LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

      “People get the priests they deserve” is the old Russian proverb, which is true if a good-living and successful community of people is served by a good priest, or a troubled and failed community by a bad priest. But you do not have to study history to know that the proverb is not always true. French aristocrats of the revolutionary era would have denied it, some of them complaining, “It is the screwed-up priests who have caused the Revolution,” and wondering how could they have deserved that?

      There were about 115,000 priests on French territory in 1789, certainly a large professional class.¹ They made what they could of the long and evolving tradition of priesthood, at its double levels of priest and bishop: mediators with another world, moral guides, or simple teachers. There is no reason to assume that in their day-to-day lives they were innocent of the regular run of personal deficiencies stemming from upbringing, sexual development, and competitiveness. The challenge of making sense of the Christian tradition can be formidable in any era, but this challenge was especially formidable for those priests required at the very beginning of 1791 to take an oath of loyalty to the new government, and thereby to accept the religious reforms promoted in a new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. More than half did so at the beginning (recent calculations put the number as high as 61 percent), and those who were subsequently consecrated bishops became the new official hierarchy of France.² Their writings, public testimony, and recorded private confidences furnish the story of a national Catholic church, the so-called Constitutional Church, which was rejected as schismatic by Rome and eventually rejected as an alien force by the revolutionary government.

      These men lived out creative and sometimes destructive versions of priestly ministry as it had been handed on to them. Haunted by the besetting ghosts of the monarchical past, priests and bishops had to deal with the radical revolutionary conversation that quickly dominated their national and local government assemblies, coursed along their city streets, and quietly or noisily entered their villages. Certainly resentment of Old Regime episcopal power animated some of the most outspoken and politically effective curés—parish priests—in 1789. Those who were deputies to the Estates General railroaded their own First Estate into revolutionary partnership with the Third (commoner) Estate, to the chagrin of the aristocracy of the Second Estate. As the Estates General was transformed into the official French legislature, priest diarists recorded the heated discussions of the clergy among themselves. Then, once the Constituent Assembly was established, a special ecclesiastical committee began work on church reform.

      The resulting Civil Constitution of the Clergy coordinated church dioceses with the new system of counties (départements) in France. Curés and bishops (previously ordained or consecrated within the church system, of course) were to be elected to their parishes and their dioceses, the bishops no more needing a mandate from the pope to occupy their sees than they did in the early church. The state was guaranteed freedom from church interference and the right to help with reform. The pope had begrudgingly supported Old Regime Catholicism, which gave the papal court general ecclesiastical jurisdiction while reserving certain prerogatives in the appointment of bishops for the monarchical state. But the Constituent Assembly reserved for itself and its ecclesiastical committee every operative decision, and the pope and his entourage considered this an unacceptable arrangement.³ It is clear that whatever chance there had been to sell genuine republic-oriented Catholicism to the legislators of the Republic quickly failed in the face of high-level enthusiasm for republic-oriented deism: a civil religion presented earlier by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and promoted in the first half of the revolutionary decade by Maximilien Robespierre. The move to Rousseau had been natural enough, given the diffusion of Rousseauian ideas, among both the intelligentsia and broad areas of the population.⁴ Deistic religion continued on, of course, as a major competitor to the Constitutional Church, all the more potent because the campaign against Catholicism, the famous “dechristianization” efforts of the central years of the revolutionary decade, gave a pass to deism even as it persecuted Catholicism. But the constitutional bishops and priests believed that they were the last great hope for revolutionary, or republican, Catholicism in France. The French church they administered, in coordination with the revolutionary government, tried to avoid the Scylla of Old Regime Catholicism with its assumption of papal control moderated only by monarchical order, if not divine right monarchy, and the Charybdis of the civil religion that ex-Catholic or post-Catholic political leaders promoted all across the revolutionary decade.

      In fact, our revolutionary priests were not always participants in the Constitutional Church nor were all constitutional priests so very revolutionary. This is not primarily a prosopography of the constitutional clergy or an organizational history of the Constitutional Church before the separation of church and state, and the Second Constitutional Church after 1795. Some of the great personalities who pass in review, beginning with the abbé Sieyès, were little involved in the church reforms of 1790 and 1791. Others who took the oath, such as the violent populist Jacques Roux and the virtual terrorist Joseph Le Bon, spun out of the organizational church into their own secularized apostolates. Histories of the Constitutional Church as such do not include these men. Subtler even is the problem of the continuity of the original Constitutional Church and the Second Constitutional Church. The great dominating bishops of the Constitutional Church such as Henri Grégoire and Claude Le Coz referred to the foundational value of the first oath to the government in accordance with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but they had to give that oath symbolic value when it was no longer operative. At times the old label for a French Catholic church structured with its own specific prerogatives was used, and the Second Constitutional Church was simply called the Gallican Church. In part III of this book, after clearly noting that I am talking about a “Second” version of the Constitutional Church, I will continue to use the single adjective “Constitutional.”

      Instead of the label “revolutionary priest,” I have used in my title the most open expression possible, “priests of the French Revolution.” The priests who moved into, out of, or parallel to the constitutional clergy had their own degrees of dedication to the revolution as represented by the governments between 1789 and 1802. Those priests who detested the national government after the disappearance

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