The last and the most important of the aspects which the French
Revolution presents to a foreign, and in particular to an English
reader, is the antagonism which arose between it and the Church.
As this is the most important so it is the most practical of the
historical problems which the Revolution sets the student to solve; for
the opposition of the Church’s organisation in France has at once been
the most profound which the Revolution has had to encounter, the most
active in its methods, and the only one which has increased in strength
as time proceeded. It is hardly too much to say that the Revolution
would, in France at least, have achieved its object and created a
homogeneous, centralised democracy, had not this great quarrel between
the Republic and the Church arisen; and one may legitimately contrast
the ready pliancy of men to political suggestion and the easy story of
their institutions where men knew nothing of the Church, with the great
storms that arise and the fundamental quarrels that are challenged
wherever men are acquainted with the burning truths of Catholicism.
Finally, the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Revolution is
not only the most important and the most practical, but also by an
unhappy coincidence the most difficult of comprehension of all the
matters presented to us by the great change.
We have seen in this book that one department of revolutionary history,
the second in importance, perhaps, to the religious department, was also
difficult of comprehension--to wit, the military department. And we have
seen (or at least I have postulated) that the difficulty of following
the military fortunes of the Republic was due to the mass of detail, to
the technical character of the information to be acquired and to the
natural unfamiliarity of the general reader with the elements of
military science. In other words, an accurate knowledge of great numbers
of facts, the proper disposition of these facts in their order of
military importance, and the correlation of a great number of
disconnected actions and plans will alone permit us to grasp the
function of the armies in the development and establishment of the
modern State through the revolutionary wars.
Now in this second and greater problem, the problem of the function
played by religion, it is an exactly opposite method which can alone be
of service.
We must examine the field generally, and still more generally we must
forget details that here only bewilder, and see in the largest possible
outline what forces were really at issue, why their conflict occurred,
upon what points that conflict was vital. Any more particular plan will
land us, as it has landed so many thousands of controversialists, in
mere invective on one side or the other, till we come to see nothing but
a welter of treason on the part of priests, and of massacre upon the
part of democrats.
Men would, did they try to unravel the skein by analysing the documents
of the Vatican or of the French archives, come apparently upon nothing
but a host of petty, base, and often personal calculations; or again,
did they attempt to take a local sample of the struggle and to follow it
in one department of thought, they would come upon nothing but a whirl
of conflict with no sort of clue to the motives that lay behind.
The contrast between the military and the religious problem of the
French Revolution is like the contrast between the geological
composition and the topographical contours of a countryside. To
understand the first we must bore and dig, we must take numerous samples
of soil and subject them to analysis, we must make ourselves acquainted
with detail in its utmost recesses. But for the second, the more general
our standpoint, the wider our gaze, and the more comprehensive our
judgment, the more accurately do we grasp the knowledge we have set out
to seek.
We must, then, approach our business by asking at the outset the most
general question of all: “_Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel
between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic
Church?_”
Those ill acquainted with either party, and therefore ill equipped for
reply, commonly reply with assurance in the affirmative. The French (and
still more the non-French) Republican who may happen, by the accident of
his life, to have missed the Catholic Church, to have had no intimacy
with any Catholic character, no reading of Catholic philosophy, and
perhaps even no chance view of so much as an external Catholic ceremony,
replies unhesitatingly that the Church is the necessary enemy of the
Revolution. Again, the _émigré_, the wealthy woman, the recluse, any one
of the many contemporary types to whom the democratic theory of the
Revolution came as a complete novelty, and to-day the wealthy families
in that tradition, reply as unhesitatingly that the Revolution is the
necessary enemy of the Church. The reply seems quite sufficient to the
Tory squire in England or Germany, who may happen to be a Catholic by
birth or by conversion; and it seems equally obvious to (let us say) a
democratic member of some Protestant Church in one of the new countries.
Historically and logically, theologically also, those who affirm a
necessary antagonism between the Republic and the Church are in error.
Those who are best fitted to approach the problem by their knowledge
both of what the Revolution attempted and of what Catholic philosophy
is, find it in proportion to their knowledge difficult or impossible to
answer that fundamental question in the affirmative. They cannot call
the Revolution a necessary enemy of the Church, nor the Church of
Democracy.
