Revolution and the Republic
Page 64
Bossuet declared, was sacrilege. In this way, the mortal monarch acquired the
quality of quasi-divinity whilst the monarchy as an institution was adorned with
the trappings of religious sanctity: thus strengthened, the crown could be rendered
immune from the perils of Protestant dissent.20
Protestant dissent had indeed posed a formidable challenge to royal supremacy.
From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, Huguenot writers developed a radical
constitutionalist theory that not only emphasized the legal limits on absolutism but
also came to relocate the original source of sovereignty among the people them-
selves. In so doing, as Quentin Skinner has argued, they were to perform ‘the
epoch-making move’ of transforming a purely religious theory of resistance into a
political theory of revolution. On this view, there existed the moral right (as
opposed to religious duty) to resist any ruler who did not honour the obligation
to pursue the welfare of his people.21 After the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572
(when as many as two thousand Protestants were murdered in Paris) such ‘mon-
archomach’ principles were deployed to justify outright rebellion and civil war.
This was a battle that French Calvinists were destined to lose and one that allowed
proponents of absolutism to claim, with some justification, that royal authority
alone could protect France from the decline into anarchy, but the subversive
potential of Calvinist political theory, much of it developed in exile in the Nether-
lands, remained intact until the end of the ancien régime.
For its part, the French state continued to persecute Protestants and what it
regarded as Protestant tendencies within the Catholic Church, most notably
Jansenism.22 The doctrinal controversy that separated Jansenism with its austere
Augustinian theology from the humanistic optimism of the Jesuits constituted one
18 Ibid. 15.
19 See Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture (Cambridge, 1990), 160. For the
broader context see William Farr Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study
in the Evolution of Ideas (Cambridge, Mass., 1941) and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern
Political Thought, ii. The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, 1978), 239–301.
20 See Jean-Frédéric Schaub, La France espagnole: Les Racines hispaniques de l’absolutisme français
(2003). Schaub shows that the French monarchy, in driving out Protestants from France, sought to
emulate the example of Spain’s expulsion of Muslims and Jews.
21 Skinner, Foundations, 335.
22 See William Doyle, Jansenism (Houndmills, 2000) and Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la
cause de la Nation: Le Jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (1998). See also Maire (ed.), Jansénisme et Révolution
(1990) and Maire, ‘Port Royal: The Jansenist Schism’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory, i.
Conflicts and Divisions (New York, 1996), 301–51. The classic study is by Lucien Goldmann, The
Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (London,
1964). For a brilliant discussion of the theological issues at stake see Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us
Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago, 1995). Jansenism
took its name from Cornelius Jansenius (1585–1638), Bishop of Ypres, whose study of the thought of
St Augustine was published posthumously in 1640.
302
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
of the great religious quarrels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.23
Much of the serious polemic focused upon discussion of the ‘Five Propositions’
deemed by their opponents to be at the heart of Jansenist doctrine, but, in essence,
what was at stake was a divergence over the extent to which Christianity had to
make concessions to worldliness. For the Jesuits, the emphasis placed by Jansenists
upon divine grace and moral rigour smacked of Protestant heresy whilst, for the
Jansenists, the defence of human free will associated with Jesuit Pelagianism and
Molinism was a pretext for confessional and spiritual laxity.24 By 1669 the Jesuits
appeared victorious and the supporters of Jansenism had been largely reduced
to silence and submission. Moreover, any potential political challenge posed by
Jansenism to the claims of divine right monarchy had failed to materialize.
This might have remained the case had the State and the Church not persisted in
the persecution of what survived of the Jansenist community. In 1709 its spiritual
home, the monastery of Port Royal outside Paris, was closed down. Two years later
the buildings were demolished in order to prevent them from becoming a site of
pilgrimage. Then, in 1713, Pope Clement XI published the papal bull Unigenitus
condemning 101 Jansenist propositions deemed to be false and heretical. This
proved to be a major miscalculation and something of a pyrrhic victory. Unigenitus
quickly became a metaphor for absolutism and a regalvanized Jansenist movement
found growing support amongst both clergy and laity alike. Matters came to a head
between 1730 and 1733 when Cardinal Fleury, Louis XV’s first minister, deter-
mined to put an end to dissent once and for all by having it declared that Unigenitus
had the status of a ‘law of Church and State’.
