Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (40 page)

A particular worry to Condorcet and his colleagues were the
sophismes adroits
and “maximes les plus inconstitutionelles” inculcated into
the thousands of theology students attending France’s 140 seminaries. With their job prospects massively curtailed, their instructors exhorted them to fight la philosophie moderne and its secularizing doctrines, and oppose the
parti révolutonnaire
, however they could, openly or behind the scenes. After the pope’s pronouncements, “priestly fanaticism and vindictiveness” were, by June 1791, causing widespread turbulence, not just in Alsace-Lorraine, Provence, Artois, and Corsica but to an extent everywhere, most worryingly in Normandy, Brittany, and the Vendée region.
¹⁰²
Doubtless, uncooperative churchmen deemed themselves the wronged party and not as rebels subverting the state. But it was difficult for the revolutionary leadership not to consider them outright “rebels.” In and around Nantes, by December 1791, local clergy, it was reported to the Assembly, were actively fomenting discord, ostracizing elected constitutional clergy, dissuading men from joining the National Guard, and encouraging defiance of the law.
¹⁰³

For several months, from January 1791, the battle “over the oath” and inauguration of constitutional clergy was undoubtedly the issue that most agitated French communities at the provincial and village level. Open opposition to the church reforms further intensified the revolutionary leadership’s anticlerical sentiments and profoundly dismayed pro-Revolution priests like Lamourette, who was convinced the papacy had made a fatal mistake.
¹⁰⁴
Before being ousted, Bishop Sebastien-Michel of Vannes in Brittany, like other soon-ejected bishops of neighboring dioceses, in February 1791 commanded the clergy to denounce the reforms in their sermons. The Assembly’s proceedings, local peasants were assured, would blight their crops and cause sterility throughout the land. Sacraments administered by civil clergy were null and void and, worse, sacrilegious, and would cause the sick to die. As for the newly elected “bishops,” these were heretical; the only correct response was to boycott the churches, cemeteries, and confessionals, and fight.
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Numerous nonviolent—and soon also violent—demonstrations ensued, especially by infuriated women expressing pro-réfractoire sentiment. When the leading revolutionary figure at Montpellier, the mayor Jean-Jacques Durand, proceeded to install the new constitutional curés, he was stoned by furious women and injured.
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When the curate of a church in Troyes convened a meeting to explain his opposition to the Civil Constitution in March 1791, an official enforcing the law was driven off by an irate female mob screaming support for religion.
¹⁰⁷

No one failed to notice the Revolution’s growing blanket hostility to the faith of the majority. The revolutionary press professed not to be
anti-Catholic. Officially, it lambasted only recalcitrant clergy, accusing nonjurors of shamelessly fanning popular fanaticism, ignorance, and superstition, including anti-Protestantism and anti-Semitism.
¹⁰⁸
But its comments were often indiscriminately hostile. Citing the backlash against Joseph II’s 1780 toleration decree, granting religious toleration to the Hapsburg Empire’s Protestants and Jews,
La Feuille villageois
denounced not just Austria’s conservative bishops but all bishops, alleging that “the episcopacy is the most dreadful aristocracy and most odious privileged elite that has ever existed.”
¹⁰⁹
Even a paper intended for simple, uneducated villagers regularly slipped into comprehensively anti-Catholic rhetoric. Refractory clergy responded in kind. The legislature claimed to honor Christ’s name, but how was it composed? It was evidently stocked chiefly with atheists and irreligious men—Freemasons, skeptics, Protestants like Barnave and Rabaut, and an unspecified leader who was “a Jew.”

The Revolution could scarcely avoid acting to weaken the episcopate as a social force and suppress obstreperous remnants of the cathedral chapters, monasteries, and seminaries. A supplementary ecclesiastical reform edict on 7 June 1791 engineered a huge further fall in ecclesiastical employment: the Assembly ruled that each cathedral, the ecclesiastical hub of every department, could have no other regular paid parish priest than the bishop himself.
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At the same time, all the Revolution’s leading figures acknowledged the need to harmonize the Civil Constitution of the Clergy with freedom of thought, belief, and expression. Some advocated a gentle approach, others more forceful methods. Sieyès publicly criticized the Civil Constitution and the way it was implemented, deploring use of coercive methods and the onset of a persecuting attitude contrary to the spirit of freedom of conscience.
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The Assembly agreed to adhere to the policy of toleration and not act against refractory priests celebrating mass and preaching within existing Catholic churches or establishing separate congregations. Over the next two years, the principle that “prêtres non-assermentés,” refractory priests, remained “citizens” enjoying all the rights of citizens, “provided they remained subject to the law,” was broadly respected. (Organized persecution did not commence until after June 1793.) In the Revolution’s early years, refusing the oath incurred only loss of salary, exclusion from the public Church, and the obligation not to publicly condemn the Assembly, reforms, or constitutional clergy.
¹¹²
An Assembly decree of July 1791 reaffirmed the rights and freedom of the
prêtres non-assermentés
, except that, like former monks forsaking their vows and
reentering private life, they must not reside within thirty leagues of any border (because of the security risk). If residing closer to a border, they had to move inland and notify the municipalities where they had previously been of their new locations.
¹¹³

In his Brief
Quod aliquantum
of 10 March 1791, Pope Pius VI comprehensively condemned the philosophical principles underpinning the Rights of Man, religious toleration, freedom of expression and the press, and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, accusing the National Assembly of “heresy” and perpetrating “schism.”
¹¹⁴
The idea that men enjoy an “absolute liberty” regarding their religious views and freedom to think independently about faith and morality rather than submit to ecclesiastical guidance and authority, and the constraints imposed by Original Sin, the pope declared a “monstrosity.” The Brief
Caritas
of 13 April further condemned the principles of elections and democracy applied to the Church.
¹¹⁵
The Revolution’s measures amounted to changing the universal discipline of the Church, overthrowing the hierarchical order that lay at its heart and transforming the character of the episcopate. Loménie de Brienne, who renounced his cardinal’s hat in March 1791, was declared an apostate by the papacy the following September. The departure of the papal nuncio from Paris in late May 1791 marked the final rupture in relations between the papacy and the Revolution and also, if only privately at first, between Louis XVI and the Revolution. It was a break not healed until Napoleon’s concordat with the Church in 1801.