What is more, minds at once of the most active and of the best
instructed sort are the very minds which find it difficult to explain
how any such quarrel can have arisen. French history itself is full of
the names of those for whom not so much a reconciliation between the
Revolution and the Church, as a statement that no real quarrel existed
between them, was the motive of politics; and almost in proportion to a
man’s knowledge of his fellows in Catholic societies, almost in that
proportion is the prime question I have asked answered by such a man in
the negative. A man who knows both the Faith and the Republic will tell
you that there is not and cannot be any necessary or fundamental reason
why conflict should have arisen between a European Democracy and the
Catholic Church.
When we examine those who concern themselves with the deepest and most
abstract side of the quarrel, we find the same thing. It is impossible
for the theologian, or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher, to
put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the Revolution and
to say, “This doctrine is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic
morals.” Conversely, it is impossible for the Republican to put his
finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and
to say, “This Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the
State.”
Thousands of active men upon either side would have been only too
willing during the last hundred years to discover some such issue, and
it has proved undiscoverable. In a word, only those Democrats who know
little of the Catholic Church can say that of its nature it forbids
democracy; and only those Catholics who have a confused or imperfect
conception of democracy can say that of its nature it is antagonistic to
the Catholic Church.
Much that is taught by the purely temporal theory of the one is
indifferent to the transcendental and supernatural philosophy of the
other. In some points, where there is contact (as in the conception of
the dignity of man and of the equality of men) there is agreement. To
sum up, the Republican cannot by his theory persecute the Church; the
Church cannot by her theory excommunicate the Republican.
Why, then, it must next be asked, has there in practice arisen so
furious and so enormous a conflict, a conflict whose activity and whose
consequence are not narrowing but broadening to-day?
It may be replied to this second question, which is only less general
than the first, in one of two manners.
One may say that the actions of men are divided not by theories but by
spiritual atmospheres, as it were. According to this view men act under
impulses not ideal but actual: impulses which affect great numbers and
yet in their texture correspond to the complex but united impulses of an
individual personality. Thus, though there be no conflict demonstrable
between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of
the Revolution, yet there may be necessary and fundamental conflict
between the _Persons_ we call the Revolution and the Church, and between
the vivifying principles by which either lives. That is one answer that
can be, and is, given.
Or one may give a totally different answer and say, “There was no
quarrel between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political
theory of the Revolution; but the folly of this statesman, the ill
drafting of that law, the misconception of such and such an institution,
the coincidence of war breaking out at such and such a moment and
affecting men in such and such a fashion--all these material accidents
bred a misunderstanding between the two great forces, led into conflict
the human officers and the human organisations which directed them; and
conflict once established feeds upon, and grows from, its own
substance.”
Now, if that first form of reply be given to the question we have posed,
though it is sufficient for the type of philosophy which uses it, though
it is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels, and though it in
particular satisfies a particular modern school of thought, it is
evident that history, properly so called, cannot deal with it.
You may say that the Revolution was the expression of a spirit far more
real than any theory, that this spirit is no more susceptible of
analysis or definition than is the personality of a single human
character, and that this reality was in conflict with another
reality--to wit, the Catholic Church. You may even (as some minds by no
means negligible have done) pass into the field of mysticism in the
matter, and assert that really personal forces, wills superior and
external to man, Demons and Angels, drove the Revolution against the
Catholic Church, and created The Republic to be an anti-Catholic force
capable of meeting and of defeating that Church, which (by its own
definition of itself) is not a theory, but the expression of a
Personality and a Will. To put it in old-fashioned terms, you may say
that the Revolution was the work of antichrist;--but with that kind of
reply, I repeat, history cannot deal.
If it be true that, in spite of an absence of contradictory intellectual
theories, there is a fundamental spiritual contradiction between the
Revolution and the Catholic Church, then time will test the business; we
shall see in that case a perpetual extension of the quarrel until the
Revolution becomes principally a force for the extinction of
Catholicism, and the Catholic Church appears to the supporter of the
Revolution not as his principal, but as his only enemy. Such a
development has not arisen in a hundred years; a process of time far
more lengthy will alone permit us to judge whether the supposed duello
is a real matter or a phantasm.
The second type of answer, the answer which pretends to explain the
antagonism by a definite series of events, does concern the historian.
Proceeding upon the lines of that second answer, he can bring his
science to bear and use the instruments of his trade; and he can show
(as I propose to show in what follows) how, although no quarrel can be
found between the theory of the Revolution and that of the Church, an
active quarrel did in fact spring up between the Revolution in action
and the authorities of Catholicism; a quarrel which a hundred years has
not appeased, but accentuated.