How might these theological disputes have contributed to the origins of the
Revolution of 1789? First, under the weight of persecution the Jansenist cause
converged with that of the Parlements in their opposition to the arbitrary power and
unlimited authority of royal absolutism and ecclesiastical hierarchy.25 Next, the
continuous replaying of these Jansenist controversies throughout the eighteenth
century severely undermined the legislative and religious symbols of absolutism,
thereby, it is argued, contributing to the ‘desacralization’ of the monarchy and its
ultimate delegitimation.26 Finally, in the wake of the so-called Maupeou revolution
23 See Dale K. Van Kley, ‘Jansenism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits’, in Brown and
Tackett, Cambridge History of Christianity, vii. 302–28, and Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the
Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 (New Haven, Conn., 1975).
24 The most famous Jansenist attack upon this aspect of Jesuit practice—known as casuistry—was
Blaise Pascal’s Lettres provinciales of 1656. Pascal’s text highlighted what he regarded as the theological
frivolity and hypocrisy of the Jesuits.
25 See Julian Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754–1774 (Cambridge,
1995). If Swann accepts that a ‘coterie’ of Jansenist magistrates exercised influence within the Parlement
of Paris, he nevertheless suggests that ‘it is important not to allow the Jansenist tale to wag the
parlementaire dog’: p. 38.
26 See Kley, Religious Origins, and Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the
Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1990). Merrick argues that ‘These conflicts, more than the
Enlightenment, undermined the judicial fictions that bound the ancien régime together’: p.49.The
counter-argument affirms that the desacralization of the monarchy was far less profound and
widespread than this might suggest: see Roger Chartier, Les Origines culturel
les de la Révolution
française (1990), 138–66, and Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
303
of 1771 designed to emasculate the Parlements, Jansenists rallied to the cause of
popular representation and, in so doing, contributed to the elaboration of the
ideology of national sovereignty and citizens’ rights that was to emerge on the eve of
the Revolution.27 Accepted with qualification, each of these arguments lends
support to Roger Chartier’s conclusion that Jansenism ‘drew upon religion to
build a radical critique of both ecclesiastical and ministerial despotism that, in
certain places at least, most notably Paris, accustomed people to distrust established
authorities’.28
Not surprisingly, there were those who suspected the Jansenists of preparing
the way for the Revolution and, at worst, of actually instigating it.29 These are
exaggerated claims, not least because they rest upon a misplaced characterization of
Jansenism as an occult party or sect intent upon the destruction of religion.
Nevertheless, a case can be made in defence of the argument that Jansenism
did have a direct, if not decisive, influence upon the course of the Revolution.
A considerable number of the clergy elected to represent their Estate in 1789 had
Jansenist sympathies. One of these was the Abbé Grégoire, subsequently to achieve
fame as the advocate of the ‘regeneration’ of the Jews and an opponent of slavery.30
More significantly, and of grave consequence, the Jansenist contingent played a key
role in driving through the legislation that established the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy.31 As William Doyle has written of the latter: ‘Its hostility to the pope,
subjection of bishops to election, and emphasis on the active role of the lay faithful,
as well as a number of (now) lesser matters like the prohibition of formularies, were
clearly of Jansenist inspiration.’32 Of course, the Revolution quickly outpaced its
Jansenist supporters and it soon became apparent that many were far from happy
to contemplate the consequences of their own actions. In effect, therefore, the
Revolution killed off what remained of Jansenism and if, in subsequent years, it
survived this was largely to be in the form of a spiritual ancestry dear to later
French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ,
1996), 102 and 304.
27 Doyle, Jansenism, 83. See also Kley, ‘The Jansenist Constitutional Legacy in the French
Prerevolution’, in Keith Michael Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern
Political Culture, i. The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1987), 169–201; Kley, ‘Du parti
janséniste au parti patriote (1770–1775)’, and Shanti-Marie Singham, ‘Vox populi vox Dei: Les
Jansénistes pendant la révolution Maupeou’, in Maire, Jansénisme et Révolution, 115–30, 183–93.
28 Chartier, Les Origines culturelles, 208. See also Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested:
Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), 699–712. Israel,
ibid. 710, quotes Diderot to the effect that the Jansenists did more to diminish respect for the Church
and raise the prestige of philosophy than the philosophes did in the forty years prior to the publication of
the first volume of the Encyclopédie.
29 See Marcel Gauchet, ‘La Question du Jansénisme dans l’historiographie de la Révolution’, in
Maire, Jansénisme et Révolution, 15–23.
30 See Rita Hermon-Belot, L’Abbé Grégoire, la politique et la verité (2000); J. D. and R. H. Popkin
(eds.), The Abbé Grégoire and his World (Dordrecht, 2000) and Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé
Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
Calif., 2005).
