Authority being originally, and in its essence, ecclesiastical and
religious, an understanding of the successive developments in the
position of the Revolution to church and religion is indispensable to a
comprehension of the intellectual reaction which followed. For, as that
reaction meant the re-establishment of the principle of authority, it
naturally, as well as logically, began with the rehabilitation of the
church.
The Revolution was in reality quite as much of a religious as of a
political nature. Regarded from one standpoint, it was the practical
result of the labours of the great free-thinking philosophers of the
eighteenth century. It is to the Revolution of 1789 that we owe the
greatest conquest wrested by the human intellect from prejudice and
power--liberty of conscience, religious toleration. It is certainly not
to the Christian church that humanity is indebted for this inestimable
blessing, for the church opposed to the utmost every demand suggestive
of it.
At the moment when the Revolution begins, all the preparations for
the great encounter between the principle of authority on the one
side and the principles of individuality and solidarity on the other
are complete. All the leaders, all the knights and squires who are to
fight in the great joust, are already at their posts, unknown to each
other, unknown to the world, which is soon to ring with their names.
They are men with very varied pedigrees and pasts. There are noblemen
like Mirabeau, priests like Mauret, Fauchet, and Talleyrand, physicians
like Marat, lawyers like Robespierre, poets, philosophers, orators,
authors like M. J. Chénier, Condorcet, Danton, and Desmoulins--a whole
host of men of talent and men of character. The church rallies all its
forces for a desperate struggle, in which it is doomed to be worsted;
the Revolution progresses, first hesitatingly, then threateningly,
then irresistibly, finally in the intoxication of victory. With
the summoning of the Estates the lists are opened; challenges are
exchanged; and the great umpire, history, gives the signal for the fray.
As soon as the Estates are assembled the first and unanimous demand of
the clergy is that "the Catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion" shall
be recognised as the national religion, with the exclusive monopoly of
public worship. And yet among the lower orders of the clergy were to be
found many republicans; but of the liberty demanded by these, religious
liberty did not form a part. The liberal-minded abbés might declaim
against the Inquisition, and bestow on it such epithets as cannibal and
tiger-like, but they were all opposed to toleration. The revolutionary
abbé, Fauchet--he who, after the capture of the Bastille, blessed the
tricoloured uniforms of the citizen soldiers, and made of the tricolour
the national flag--now jeered at the idea of toleration, and prophesied
general and complete demoralisation as its only possible result. He
went so far as to maintain that those who belonged to no church ought
not to have the right to marry, "since one could not consider such
persons bound by their word."
When the Estates met as the National Assembly, the clergy were soon
compelled to make concessions; but even when the feeling against them
found expression, it always in the end assumed the mildest, most
deferential form. When, for example, in February 1790, incensed by
Garat's declaring consecration to the priesthood to be civic suicide,
a number of priests, amongst them Abbé Maury and the Bishops of Nancy
and Clermont, started up, accused Garat of blasphemy, and moved that
the Catholic religion should be proclaimed as the national religion,
the motion was rejected, but in such a manner as clearly evinced the
timidity and hesitation of its opponents. It would, they declared,
be an insult to religion, and to the feelings of the whole Assembly,
to act as if there could be any doubt in such a matter. Men did not
yet dare to say what they thought; and so an Assembly, the majority
of which were free-thinkers, took part in church processions and
attended Catholic public worship. Only two months later the motion
that Catholicism should be proclaimed the state religion was again
brought forward, this time after Maury's angry tirade against the
proposal to secularise the property of the church. The proposer of
the motion on this occasion was a priest, Dom Gerle, who afterwards,
as a Jacobin, did his utmost to blot out the remembrance of his first
public appearance. Mirabeau answered with a reference to a window in
the Louvre which he could see from the place where he stood; "the
very window," he shouted, "from which a French autocrat, who combined
secular aims with the spiritual aims of religion, fired the shot which
gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew." But once again
the Assembly avoided the settling of the question by declaring that
the majesty of religion and the reverence due to it forbade their
making it the subject of debate. The Left with one accord refrained
from voting and a protest was signed by 297 members, of whom 144 were
ecclesiastics. Vacillation and self-contradiction were the order of the
day.
The aristocracy, who a hundred years before had joyfully acclaimed
Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had been influenced to
such an extent by the literature of the eighteenth century that, in
their capacity as an Estate, they in a genuinely Voltairean spirit
expressed themselves in favour of universal toleration; but they at the
same time gave hesitating expression to the opinion that the Catholic
church ought to be the national church. The Third Estate, the citizens,
a considerable proportion of whom were Jansenists, and consequently
in reality less liberal-minded, had expressed itself in a similarly
evasive manner. But once the National Assembly was constituted, there
was no longer any real uncertainty. As we all know, one of the first
acts of that Assembly was the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and
liberty of thought and speech in matters of religion was specified as
one of these rights. Article 10 of the Declaration runs as follows:
"No one may be harassed on account of his opinions, not even of
his religious opinions, provided his expression of the same be not
subversive of lawful order." The Pope replied by declaring this liberty
to be "an unnatural and foolish right, subversive of reason" (_sic_).
This was a sufficient indication of the relative positions of the two
camps.
When toleration becomes the subject of debate in the Constituent
Assembly we perceive the direction things are taking. One of the
clauses in the first draught of the Declaration of the Rights of Man
ran thus: "Public worship being a matter of public import, it is the
prerogative of society to control it, to permit the rites of one church
and forbid those of another." Upon this clause Mirabeau made a violent
attack.
"It is not toleration that I champion," he said. "In the matter of
religion, unrestricted liberty is in my eyes such a sacred right that
the employment of the word toleration to express it savours to me of
tyranny; for the very existence of an authority which has the power to
tolerate, and, consequently, the power not to do so, is an infringement
on freedom of thought." In a subsequent debate he went still farther.
"A ruling religion has been spoken of. What is meant in this case by
'ruling'? I do not understand the word, and must request a definition
of it. Does it mean a religion which suppresses other religions? Has
not the Assembly interdicted the word suppression? Or does it mean the
religion of the sovereign? The sovereign has not the right to rule over
men's consciences or to direct their opinions. Or does it apply to the
religion of the majority? Religion is a matter of opinion. This or that
religion is the outcome of this or that opinion. An opinion is not
formed by counting votes. Thought is a man's own, is independent, and
cannot be restricted."
It is evident that men were beginning to have the courage of their
opinions in religious matters.
I adduce another example of the rapidity with which, both in the
Assembly and in society in general, they were advancing from a timid
first apprehension to certainty of the great spiritual revolution which
was taking place.
In October 1789 there stood at the bar of the National Assembly a
deputation of curiously dressed men with oriental features. They
were Jews from Alsace and Lorraine, who had been deputed by their
fellow-believers to appeal for mercy.
