Daily Life During the French Revolution (29 page)

Meanwhile, in regions such as the Vendée and much of
Brittany, where there was widespread refusal to take the oath, the departments
took it upon themselves to keep a close eye on rebellious priests, introducing
their own policy of exiling or imprisoning them.

On May 27, 1792, a new law was issued according to which
any non-juring priest could be deported if denounced by 20 active citizens
(later reduced to 6). By August, all refractory priests were ordered to leave
the country within two weeks or be deported to French Guiana. After August 11,
sans-culotte vigilantes were arresting them in Paris. Flight was difficult as
no one could leave Paris without a passport issued by city hall, and to obtain
a passport one was required to show a certificate of civic responsibility from
the section Surveillance Committee.

The prison massacres of September 2–6, 1792, during which
most of the prisons in Paris were broken into and the prisoners butchered by
sans-culottes, resulted in about 1,200 deaths. More than 200 priests were among
the victims. Nevertheless, in the countryside, in spite of government efforts
to disestablish the church, many thousands of village inhabitants encouraged
their priests to resist the government and to refuse to take the oath.

DE-CHRISTIANIZATION AND REACTION

Anticlericalism had gained momentum since the outbreak of
the revolution and the downfall of the monarchy. Many patriots assumed that if
the revolution was to survive and flourish, Catholicism must be eradicated. A
campaign against the church began in the spring of 1793 and was taken up by the
Paris Commune under the leadership of Chaumette and Hébert, whose anticlerical
paper
Le Père Duchesne
had laid the groundwork.

In May 1793, the Commune terminated all clerical salaries,
closed churches in Paris, and forced some 400 priests to resign. The
revolutionaries demanded that the metropolitan church of Nôtre-Dame be
reconsecrated as the Cult of Reason. The Convention complied, and on November
10, a civic festival was held in the new temple, which displayed the
inscription “to philosophy” over the facade. Although the various factions of
the revolution had begun splintering into subsects, anti–Roman Catholic
religious activity continued to rise in both volume and severity, and
eventually this started to reflect badly on the Revolutionary Council.

By autumn 1793, there were few refractory priests left in
France. Those who had remained or returned secretly to their parishes from
exile led the life of fugitives. The clergymen who had taken the oath fared
little better. They were blamed for royalist revolts in the countryside on the
assumption that they had not taught their flocks proper obedience to the new
state.

Equally avid in shaping the new religion for France were
the
représentants-en-mission,
members of government who administered the
provinces. Local sans-culottes supported their endeavors and did much of the
work, destroying shrines along the roads and stripping the village churches of
their statues, ornaments, bells, and crosses, after which they turned the
buildings into stables, barns, and storehouses.

The Revolutionary Army, a product of the Terror, in
September 1793, set off from Paris for the departments of the south. About
3,000 men in all, they took the route through Auxerre, southeast of Paris.
Along the way they indulged in ferocious atrocities against church properties.
As recorded by a local official, they smashed church doors, hurled altars,
statues, and images to the ground, and took anything of value. Around Auxerre
they spread out in smaller detachments along the back roads to pillage the
chapels and churches, even climbing onto the roofs with ropes to throw down any
sacred object. Joined by the young men of Auxerre, the marauders ensured that
little in the town or the surrounding country, including beautiful and ancient
religious objects, escaped them. Within a week, nothing of the Catholic faith
remained visible in the region except the battered shells of religious
buildings.

Constitutional priests were mocked and forced to renounce
the priesthood, and, in some areas to marry, by officials who denounced clerical
celibacy. Those too old to marry were compelled to take in an orphan or an
elderly person and care for the person. Sundays and Christian feast days were
abolished by the new revolutionary calendar adopted on September 22, 1793.

In spite of the efforts to destroy the Catholic faith in
France, there remained a deep and widespread substratum in the provinces that
would never abandon its cherished beliefs. A vague, undefined Deism had no
place in their intimacy with the highly organized Christian world in which they
had participated all their lives, knowing what to expect in this life and the
next.

The deputies of the Convention agreed with the process of
de-Christianization for a time, but the excesses multiplied, and many were not
enthralled with the events taking place. Voices were beginning to be raised in
strong protest as the disturbances created financial instability. Some, like
Danton, believed that the campaign alienated France’s neighbors and encouraged
them to join the allied coalition against the revolution. Robespierre ardently
disliked priests but also opposed the excesses of the sans-culottes on moral
and practical grounds. He felt that the unbridled attacks on the church were
driving people into the ranks of the counterrevolutionaries. As the Committee
of Public Safety exerted more and more power over the sans-culotte movement,
de-Christianization began to weaken until it was finally brought under control
in 1793 and 1794.

On February 21, 1795, the state renounced all financial
support for or ties to the constitutional church or any other kind of worship.
Formal freedom of religion was proclaimed, as a result of which many new cults
sprang up, such as that of Marat, of Atheism, of Reason, of Rationalism, and of
the Supreme Being, which regarded Rousseau as the high priest.

