Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (33 page)

of the Constituent Assembly’s reforms in the domain of state finance were,

consequently, fairly evident.

This does not mean that, in this particular field of public policy, we can-

not find any tensions between individual rights and “public” (i.e., statist)

powers.Jean-Pierre Gross has noted that the Declaration of the Rights of

Man of 1789 called property “an inviolable and sacred right of which no one

can be deprived” and yet simultaneously proclaimed that tax obligations

“should be equally distributed among all citizens in proportion to their

faculties.” The former statement seemed to privilege “possessive individu-

alism,” the autonomy of the citizen; the latter assertion appeared to posit

“the promise of a fair society” to be realized in the final analysis by state

intervention to ensure progressive taxation.Tax reform would navigate

tentatively, uneasily, between “these two poles of liberty and equality,” be-

tween the individual and the state, as the
taille
,
capitation,
and
vingtièmes
, and the
gabelle
,
aides
, and
traites
of the old regime gave way by 1791 to the new
contribution foncière
(land tax),
contribution mobilière
(poll tax), 55 Ibid., pp. 310–11.

56 Clive H.Church,
Revolution andRedTape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy

1770–1850
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp.64–68.

57 Bosher,
French Finances
, p.313.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

133

and
patente
(commercial tax).58 For a time, in this area at least, “liberty”

prevailed over “equality,” in part due to the very incompleteness of bureau-

cratization.How could new taxes be imposed when a fiscal bureaucracy

still in its formative stages was not yet able to reevaluate the lands and

properties slated for taxation? The authorities, moreover, had to reckon

with the intoxicating sense of liberation, of new beginnings among the cit-

izens of the country – an attitude that for some years was all too readily

translatable into a refusal to pay taxes.59 This would mean in practice that

the French, still burdened with debts from past wars, and soon needful

as ever of funds with which to finance new wars, would have to resort to

discredited old methods to raise those funds.In the long run, however, the

“bureaucratic revolution” would help to realize a more equitable assess-

ment (and collection) of taxes.The permanent needs of the state, geostrate-

gic and other, would see to that.

As we have already noted, those needs figured as well in the deputies’

decision, taken (tentatively) as early as October 1789, to nationalize and

sell off ecclesiastical properties.“Sold to meet the deficit incurred by the

French contribution to American independence, the alienated patrimony

of the Gallican Church was to unite the active and successful groups in

French society in their resistance to the kings of Europe.”60 Granted, there

was more to it than that: the Assemblymen, after all, had to beard a legion

of special interests in their country as they pursued their reforms, and they

hoped to generate public support for their controversial policies by trans-

ferring church properties to bourgeois and enterprising peasants who had

long coveted them.In addition, the concurrent abolition of venal offices,

by releasing so much liquid capital, facilitated such a transference of wealth.

What was more, the Constituent Assembly’s actions in this realm seemed

to be entirely compatible, ideologically and economically, with its other

initial ecclesiastical reforms – the abolition of tithes, annates, and pluralism

in office, and the suppression or consolidation of the contemplative orders

of “regular” clergy.

Nonetheless, what especially strikes us about the Assembly’s seizure of

church properties is the extent to which it pointed up the revolutionaries’

sense of the supremacy of the “nation” – and, prospectively, of statist needs.

Henceforth, only the rights of individuals (assuming that they were, in

real-life situations, defensible) were to impose any limitations upon the

new national sovereignty.Ecclesiastical property, along with much else,

58 See Jean-Pierre Gross, “Progressive Taxation and Social Justice in Eighteenth-Century France,”
Past andPresent
140 (1993): 79–126.

59 On these issues, see ibid., esp.pp.107–8.See also Peter M.Jones,
The Peasantry in the
French Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.185–88, 190–91.

60 John McManners,
The French Revolution andthe Church
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), p.30.

134

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

now fell into the lap of the nation – and the nation-state.If the crown in

olden times had turned to its own (warlike) uses the incomes from church

benefices, the Assembly now was basically doing the same thing, if on a

larger scale.In the revolutionary nation no privileged corps should frustrate

the national will; hence, for legislators like Le Chapelier and Robespierre,

the importance of expropriating the clergy so that they could no longer

portray the Gallican Church as an eternally separate order in France.61

The central importance of this “national” (and statist) theme emerges

even more arrestingly in connection with the Civil Constitution of the

Clergy, decreed by the Assembly in July 1790.It is especially revealing

here to distinguish between what most clerics were prepared to accept in

the new “Constitution” and what many of them could not in good con-

science approve.Most parish clergy, at least, had good reason to cheer the

abolition of chapters and benefices “without cure of souls” and the assim-

ilation of dioceses and parishes into the new framework of departments

and communes.Parish priests, after all, were henceforth to benefit from

state-guaranteed annual salaries ranging from 1,200 to 6,000
livres
; bish-

ops, held to proper residence in their dioceses, would receive no more than

12,000
livres,
and most metropolitan bishops no more than 20,000
livres.

Thus, the scandalous clerical income inequities of the old regime would be

greatly reduced.Again, aristocratic monopolization of churchly promo-

tion would be ended, since bishops, like parish priests, would be elected.