* * * * *
Behind the revolutionary quarrel lay the condition of the Church in the
French State since the settlement of the quarrel of the Reformation.
With what that quarrel of the Reformation was, the reader is
sufficiently familiar. For, roughly speaking, a hundred years, from the
first years of the sixteenth century to the first years of the
seventeenth (from the youth of Henry VIII to the boyhood of Charles I in
England), a great attempt was made to change (as one party would have
said to amend, as the other would have said to denaturalise) the _whole
body_ of Western Christendom. A _general_ movement of attack upon the
inherited form of the Church, and a general resistance to that attack,
was at work throughout European civilisation; and either antagonist
hoped for a universal success, the one of what he called “The
Reformation of religion,” the other of what he called “The Divine
Institution and visible unity of the Catholic Church.”
At the end of such a period it became apparent that no such general
result had been, or could be, attained. All that part of the West which
had rejected the authority of the See of Rome began to appear as a
separate territorial region permanently divided from the rest; all that
part of Europe which had retained the Authority of the See of Rome began
to appear as another region of territory. The line of cleavage between
the two was beginning to define itself as a geographical line, and
nearly corresponded to the line which, centuries before, had divided the
Roman and civilised world from the Barbarians.
The Province of Britain had an exceptional fate. Though Roman in origin
and of the ancient civilisation in its foundation, it fell upon the
non-Roman side of the new boundary; while Ireland, which the Roman
Empire had never organised or instructed, remained, alone of the
external parts of Europe, in communion with Rome. Italy, Spain, and in
the main southern or Romanised Germany, refused ultimately to abandon
their tradition of civilisation and of religion. But in Gaul it was
otherwise--and the action of Gaul during the Reformation must be seized
if its modern religious quarrels are to be apprehended. A very
considerable proportion of the French landed and mercantile classes,
that is of the wealthy men of the country, were in sympathy with the new
religious doctrines and the new social organisation which had now taken
root in England, Scotland, Holland, northern Germany and Scandinavia,
and which were destined in those countries to lead to the domination of
wealth. These French squires and traders were called the Huguenots.
The succeeding hundred years, from 1615 to 1715, let us say, were a
settlement, not without bloodshed, of the unsatisfied quarrel of the
preceding century. All Englishmen know what happened in England; how the
last vestiges of Catholicism were crushed out and all the social and
political consequences of Protestantism established in the State.
There was, even in that same seventeenth century, a separate, but
futile, attempt to destroy Catholicism in Ireland. In Germany a struggle
of the utmost violence had only led to a similar regional result. The
first third of that hundred years concluded in the Peace of Westphalia,
and left the Protestant and Catholic territorial divisions much what we
now know them.
In France, however, the peculiar phenomenon remained of a body powerful
in numbers and (what was far more important) in wealth and social power,
scattered throughout the territory of the kingdom, organised and, by
this time, fixedly anti-Catholic, and therefore anti-national.
The nation had recovered its traditional line and had insisted upon the
victory of a strong executive, and that executive Catholic. France,
therefore, in this period of settlement, became an absolute monarchy
whose chief possessed tremendous and immediate powers, and a monarchy
which incorporated with itself all the great elements of the national
tradition, _including the Church_.
It is the name of Louis XIV, of course, which symbolises this great
time; his very long reign precisely corresponds to it. He was born
coincidently with that universal struggle for a religious settlement in
Europe, which I have described as characteristic of the time; he died
precisely at its close; and under him it seemed as though the
reconstructed power of Gaul and the defence of organised Catholicism
were to be synonymous.
But there were two elements of disruption in that homogeneous body which
Louis XIV apparently commanded. The very fact that the Church had thus
become in France an unshakable national institution, chilled the vital
source of Catholicism. Not only did the hierarchy stand in a perpetual
suspicion of the Roman See, and toy with the conception of national
independence, but they, and all the official organisation of French
Catholicism, put the security of the national establishment and its
intimate attachment to the general political structure of the State, far
beyond the sanctity of Catholic dogma or the practice of Catholic
morals.
That political structure--the French monarchy--seemed to be of granite
and eternal. Had it indeed survived, the Church in Gaul would doubtless,
in spite of its attachment to so mundane a thing as the crown, have
still survived to enjoy one of those resurrections which have never
failed it in the past, and would have returned, by some creative
reaction, to its principle of life. But for the moment the consequence
of this fixed political establishment was that scepticism, and all those
other active forces of the mind which play upon religion in any Catholic
State, had full opportunity. The Church was, so to speak, not concerned
to defend itself but only its method of existence. It was as though a
garrison, forgetting the main defences of a place, had concentrated all
its efforts upon the security of one work which contained its supplies
of food.
