The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  And growing Catholic dismay at the course of events in France extended to the very top—for the Pope himself was soon involved. The end of the Annates proved merely a warning shot. By the end of 1789 many of the 150,000 papal subjects living in the enclaves of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin were demanding the end of 441 years of rule from Rome and integration into France. In Avignon the annexationists won control of the city council after a long campaign and began to bring local law into line with the changes being made in France. Pius VI refused to accept these changes; and meanwhile, on 29 March, in an address to a secret consistory in Rome, he condemned the Declaration of the Rights of Man and all the policies so far pursued in France on religious matters. Encouraged by their ruler’s intransigence, anti-annexationists in Avignon made efforts to recapture power, culminating in a day of riots on 10 June. They were put down with the help of French National Guards, and a number of the Pope’s adherents were killed. Immediately afterwards the pro-French party proclaimed Avignon annexed to France, and later in the month several parts of the Comtat did the same. The Assembly, aware of the international ramifications of outright annexation, was in no hurry to accept these declarations, but in its debates on the question there were many who argued that the popular will had settled it. In the Comtat, it certainly had not, and civil war raged throughout the territory for the next twelve months. During that time, the split between the Pope and the Revolution was to become irreparable; but the breaking-point did not come over Avignon or the Comtat. The decisive issue was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

  Ever since August 1789 an ecclesiastical committee of the Assembly had been working on a comprehensive reform plan to revitalize the Church, bring it into harmony with the principles of the Revolution, and provide a secure financial and organization basis for its future. Only a third of the committee’s original fifteen members were clerics; and when, as the full range of their colleagues’ ideas became apparent, they began to drag their feet, the Assembly added fifteen more laymen. A handful were freethinkers, steeped in the anti-clerical writings of the Enlightenment; but most were sincere Catholics, concerned only to purge the Church of its abuses, making it leaner but fitter. What they proposed, one declared, was ‘merely … a return to the discipline of the early Church’.1 But that meant changing many practices centuries old, and observed throughout a Church that far transcended the frontiers of France. And, the committee made clear, it meant doing so without consulting the head of the Church, that foreign monarch, in any way. Nobody disputed the Pope’s authority in matters spiritual or doctrinal: but how the French Nation chose to organize the practice of religion within its own frontiers was none of his business. The most he could expect was the courtesy of notification. As the debates on the proposed Civil Constitution began on 29 May, the king was asked to arrange for the winding up of the Concordat of 1516, which had hitherto governed relations between Rome and the French Church. No replacement was envisaged. The National Assembly, having recast vast areas of French secular life unresisted, and indeed removed the Church’s material foundations without much outcry, saw no need to negotiate its policies with anyone. When, at the start of the debates, bishops suggested that the consent of the French Church to the Civil Constitution be obtained through a national council, they were brushed aside. There could be no question of resurrecting the clergy as a separate order in society or the State. Many parish priests in the Assembly endorsed this argument, remembering how before 1789 assemblies of the clergy had been mere mouthpieces of the hierarchy. But the danger of that was past. The danger of not referring the reforms to a national council was that, if the Pope came out against them, no other ecclesiastical authority could challenge his decision.

  But was the Pope likely to object? What was proposed was scarcely more radical than changes he had accepted in the Habsburg realms in recent years. And the news from Avignon and the Comtat, coming in when the debate was at its height, suggested that if he did prove recalcitrant a French threat to agree to annexation of these territories would blackmail him into compliance. Despite all the weeks of debate, therefore, the plan drafted by the ecclesiastical committee was accepted almost without amendment on 12 July. Much of it, too, would probably have been perfectly acceptable to most of the clergy. The salary scales it laid down were generous, although most bishops and many rectors would make less than they had in the days of church lands and tithes. There were stringent residence requirements at every level, but these had been the unanimous demand of the cahiers. Even the rationalization of the ecclesiastical map made obvious good sense. Henceforth there were to be only eighty-three bishops, one per department, and ten metropolitans. Parishes, too, were drastically reduced in number: in all towns of less than 6,000 inhabitants there was to be only one. All chapters and other benefices without cure of souls were now abolished. Like monasteries and convents, they were regarded as useless and parasitical. The clergy existed to minister to the faithful, and had no other justification. On these grounds the requirement for bishops to have served fifteen years in a parish, and vicars five as a curate, were also clear improvements. Apart, therefore, from the clerical unemployment bound to result from the reduction and rationalization of benefices, there was little in the reorganization effected under the Civil Constitution to alarm the majority of priests. The real difficulties came with the provisions on appointment. All clerics were to be elected by the laity, just like other public officials. Bishops would be chosen by departmental assemblies, parish priests by district ones. Bishops would exercise their powers in concert with an advisory council. The latter recalled the synods of parish priests long advocated by certain sorts of Jansenists who derived inspiration from the seventeenth-century Sorbonne canonist Edmond Richer. ‘Richerists’ advocated church government by election—but not lay election, let alone election by a body of active citizens who might even include Protestants, Jews, or atheists. Cure of souls was too serious a business to be left in uninitiated hands. Finally there was the problem of the Pope’s role and powers. All French citizens were expressly forbidden to have any contact with any foreign bishop or his agents; without prejudice, it was true, to ‘the unity of the faith, and the communion to be maintained with the visible Head of the universal church’. The first draft had called him the bishop of Rome, but that was found too disrespectful. Respect, however, was all he was now to receive. The pontiff who had hitherto confirmed all episcopal appointments was now merely to be notified that they had been made.

