Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (37 page)

Led by Maury, the clergy’s representatives in the Assembly resisted this “spoliation” of “our property” as best they could. Few clergy agreed with Fauchet and Lamourette that a Church without property would be spiritually better off, wealth being the “root of depravity.”
²⁶
(Even the Abbé Grégoire opposed the clergy’s transformation into salaried officials of the state.) But many lower clergy were swayed by Talleyrand’s assurance that the proceeds from the planned sale of church lands would be used for paying curés’ salaries, a key clause of the confiscation decree guaranteeing that no curé would subsequently receive less than 1,200 livres annually.
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Exploiting the friction between higher and lower clergy helped push the hierarchy onto the defensive. The bishops retaliated by denouncing philosophique ideas as the worst of the evils afflicting the land.
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Rousseau would in no way have condoned Mirabeau’s attacks on the Church, protested conservative clergy. Rousseau
maintained that “religion” is always the basis for a country’s laws. Eager to demonstrate that the revolutionary leadership publicly pretended to venerate Rousseau while actually disregarding the people’s new hero, Maury highlighted Rousseau’s scorn for the irreligious inclinations of his philosophe foes.

Terminating the Church’s financial independence, on 2 November 1789, the Assembly voted by 568 to 346 with forty abstentions, on a motion of Talleyrand, to place all church property “at the disposition of the nation” with a view to paying the clergy salaries and supporting their social functions.
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The revolutionary leadership, backed by the Paris cafés and streets, could in the prevailing atmosphere of late 1789, the substantial voting margin in favor proved, fairly easily pressure most deputies into following their lead. Just prior to this pivotal vote, noted the Venetian envoy, Chénier’s
Charles IX
opened on the Paris stage, a play vilifying the Church and evoking the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre with the obvious aim of channeling opinion behind the revolutionary leadership. The Assembly’s leaders, concluded some clergy, consisted not of Catholics but “Protestants and unbelievers.”
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On 5 February 1790, the Assembly voted for all ecclesiastical benefices and pensions to be inventoried and for registration of property belonging to regular orders to begin.
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Disputes over how confiscation should proceed persisted for months. But by 14 May, the Assembly had fixed the terms of sale for ecclesiastical land, and from June, an immense quantity of farms, pasturage, and forests, as well as urban properties, was unloaded onto the market.
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Though critical of the ham-fisted way a vast mass of church property was suddenly dumped on the open market, thoroughly depressing land prices, Condorcet otherwise concurred with Mirabeau and Volney, being no less keen to confiscate for social purposes.
³³

The next step was dissolution of the monasteries. Although “the great question” whether religious orders were useful or not had been decided by the philosophes and “la raison” long before, suggested Mirabeau’s
Courrier de Provence
, in September 1789, opposition remained intense.
³⁴
Where the “bons esprits” saw truth and justification in abolishing contemplative orders, noted the
Chronique de Paris
, the pious perceived only impiety and blasphemy.
³⁵
Ostensibly, conservatives controlled the Assembly’s
comité ecclésiastique,
which included two bishops and seven other members who preferred bishops to philosophes. But it was not easy to block the anticlerical offensive since, once again, the “bons esprits” proved better placed to exert pressure.
³⁶
This was shown
in a series of stormy debates between December 1789 and March 1790. On 17 December, Jean-Baptiste Treilhard (1742–1810), a former
avocat
of the Paris parlement and now president of the
comité ecclésiastique
, recommended full dissolution of those orders under vows of strict seclusion, as these served no social function and merely enabled monks to live at the expense of others.
³⁷
After a tumultuous debate, in which Barnave (a Protestant) claimed that religious orders contradicted the liberty, equality, and rights of men,
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the Assembly rejected a compromise to spare at least one monastic house in each town, despite Abbé Gregoire’s plea that the “destruction absolue” of the orders was “impolitique,” and that scholarship, agriculture, and the cult would suffer.

On 13 February 1790, the Assembly declared all monastic establishments not devoted to educational or charitable work contrary to society’s interests, abolishing them “for ever.”
³⁹
To determine which monasteries should be spared as socially useful, questionnaires requiring details of their governance, rules of life, and goals, and the identities and ages of all occupants were circulated to all France’s monastic establishments, male and female, in early March.
⁴⁰
As the country’s laws no longer recognized “monastic solemn vows either for the one or the other sex,” everyone wishing to leave monastic houses or nunneries was free to do so. Nuns refusing to relinquish their vows could remain in the convents where they were; monks and friars adhering to vows had to recongregate in monastic houses deemed charitable (of whatever order), still counting at least fifteen members.
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Thus, in each region a few houses designated “charitable” absorbed residues from larger batches of monastic houses now dissolved. Most regular clergy made little protest and simply vacated their premises, many emigrating, or abandoning monastic life for good. Indiscriminate commingling of orders in surviving monasteries, moreover, quickly persuaded some who had not initially chosen to forsake their vows to reenter secular life after all. Monks and friars departing voluntarily received pensions of between 700 and 1,200 livres, though sequestration began immediately but promised pensions only from January 1791. Here and there, defiant stalwarts remained a solid majority in control of their monasteries. At Saint-Germain-des-Près, the great abbey in central Paris, thirty-seven out of forty-seven monks refused to leave.