Wit, good verse, sincere enthusiasm, a lucid exposition of whatever in
the human mind perpetually rebels against transcendental affirmations,
were allowed every latitude and provoked no effective reply. But overt
acts of disrespect to ecclesiastical authority were punished with
rigour.
While in the wealthy, the bureaucratic, and the governing classes, to
ridicule the Faith was an attitude taken for granted, seriously to
attack the privileges or position of its ministers was ungentlemanly,
and was not allowed. It did not shock the hierarchy that one of its
Apostolic members should be a witty atheist; that another should go
hunting upon Corpus Christi, nearly upset the Blessed Sacrament in his
gallop, and forget what day it was when the accident occurred. The
bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their
body to be loose livers, or in some of them openly presenting their
friends to their mistresses as might be done by any great lay noble
round them. That a diocese or any other spiritual charge should be
divorced from its titular chief, seemed to them as natural as does to us
the absence from his modern regiment of some titular foreign colonel.
Unquestioned also by the bishops were the poverty, the neglect, and the
uninstruction of the parish clergy; nay--and this is by far the
principal feature--the abandonment of religion by all but a very few of
the French millions, no more affected the ecclesiastical officials of
the time than does the starvation of our poor affect, let us say, one of
our professional politicians. It was a thing simply taken for granted.
The reader must seize that moribund condition of the religious life of
France upon the eve of the Revolution, for it is at once imperfectly
grasped by the general run of historians, and is also the only fact
which thoroughly explains what followed. The swoon of the Faith in the
eighteenth century is the negative foundation upon which the strange
religious experience of the French was about to rise. France, in the
generation before the Revolution, was passing through a phase in which
the Catholic Faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the
preaching and establishment of it in Gaul.
This truth is veiled by more than one circumstance. Thus many official
acts, notably marriages and the registration of births, took place under
a Catholic form, and indeed Catholic forms had a monopoly of them.
Again, the State wore Catholic clothes, as it were: the public occasions
of pomp were full of religious ceremony. Few of the middle classes went
to Mass in the great towns, hardly any of the artisans; but the Churches
were “official.” Great sums of money--including official money--were at
the disposal of the Church; and the great ecclesiastics were men from
whom solid favours could be got. Again, the historic truth is masked by
the language and point of view of the great Catholic reaction which has
taken place in our own time.
It is safe to say that where one adult of the educated classes concerned
himself seriously with the Catholic Faith and Practice in France before
the Revolution, there are five to-day. But in between lies the violent
episode of the persecution, and the Catholic reaction in our time
perpetually tends to contrast a supposed pre-revolutionary “Catholic”
society with the revolutionary fury. “Look,” say its champions, “at the
dreadful way in which the Revolution treated the Church.” And as they
say this the converse truth appears obvious and they seem to imply,
“Think how different it must have been before the Revolution persecuted
the Church!” The very violence of the modern reaction towards
Catholicism has exaggerated the revolutionary persecution, and in doing
so has made men forget that apart from other evidence of the decline of
religion, it is obvious that persecution could never have arisen without
a strong and continuous historical backing. You could not have had a
Diocletian in the thirteenth century with the spirit of the Crusaders
just preceding him; you could not have had Henry VIII if the England of
the fifteenth century just preceding him had been an England devoted to
the monastic profession. And you could not have had the revolutionary
fury against the Catholic Church in France if the preceding generation
had been actively Catholic even in a considerable portion.
As a fact, of course it was not: and in the popular indifference to or
hatred of the Church the principal factor was the strict brotherhood not
so much of Church and State as of Church and executive Government.
But there was another factor. We were describing a little way back how
in France there had arisen, during the movement of the Reformation, a
wealthy, powerful and numerically large Huguenot body. In mere numbers
it dwindled, but it maintained throughout the seventeenth century a very
high position, both of privilege and (what was its characteristic) of
money-power; and even to-day, though their birth-rate is, of course,
lower than the average of the nation, the French Huguenots number close
upon a million, and are far wealthier, upon the average, than their
fellow citizens. It is their wealth which dominates the trade of
certain districts, which exercises so great an effect upon the
universities, the publishing trade, and the press; and in general lends
them such weight in the affairs of the nation.