"Most noble Assembly," they said, "we come in the name of the Eternal,
who is the source of all justice and truth, in the name of God, who
has given to all men the same rights and the same duties, in the name
of humanity, which has been outraged for centuries by the infamous
treatment to which the unfortunate descendants of the oldest of nations
have been subjected in almost every country, to beseech you humbly to
take our unhappy fate into consideration. Those Jews who are everywhere
persecuted, everywhere humiliated, and yet are always submissive, never
rebellious; those Jews who are despised and harassed by all nations,
whereas they ought to be pitied and tolerated, cast themselves at your
feet, and venture to hope that, even in the midst of the important
tasks which engross you, you will not neglect and despise their
complaint, but will listen compassionately to the timid protests which
they venture to offer from the depth of degradation in which they are
sunk.... May an improvement in our position, which we have hitherto
desired in vain, and which we now tearfully implore, be your work, your
benefaction!"
Clermont-Tonnerre warmly supported this petition. He was opposed by
the audacious and callous Abbé Maury, who argued thus: "It is absurd
to talk in our days of persecution and intolerance. The Jews are
our brothers. But to make the Jews citizens would be equivalent to
permitting Englishmen or Danes to become Frenchmen without any process
of naturalisation, without ceasing to be Englishmen or Danes." He also
dwelt upon the usurious proclivities of the Jews and the other vices
attributed to them: "Not a man amongst them has ennobled his hands by
guiding a plough or cultivating a plot of ground."
Considering that Jews were strictly prohibited by law from acquiring
even the smallest piece of land, and that their position was such that
when they entered a town they were liable to the same duty as was
imposed on pigs, Maury's argument was easy of refutation. But hatred
of the Jews was still so strong that no one contradicted him. It was
feared that, if civic rights were conferred on the Jews, they would
turn the whole of Alsace into a Jewish colony.
There was a general feeling of embarrassment. Only one member of
the Assembly, a man who as yet had attracted no notice, Maximilien
Robespierre, spoke in favour of the motion for granting the Jews
equality. He declared their vices to be the consequence of the degraded
position in which they had been kept.
But he was alone in supporting a measure which, significantly enough,
classed Protestants, actors, and Jews together. The human rights of
the Protestants and the actors were acknowledged, but, as Mirabeau
recognised the impossibility of passing the clause of the motion
which concerned the Jews, he adjourned the debate on this clause
indefinitely. Two years passed. In 1791 the Jews once more appealed.
But in what a changed tone! The humble prayer of the slave had become
the peremptory demand of the man. The conclusion of the appeal runs as
follows:--
"If there were one religion which incapacitated its followers from
being citizens, whilst the followers of all other religions made good
citizens, then these other religions would be the ruling religions;
but there is no ruling religion, since all have equal rights. If the
Jews are refused civic rights because they are Jews, they are punished
for belonging by birth to a certain religion. In this case there is no
religious liberty, seeing that loss of civic rights accompanies the
liberty. This much is certain--in advancing men to religious liberty,
the intention was that they should simultaneously be advanced to civic
liberty; there is no half liberty, just as there is no half justice."
Two years spent in the atmosphere of the Revolution had given to these
pariahs not only self-esteem but pride. This time the measure was
passed without debate.
In the Constituent Assembly the animosity towards positive religion
and its priests with which the "philosophers" had inoculated their
age did not find vent in words; as yet it only expressed itself in
deeds. All church property was proclaimed to be state property.
Voltaire had impressed upon his disciples that it was their mission "to
annihilate the infamous thing" (_écraser l'infame_). In the decisions
of the Assembly faithful Catholics saw an attempt to carry out this
injunction. It seemed to them as if all the powers of hell had been
let loose upon the church of Christ, "as if the philosophers were bent
upon exterminating the Christian religion, not only in France, but
throughout Europe, nay, throughout the whole world." (_Conjuration
contre la religion catholique et les souverains_, 1792.) In order to
attain this result the "philosophers" had addressed themselves to the
sovereigns of the great countries, to Frederick of Prussia, Catherine
of Russia, and others; but it was from the French middle class that the
blow came.
The priests, who, as the saying goes, have found what Archimedes
sought, a fulcrum in another world from which to move this one, now
began to stir up the spirit of fanaticism in the provinces. In the town
of Arras a picture of the crucifixion was paraded in the streets, in
which Maury and the royalists were represented standing on the right
side of the cross, and the revolutionists on the left side, below the
unrepentant thief. At Nîmes there was a regular riot when the news came
that a Protestant, Saint-Étienne, had been elected President of the
National Assembly.
The new ordering of the church's affairs was brought about by a
coalition of the Voltairean and Jansenist members of the Assembly.
The Jansenists had a religious hatred of earthly greatness, and, as
fatalists, unquestioningly accepted the existence of human misery.
Therefore it displeased them to see the church rich, and they took
no account of the manner in which the poor benefited by its wealth.
Moreover, the scandalous lives led by many of the high-placed
ecclesiastics aroused their moral indignation. Everyone, for instance,
knew that Bishop Jarante's mistress, Mademoiselle Guimard, distributed
ecclesiastical promotion behind the scenes of the opera, that the
Archbishop of Narbonne had a regular harem in one of his abbeys, and
that the monks of the Abbey of Granselve had quarters for their ladies
in a neighbouring village, where the tables were regularly spread for
nightly revels.
If the revolutionists had been content with secularising church
property, they could not well have been convicted of attacking
religion. But they interfered in the church's internal arrangements and
discipline, and even altered its ritual; and its dignitaries naturally
proclaimed that the foundations of religion were shaken. Therefore
the ordinary priest hardly ever dared take the oath of allegiance to
the constitution. The small yearly payment received from the state by
those who did so was likened to Judas Iscariot's blood-money, although
in times past it had been considered just that bishops should own
palaces and pleasure-grounds, and have luxuries of every kind at their
disposal, while the lower orders of the clergy were positively starving.
As a result of the new order of things many riotous and many comic
scenes were witnessed in the provinces. In one of Camille Desmoulins'
newspaper articles we find an amusing description of the compulsory
parting between a village curé and his charge. Coming out at the church
door one Sunday after mass, Monsieur le Curé is surprised by the sight
of a coach loaded with all his belongings. On the top sits Javotte,
his housekeeper, to whom the schoolmaster, with tears in his eyes, is
saying farewell. The curé is handed into the carriage amidst cries of:
"Good-bye, good-bye, your Reverence!" and off he has to go, though he
rages and storms as long as his church steeple is in sight. In other
places, however, the priest was forced to take the oath with the
bayonet at his breast; and in one instance a recalcitrant was shot dead
in his pulpit. But if dissident priests were occasionally maltreated,
the treatment meted out by these priests to their opponents was
infinitely worse. They taught the peasants that the new constitution,
which did not in reality interfere with religion at all, was a work
of the devil. They impressed upon their congregations that it was a
mortal sin to take the sacrament from the hands of a priest who had
sworn allegiance to the government, that the children of parents who
had been married by such priests were illegitimate, nay, that the curse
of God rested on them. One priest who had taken the oath was stoned
in his church, another was hanged from the chancel lamp. The churches
which had been closed by order of the National Assembly were broken
open again. In certain departments murderous bands of devotees, led by
priests, marched about armed with guns and spears. The situation was
worst in Brittany. When the Breton peasant who had gone many miles to
hear mass said by a true, _i.e._ non-juring priest, on his return met a
dozen or so of his neighbours coming out of his own church, where they
had been comfortably attending the ministrations of the new government
curé, he was so infuriated that he felt justified in committing any of
the outrages to which the church incited him.