Most ecclesiastical deputies continued attending the Assembly’s meetings over the winter of 1789–90 and into the spring, preferring to resist from within the Assembly for as long as possible.
⁴²
France’s battered episcopate, despite the affronts to which, from October 1789, it
was continually subjected, made no move yet to openly repudiate the Revolution. By April 1790, though, those clergy still attending sessions were nearing the point of absolute rupture. On 11 April, they formally protested at the anticlerical tone of much of the debate, threatening to boycott the Assembly’s sessions. Some walked out. On 12 April, the mystic Carthusian Dom Gerle introduced his unsuccessful motion, prepared with other clerics, proclaiming Catholicism France’s sole publicly acknowledged religion. Some lower clergy still hoped the alliance of Revolution and clergy of June 1789 would somehow surmount all obstacles. But there was scant likelihood of this. Doubtless relatively few Frenchmen rejoiced at the monasteries’ dissolution, but precisely these considered dissolution a mere preliminary preceding still more drastic action directed against the Church. Among the fiercest anti-Church tracts at this juncture was the
Catéchisme du curé Meslier—
penned by the militantly egalitarian atheist republican philosophe of the Cordeliers, Sylvain Maréchal (1750–1803)—which revived the irreligious communism and atheism of Jean Meslier (1664–1729) and plainly intended to spread his anti-Christian message far and wide.
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Meanwhile, deteriorating relations with the papacy, and the strife in the papal enclaves of Avignon and Comtat Venaissin, as well as Pius VI’s condemnation of the Declaration of Rights at Rome on 29 March 1790 (even if thus far only in secret consistory), aggravated the general position. By the spring of 1790, revolutionaries had won control of the Avignon city council and were agitating for annexation to France, a development from which local Protestants, Jews, deists, and nonbelievers stood to gain. The pope’s supporters fought back by instigating popular riots in Avignon on 10 June 1790, physically attacking revolutionaries, Protestants, and Jews, to which the insurgents responded by proclaiming the enclave’s annexation to France. This was furiously resisted in the Comtat and precipitated a miniature civil war that lasted an entire year.

However, the principal battle, the culminating struggle, was fought over the Assembly’s proposals for a comprehensive restructuring of the Church designed to subordinate it firmly to the interests and “general will” of the nation, ending the Church’s autonomy and aristocratic dominance of the episcopate and drastically curtailing the hierarchy. Church activities in future should be confined to administering the cult, pastoral care, primary education, and charity. The key legislation was framed and advanced by a group of radical revolutionaries, including Mirabeau, Treilhard, Lanjuinais, and Camus, a “fervent Jansenist,” according to Malouet, and certainly an erudite expert in church history and canon law (as well as the later founder of the Archives Nationales),
⁴⁴
but actually an uncompromising republican and foe of aristocracy with a vehemently erastian and antipapalist attitude, detested by practically all clergy.
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These men worked together with a handful of radical reforming clergy, notably Lamourette, Fauchet, and Grégoire, and a few Jansenists. The enactment amounted to a fundamental reorganization of the Church’s institutional structure. To justify the many changes, the reformers claimed not to be transforming the Church itself but restoring its long-lost authentic apostolic character, rendering it again poor, propertyless, and the “servant” of the people, embodying, as Fauchet put it,
la liberté universelle
. The large revenues and aristocratic pomp of the episcopate, which Treilhard did not hesitate to label “corruption,” and the bishops’ ingrained “despotisme,” were heavily stressed. Jesus Christ established no hierarchy among the apostles, claimed one pamphlet, but rather placed them all on the same level. The apostles’ successors had been appointed “bishops” by the people, not a corrupt court (i.e., the papacy). Supposedly, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy “far from advancing anything contrary to religion is, in fact, in perfect agreement with Gospel doctrine.”
⁴⁶

The Assembly’s Ecclesiastical Committee, doubled in size in order to swamp the ecclesiastics with nonecclesiastics, presented its proposed Civil Constitution of the Clergy on 29 May 1790.
⁴⁷
There were four main aspects to this key decree: reform of the episcopate, reform of the parish system, instituting the election of both parish priests and bishops, and finally ending jurisdictional appeals to Rome.
⁴⁸
Under the edict’s terms, the episcopate was drastically diminished in size, resources, and competence. Diocesan boundaries were redrawn so that there were now only eighty-three dioceses corresponding exactly to each
departement
in France, thereby ending the age-old inequality between dioceses. The result was that fifty-two sees disappeared outright, reducing the number of French bishops from 135 to 83 (subsequently 85). At the same time, surviving bishops had their incomes drastically reduced, afterward receiving relatively modest salaries of only 20,000 livres for those residing in towns of more than 20,000 inhabitants and 12,000 livres for smaller centers—barely more than double that of curés of large parishes.
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The rank of “archbishop” disappeared altogether, horrifying the entire upper hierarchy. The ten most senior prelates, now designated “metropolitans,” were henceforth those of Paris, Rouen, Reims, Lyon, Besançon, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Bourges, and Rennes.

Parish boundaries were redrawn, rendering the parishes likewise equal in territory and population, with the consequence that hundreds disappeared. The number of curés in both town and country fell
precipitately, especially in towns with populations of less than ten thousand, where there was now just one curé.
⁵⁰
In Paris, under one-third of former parishes (eleven) were eliminated.
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In smaller centers, though, the proportion was considerably higher, often comprising the majority. Parishes in Arras dropped from eleven to four, in Auxerre from twelve to four.
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To end the old patronage system for episcopal appointments, cathedral chapters and vicars general, with their extensive aristocratic establishments, were also all suppressed. Henceforth, every bishop must previously have served for fifteen years as a curé in an ordinary parish and be “elected” by the citizenry. Fauchet stongly supported election of
pasteurs
and bishops by the people, seeing no other way to extirpate everything “aristocratic” and hierarchical and effectively subject the Church to the “public voice,” la volonté générale. Bishops would be elected in departmental assemblies, curés in local ones, without those standing being allowed to solicit Vatican or any external endorsement.
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Curés and bishops would be elected, moreover, not by Catholic congregations alone but by all “active citizens” enfranchised to vote, Protestants and Jews included, a democratic principle intended to render all clergy public servants.