend-enemy dissociation.

NOTES

1. See P. M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 1.

2. Bruno Benoit, ed. Ville et Révolution française: Actes du colloque international (Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1994), p. 7.

3. André Latreille, L’église catholique et la Révolution française, vol. 1, Le pontificat de Pie VI et la crise française, 1775–1799 (Paris: Hachette, 1946), pp. 8–17; Bernard Cousin, Monique Cubells, and René Moulinas, La pique et la croix: Histoire religieuse de la Révolution française (Paris: Centurion, 1989), pp. 13–26; Jean de Viguerie, Christianisme et révolution: Cinq leçons d’histoire de la Révolution française (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1986), pp. 8–54, esp. p. 52; Nigel Aston, The End of an Elite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution, 1786–1790 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), chs. 7–8.

4. This reconstruction of the sacre of June 11, 1775, is based on Duc de Croy, Journal inédit, 1718–1784 (Paris: Flammarion, 1907), pp. 179–89; Bernard Fay, Louis XVI ou la fin d’un monde (Paris: Perrin, 1966), pp. 123–26; Jean-François Chiappe, Louis XVI, vol. 1: Le Prince (Paris: Perrin, 1987), ch. 1.

5. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris: Laffont, 1979), vol. 1, p. 104.

6. Cited in Georges Lefebvre and Anne Terroine, eds., Recueil de documents relatifs aux séances des états généraux, mai–juin 1789, vol. 1 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1953), pp. 117–18.

7. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, pp. 102–3.

8. Ibid., p. 103.

9. Lefebvre and Terroine, eds., Recueil, p. 131.

10. Ibid., pp. 120–22 and p. 133.

11. Ibid., pp. 134 ff.

12. Jean Centini, “Le clergé et la bénédiction des drapeaux de la garde nationale parisienne,” in Jean-Clément Martin, ed., Religion et révolution (Paris: Anthropos, 1994), pp. 150–57; and Julien Tiersot, Les fêtes et les chants de la Révolution française (Paris: Hachette, 1908), p. 15.

13. See Edgar Quinet, La Révolution (Paris: Belin, 1987), bk. 5 (La Religion), pp. 147–90.

14. See Hans Meier, Revolution und Kirche: Zur Frühgeschichte der Christlichen Demokratie, 5th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1988), pp. 101–5; and Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 31.

15. Gibson, Social History, p. 34.

16. Ibid., p. 34; Meier, Revolution und Kirche, pp. 106–7; and Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 11–12.

17. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 87.

18. See ibid., pp. 150–52.

19. Meier, Revolution und Kirche, p. 121.

20. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 140.

21. See Pierre Pierrard, L’église et la Révolution, 1789–1889 (Paris: Éditions Nouvelle Cité, 1988), p. 54.

22. Ibid., pp. 53–54.

23. See Tackett, Religion, ch. 5; and Aston, End of an Elite, ch. 12.

24. Latreille, L’église, p. 93; and Tackett, Religion, pp. 16–33.

25. See Claude Langlois, “Le serment révolutionnaire: Archaïsme et modernité,” in Martin, ed., Religion et révolution, pp. 25–39, esp. pp. 33–34, 38–39.

26. The four bishops were Loménie de Brienne, Talleyrand, Jarente, and La Font de Savine. See Aston, End of an Elite, p. 245.

27. Tackett, Religion, esp. pp. 291–98; Cousin et al., La pique, pp. 135–40; Michel Vovelle, Revolution against the Church: From Reason to the Supreme Being (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 171–73.

28. Tackett, Religion, p. 287.

29. See François Lebrun, “Religion et révolution dans l’ouest: Publications scientifiques et luttes historiographiques,” in Martin, ed., Religion et révolution, p. 49.

30. Tackett, Religion, p. 6.

31. Latreille, L’église, p. 113 ff.; and Doyle, French Revolution, p. 177.

32. Latreille, L’église, p. 118; and Paul Christophe, 1789: Les prêtres dans la Révolution (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1986), pp. 107–11.

33. See chapter 7 above.

34. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 169.

35. Cited in Abbé Jules Gendry, Pie VI: Sa vie et son pontificat, 1717–1799, vol. 2 (Paris: Picard, 1906), pp. 111–12.

36. Recueil des décisions du Saint-Siège Apostolique relatives à la Constitution Civile du Clergé et aux affaires de l’Église de France depuis 1790 jusqu’en 1799, 2 vols. (Rome, 1900), vol. 1, pp. 5–17.

37. Recueil du Saint-Siège, vol. 1, pp. 23–29.

38. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 39–45, esp. p. 45.

39. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 31–37, esp. p. 35.

40. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 53–59, 69.

41. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 65–79, esp. p. 67 and p. 71.

42. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 101–19.

43. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 119–301.

44. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 301–17, esp. p. 305 and p. 309.

45. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 333–95.

46. Cited in Pierrard, L’église, pp. 83–84.

47. Recueil du Saint-Siège, vol. 2, pp. 79–149.

48. Viguerie, Christianisme, p. 110.

49. Cousin et al., La pique, pp. 142–43.

50. Recueil du Saint-Siège, vol. 2, pp. 225–95.

51. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 295–363.

52. The French translation of “Allocutio Habita in consistorio dei XVII junii MDCCXCIII super obitu regis galliarum” is cited in Abbé Isidore Bertrand, Le pontificat de Pie VI et l’athéisme révolutionnaire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1879), vol. 2, pp. 208–26.

53. “Remarks on the Policy of the Allies” (1793), cited in Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 9 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 452–99, esp. p. 486.

54. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 177.

55. Albert Mathiez, Les origines des cultes révolutionnaires, 1789–1792 (Paris: Bellais, 1904), p. 141.

56. Aulard, Le culte de la Raison et le culte de l’Être suprême (Paris, 1892), pp. vii–viii. See chapter 6 above.

57. Vovelle, Revolution against the Church, pp. 40–54.

58. Cited by Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 631.

59. See Vovelle, Revolution against the Church, p. 64; Christophe, Les prêtres, pp. 109–13; Aston, End of an Elite, pp. 269–82 (Appendix 5).

60. Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies: Instrument of the Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to Floréal Year II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 443.

61. See Vovelle, Revolution against the Church, chs. 8–10; Vovelle, Religion et révolution: La déchristianisation de l’an II (Paris: Hachette, 1976), chs. 4–5 and conclusion; Cobb, People’s Armies, pp. 442–43.

62. Cited in Mathiez, Les origines, p. 109.

63. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, bk. 14, ch. 3; and Quinet, La Révolution, bk. 16, ch. 3. See also Mona Ozouf, “Religion révolutionnaire,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), pp. 607–8.

64. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, bk. 19, ch. 4; Quinet, La Révolution, p. 473; Ozouf, “Religion révolutionnaire,” pp. 608–9.

65. “Evangile de la liberté,” cited in Yann Fauchois, Religion et France révolutionnaire (Paris: Herscher, 1989), p. 99.

66. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 615. Cf. Ozouf, “Religion révolutionnaire,” pp. 609–10.

67. Quinet, La Révolution, pp. 485–86.

68. Alexis de Tocqueville, “The European Revolution” and Correspondence with Gobineau (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 110–11.