By the time the Legislative Assembly met, there were no longer any
Estates. The nobles had emigrated, and the exiled ecclesiastical
dignitaries were imploring assistance at foreign courts. The lower
ranks of the clergy, inspired by anti-revolutionary fanaticism, were
inflaming the ignorant multitude. The debates now held in the Assembly
were very different in tone from those of the old days. Now the
standing grievance against religion was the naïvely formulated one
that it did not harmonise with the constitution, and that against the
clergy, that their one aim was to recover their property. The lies and
violence of the priests had stirred up a feeling of great bitterness
against them. A few conciliatory voices were heard, such as that of
André Chénier, who maintained that the priests did not trouble the
state when the state did not interfere with them, or Talleyrand, who
insisted that, as no form of religion was prescribed by law, neither
should any be prohibited by law; but Voltairean indignation was long
the order of the day.
These were the halcyon days of the Girondists, and the Girondists were
the practical expression of the ideas of Voltaire.
In a public declaration drawn up by their famous leader, Vergniaud,
we read: "The rebellious priests are preparing a revolt against the
constitution; these insolent myrmidons of absolutism are supplicating
all the sovereigns of Europe for money and soldiers wherewith to
reconquer the sceptre of France." Roland, as Minister of the Interior,
said: "Mutinous and hypocritical priests, concealing their plans and
their passions under the sacred veil of religion, do not hesitate to
excite fanaticism and to arm their misguided fellow-citizens with the
sword of intolerance." When the proposal to banish the priests was
under discussion, Vergniaud spoke, half jestingly, half seriously, of
the iniquity of bringing evil upon other countries by sending them
such a gift. "Generally speaking," he maintained, "nothing can be more
immoral than that one country should send into another the criminals
of whom it desires to be rid." But he comforts himself with the idea
that in Italy they will be received as saints, and that "in this gift
of living saints which we are sending him, the Pope will recognise
a humble attempt to express our gratitude for all the arms, legs,
and other relics of dead saints with which he has favoured our pious
credulity during the centuries gone by."
"Yes," cries Isnard, the future President of the Convention, "let us
send these plague-stricken creatures to the hospitals of Italy." And
he adds that when a priest is depraved, he is never partly, but always
wholly depraved, that to forgive crimes is the same as to commit them,
that an end must be put to the existing state of matters, and that the
enemies of the Revolution are themselves compelling the Revolution to
crush them. From his lips issue for the first time the terrible words
which were to be echoed and re-echoed times without number in days to
come: "There is no need of proofs." That is to say, all priests accused
were at once to be banished.
And when the fear was expressed that such proceedings would result
in civil war, the noted Girondist, Guadet, a disciple of Holbach,
reassured the Assembly with a speech containing the following
assertion: "Every one knows that a priest is as cowardly as he is
covetous, that he wields no weapons but those of superstition, and
that, having fought nowhere but in the theological prize-ring, he is a
nonentity on the field of battle." It was soon seen how mistaken, in
this matter at least, Guadet and his sympathisers were, and what bold,
enthusiastic leaders the priests made in the sanguinary civil war which
ensued.
Things reached such a pitch that speakers actually began to excuse
themselves when they were obliged to address the Assembly on church
matters. François de Nantes (as spokesman of a committee, be it noted)
declares: "Our one consolation in being obliged to take up your time
with the discussion of church matters is the hope that the measures
you will take will prevent the necessity of your ever hearing of them
again." His whole speech is a tissue of audacities.
These sentiments were shared by high and low. One of Louis XVI.'s
ministers, the insolent, high-handed Cahier de Gerville, said one day,
on leaving the council chamber, to his colleague Molleville, who noted
down the expression in his Memoirs: "I wish I had these damned vermin,
the clergy of all lands, between my fingers, that I might squeeze
them all to death at once." But the spirit of the Revolution found
temperate, dignified expression in a letter from the Republic to the
Pope, which a woman had been commissioned to write. It is addressed
to "The Prince-Bishop in Rome." In the name of the Republic Madame
Roland writes: "High-priest of the Roman church, sovereign of a state
which is slipping out of your hands, know that the only possible way in
which you can preserve state and church is by making a disinterested
confession and proclamation of those gospel principles which breathe a
spirit of the purest democracy, the tenderest humanity, and the most
perfect equality--principles with which Christ's representatives have
adorned themselves only for the purpose of supporting and increasing a
sovereign power which is now falling to pieces from decrepitude. The
age of ignorance is past."
But such language as this is quite out of keeping with what was
generally spoken and written. The period of calm conviction was at an
end, that of unbridled passions had begun. The passions followed in the
track of the convictions. Hatred of Catholicism reached its climax; it
broke out in one great flame all over France. Those were the golden
days of the Clubs.
The Cordelier Club held its meetings in the chapel of a monastery. All
the paintings, tapestries, and carvings were torn down; nothing but
the skeleton of the church remained. The president's seat was in the
chancel, where the rain blew in through the broken panes of the east
window. His table was composed of joiners' benches; on it lay a row
of red caps, and whoever wished to speak had to put on one of these.
Behind him was a statue of Liberty with broken instruments of torture
in her hands. Planks, fragments of stalls, of church benches, or of
shattered images provided seats for a dirty, wild audience in ragged
_carmagnoles_ (as their jackets were called), shouldering spears, or
sitting with their bare arms crossed. The orators spoke boldly and to
the point; everything was called by its plainest name; an indecent
word or audacious gesture roused applause. They were often interrupted
by opponents, and at times by the screeching of small owls, which had
been driven from their homes under the monastery roof, and now flew
in and out through the broken windows seeking food. These were not
to be silenced by the chairman's bell; they were sometimes shot, and
fell fluttering and bleeding among the crowd. Among the speakers were
Danton, Marat, and Camille Desmoulins--the amiable, witty Camille,
whose moderation brought upon him the charge of hypocrisy, and who even
before the tribunal of the Revolution spoke of the _sans-culotte_,
Jesus. Camille had private reasons for his hatred of the priests. When,
in December 1790, he wished to marry his beloved Lucile, without doubt
one of the purest and most beautiful of the female characters of the
Revolution, no priest would perform the ceremony because he had written
in a newspaper article that the religion of Mahomet was as intelligible
as the religion of Jesus. He was obliged to recant this assertion and
to go to confession before he could be married. But now he made amends.
In his newspaper, _Le vieux Cordelier_, he wrote: "The whole subject
of priests and of religions is disposed of when it has been said that
they resemble each other in all being equally absurd, and when it has
been instanced that the Tatars eat the excrement of the Grand Lama as
the greatest delicacy. There is no fool too foolish to be honoured as
Jupiter's equal. The Mongolians worship a cow, which is the object
of as many genuflexions as the god Apis.... We have not the right to
be aggravated by such follies, we who in our simplicity have so long
allowed ourselves to be persuaded that it is possible to swallow a god
as one swallows an oyster." An influential paper which had a great
circulation among the Cordeliers was Loustalot's _Les Révolutions de
Paris_. One of its numbers, published during Lent 1792, contained the
following tirade, apropos of the shows at the fair: "In the days when
there was a ruling religion in France, the tonsured jugglers allowed
no competition during Holy Week. They alone might give performances.
