Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791

by Timothy Tackett

Overview

The imposition of a loyalty oath on French clergymen in the winter of 1790 was a turning point in the Revolutionary decade after 1789. What is more, there is a remarkable similarity between the geography of this oath—the regional percentages of those who accepted or rejected it—and the geographic patterns of religious practice and political behavior persisting into the twentieth century. Timothy Tackett investigates the origins and nature of this fascinating phenomenon.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691610962
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #92
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

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Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France

The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791

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By Timothy Tackett

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05470-4

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CHAPTER 1

The Oath and the French Revolution

On any of several chilly Sunday mornings in the winter of 1791, parish clergymen throughout France were asked to stand in their churches before their congregations and swear a solemn oath of allegiance to the nation, the law, the king, and the new Revolutionary constitution. In many respects, the oath ceremony in question was a signal occurrence among the great and tumultuous events which had been unrolling in France over the previous two years. Like the election of the Estates General in 1789 or the Festival of Federation in 1790, it was an event which was directly witnessed by even the smallest and most isolated villages of the country, an event which thrust the experience of the Revolution clearly and unambiguously into the lives of common men and women everywhere. But while the first electoral assemblies and the Federation ceremonies had generally been marked by a buoyant sense of optimism and unity, the ceremony of the oath of 1791 was often overladen with -tension and uncertainty. Far from the earlier ritual communions of patriotic affirmation, the ecclesiastical oath staked out a real and deadly serious obligation, wherein a failure to conform entailed a clergyman's ejection from his functions and his ostracism from the community of the Revolutionary nation. For, as everyone knew, it was primarily directed at establishing acceptance of one critical aspect of the new constitution: the sweeping reorganization of the French Church, a reorganization which had begun on the night of August 4 and which had culminated in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. And it was precisely over this issue that the Revolution would experience the first great parting of the ways, a major schism within the French Church and clergy, but also a great and lasting schism across the political allegiance of the entire population.

To believe the accounts of contemporaries, the issue of the oath soon became a veritable obsession, unleashing emotional reactions and factional strife in parishes everywhere. There were villages in which a clergyman's acceptance of the new legislation could elicit an extraordinary outpouring of enthusiasm, with vigorous applause, bell ringing, parades, and pomp in endless variations. Elsewhere, the same action might incite storms of popular outrage, leading on occasion to open riots and physical attacks against the priest himself. Intimate friendships were shattered over the crisis of the oath. Wives, it was said, were being turned against their husbands, children against their parents, servants against their masters — to the extent that some observers voiced fears for the continued stability of the French family. In the towns, one could read poetry about the oath, attend plays about the oath, hear public lectures on the subject by eminent specialists, or buy engravings depicting the event to put on one's wall. By the spring, the whole issue had so permeated popular consciousness that even young children might be seen reenacting the oath ceremony as they played in the streets.

Soon, moreover, the enforcement of the oath and the dismissal of thousands of clergymen from the officially sanctioned Church would set in motion a chain of events which embittered whole segments of the rural population. In some areas the non-jurors represented such a large proportion of all local priests that it was all but impossible to find replacements, and the "anticonstitutional" clergymen had to be left for up to a year and a half with little effective supervision over their preaching activities. Rapidly appreciating the problem, the legislators in Paris abruptly revoked one of the more important reform measures of their Civil Constitution, allowing priests with only minimal previous experience to move into vacant posts. This legislation, rushed through in January 1791, opened the floodgates to an enormous flow of priests throughout the kingdom, as young clergymen looking for rapid careers and newly released regulars searching for employment streamed into openings around the country. Many villagers discovered not only that their accustomed priests had been ousted but that they had been replaced by unknown outsiders. To further confuse the issue, the National Assembly — much to the ire of the new Constitutional Church — steadfastly maintained its earlier pronouncements on religious toleration and allowed the continued presence of the refractory clergymen and their participation in a parallel, non-official cult. Henceforth, two competing churches would each claim sole powers for administering the sacraments efficaciously. The state of religious chaos was gradually clarified after numerous departments began cracking down unilaterally to banish the local refractories and after the provisional government itself issued its decree of August 1792, leading to the blanket deportation of all non-jurors. But the residue of the crisis was lasting and profoundly unsettling. Where people's eternal souls were at stake and where people were still genuinely concerned over the fate of those souls, the potential for unrest and anxiety was substantial.