Now the Huguenot had in France a special and permanent quarrel with the
monarchy, and therefore with the Catholic Church, which, precisely
because it was not of the vivid and intense kind which is associated
with popular and universal religions, was the more secretly ubiquitous.
His quarrel was that, having been highly privileged for nearly a
century, the member of “a State within a State,” and for more than a
generation free to hold assemblies separate from and often antagonistic
to the national Government, these privileges had been suddenly removed
from him by the Government of Louis XIV a century before the Revolution.
The quarrel was more political than religious; it was a sort of “Home
Rule” quarrel. For though the Huguenots were spread throughout France,
they had possessed special cities and territories wherein their spirit
and, to a certain extent, their private self-government, formed
_enclaves_ of particularism within the State.
They had held this position, as I have said, for close upon a hundred
years, and it was not until a date contemporary with the violent
settlement of the religious trouble in England by the expulsion of James
II that a similar settlement, less violent, achieved (as it was thought)
a similar religious unity in France. But that unity was not achieved.
The Huguenots, though no longer permitted to exist as a State within a
State, remained, for the hundred years between the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes and the outbreak of the Revolution, a powerful and
ever-watchful body. They stood upon the flank of the attack which
intellectual scepticism was making upon the Catholic Church, they were
prepared to take advantage of that scepticism’s first political victory,
and since the Revolution they have been the most powerful and, after the
Freemasons, with whom they are largely identified, the most strongly
organised, of the anti-clerical forces in the country.
The Jews, whose action since the Revolution has been so remarkable in
this same business, were not, in the period immediately preceding it, of
any considerable influence, and their element in the coalition may be
neglected.
Such, then, was the position when the Revolution was preparing. Within
memory of all men living, the Church had become more and more official,
the masses of the great towns had wholly lost touch with it; the
intelligence of the country was in the main drawn to the Deist or even
to the purely sceptical propaganda, the powerful Huguenot body was ready
prepared for an alliance with any foe of Catholicism, and in the eyes of
the impoverished town populace--notably in Paris, which had long
abandoned the practice of religion--the human organisation of the
Church, the hierarchy, the priesthood, and the few but very wealthy
religious orders which still lingered on in dwindling numbers, were but
a portion of the privileged world which the populace hated and was
prepared to destroy.
It is upon such a spirit and in such conditions of the national
religious life that the Revolution begins to work. In the National
Assembly you have the great body of the Commons which determines the
whole, touched only here and there with men in any way acquainted with
or devoted to Catholic practice, and those men for the most part
individual and eccentric, that is, uncatholic, almost in proportion to
the genuineness of their religious feeling. Among the nobility the
practice of religion was a social habit with some--as a mental attitude
the Faith was forgotten among all but a very few. Among the clergy a
very wealthy hierarchy, no one of them prepared to defend the Church
with philosophical argument, and almost unanimous in regarding itself as
a part of the old political machine, was dominant; while the
representatives of the lower clergy, strongly democratic in character,
were at first more occupied with the establishment of democracy than
with the impending attack upon the material and temporal organisation of
the Church.
Now, that material and temporal organisation offered at the very
beginning of the debates an opportunity for attack which no other
department of the old _régime_ could show.
The immediate peril of the State was financial. The pretext and even to
some extent the motive for the calling of the States-General was the
necessity for finding money. The old fiscal machinery had broken down,
and as always happens when a fiscal machine breaks down, the hardship it
involved, and the pressure upon individuals which it involved, appeared
to be universal. _There was no immediate and easily available fund of
wealth upon which the Executive could lay hands save the wealth of the
clergy._
The feudal dues of the nobles, if abandoned, must fall rather to the
peasantry than to the State. Of the existing taxes few could be
increased without peril, and none with any prospect of a large
additional revenue. The charge for debt alone was one-half of the total
receipts of the State, the deficit was, in proportion to the revenue,
overwhelming. Face to face with that you had an institution not popular,
one whose public functions were followed by but a small proportion of
the population, one in which income was most unequally distributed, and
one whose feudal property yielded in dues an amount equal to more than a
quarter of the total revenue of the State. Add to this a system of
tithes which produced nearly as much again, and it will be apparent
under what a financial temptation the Assembly lay.
It may be argued, of course, that the right of the Church to this
ecclesiastical property, whether in land or in tithes, was absolute, and
that the confiscation of the one or of the other form of revenue was
mere theft. But such was not the legal conception of the moment. The
wealth of the Church was not even (and this is most remarkable)
defended as absolute property by the generality of those who enjoyed it.