Popular demand that churches be reopened could no longer be
ignored by the government. On Palm Sunday, March 29, 1795, for example, a
massive demonstration marched to the cathedral of Saint-Etienne in Auxerre,
opened it up, cleaned out the clutter and the classical pagan images that had
been used there, and burned them. The Assembly passed another decree, in
October 1795, penalizing nonjuring priests, many of whom were in prison, but it
was withdrawn in December 1796. Uncertainty and confusion prevailed among the
people and the church. What was next? All legislation against refractory
priests was repealed on August 24, 1797, and then re-invoked on September 4.
Some 1,500 priests were deported the following year, and the authorities made a
concerted effort to reintroduce national festivals and make the
décadi
again
the day of worship. Not until the Concordat of 1801 was the matter resolved in
favor of the church.

RELIGION AND POVERTY

Under pressure from the Paris authorities, the Constituent
Assembly turned its attention to relief for the poor and added to its
bureaucracy the
Comité de Mendicité,
whose object it was to formulate a
new public-assistance policy. The members began with preconceived ideas about
poverty, grounded in Enlightenment literature, that included an abhorrence of
religious clerics. Not only did the ready availability of Catholic charity, it
was thought, deceive the donor into thinking that his chances of going to heaven
would be greater because of his philanthropy, but also, it was argued,
donations to the poor created a large and growing class of social parasites.
The donor was locked into superstition, while the recipient, generally
considered indolent, passed on his unsavory habits to his children. Often using
God’s name to solicit alms, the poor employed a kind of spiritual blackmail,
knowing that if little or no alms were forthcoming, they still had Catholic
charity to fall back on. With this in mind they saved nothing for the future
for themselves or their families.
“J
’
irai à l
’
hospice”
(I’ll
go to the hospital) if other methods fail was considered to be the philosophy
of the beggar. In addition, the government viewed with consternation the hold
that the Catholic Church established on society through poor relief. The
committee thought that hospitals were uneconomical and mismanaged their task of
coping with the poor; its members were convinced that the state could do a
better job once the truly poor had been identified among the lazy and
shiftless.

CULT OF REASON

A rationalist religious philosophy known as Deism
flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Deists held that a
certain kind of religious knowledge or natural religion is either inherent in
each person or accessible through the exercise of reason, but they denied the
validity of religious claims based on revelation or on the specific teachings
of any church. Deists advocated rationalism and criticized the supernatural or non-rational
elements in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Practitioners of reason opposed fanaticism and intolerance
and viewed the church, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as the principal
agency that enslaved the mind. Many intellectuals believed that knowledge comes
only from experience, observation, reason, and proper education, and through
these methods humanity itself could be altered for the better. This approach
was considered more beneficial than the study of dubious sources, such as the
Bible. Advocates of reason further believed that human endeavors should be
centered on the means of making this life more agreeable, rather than
concentrating on an afterlife. The church, with its wealth and suppression of
reason, was ferociously attacked.

James St. John, who practiced medicine in Ireland, visited
France several times and sent his last letter home on October 20, 1787, perhaps
foreseeing some of the difficulties soon to come:

There
is not, nor never was a nation in the world, who have less religion than the
modern French. The lower class of people, and also the clergy, may keep up the
shew
(sic)
of religion, but the generality of their genteel people make
a scoff of the faith, and think it ridiculous to be a Christian. The Deistical
works of Rousseau and Voltaire, are every where distributed through the
kingdom, are universally read, and studied, and in my opinion have been the
cause of undermining the whole structure of Christianity in France; and in the
course of half a century more, in all human probability will totally erase all
vestiges of revealed religion in the French nation.

In April 1794, Robespierre proposed a new state religion,
the Cult of the Supreme Being, based around the worship of a Deist-style
creator god. It had few distinguishing characteristics other than being opposed
to priests and monarchs and in favor of liberty.

The festival of the Supreme Being was set for June 8, 1794,
and Robespierre laid out an elaborate series of somber, mandatory observances,
which largely involved everyone dressing in uniforms with the colors of the new
French flag and marching around in formation. He made a speech that included
the following:

French
Republicans, it is for you to purify the earth that has been soiled and to
recall to the earth Justice which has been banished from it. Liberty and virtue
spring together from the breast of the divinity—neither one can live without
the other.

Other cities and villages staged similar fêtes and added a
few twists of their own. The only tenets of the cult were that the Supreme
Being existed and that man had an immortal soul. Despite the blessing of the
Supreme Being, Robespierre did not survive two months after the first
celebration of the feast. The process stands as an example of a religion
manufactured by government officials. When Robespierre went to the guillotine,
the cult went with him.

RESULTS OF THE REVOLUTION FOR THE CHURCH

All in all, the church fared badly during the revolution.
It went from being the First Estate of the land and the most powerful
corporation to being a nonentity. The sale of church land, its main source of
wealth, was the worst blow, one from which it never fully recovered, but the
churches and monasteries were rebuilt, and the priesthood revived under
Napoleon, who set about restoring ecclesiastical authority, believing that it
was an effective tool for keeping the people in line. He struck a deal with
Rome that allowed him to keep the church property seized by the revolution,
while reestablishing Catholicism as the primary religion of the country.

10 - WOMEN

WOMEN AND POLITICS

In
pamphlets and in delegations to the Revolutionary Assembly, women activists
unsuccessfully demanded universal suffrage, but Sieyès spoke for the majority
of deputies when he said that women contributed little to the public
establishment and hence should have no direct influence on government. He also
claimed that women were too emotional and easily misled, and because of this weakness
it was imperative that they be kept at home and devote themselves to their
natural maternal roles.