But if it was a capital event in the history of the French village, so too the oath of 1791 marked a major crisis in the political life of the nation. In both Paris and the provinces it was probably the central public event, the single most discussed problem during the first six months of that year. Virtually all newspapers, at every point on the political spectrum, wrote at length on the issue, covering their pages with enumerations of priests who had or had not fulfilled their obligations and recounting the debates, theological and political, surrounding this "Battle of the Oath." For weeks, the National Assembly began most every session with the reading of testimonies on the reception of the oath in the members' constituent districts. Buoyed up by the inflation of rhetoric, which was rapidly taking on a life of its own, deputies and journalists on both sides predicted the most dire outcome. There were endless references by Right and Left to an impending civil war. It would be a return to the sixteenth century and to the Holy League and the Wars of Religion. "In the midst of the effervescence which presently excites the capital," wrote the Révolutions de Paris, "the slightest spark would be enough to ignite a civil war. ... Malcontents, long divided, have now rallied together in the sinister glimmer of the torches of fanaticism."

In fact, open civil war would not come so soon. But a kind of internal cold war was breaking out in full intensity. It was the question of the religious legislation and the oath which, as much as any other single issue, stripped away the veneer of concord and harmony which had been maintained for the most part since the summer of 1789. By forcing the separation of the sheep and the goats among the French clergy, by imposing an absolute, unambiguous stance for or against the new constitution, the oath would come to reinforce and solidify the Manichaean universe of revolutionary politics and give visible substance to the underlying paranoia which had gripped the National Assembly and much of the population since the inception of the Revolution. And the issue was also of the greatest importance in the growing division between the king and his kingdom — a king who could never reconcile himself to the Civil Constitution and the juring clergy and who could never escape his remorse for having sanctioned the legislation in the first place. As he fled toward Varennes in June of 1791, one of the key items on his agenda for a restoration was the reinstatement of the Church of the Old Regime. It is little surprising, then, that many historians have seen the oath of 1791 as one of the pivotal events in the French Revolution.

The Background

The origins and antecedents of these controversial reforms can be traced to a number of sources well back into the eighteenth century. Indeed, many of the National Assembly's ecclesiastical policies had been prefigured by proposals emanating from the clergy itself. In the heat of its epic struggles with the Jesuits and the orthodox episcopacy, the Jansenist movement had not only put into question the power of the papacy and lambasted the abuses of the bishops, but had also leveled searching indictments against a wide range of ecclesiastical practices and institutions. Some of the "Gallicano-Jansenists" seem even to have exceeded the philosophes in their anticlerical harangues and calls for radical reform, going so far, for example, as to demand the suppression of all Church property. While the contingent of avowed Jansenists or Jansenist sympathizers in the National Assembly was certainly small, several — of whom Grégoire, Camus, and Lanjuinais were the most notable — would hold key committee positions and would exercise leadership in ecclesiastical debates out of proportion to their numbers.

Perhaps even more influential during the last decades of the Old Regime, however, had been a movement gaining ground and loosely described as "curé syndicalism" or "Richerism." The well-publicized campaign by the curé of Vienne, Henri Reymond, for the augmentation of both the revenues and the political power of the parish clergy within the Church would be frequently echoed in the pamphlet literature and the cahiers de doléances of the Clergy and the Third Estate on the eve of the Revolution. Though he based his indictment on the very special and atypical ecclesiastical situation in his own province of Dauphiné, Reymond had, nevertheless, elevated his demands to encompass a vast program of reform for the economic, educational, and career structures of the Church, a program that would anticipate some of the revolutionary reforms. Numerous of the curé deputies to the Estates General were undoubtedly familiar with Reymond's program, and several of Reymond's writings are known to have circulated within the Ecclesiastical Committee which would draft the Civil Constitution.

Nor had the French bishops themselves been altogether isolated from the winds of change. In the years after mid-century, finding themselves increasingly under attack from the philosophes, from the parlementaires, and from their own curés, the prelates sensed the need for a searching reevaluation of the Church's situation. Led by archbishops Loménie de Brienne, Le Franc de Pompignan, Du Lau, and Boisgelin, the bishops had made proposals in the General Assembly of the Clergy for the reform of clerical taxes, the improvement of the revenues of the lower clergy, and the modification of the benefice system — including recommendations for the appointment of curés by competitive examinations, an enforced apprenticeship period as vicaire before taking charge of pastoral functions, and a reform of clerical education. There had even been talk of changing diocesan boundaries in order to suppress the minuscule "dioceses crottés" of southern France. Perhaps the bishops' most heralded success had been the creation of the Commission on the Regular Clergy which reformed some aspects of monastic life and reduced the number of religious houses. In 1790 these measures would be cited by the National Assembly as a precedent for the suppression of all monastic vows. Yet, all in all, the bishops' efforts were probably less a manifestation of the desire for Enlightened transformation than an effort to rationalize and centralize their administrations and thereby curb the threat to traditional discipline posed by elements of the lower clergy. And when the final General Assembly of the Old Regime met in 1788 most of the reforms proposed ten to twenty years earlier were still no closer to execution. The same kinds of vested interests and privileges which had undermined the royal government's attempts at transformation from above ultimately paralyzed the efforts of the clergy. Yet the bishops' very failure to effect such changes would go far in publicizing the need for extensive reform.