Now there is free competition. When the ordinary conjurer shows himself
upon his stage he is attired in a cloak and strange headgear, by which
he is distinguished from the surrounding crowd; but as soon as the
performance is over he takes off his costume. The priest wears his
all day long, and performs his part off as well as on the stage....
When will they blush to play the rôle of the harlequins of humanity?"
Henceforward the revolutionary nickname of the priests is "theophagi."
In the month of April the same newspaper contains an article in which
it is proposed to apply to priests the regulations instituted by
Johanna of Naples for the control of women of ill-fame. "They ought to
be shut up in a house where they can preach and pray as much as they
choose for those who seek them there, but should be prohibited from
going abroad, so that they may not infect the population." The wine of
Voltaire has turned into vinegar, into poison.
A rival club of a very different type from the Cordeliers' was the
Jacobins'. Its intellectual tendency was more serious and more
pedantic. Its patron was Rousseau, as its rival's was Voltaire. The
original programme of the Jacobins--love of equality, hatred of all
established inequality--was derived purely from Rousseau; with it they
managed to combine ambition, a cold, calculating, revolutionary spirit
of persecution, and, underlying everything else, devotion to rule,
that is to say, to the regulation of society according to Rousseau's
principles.
To the student who observes historic phenomena from the literary point
of view, nothing in the history of the Revolution is more striking
than the distinct manner in which all its men of action and of words
acknowledge the literature of the eighteenth century to be the
mainspring of their actions and utterances. They seem to seek no other
honour than that of transforming ready-made principles into action.
At Mirabeau's grave it was told to his honour that he had said of the
philosophers: "They have produced light; I will produce movement." And
there is scarcely a paragraph in the _Contrat Social_ which did not,
during the course of the Revolution, reappear either in a law, or a
public declaration, or a newspaper article, or a speech in the National
Assembly, or in the very constitution of the Republic itself.
The most important of its theories--that power emanates from the
people, that law is the expression of their will--is to be found
literally reproduced in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. As soon
as the idea of association occurs to the Jacobins they instantaneously
trace it back to Rousseau, and employ all his phraseology. Abbé Fauchet
writes, in an article in _La Bouche de Fer_: "Great Rousseau, of the
candid mind and feeling heart! thou art one of the first to have
understood the eternal laws of equity. Yes; every man has a right
to the earth, has a right of property in what he requires for his
support." And he goes on to maintain that the social contract is a
contract between the man and his country. Saint-Just expresses himself
in almost the same words in his speech demanding the death of Louis
XVI.: "The social contract is a contract which the citizens conclude
with one another, and not a contract with the government. Men have no
responsibility in the matter of a contract into which they have not
entered." But it is Robespierre who, as leader of the Jacobins, gives
typical expression to their devotion to the principles of Rousseau.
He was the first enemy of the Girondist rationalism; hence we find
him, at the time when this rationalism was most distinctly proving
its destructive tendency, declaring in a charge to the Jacobins that
the Revolution is under the direction of God, is in fact His work. He
felt impelled to give his revolutionary sentimentality this affected
expression, which implied its relationship with what was called
"natural religion."
It was not this feeling, but the spirit of contemptuous indignation
awakened by Voltaire, which, towards the middle of the year 1792,
became the dominant feeling in the Legislative Assembly and in France.
In August the edict was passed which condemned all refractory priests
to banishment to one of the colonies. Arrests of such priests took
place every day. Then came the September slaughter. The imprisoned
priests were the first to fall. Abbé Baruel writes: "These executioners
did not all belong to the dregs of the people. A man shouted to the
priests who were being murdered: 'Scoundrels, murderers, monsters,
contemptible hypocrites! the day of vengeance has come at last. No
longer shall you delude the people with your masses, your scrap of
bread upon the altar!'" The fortitude displayed by most of the priests
is worthy of all admiration. In the prison of the Carmelite Convent,
172 of them unhesitatingly elected to be shot rather than take the
oath of allegiance to the constitution. It is touching to read the
description of the composure of those who were locked into the church:
"From time to time we sent some of our comrades up to the window
in the tower, to look in what posture the unfortunate men who were
being sacrificed in the courtyard were meeting their fate, so that
we might know how to conduct ourselves when our turn came. They told
us that those who stretched out their arms suffered longest, because
the sword-blows slackened before they reached the head" (Jourgniac de
Saint-Méard.) In all, 1480 human beings were butchered. The number is
unquestionably an appalling one; but it is to be noted, as not without
interest, that, according to Michelet's calculation, the number of
men (and women) executed between the beginning and the end of the
Revolution does not amount to a fortieth part of the number killed in
the battle of the Moskwa alone.
The hatred which had found such ferocious expression in the Days of
September had not cooled down when the Convention assembled. Let us see
what the member of Convention writes, reads, and says on the subject
of priests and religion. One of them, Lequinio by name, presents his
colleagues with a book which he has written and dedicated to the Pope.
Its title is _Les Préjugés Détruits_. In it we read: "Religion is a
political chain invented for the purpose of fettering men; its only
use has been to ensure the pleasures of a few individuals by holding
all the others in check." The tirades against the priests in this
book surpass in violence and indecency any yet published. Amongst
its mildest affirmations concerning them is one perpetually made at
this time, with all manner of variations: "When they are honest, they
are stupid or mad; as a rule they are audacious impostors, veritable
assassins of the human race." We must go to Kierkegaard's _Öieblikket_
(The Moment) to find outbursts corresponding to this. Such is the
literature of the day. And Lequinio is not to be regarded as an
exception, though he carried his war with prejudice to the extent of
inviting the public executioner to dine with him and his family for
the purpose of overcoming the prejudice against that official. In _Les
Révolutions de Paris_, the newspaper which the member of Convention
perused before he went forth to take his part in the debates of the
day, he read one morning in December 1792, apropos of the celebration
of the midnight mass in Paris: "There is no particular harm in holding
exhibitions of dancing marionettes or conjurers' tricks in the public
streets in the light of day; it is quite permissible that children and
nurses should be amused. But to meet in dark assembly halls at night
for the purpose of singing hymns, lighting tapers, and burning incense
in honour of an illegitimate child and an unfaithful wife is a scandal,
an offence against public morality, which demands the attention of the
police and strict repressive measures."[1] Previously quoted utterances
have been aglow with exasperation, hatred, and scorn; but as yet they
have not been ribald. They were the revengeful cries of that human
reason which had been so long fettered and tortured. This language is
scurrilous. And there is another change. Those who have hitherto been
oppressed are betraying a marked inclination in their turn to play the
part of oppressors.
Action followed swiftly upon resolve. "They proceeded," writes Mercier
in _Le nouveau Paris_, "to the destruction of everything connected
with the old worship, not with the frenzy of zealotry, but with an
ironical contempt and uncontrolled mirth which could not but astound
the onlooker." The churches were positively ravaged. One troop of its
emissaries communicated to the Convention that they had "permitted
'brown Mary' (a certain miracle-working image) to retire, after all
the hard work she had had in fooling the world for 1800 years." The
altars were plundered for the benefit of the treasury of the Republic.