  The Pope’s private reaction anticipated the Assembly’s final approval of the Civil Constitution. On 10 July he wrote to Louis XVI urging him not to sanction a document which would drag the whole French Nation into schism. But by the time the letter arrived the king had already given his preliminary sanction, advised by bishops whom the Pope had thought would counsel intransigence. Schism was their fear too, but they thought the initiative for avoiding it lay with Rome. Few of the clerical deputies favoured resisting the new law, whatever their private reservations. But they all believed that it must be accepted by the Church, and since a national council was out of the question, the Pope must pronounce. Unaware that he already had pronounced, over the summer they bombarded Rome with urgings not to condemn the new order, but to seek ways of working with it. When the king formally promulgated the Civil Constitution on 24 August they presumed, erroneously but understandably, that agreement had been reached on abandoning the Concordat, and that a settlement was therefore in the offing. Pius VI, shocked by the pliability of the French episcopate, decided to temporize, consult his cardinals, and belatedly explore ways of avoiding schism. Outwardly he said absolutely nothing; yet so long as he remained silent the French clergy could not feel confident of the acceptability of what was now a law of the French State.

  Nor were the French clergy alone in feeling they could not afford to wait. All over the country church lands were now being inventoried prior to sale, monasteries and convents were being closed down, and patriots were proclaiming that supp
ort for the Civil Constitution, like the assignats, was a test of commitment to the new order. The whole complex of issues raised by religion, in fact, was soon polarizing opinion in ways not seen since the spring of 1789. The conservative press, disparate and unco-ordinated throughout 1789, came together for the first time to denounce the Civil Constitution with one voice as an attack on the Catholic faith. Patriotic papers responded with by now characteristic anti-clerical vigour. And no stimulus was more important in the proliferation of Jacobin clubs which was such a striking feature of political life in 1790.

  When the National Assembly moved to Paris, its radical leaders formed a ‘Revolution Club’ to discuss and co-ordinate reform policies in the way first pioneered at Versailles by the shadowy ‘Breton Club’. It met in a Jacobin convent near the Assembly, and in January 1790 renamed itself the ‘Society of the Friends of the Constitution’. A number of provincial centres had also seen the foundation of political clubs in the course of the stirring events of 1789. Some emerged in great cities, like Bordeaux or Dijon, but many sprang up in improbable remote townships. From the earliest stage they sought to correspond with one another, and in the spring of 1790 they began to seek affiliation with the society meeting at the Jacobins in Paris. As the fame of the latter increased new affiliates proliferated. From two dozen in February they grew to 152 in August, and over 200 by November. In these bodies the leisured, educated men of France, recognized by the National Assembly as active citizens, turned their habit of forming circles, associations, and lodges over the preceding two generations to politics. The Paris Jacobins, with a membership of over 200 deputies and, by July 1790, 1,000 others, debated national issues before and even as they were ventilated in the National Assembly itself. The provincial clubs saw their duty as keeping up enthusiasm for the new order. They organized festivals and demonstrations, chivvied lax local authorities, read and distributed patriotic newspapers, and sent endless addresses to their counterparts in other towns. Many figures prominent in the later history of the Revolution gained their first political experience in the clubs. Occasions for their foundation varied, but usually they emerged from some specific event or issue. None was more important than those connected with religion. Thus at Bergerac and Tulle clubs were founded to denounce those deputies who had supported Dom Gerle’s ill-fated motion of 13 April. At Nîmes and Montauban they were formed by Protestants in the aftermath of sectarian clashes which marked local Catholic leaders as counter-revolutionary. In September the annexationists of Avignon set up a club as a further sign of their determination to join France, and its appearance was hailed by the Jacobins of neighbouring towns like Aix, Marseilles, Nîmes, and Tarascon. The clubs of the Midi were also galvanized during the summer by the first armed demonstration of avowed counter-revolutionaries. In August a federation of National Guards met in a remote valley of the northern Gard at Jalès. Unimpeachably patriotic at first in its activities, the meeting was later taken over by the leaders of the Nîmes Catholics defeated in the bagarre. They declared themselves to be an insurrection and drafted a petition denouncing Protestant control of the department. ‘Exploiting decrees intended for our protection’, they complained,2 ‘the Protestants are endeavouring to impose their laws upon us. The department, the districts and the municipalities are all filled with their protégés. They receive the advancements, the offices and the honours … the tribunals are deaf to our pleas.’ Although the camp then dispersed, it left behind a planning committee to organize further camps and coordinate action with agents of the Count d’Artois, who from exile in Turin was now dreaming of armed intervention to rescue the king and reverse the Revolution.