Finally, episcopal powers were to be curbed, as bishops in the future were

to perform no acts of jurisdiction without the advice of twelve or more

vicars episcopal, and
curés
in the parishes were henceforth to select their own assisting
vicaires
.62

It is true that such provisions were bound to arouse opposition in some

humble curial residences as well as in most episcopal palaces.Even those

bishops,
curés
, and
vicaires
whose positions were not to be suppressed might feel that departmental authorities should have no right to take action

against nonresident clerics; and some parish priests, inspired by democratic

“Richerist” ideas of the past, preferred the notion of election by clerical

synod to that of secular election.Furthermore, resistance to the Civil

Constitution was only to be expected from those churchmen, high and low,

whose livings were to disappear.Even so, as John McManners has noted,

the truly “insuperable obstacle” to ecclesiastical acceptance of this reform

61 Ibid., pp.28–29.Dale Van Kley has recently pointed up the obvious historical precedents for the revolutionaries’ neo-Gallican and neo-Jansenist policies.See, in addition to his earlier studies,
The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil
Constitution, 1560–1791
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).

62 These specific provisions of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy are discussed in McManners,
The French Revolution
, esp.pp.38–40.See also André Latreille,
L’Eglise
Catholique et la Révolution franc¸aise
, 2 vols.(Paris: Hachette, 1946–50), esp.1:99–116.

The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution

135

was the fact that the legislators were imposing changes without consulting

Rome.Many canonists rejected the state’s claim that it could redraw dioce-

san borders without the agreement of spiritual authorities, and contested

as well the state’s right to arrogate to itself the investiture of bishops.But

beyond such specific points loomed the larger issue: the problem of finding

some way to secure Rome’s official approval for the whole reform, taken

together.63

Yet there could be no doubt as to how most legislators, as laymen, would

frame the issue.“When the sovereign believes a reform is necessary,” pro-

claimed one of their number, Treilhard, “no one can oppose it.”64 The

revolutionaries were heirs of the kings and of the Gallican traditions of

the old regime, and were mindful as well as of efforts by “enlightened

despots” such as Joseph II of Austria and Catherine II of Russia to remodel

church institutions and curb church prerogatives within their dominions.

Hence they were not about to be deterred from asserting national-statist

control over the Church International.Moreover, by the spring and early

summer of 1790 the Assemblymen were receiving encouragement to ad-

here to this hard line from radical Parisian journalists for whom any de-

fense of churchly rights had become little more than a rationalization of

“counterrevolution.”65

Small wonder, therefore, that the Assembly burned its bridges behind

it on this potentially explosive issue, ratifying the Civil Constitution of

the Clergy in July and insisting four months later that all clergy take an

oath of allegiance to the new religious order.As subsequent research has

revealed, following the local fortunes of this oath allows one to distinguish

between “citizen priests” amenable to the Revolution’s assertion of secular-

statist authority and “Tridentine priests” wedded to the older vision of a

hierarchy of ecclesiastical institutions in France denying the secular state’s

supremacist claims.Whether the model of the “citizen priest” who was

willing to swear the oath or that of the “Tridentine priest” refusing the

oath prevailed in a given region might well decide whether clerical and

secular inhabitants would give their allegiance to local patriots and the

National Assembly or to local bishop and distant Rome.66

Today it is possible to consult a map of France and sketch a rough

geography of priestly and popular reactions to the religious oath in 1790–91

(and, by extension, to the Assembly’s ecclesiastical reforms in general).

63 McManners,
The French Revolution
, pp.38–41.

64 Cited in ibid., p. 42.

65 See, on this subject, Jack R.Censer,
Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press,
1789–1791
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), esp.pp.98–99.

66 Timothy Tackett,
Religion, Revolution andRegional Conflict in Eighteenth-Century
France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp.290–91.

136

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

It appears that, in the region centering on the Parisian Basin, much as in

a very broad sweep of provinces cutting diagonally across the core of the

country from the border of the Netherlands to the mouth of the Gironde

River, and in certain other zones (in the southeast and the central Pyrenees),

most clerics and lay citizens were inclined to accept the oath.On the other

hand, in many outlying reaches of the realm – the far north and northeast,

the eastern periphery stretching from Alsace and Lorraine to Franche-

Comté, the Massif Central, Languedoc, and both ends of the Pyrenees in the

far south, and the Atlantic provinces extending from Lower Poitou through

Anjou and Maine into Brittany and Normandy – clerics and lay citizens

tended to reject the oath.Such patterns of response to ecclesiastical reform

may not necessarily be reliable predictors of popular reactions to other

kinds of revolutionary change, but they do help to place the Constituent

Assembly’s assertion of “national sovereignty” (and reassertion of statist

authority) in religious affairs in a broader national and social context.67

And by doing so they make it easier for us to understand why the deputies’

assault upon the venerable Gallican Church would resonate so powerfully

throughout France.

That such an assault inevitably raised issues of property and corporate

privilege serves to anticipate the fifth and sixth areas of reform we need

to discuss for the early Revolution: namely, the entwined questions of

seigneurialism and transference of property, and the fate of
all
privileged corporate bodies in the realm.In both of these areas we again discern, behind the complex interplay of tangible social interests, the central question

of the French state’s geostrategic and other requirements.

There is no doubt that the revolutionaries’ decision to confiscate and sell

off crown and church properties and to curtail the rights of all seigneurs