Here is a fragment of a report: "There are no longer any priests in
the Department of Nièvre. The altars have been despoiled of the piles
of gold which ministered to priestly vanity. Thirty millions worth
of valuable articles will be sent to Paris. Two carts laden with
crucifixes, gold croziers, and two millions in gold coin, have already
arrived at the Mint. Three times as much will immediately follow."
Sometimes the carts stopped at the door of the assembly hall of the
Convention, and sacks full of gold and silver were piled up in the hall
itself.
Another report is in the ironical style. "I have been unjustly accused
of an onslaught on religion. The fact is that I asked most politely
before I acted, and three or four hundred saints begged for permission
to go to the Mint. The language employed on the occasion was something
in this style: 'Ye who have been the tools of fanaticism, ye saints and
holy ones of every description, show now that ye are patriots, and help
your country by marching to the Mint!'"
In a third report the delegates congratulate themselves on the result
of their "philosophic mission" in the Department of Gers. "Public
feeling was ripe, and it was decided that the abolition of fanaticism
should be solemnly celebrated on the last day of the third Decade.
The whole population assembled in a rustic spot to hold the festival
of brotherhood. After a Spartan meal they hurried into the town, tore
down all the emblems of fanaticism, and trampled them under foot. A
scavenger's cart drove up, bringing two miracle-working virgins and a
variety of crucifixes and images of saints, to which, but a short time
before, superstition had offered incense. All this ridiculous rubbish
was piled upon a bonfire, on which already lay a collection of patents
of nobility, and burned amidst the rejoicings of an enormous crowd.
Round this philosophic pyre on which so many delusions were consumed
the _carmagnole_ was danced all night."
In a fourth report we read: "Sixty-four refractory priests were living
in a house belonging to the people. I ordered them to be marched
through the town to prison. The new kind of monster, which had not as
yet been exhibited to the gaze of the public, produced an excellent
effect. Shouts of 'Vive la République!' rose from the crowd that
surrounded the herd. Have the goodness to let me know what I am to do
with the five dozen animals whom I have held up to the ridicule of the
multitude. I gave them actors as an escort."
The debates which preceded the proclamation of religious liberty on
the 3rd Ventôse of the year III. were all in this same tone. However
divided the Convention might be upon other questions, upon this there
was absolute unanimity. Marked as is the difference in the nation's
frame of mind during, and after, the Reign of Terror, there is no
difference in its attitude towards Catholicism. When, as one result
of the proclamation of religious liberty, a few churches had been
reopened, the fact was announced by the weekly paper _Le Décade
Philosophique_, under the heading "Theatres," in the following terms:
"On the 18th and 25th of this month a comedy was played in several
parts of Paris. The chief character, in an absurd costume, performed a
variety of foolish antics, at which the spectators did not laugh. As we
are not in the habit of criticising revived plays when they are neither
useful nor instructive, we shall take no further notice of this one."
Mirabeau had said that men's first aim must be "to decatholicise"
France. To all appearance this was being done. One Commune after
another petitioned to be allowed to change its name, which was almost
always that of some saint. Saint-Denis, for instance (whose headless
patron never existed), was renamed Franciade. Most of the provinces
followed the example of Paris. Nothing that could remind men of
the "kingdom by the grace of God" was spared. In 1793 a venerable,
white-bearded Alsatian, a member of the Committee of Public Safety,
Ruhl by name, managed to get possession of the sacred, miracle-working
ampulla containing the anointing oil which a dove had brought down
from heaven on the occasion of the coronation of Clovis. Followed by a
vast crowd, he bore it in triumph to the great square of Reims, where
the magistrates and other public officials had already assembled round
the statue of Louis XV. Here he delivered an oration against tyranny
and tyrants, and wound up by throwing the sacred vessel at the head
of Louis le Bien-aimé with such violence that it broke into a hundred
pieces, and the sacred oil trickled once again down the cheeks of the
Lord's Anointed.
Events such as these, and language such as the above quoted, show
plainly enough how determinedly the Revolution was attacking the
principle of authority. It was highly significant that patents of
nobility were burned in the same bonfire with the images of the saints,
and that disbelief in the sacred ampulla led to the flouting of
royalty. From the moment when the authority of religion was overthrown,
the magic power of authority in every domain was gone.
It was supplanted by the watchword: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
But this watchword contained at least two fundamental principles
instead of one. Liberty as a fundamental principle may be regarded as
emanating from Voltaire, fraternity from Rousseau. And equality and
liberty did not combine well. When, not long before the Revolution,
Saint-Martin, the mystic, proclaimed his mysterious doctrine of
the Holy Trinity (Ternaire)--liberty, equality, and fraternity,
which always had been, and always should be--he did not foresee the
possibility of disunion, of conflict, between these principles.
Voltaire says somewhere: "It was a wise provision that made of the
Trinity one God; if there had been three they would have come to
blows." In 1793 Saint-Martin's trinity revealed the contradictions
which lay latent in it.
In the month of April the new Declaration of the Rights of Man which
Robespierre had drawn up and persuaded the Jacobins to accept as
their programme was published, and in the same month, whilst the
violent dispute between Robespierre and Vergniaud was going on, there
emanated from the opposite camp the plan of a constitution, evolved
by Condorcet, Barrère, Thomas Paine, Pétion, Barbaroux, Sièyes, and
others, and drawn up by Condorcet.
If we place these two documents side by side, we have before us in
embryo the two ideas which in the future were to struggle for the
mastery, namely, the idea of liberalism and the idea of socialism, the
former derived from Voltaire, the latter from Rousseau. As the two
programmes deal point by point with the same subjects, the difference
strikes us here as it does nowhere else.
In the first years of the Revolution there had been no mention of
socialism. Men aimed at freeing capital from unjust burdens, not at
limiting its power. This is clearly shown by the fact that the first
proof which the victorious bourgeoisie gave of their authority after
the storming of the Bastille was the publication of a decree that
the printers were to be held responsible for every book or pamphlet
published by writers without known means of subsistence (_sans
existence connue_). This regulation was published on the 24th of
July 1789, exactly ten days after the capture of the Bastille. The
bourgeoisie took care, as soon as they had mounted themselves, to draw
the ladder up after them. Their first act, when they had won their own
place by the aid of the pen, was to take the pen out of the hand of the
classes below them.
The Convention, nourished on the ideas of Rousseau and Mably,
comprehended that inequality within the citizen society was the worst
enemy of political equality, and dreamed of producing equality by
giving property to all. Condorcet wished to devote the funds at the
disposal of the state, not to the abolishment of private property, but
to the equalisation of any excessive disproportion in the distribution
of worldly possessions. Right of succession was to be abolished, the
means of education were to be made accessible to all, &c, &c. It was
not till the owners of property began, after the fall of Robespierre,
to resist the claims of those who owned nothing, that the attack on
property as such was made. Babeuf's communistic conspiracy followed.
The conspiracy was betrayed and defeated, drowned in the blood of the
conspirators without a voice being raised in defence of the ideas which
had inspired it. Socialism did no more than put out feelers at the time
of the Revolution.
Whilst the Girondists' Declaration of the Rights of Man ensures first
and foremost the rights of the individual--freedom of conscience and
of thought (_les franchises de la pensée_ was the expression in those
days), the inviolability of the home, equality in sight of the law,
the proportioning of punishment to crime--the Jacobins in every matter
insist upon the responsibility of human beings for each other and the
duty entailed by brotherhood.