  To these groups the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was quite literally a godsend. And the way the Assembly chose to deal with the clergy’s persistent hesitations compounded their delight. On 30 October thirty bishops from the Assembly who had voted against the Civil Constitution issued an Exposition of Principles to explain why they had. It was no call to arms; they merely declared that they could not connive at such radical changes without consulting the Church through either a council or the Pope. Nevertheless patriots saw it as an incitement to disobey the law, and local authorities, clamorously supported by Jacobin clubs, began to enforce it. Bishops began to be expelled from suppressed sees; chapters were dissolved. In October and early November the first departmental bishops were elected. But this time the clergy did not meekly accept its fate. There were protests. ‘I can no more’, declared the incumbent of the doomed see of Senez, ‘renounce the spiritual contract which binds me to my Church than I can renounce the promises of my baptism … I belong to my flock in life and in death … If God wishes to test his own, the eighteenth century, like the first century, will have its martyrs.’3 The first elected bishop, the deputy Expilly, who was chosen by the Finistère department, was refused confirmation by the archbishop of Rennes. In Soissons, the bishop was dismissed by the departmental authorities for denouncing the Civil Constitution. It was impossible to dismiss all the 104 priests of Nantes who did the same, but their salaries were stopped. Evidently there was to be no peaceful transition to a new ecclesiastical order, and indignant local authorities bombarded the Assembly with demands for action. Eventually, on 27 November, action was taken. The deputies decided, after two days of bitter debate, to dismiss at once all clerics who did not accept the new order unequivocally. And to test this acceptance they imposed an oath. All beneficed clergy were to swear after mass on the first available Sunday ‘to be faithful to the nation, the king and the law, and to uphold with all their power the constitution declared by the National Assembly and accepted by the king’. All who refused were to be replaced at once through the procedures laid down in the Civil Constitution.

  The French Revolution had many turning-points; but the oath of the clergy was unquestionably one of them, if not the greatest. It was certainly the Constituent Assembly’s most serious mistake. For the first time the revolutionaries forced fellow citizens to choose; to declare themselves publicly for or against the new order. And although refusers branded themselves unfit to exercise public office in the regenerated French Nation, paradoxically their freedom to refuse was a recognition of their right to reject the Revolution’s work. In seeking to identify dissent, in a sense the revolutionaries legitimized it. That might scarcely have mattered if, as the deputies expected, nonjurors had amounted only to a handful of prelates and their clients. But when, months rather than the expected few weeks later, the overall pattern of oath-taking became clear it was found that around half the clergy of France felt unable to subscribe. With no word from Rome, the king sanctioned the new decree on 26 December, so that oath-taking (or refusal) dominated public life throughout the country in January and February 1791. The clergy in the Assembly themselves set the pattern, in that they were completely divided. Only 109 took the oath, and only two bishops, one of them Talleyrand. As the deadline approached on 4 January the Assembly was surrounded by crowds shouting for nonjurors to be lynched; and the patriots, led unpersuasively by the Protestant Barnave, used every possible argument and procedural ploy to sway waverers. But there were none. And faced with this example from the majority of clerical deputies, it is little wonder that so many clerics in the country at large became refractories (as nonjurors were soon being called). There were, however, spectacular geographical differences. In anti-clerical Paris, few priests braved popular disapproval by refusing, although, reported the Venetian ambassador,4 ‘the whole national guard was deployed in arms, and parish churches transformed into so many strong points fully garrisoned within and without, to protect persons and places from any bloody outbreaks.’

  Other areas of high oath-taking were the plains around Paris, the Pyrenees, and above all the south-east, Provence and Dauphiné, whose underpaid congruistes had been prominent in the clerical revolts of the early 1780s against ‘episcopal despotism’. Many big provincial cities, however, saw high levels of refusal, as did most peripheral regions. Less than a quarter of the b
eneficed clergy took the oath in most districts of Flanders and Alsace, areas culturally distinct from the French heartland. Languedoc, riddled with Protestants who had appropriated the Revolution for their own ends, produced few clergy willing to endorse the new order. Above all, there was a massive refusal of the oath throughout the west.

  I had not believed, [wrote one astonished deputy from Le Mans, on his wife’s reports of mass refusals5 ] that a great number among the ministers of the Lord should have carried stubbornness and resistance to this point. Now I really believe that the result will be seriously troublesome … They are all, in my eyes, worthy of admiration if they are really following their conscience: but had I been in their place, mine would have spoken to me very differently. I do not claim to accuse anyone: it is enough for me to observe that often under the cloak of religion and conscience are hidden scarcely related motives, and truly reprehensible intentions.