The tone of the debates which suppressed the tithes, and later
confiscated the Church lands, was a tone of discussion upon legal
points, precedents, public utility, and so forth. There was not heard in
it, in any effective degree, the assertion of mere moral right; though
in that time the moral rights of property were among the first of
political doctrines.
It was not, however, the confiscation of the Church lands and the
suppression of the tithe which founded the quarrel between the
Revolution and the clergy. No financial or economic change is ever more
than a preparation for, or a permissive condition of, a moral change. It
is never the cause of a moral change. Even the suppression of the
religious houses in the beginning of 1790 must not be taken as the point
of departure in the great quarrel. The religious orders in France were
at that moment too decayed in zeal and in numbers, too wealthy and much
too removed from the life of the nation, for this to be the case. The
true historical point of departure from which we must date the beginning
of this profound debate between the Revolution and Catholicism, is to be
found in the morning of the 30th of May, 1790, when a parliamentary
committee (the Ecclesiastical Committee) presented to the House its plan
for the reform of the Constitution of the Church in Gaul.
The enormity of that act is now apparent to the whole world. The
proposal, at the bidding of chance representatives not elected _ad hoc_,
to change the dioceses and the sees of Catholic France, the decision of
an ephemeral political body to limit to such and such ties (and very
feeble they were) the bond between the Church of France and the Holy
See, the suppression of the Cathedral Chapters, the seemingly farcical
proposal that bishops should be elected, nay, priests also thus chosen,
the submission of the hierarchy in the matter of residence and travel to
a civil authority which openly declared itself indifferent in matters of
religion,--all this bewilders the modern mind. How, we ask, could men so
learned, so enthusiastic, so laborious and so closely in touch with all
the realities of their time, make a blunder of that magnitude? Much
more, how did such a blunder escape the damnation of universal mockery
and immediate impotence? The answer is to be discovered in what has just
been laid down with so much insistence: the temporary eclipse of
religion in France before the Revolution broke out.
The men who framed the Constitution of the Clergy, the men who voted it,
nay, even the men who argued against it, all had at the back of their
minds three conceptions which they were attempting to reconcile: of
those three conceptions one was wholly wrong, one was imperfect because
superficial, the third alone was true. And these three conceptions were,
first, that the Catholic Church was a moribund superstition, secondly,
that it possessed in its organisation and tradition a power to be
reckoned with, and thirdly, that the State, its organs, and their
corporate inheritance of action, were so bound up with the Catholic
Church that it was impossible to effect any general political settlement
in which that body both external to France and internal, should be
neglected.
Of these three conceptions, had the first been as true as the last, it
would have saved the Constitution of the Clergy and the reputation for
common-sense of those who framed it.
It was certainly true that Catholicism had for so many centuries been
bound up in the framework of the State that the Parliament must
therefore do something with the Church in the general settlement of the
nation: it could not merely leave the Church on one side.
It was also superficially true that the Church was a power to be
reckoned with politically, quite apart from the traditional union of
Church and State--but only superficially true. What the revolutionary
politicians feared was the intrigue of those who commanded the
organisation of the Catholic Church, men whom they knew for the most
part to be without religion, and the sincerity of all of whom they
naturally doubted. A less superficial and a more solid judgment of the
matter would have discovered that the real danger lay in the animosity
or intrigue against the Civil Constitution, not of the corrupt
hierarchy, but of the sincere though ill-instructed and dwindling
minority which was still loyally attached to the doctrines and
discipline of the Church. But even this superficial judgment would not
have been fatal, had not the judgment of the National Assembly been
actually erroneous upon the first point--the vitality of the Faith.
Had the Catholic Church been, as nearly all educated men then imagined,
a moribund superstition, had the phase of decline through which it was
passing been a phase comparable to that through which other religions
have passed in their last moments, had it been supported by ancient
families from mere tradition, clung to by remote peasants from mere
ignorance and isolation, abandoned (as it was) in the towns simply
because the towns had better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment
and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences; had,
in a word, the imaginary picture which these men drew in their minds of
the Catholic Church and its fortunes been an exact one, then the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy would have been a statesmanlike act. It would
have permitted the hold of the Catholic Church upon such districts as it
still retained to vanish slowly and without shock. It proposed to keep
alive at a reasonable salary the ministers of a ritual which would
presumably have lost all vitality before the last of its pensioners was
dead; it would have prepared a bed, as it were, upon which the last of
Catholicism in Gaul could peacefully pass away. The action of the
politicians in framing the Constitution would have seemed more generous
with every passing decade and their wisdom in avoiding offence to the
few who still remained faithful, would have been increasingly applauded.