The Girondists laid down the principle of non-interference. The
Jacobins taught: The men of all countries are brothers, and the
different nations ought to help each other to the best of their
ability, like citizens of the same state. The nation which oppresses
another nation declares itself the enemy of all. Those who make war
upon any one nation in order to arrest the progress of liberty and
abolish the rights of humanity ought to be assailed by all the others,
not as ordinary enemies, but as insurrectionary murderers and robbers.
The Girondists opposed every tyranny in human shape, but they seldom
tried to protect from the tyranny of circumstances. Their work was for
the most part of a negative nature. The Jacobins perceived more clearly
the uselessness of bestowing on the sick the right to be cured without
curing them, the mockery in solemnly conferring on the lame the right
to walk. Yet there was no essential difference between them. Condorcet
the Girondist felt as strongly as any Jacobin that free competition was
a lie when in the race one man was mounted on an excellent horse while
the other had to run barefoot.
It was the feeling of duty to society (as defined by Rousseau) which
led to Robespierre's significant intervention in the war between
the Revolution and positive religion. Once the Revolution had
broken into the churches axe in hand, it seemed as if the movement
were irresistible. Men mounted on the frailest of scaffolding to
scrape from the ceilings of churches portraits of popes concealed
by century-old spiders' webs. Images of saints were torn from their
niches, and fanaticism destroyed some of the finest works of Gothic
art; the emissaries of the Revolution descended even into the vaults,
and flashed their lanterns in the pale faces of the dead; fragments
of broken-up altars were piled together "like shapeless stones in a
quarry." The chairmen of the revolutionary committees wore velvet
breeches made out of episcopal robes, and shirts cut out of choristers'
surplices. In the end a few atheistic enthusiasts (Anacharsis Clootz,
a man of German extraction, Chaumette, and Hébert) made their voices
heard, and carried the mob with them in their iconoclastic fury.
Except on this occasion we hear as little of atheism during the
Revolution as of socialism. Belief in God and immortality, the common
creed of Voltaire and Rousseau, is the creed held unchanged by almost
all the chosen leaders of the people. And this same belief pervades all
the writings of the period. Thomas Paine's _Age of Reason_ is a good
example. Even such a recklessly disreputable poem as Parny's _Guerre
des Dieux_ inculcates the same doctrine, Camille Desmoulins writes in
a letter: "Mon cher Manuel! Les rois sont mûrs, mais le bon Dieu ne
l'est pas encore (notez que je dis _le bon Dieu_ et non pas _Dieu_, ce
qui est fort différent)." This is the standpoint of the age; its task
was not to subject the conception of God to criticism, but to free it
from the legendary encumbrances of the positive religions. The atheists
in the National Assembly led the Revolution beyond its proper goal and
instigated excesses which degraded it in the eyes of the contemporary
generation.
Clootz succeeded in persuading a bishop, Gobel by name, to write a
letter to the Convention, which began: "Citizens, representatives! I
am a priest, that is to say, a quack. Hitherto I have been an honest
quack; I have only deceived because I myself was deceived." It ended,
of course, with the information that he had become converted to
philosophy.
Chaumette, an enthusiast, who had procured the abolition of corporal
punishment in educational institutions and of legally regulated
prostitution, persuaded the Commune to consecrate the cathedral of
Notre Dame to "the worship of Reason." Within the church was erected
a temple with the inscription _À la Philosophie_, the porch of which
was decorated with busts of the great philosophers. On the dedication
day, when the door was thrown open, a young actress, Mademoiselle
Candeille, representing Liberty, issued forth, and a hymn to Liberty,
written by Marie-Joseph Chénier and set to music by Gossec, composer to
the Republic, was sung in her honour. On another occasion Mademoiselle
Maillard of the Opera, a stately and beautiful woman, chosen to
represent the goddess of Reason, was carried shoulder-high out of the
old cathedral in a chair decked with garlands of oak leaves and was
escorted by trumpeters, a crowd of red-capped citizens, and a number
of members of the Convention, to the assembly hall of that body, whose
president solemnly impressed a kiss on her brow. But these ceremonies,
innocent in themselves, were degraded by the ribald manner in which
they were imitated by the mob. Women of bad character had themselves
carried in triumphal processions as goddesses of Reason. Wild revels
were held in churches; the church of Saint-Eustache was actually turned
into a tavern. The relics of Saint Geneviève were burned, and such
a bonfire of wooden images of saints, prayer-books, and Old and New
Testaments was lit on the Place de la Grève that the flames rose to the
second stories of the houses.
Clootz was elected president of the Jacobin Club. Hereupon Robespierre,
as a good disciple of Rousseau, and with his eye on Europe, prevailed
on the Convention to issue a public declaration that the French people
acknowledged the existence of the Supreme Being; and he moreover
persuaded the Jacobins to present a petition to the Convention, praying
that assembly to do all that was in its power to restore belief in God
and in the immortality of the soul. He denounced the iconoclasts as
fanatics of the Catholic type, and atheism as aristocratic. When, in
May 1794, he mounted the tribune to urge the Convention to celebrate
a festival in honour of the Supreme Being, he proceeded, after saying
a few enthusiastic words in praise of Rousseau, to make a deliberate
attack on Christianity. "All men's imaginings disappear in presence of
the truth, and all follies succumb to reason.... What have the priests
to do with God? The position of priests to morality is the same as
that of quacks to the science of medicine." Assuming, in the manner
of his century, that religions are the inventions of their priests,
he says: "The priests have made of God a fire-ball, a bull, a tree, a
man, a king. The Supreme Being's true priest is nature, his temple the
universe, his worship virtue." He goes on to show that priests have
everywhere supported tyranny: "It is you who have said to kings: Ye
are the representatives of God on earth; it is from Him ye hold your
authority! And the kings in their turn have said to you: In very truth
ye are God's messengers; let us divide the incense and the spoils!"
The result of these endeavours was the Convention's proclamation to all
the nations of the earth that it countenanced free worship of God, and
that it censured "the excesses of philosophy as strongly as the crimes
of fanaticism." One paragraph of this proclamation runs: "Your rulers
will tell you that the French nation has banished all religions and
has ordained the worship of certain men instead of the worship of the
Deity; they represent us to you as an idolatrous and insane people.
They lie. The French people and its representatives favour liberty of
worship of every kind." It was decided to celebrate a certain number
of religious festivals--the festivals of liberty, of equality, of
humanity, one in honour of the great men who in their day had been
liberators, &c.,&c.
The first outcome of this decision was the famous festival in honour
of the Supreme Being. There is something touchingly comic in the
childishness of the whole proceeding. With a bouquet of flowers and
ears of wheat in his hand, Robespierre, elected president for the
day, led the assembled Convention through Paris to the Champ de Mars.