31 See Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary , 290–1; Kley, Religious Origins, 353–60; and Maire,
‘Port Royal: The Jansenist Schism’, 333–4.
32 Doyle, Jansenism, 83.
304
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
republicans. The point, however, is that, for all that the Revolution came to
constitute a fundamental challenge to the Church and to Christianity more
generally, it is a mistake to conceive the relationship between the Revolution and
Catholicism exclusively in terms of mutual antagonism.
It is similarly a mistake to believe that Christianity was in principle hostile to
science and that Catholicism in France remained untouched by the intellectual
developments of the early modern period. If Jonathan Israel has insisted upon the
need to pluralize our conception of the Enlightenment—from the very outset, he
has argued, there were two enlightenments, one radical and one moderate main-
stream33—then Helena Rosenblatt has suggested that we should be prepared to
contemplate the existence of a Christian Enlightenment.34 There is evidence, she
asserts, of a common commitment among those she describes as Enlightened
Christians to embrace reasonableness, toleration, a relatively optimistic view of
human nature, and a positive attitude towards reform and progress. These same
people, she adds, ‘sought ways to reconcile their faith with the new sciences
emerging in Europe’.35
French Catholicism, as unlikely as it might seem, was no exception. Here too
members of the Catholic community were receptive to science, shunned blind
dogma, and defended religion in terms of its social usefulness. When, from the
mid-eighteenth century onwards, Christians in France faced a growing challenge
from deism and atheism some responded by adopting another vocabulary integral
to the Enlightenment, that of sentiment and sensibility. Thus, to see France and her
religious history in terms of a stark and irreconcilable division between secular
philosophes and religious anti-philosophes is a gross over-simplification. As Rosenblatt
concludes: ‘the boundaries between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment
were, in fact, often blurred’.36
The fact of the matter was, however, that from Voltaire onwards many of the
French philosophes specialized in a particularly virulent and vitriolic form of anti-
clerical and anti-religious polemic. In large part, this arose from the association of
the Church with absolutism and with intolerance, an association given vivid
substance by Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the subsequent
departure into exile of over 200,000 French Protestants. The Church was an arm of
the State and few opportunities, if any, were missed to publicize the persecutions
and punishments meted out by organized religion. Held in particular opprobrium
was a corrupt and self-seeking priesthood intent on keeping the faithful in a
condition of credulous superstition and fear. Yet, even among the philosophes, the
33 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 11. Israel’s thesis is an explicit rejection of Peter Gay’s earlier
claim that ‘there was only one Enlightenment’: see Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, i. The
Rise of Modern Paganism (1973), 3. See also Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists,
Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981).
34 Rosenblatt. ‘The Chri
stian Enlightenment’, in Brown and Tackett, Cambridge History of
Christianity, vii. 283–301. See also Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion and the Soul
in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford, 2008).
35 Rosenblatt, ‘The Christian Enlightenment’, 284.
36 Ibid. 290.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
305
prevailing opinion was that religious faith, purged of idolatrous disfigurations,
could be sustained by reason
There is little need here to explore the details of this immense controversy,
despite the obvious temptations provided by the work of the great teacher of doubt,
the sometime Protestant Pierre Bayle.37 Suffice it to say that mainstream opinion
was disinclined to accept Bayle’s contention that atheism was no greater evil than
idolatry and that a society of atheists could be well-ordered and durable. Mon-
tesquieu was a case in point. For all its naturalistic premises, De l’Esprit des lois
affirmed that the Christian religion played a central role in preserving morality and
maintaining the stability of society.38 ‘He who has no religion at all’, Montesquieu
wrote, ‘is that terrible animal who feels his liberty only when it claws and
devours.’39 Voltaire, perhaps surprisingly, was another. His Essai sur les moeurs of
1745 denied that morality had been made known to us through either scriptural
revelation or miraculous means but nevertheless concluded that it was divinely
ordained. He wrote, for example, of the ‘fatal and invincible destiny by which the
Supreme Being enchains all the events of the universe’.40 The slightly earlier
Elements de la philosophie de Newton accepted the Newtonian ‘argument from
design’ postulating the existence of a benign Deity who had created the world in
accordance with mathematical principles. In brief, many philosophes, if they broke
with Christian orthodoxy, were happy to embrace a form of deism and, as such,
were prepared to believe that reason disclosed the mind of the Creator and that this
Creator had instilled in our own minds knowledge of both his attributes and the
fundamental principles of ethical life. Indeed, they tended to believe that, once
religion had been stripped of the fraudulent accretions of the past, its essential and