Nevertheless, the push for clerical reform had not come solely from within the Church. In the second half of the eighteenth century, armed with their particular version of "Parlementary" Gallicanism — stressing not only the relative independence of the French Church from Rome, but also the general domination of the state over the Church — several of the Parlements had pushed the long-standing rivalry of authority between themselves and the clergy to a new level of intensity. In the 1740's and 1750's, in the affair of the billets de confession, the Parlements had even claimed powers of supervision over the distribution of sacraments; and their dominant role in the destruction of the Society of Jesus in the 1760's is well known. In the last decades of the century, through a careful cultivation of the appel comme d'abus, certain of the Sovereign Courts were interposing themselves in the name of justice and reform into a wide range of ecclesiastical affairs: granting benefices, naming curés, or creating new parish annexes despite the objections of the bishops; and establishing fundamental changes in the mode of tithe collection, much to the disadvantage of the ecclesiastical tithe owners. A few of the courts were also actively encouraging the "revolt of the curés" against the bishops on the eve of the Revolution. There can be little doubt that numerous deputies of the Third Estate, trained in the law and often in the service of the royal courts, were well versed in the theory and practice of Parlementary Gallicanism, and that the Gallican lawyers — Durand de Maillane, Treilhard, and Martineau — even more than the Jansenists or Richerists, were among the most influential contributors to the Civil Constitution.

Far more difficult to disentangle is the influence of the Enlightenment on the thinking and actions of the generation of 1789. Much of the problem stems from the very complexity, the inherent contradictions of the Enlightenment itself as it was actually experienced by eighteenth-century Frenchmen. It was a generation which had by no means abandoned Catholicism, at least at the superficial level of a social context for the rites of passage. Christianity was the predominant, usually the sole, frame of reference whenever a need was perceived to solemnify or consecrate an event. The near millenarian enthusiasm of the early days of the Revolution was commonly expressed in a religious idiom drawing heavily on Catholic language and ritual. And, nevertheless, two generations of attacks on the established Church and on revealed religion invariably left an effect on elements of the social elite — even though many members of that elite had probably never fully articulated to themselves their precise beliefs, had never fully understood the inconsistencies between their formal adherence to Catholicism and their predilection for the "new ideas."

For most of the philosophes, as for many of the leaders of the Revolution, there was a curious tension between religion viewed in the metaphysical sense and religion viewed as a social reality. Regardless of their personal positions on the ultimate truth of the religious world view, they returned repeatedly to the social utility of religion for the masses. It was for this very reason that few public figures would be more praised and lionized by the philosophes and by the early revolutionaries than the village parish priest: precisely because of his perceived role of instilling a sense of civil obedience and religion among the uneducated, hopelessly unenlightened, and potentially dangerous lower classes. Yet the esteem shown for the humble lower clergy would soon prove but a thin overlay to an even more powerful and deep-seated sentiment of anticlericalism. Indeed, anticlericalism emerges as one of the most powerful legacies of the Enlightenment's position on religion — all the more influential in that it reactivated and reinforced a visceral institutional anticlericalism long present in French society. If the leaders on the Left of the National Assembly ultimately provoked a crisis over the oath in 1791, it was partly because an underlying irritation and impatience with priests — particularly with priests who seemed to be slowing the progress of the Revolution — got the better of their efforts toward benevolent tolerance for the "consolations of religion" among the masses."

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. iii
• Table of Contents, pg. vii
• List of Tables, pg. xi
• List of Figures, pg. xiii
• Preface, pg. xv
• Acknowledgments, pg. xix
• Abbreviations, pg. xxi
• ONE. The Oath and the French Revolution, pg. 3
• TWO. The Statistical Approach to the Oath: An Overview, pg. 34
• THREE. Clergymen Explain Their Oaths, pg. 59
• FOUR. Collective Portraits, pg. 75
• FIVE. The Ecclesiastical Milieu, pg. 99
• SIX. Clerical Politics, pg. 127
• SEVEN. Clerical Leadership and the Voice from Below, pg. 159
• EIGHT .The Oath as a Referendum, pg. 183
• NINE. The Protestant Menace, pg. 205
• TEN. Clericalism and the Oath, pg. 226
• ELEVEN. The Urban Elites and the Oath, pg. 251
• TWELVE. The Meaning of the Oath, pg. 287
• Appendix I: Note on Method and Sources, pg. 303
• Appendix II: Oath Statistics by Department and District, pg. 307
• Appendix III: Oath Statistics (Summary), pg. 364
• Appendix IV: Estimated Oath-taking for Old-Regime Dioceses, pg. 367
• Appendix V: Incidence of Cure Collective Action, 1730-1786, pg. 369
• Sources and Bibliography, pg. 373
• Index, pg. 409