On its march it was encircled by a tricoloured ribbon carried by
children, youths, middle-aged and old men, decked according to their
age with violets, myrtle, oak, or vine leaves. Every member of the
Convention wore a tricoloured scarf and carried a bouquet of flowers,
fruits, and ears of corn. When they had taken their places in the space
reserved for them on the highest part of the plain, a ceremony was
proceeded with, which, according to the testimony of eye-witnesses,
was impressive, though somewhat theatrical. An invocation of the Most
High was sung by thousands of voices. The young girls strewed flowers,
the young men brandished their weapons and swore that they would save
France and liberty. The rites concluded with a performance in the
taste of the day. In a conspicuous position stood a group of monsters
specially designed by the famous painter, David--impiety, selfishness,
disunion, and ambition, evil things which were to be exterminated from
the earth henceforth and for ever. Robespierre seized a torch and flung
it at the monsters. As they had been drenched with turpentine they
burned up at once, and in their place there appeared an incombustible
statue of Wisdom. A curious irony of fate willed it that this statue
should be completely blackened by the flames and smoke.
The festival in honour of the Supreme Being was an ingenuous expression
of the piety of the eighteenth century. Robespierre was perfectly
right in lamenting that Rousseau had not lived to see that day; it
would have been a festival after his own heart. And so firmly were
these religious ideas rooted in the minds of the legislators that they
stood when Robespierre fell. The "citizen" religion instituted by
the Convention was not of his evolving. Far from turning back after
his death, men pressed eagerly onwards. The Republican calendar was
introduced. As "the Christian era had been the era of lies, deception,
and charlatanism." the Christian reckoning was abolished; time was
reckoned from 1792, the week was superseded by the decade, and it was
proposed to give to the various saints' days the names of agricultural
implements and useful domestic animals.
Ere long regular liturgies and catechisms of the new religion were
published. In one such book (_Office des décadis en discours, hymnes et
prières en usage dans les temples de la Raison_) we read:--
"Liberty, thou supreme happiness of man upon earth, hallowed be thy
name by all nations throughout the world! May thy joy-bringing kingdom
come and put an end to the reign of tyrants! May thy holy worship take
the place of the worship of those miserable idols whose altars thou
hast overthrown!... I believe in a Supreme Being who has created men
free and equal, who has formed them to love one another and not to hate
one another, who desires to be honoured by the exhibition of virtue,
not of fanaticism, and in whose eyes the noblest of worships is the
worship of truth and reason. I believe in the approaching fall of all
tyrants, in the regeneration of morality, the ever-increasing spread of
all the virtues, and the eternal triumph of liberty."
Simultaneously, however, men confessed their faith in other and less
innocent ways. The churches were dismantled to serve the purposes of
the new religion. Practical reasons made the abolition of Sunday a
vital question; ere long suspicion attached to every one who observed
it--and in those days it was dangerous to be suspected. The violent
attempts made during the rule of the Convention to prevent the
observance of Sunday constituted a new species of tyranny, which,
although more excusable than the tyranny it superseded, was no less
barbarous and unreasonable.
Even under the Directory, when the first symptoms of a reactionary
movement in the lower ranks of society were already perceptible, there
were, as we are told by a writer of the day, members of Assembly who
had nervous attacks if they as much as heard the word "priest"; and
the work of destruction was carried on with avidity. "Every man," says
Laurent, "who had a drop of revolutionary blood in his veins laboured
with feverish enthusiasm at the destruction of Christianity." In
official reports the faithful Catholics are described as "weak-minded."
A proclamation of the Directory relating to the elections of the year
VI. declares that it is necessary to erase from the lists "the unhappy
fanatics, who are blinded by credulity, and who might take it into
their heads to throw themselves once more at the feet of the priests."
The priests had continued to be the most terrible enemies of the
Revolution. The bloody war in La Vendée was to a great extent their
work. The horrors perpetrated during this struggle recall those of the
Middle Ages. One priest who had sworn allegiance to the constitution
was stoned to death by yelling women, and another was torn to pieces,
also by women. Before the Republican President, Joubert, was killed,
his hands were sawn off. In one town the Royalists buried their
revolutionary enemies alive; when the Republican troops arrived they
saw arms sticking up out of the ground, the hands clenching the turf.
The revolutionists were soon compelled to acknowledge that their
proceedings had had the opposite effect to what they had wished and
expected. Significantly enough, the envoys sent to La Vendée were
the first to advise complete separation of church from state. In
their opinion this was the only means of tranquillising men's minds
and restoring the country to peace. As far back as the days of the
Legislative Assembly it had been proposed by a priest that the state
should cease to subsidise any religion. But men were too excited
then to refrain from violent espousal of one side or the other. The
revolutionists hoped, as they often said, "to put an end to all
sectarianism" by the aid of universal education. They fondly imagined
that the era of dogmas was past, that the time had come when, in the
words of Jefferson, the American, the miraculous conception of Christ
in the womb of a virgin was to be classed along with the miraculous
conception of Minerva in the head of Jupiter. In a report drawn up
under the Convention we read: "Soon men will only make acquaintance
with these foolish dogmas, the offspring of fear and delusion, to
despise them. Soon the religion of Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and
Cicero will be the religion of the world." And when, in her Memoirs,
Madame Roland has occasion to use the word "catechism," she considers
it necessary to explain it for the benefit of posterity. She writes:
"So rapidly are things moving now that the readers of this passage will
perhaps ask: What was that? I will tell them."
The men of the Revolution had failed to comprehend that the great
body of the people, profoundly ignorant, and imbued with ideas and
feelings which had been transmitted from generation to generation for
centuries, were irresponsive to their appeals, terrified by their acts
of violence, and prepared, from old habit, to give themselves over into
the hands of the priests again, as soon as opportunity offered. In
1800, in a letter to Bonaparte, General Clarke writes: "Our religious
revolution has been a failure. France has become Roman Catholic again.
It would take thirty years' liberty of the press to destroy the
spiritual power of the Bishop of Rome." He is mistaken only in his
computation of thirty years. Three hundred would be more nearly the
number required, and even this would only suffice if to liberty of the
press were added good, free, and entirely secular education.
It was not the common people alone who had quietly remained faithful
to the church. In the upper-class families in the provinces the
mother, with her daughters, had generally remained Catholic, since
the father, with the Frenchman's natural caution and distrust of free
thought, almost invariably, whatever his private opinions might be,
regarded religion as a beneficial restraint upon women. The ladies
had always embroidered altar-cloths, patronised the priest, given him
money for his poor parishioners, attended mass most regularly. Now
the celebration of mass was forbidden. The industrious and phlegmatic
French peasant, his wife, and his whole household had, until the
Revolution came, been accustomed to look up to _Monsieur le curé_ as a
species of earthly providence, been accustomed to salute him reverently
when he passed, and to ask his advice; he had baptized the children,
and from his hands they had received their first sacrament; he had
united Jacques to Fanchette in holy matrimony; he had administered the
last sacraments to the old mother. No one read in the peasant's house;
no one cultivated literature, or philosophy, or music. Every impulse
of the soul that rose above the plough-share and the clods which it
flung up took the direction of the church. Poor as it might be, it
was a festal hall in comparison with the cottar's hovel--and it was
a holy place; they knelt in it. Now the church was closed. Any one
who has seen the peasants of France or Italy pray, seen the touching
devotion which shines from eyes as earnest and as clear as a dog's,
can understand what it meant to such people that there was no longer
to be mass or priest. And Sunday too! The peasant is opposed to every
change the utility of which is not at once apparent to him. Sunday to
be done away with! Had any one ever heard the like? Could such an idea
have occurred to any one except these gentlemen in Paris? Sunday, which
had been kept holy for more than a thousand years--possibly since the
creation of the world! God Himself had rested on the seventh day; but
now the week was to have ten days, and to be called _Décade_, a word
which conveyed no meaning. Was God, too, to be done away with?