On the other hand, and from the point of view of the statesman, the
Civil Constitution of the Clergy bound strictly to the State and made
responsible to it those ancient functions, not yet dead, of the
episcopacy and all its train. It was a wise and a just consideration on
the part of the Assembly that religions retain their machinery long
after they are dead, and if that machinery has ever been a State
machinery it must remain subject to the control of the State: and
subject not only up to the moment when the living force which once
animated it is fled, but much longer; up, indeed, to the moment when the
surviving institutions of the dead religion break down and perish.
So argued the National Assembly and its committee, and, I repeat, the
argument was just and statesmanlike, prudent and full of foresight, save
for one miscalculation. The Catholic Church was not dead, and was not
even dying. It was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other
organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death, but the
Catholic Church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any
other. It fructifies and expands immediately under the touch of a lethal
weapon; it has at its very roots the conception that material prosperity
is stifling to it, poverty and misfortune nutritious.
The men of the National Assembly would have acted more wisely had they
closely studied the story of Ireland (then but little known), or had
they even made themselves acquainted with the methods by which the
Catholic Church in Britain, after passing in the fifteenth century
through a phase somewhat similar to that under which it was sinking in
Gaul in the eighteenth, was stifled under Henry and Elizabeth.
But the desire of the men of 1789 was not to kill the Church but to let
it die; they thought it dying. Their desire was only to make that death
decent and of no hurt to the nation, and to control the political action
of a hierarchy that had been wealthy and was bound up with the old
society that was crumbling upon every side.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy failed: it lit the civil war, it
dug the pit which divided Catholicism from the Revolution at the moment
of the foreign invasion, it segregated the loyal priest in such a
fashion that his order could not but appear to the populace as an order
of traitors, and it led, in the furnace of 1793, to the great
persecution from the memories of which the relations between the French
democracy and the Church have not recovered.
It is important to trace the actual steps of the failure; for when we
appreciate what the dates were, how short the time which was left for
judgment or for revision, and how immediately disaster followed upon
error, we can understand what followed and we can understand it in no
other way.
If we find an enduring quarrel between two families whose cause of
contention we cannot seize and whose mutual hostility we find
unreasonable, to learn that it proceeded from a cataclysm too rapid and
too violent for either to have exercised judgment upon it will enable us
to excuse or at least to comprehend the endurance of their antagonism.
Now, it was a cataclysm which fell upon the relations of the Church and
State immediately after the error which the Parliament had committed; a
cataclysm quite out of proportion to their intentions, as indeed are
most sudden disasters quite out of proportion to the forces that bring
them about.
It was, as we have seen, in the summer of 1790--upon the 12th of
July--that the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was approved by the
Assembly. But it was not until the 26th of August that the King
consented to sign. Nor was there at the moment any attempt to give the
law effect. The protests of the bishops, for instance, came out quite at
leisure, in the month of October, and the active principle of the whole
of the Civil Constitution--to wit, the presentation of the Civic Oath
which the clergy were required to take, was not even debated until the
end of the year.
This Civic Oath, which is sometimes used as a bugbear in the matter, was
no more than an engagement under the sanction of an oath that the bishop
or priest taking it would maintain the new _régime_--though that
_régime_ included the constitution of the clergy; the oath involved no
direct breach with Catholic doctrine or practice. It was, indeed, a
folly to impose it, and it was a folly based upon the ignorance of the
politicians (and of many of the bishops of the day) as to the nature of
the Catholic Church. But the oath was not, nor was it intended to be, a
measure of persecution. Many of the parish clergy took it, and most of
them probably took it in good faith: nor did it discredit the oath with
the public that it was refused by all save four of the acting bishops,
for the condition of the hierarchy in pre-revolutionary France was
notorious. The action of the bishops appeared in the public eye to be
purely political, and the ready acceptance of the oath by so many,
though a minority, of the lower clergy argued strongly in its favour.