CHAPTER 8

The Feuillant Revolution

(J
ULY
1791–A
PRIL
1792)

The Feuillant coup of July and August 1791 was the constitutional royalists’ last and most vigorous attempt to capture the Revolution. A heavy reverse for the Left, the episode began with an ugly incident on 17 July 1791 when some six thousand people convened on the Champs de Mars to sign a petition. Acting against the advice of Robespierre and most Jacobins, with the latter still profoundly divided and weakened, the petitioners urged the Assembly to withdraw their exoneration of the king. Their radical, forthright petition demanded France become a democratic republic, republicanism being “the masterpiece of human reason.” Never would they recognize Louis XVI as rightful monarch, they swore, unless his kingship was first endorsed by the nation’s voters. Orchestrated by the Cordeliers and Cercle Social, the crowd comprised mainly Cordeliers, Dantonistes, and “Brissot” Jacobins with some Hébertistes, Orléanists, and mere curious onlookers.
¹

The scene was peaceful enough initially until four thousand men of the Paris
National Guard
arrived under Lafayette, accompanied by Mayor Bailly, brandishing a red flag proclaiming martial law. Lafayette commanded the crowd to disperse, all such gatherings being banned. The largely unarmed crowd greeted this with shouts of “à bas le drapeau; à bas les bayonnettes!,” provoking scuffles and then stone-throwing.
²
The militia responded by firing first blanks, and then live volleys, converting the affray into a hideous massacre. Bailly afterward admitted to eleven or twelve killed, but far more were “impitoyablement massacrés,” insisted the Cordeliers newssheet, besides fifty bullet-ridden wounded left strewn over the field. Soon, wildly exaggerated reports circulated that claimed there were four hundred dead.
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Foreign agents had paid troublemakers to “mislead” the crowds and stoke the
unrest, Bailly assured the Assembly. Most deputies applauded him, several expressly condemning Brissot and Danton. Barnave congratulated the National Guard on its “courage” and “fidelité,” he and his colleagues believing that with this show of severity they had finally quashed “le parti républicain.”
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Placards denouncing the radical democrats as “des factieux” inundated Paris. If their tactics were deplorable, Lafayette and Bailly were at any rate right that most Frenchmen preferred monarchy and a moderate course, rejecting the republicanism of the crowd-mobilizing Cordeliers and Cercle. Monarchical sentiment prevailed too at the divided Jacobins, especially among Robespierre’s followers, despite a powerful speech by Brissot arguing that the Dutch and English revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries foundered precisely through vainly attempting to overthrow monarchical despotism without eradicating monarchy.
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In the Jacobins, Robespierre, while vehemently critical of the Feuillants, defended the existing Constitution, assailing Brissot, Condorcet, Paine, and Carra for laboring distinctions between “monarchy” and “republic,” which signified little to him and nothing to ordinary people. The term “republic” was divisive, savoring of an unappealing intellectual dogma, inducing distraction and causing unnecessary loss of life. Robespierre squarely attributed the Champs de Mars massacre to what, to him, was Brissot’s overblown republican zeal and intellectualism. Robespierre frowned on the efforts to promote republican ideology,
⁶
but had not yet acquired that unchallenged grip over the club, later to be the springboard of his power. Outraged republicans blamed the once republican-minded Lafayette and berated the Assembly as “l’assemblée anti-nationale.” The Champs de Mars’ name, proposed the
Journal du Club des Cordeliers
, should be changed to “Saint Barthélemy des Patriotes.”
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With Robespierre’s Jacobins rejecting republicanism, the moment for a general crackdown by Barnave, the Lameths, and their allies was adroitly chosen. Planned or not, “this bloody catastrophe,” as Desmoulins called the massacre, triggered an organized repression, sustained for many weeks, aimed at crushing support for democratic republican equality. The moderates went all out to neutralize “Brissot, Carra, Bonneville, Fréron, Desmoulins, [and] Danton,” and for a time, recorded Desmoulins bitterly, succeeded in convincing Assembly and public alike that these were “dangerous agitators.” Committed republicans were appalled to find that the Assembly contained so many “charlatans” and “tartuffes” ready to betray the Revolution’s basic
principles. After 17 July, those still publicly championing the people’s cause in the Assembly found themselves diminished to a tiny rump, the rest proving an abject “mass of nobles, priests, intriguers, preachers of counter-revolution and imbeciles.”
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To add insult to injury, the repression proceeded under Lafayette, who earlier, as Condorcet’s and Paine’s associate, had joined them in denouncing the “vile individuals” with whom he now collaborated, assuring Desmoulins, Paine, and others “a hundred times” that he too was a “republican.” “Oh, Mirabeau where are you? Why had I never believed you,” exclaimed Desmoulins, “when you assured me the Lameths were just clever, ambitious scoundrels ready to betray liberty at the first opportunity?” Seeing the ungrateful masses turn “against their most illustrious champions,” those cherishing the “sacred flame of patriotism and sublime passion of liberty” in their hearts could only “grind their teeth” at their fellow citizens’ baseness.
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