Add to all this the effect upon the younger and as yet undepraved
priests. Frayssinous, who, after the Restoration, became so famous as a
Catholic vindicator of Christianity, tells how he himself and a friend,
also a priest, continued to perform their sacred avocations during the
Reign of Terror in spite of all the threats of banishment, and how, in
order to prove and strengthen themselves, and familiarise themselves
with the death which awaited them if they were discovered, they went in
turn to watch the executions on the permanent scaffold of Rodez.
Think of young enthusiasts such as these, or the priests described
in Lamartine's _Jocelyn_, meeting their flocks on Sunday mornings in
underground caves, in cold, damp cellars, which might well call to mind
the catacombs of the early Christians. The congregation talk of the
trials of the church, comfort one another, hear a sermon, receive the
holy sacrament, and go their way with tearful eyes and uplifted hearts.
The great lady and the simple peasant woman have felt that they are
members of one body, as they never felt it when the one occupied the
best seat in church while the other sat on the bench at the door.
Even the confiscation of the property of the church turned out to
be for the church's good. Many a priest who had been demoralised by
good living suddenly found himself reduced to apostolic poverty. If
deprivations only roused the wrath of many, they chastened others.
The cause for which a man suffers becomes dear to him. The wavering,
half-philosophic priest who (as we are told by Barante) was almost
ashamed to confess his belief in the doctrines of Christianity, felt
his self-esteem increase when the cause which he served was persecuted.
In 1801 Bishop Lecoz writes: "The religion which our Saviour founded
without the aid of wealth, He will maintain without its aid, which is
unworthy of His acceptance. When he called His twelve apostles, to what
did He call them? To the enjoyment of riches or of honour? No; to toil,
to care, to suffering. If then we, the servants of Jesus Christ, now
find ourselves almost in this apostolic condition, ought we to grumble?
Nay, let us rather rejoice at this precious deprivation of the world's
goods; let us thank the Lord, who has restored things to that old
condition for which the most pious of His children have never ceased to
long."
As the feeling of horror and shame produced by the Reign of Terror,
when it was past, turned the thoughts of many Frenchmen once more in
the direction of monarchy and the royal house, so the cruel persecution
of religion awoke ardent sympathy for the church and its priests.
In Belgium (now incorporated with France), where there had been
wholesale banishment of the clergy, insurrections had broken out all
over the country. To quell them it had been necessary to burn numbers
of villages and kill several thousand peasants. In France there was now
not only one Vendée; every province had its own. In 1800 the royalist
and church party had the upper hand almost everywhere in the country
communes of the twelve western departments; they had 40,000 men under
arms. Even the men whose interests bound them most closely to the new
order of things, the men who had acquired the confiscated property of
the church, were not happy in their new possessions. The land of the
new owner had formerly belonged to the priest, the hospital, or the
school. These had been plundered, and he had become rich through their
impoverishment. The women of his household, his wife, his mother, were
uneasy and often depressed, and when he himself was ill he felt the
stings of an evil conscience; he trusted that the priest would grant
him absolution at the last moment, but was tormented by the fear that
he might not. (Taine, _Le régime moderne_, i. 134, &c.)
All this was a good preparation for the rehabilitation of religion.
And we must not forget the intellectual force, the valuable ally,
which the church gained by suddenly, as it were, finding itself able
to appropriate the fundamental principle of the Revolution, and in
its name win new supporters. The whole situation was altered from
the day when the church, hostile to liberty up to the last possible
moment, finally, vanquished by necessity, inscribed liberty on its
banner. Oppressed, and feeling the need of liberty for itself, it now
spoke in the name of liberty, and that so touchingly that all who
heard the crocodile weep took it to be a defenceless creature. Liberal
Catholicism--how the words jar!--came into being. The church wrested
the best weapon of the Revolution out of its hands, and put it into
those of her own adherents--only temporarily, of course, until she had
reconquered her old power; then, alas for liberty! But in the meantime
the Pope had suddenly become _liberal_--religious liberalism, they
called it. When the order of the Jesuits was reconstructed, even the
Jesuits declared that their desire was "good, true liberty."
How much honesty there was in this appeal to liberty was seen as soon
as religion was in power again. When, in 1808, Napoleon demanded of
the Pope that he should concede liberty of religion, the Pope replied:
"Because such liberty is at variance with the law of the church, with
the decrees of its councils, and with the Catholic religion, because,
moreover, by reason of the terrible consequences it would entail, it is
incompatible with the peace and happiness of nations, we have condemned
it." Simple-minded Catholics, like Lamennais, who at a somewhat later
period acted on the supposition that all this talk of liberty was
intended to be taken literally, discovered how much it meant. But even
after Lamennais had been disposed of by a papal bull in 1832, his
disciple Montalembert, who renounced his master's theories and became
the most vigorous champion of the church in the middle of this century,
was permitted to go on preaching _liberal_ Catholicism. It was not
until 1873, when such Catholicism could no longer be turned to any
possible use, that it was anathematised in one of the most virulent
bulls on record. Only few of those who read the bull in the newspapers
understood its full import.
The appeals in the name of liberty gained the church many supporters;
and to the men of principle who, at the moment of the revulsion under
the Consulate, were influenced by these appeals, and whose sympathy
for the church was increased by the harsh treatment meted out to the
Pope under the Empire, there were added on the restoration of the
Bourbons the many whose religion is always that of their masters, all
the approvers of Holberg's fox' moral: "Give no thought to religious
matters; abide blindly by the prevailing belief!"
About the year 1800, however, though an occasional revolutionary excess
was still not unheard of, France enjoyed complete religious liberty,
guaranteed by law. To the persecution of priests under the Convention
and the imperfect tolerance of the Directory had succeeded perfect
legal security for all confessions; the priests had been relieved
from the obnoxious oath, its place being taken by a simple promise
to obey the law; and each priest was now supported by the voluntary
contributions of his parishioners, the state abstaining from all
interference. These contributions were naturally often small, and many
a prelate looked back with longing to the flesh-pots of the old days,
and to what Robespierre called the alliance between the sceptre and
the censer. Bonaparte had the choice between fostering the germ of
religious liberty and making a tool of religious tradition. He did not
deliberate. The re-establishment of the church was an indispensable
link in the chain of his policy.[2]
[1] Louis Blanc (in his _Histoire de la Révolution_, viii. 35)
has misunderstood this article. He takes the unfaithful wife and
illegitimate son to mean Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin. A note in
the original text has escaped his observation; it is to the effect that
the "founders of the three greatest religions were bastards."
[2] Laurent, _Histoire du droit des gens_, tome xiv.; Carlyle,
_History of the French Revolution_, i.-iii.; Louis Blanc, _Histoire
de la révolution française_, i.-xii.; Chateaubriand, _Mémoires
d'outre-tombe_, i., ii.