Nevertheless, no Catholic priest or bishop or layman could take that
oath without landing himself in disloyalty to his religion; and that for
the same reason which led St. Thomas of Canterbury to make his curious
and fruitful stand against the reasonable and inevitable, as much as
against the unreasonable, governmental provisions of his time. The
Catholic Church is an institution of necessity autonomous. It cannot
admit the right of any other power exterior to its own organisation to
impose upon it a modification of its discipline, nor, above all, a new
conception of its hieratic organisation.
The reader must carefully distinguish between the acceptation by the
Church of a detail of economic reform, the consent to suppress a
corporation at the request of the civil power, or even to forego certain
traditional political rights, and the admission of the general principle
of civil control. To that general principle the Assembly, in framing the
Constitution of the Clergy, was quite evidently committed. To admit such
a co-ordinate external and civil power, or rather to admit a _superior_
external power, is in theory to deny the principle of Catholicism, and
in practice to make of the Catholic Church what the other State
religions of Christendom have become.
I have said that not until the end of the year 1790 was the debate
opened upon the proposition to compel the clergy to take the oath.
It is a singular commentary upon the whole affair that compulsion should
have been the subject for debate at all. It should have followed, one
would have imagined, normally from the law. But so exceptional had been
the action of the Assembly and, as they now were beginning to find, so
perilous, that a special decree was necessary--and the King’s signature
to it--before this normal consequence of a measure which had been law
for months, could be acted upon.
Here let the reader pause and consider with what that moment--the end of
1790--coincided.
The assignats, paper-money issued upon the security of the confiscated
estates of the Church, had already depreciated 10 per cent. Those who
had first accepted them were paying throughout France a penny in the
livre, or as we may put it, a penny farthing on the shilling, for what
must have seemed to most of them the obstinacy of one single
corporation--and that an unpopular one--against the decrees of the
National Assembly.
It was now the moment when a definite reaction against the Revolution
was first taking shape, and when the populace was first beginning
uneasily to have suspicion of it; it was the moment when the Court was
beginning to negotiate for flight; it was the moment when (though the
populace did not know it) Mirabeau was advising the King with all his
might to seize upon the enforcement of the priests’ oath as an
opportunity for civil war.
The whole air of that winter was charged with doubt and mystery: in the
minds of all who had enthusiastically followed the march of the
Revolution, the short days of that rigorous cold of 1790-91 contained
passages of despair, and a very brief period was to suffice for making
the clerical oath not only the test of democracy against reaction, but
the wedge that should split the nation in two.
With the very opening of the new year, on the 4th of January, the
bishops and priests in the Assembly were summoned to take the oath to
the King, the Nation, and the Law; but that law included the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, and they refused. Within three months
Mirabeau was dead, the flight of the King determined on, the suspicion
of Paris at white heat, the oath taken or refused throughout France,
and the schismatic priests introduced into their parishes--it may be
imagined with what a clamour and with how many village quarrels! In that
same fortnight appeared the papal brief, long delayed, and known as the
Brief “_Caritas_,” denouncing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Six
weeks later, at the end of May, the papal representative at the French
Court was withdrawn, and in that act religious war declared.
Throughout this quarrel, which was now exactly of a year’s duration, but
the acute phase of which had lasted only six months, every act of either
party to it necessarily tended to make the conflict more violent. Not
only was there no opportunity for conciliation, but in the very nature
of things the most moderate counsel had to range itself on one side or
the other, and every public act which touched in any way upon the sore
point, though it touched but indirectly, and with no desire on the part
of the actors to rouse the passions of the moment, immediately appeared
as a provocation upon one side or the other.
It was inevitable that it should be so, with a population which had
abandoned the practice of religion, with the attachment of the clerical
organisation to the organisation of the old _régime_, with the strict
bond of discipline that united the priesthood of the Church in France
into one whole, and above all with the necessity under which the
Revolution was, at this stage, of finding a definite and tangible
enemy.
This last point is of the very first importance. Public opinion was
exasperated and inflamed, for the King was known to be an opponent of
the democratic movement; yet he signed the bills and could not be
overtly attacked. The Queen was known to be a violent opponent of it;
but she did not actually govern. The Governments of Europe were known to
be opponents; but no diplomatic note had yet appeared of which public
opinion could make an object for attack.
The resistance, therefore, offered by the clergy to the Civil
Constitution, had just that effect which a nucleus will have in the
crystallisation of some solution. It polarised the energies of the
Revolution, it provided a definite foil, a definite negative, a definite
counterpoint, a definite butt. Here was a simple issue. Men wearing a
special uniform, pursuing known functions, performing a known part in
society--to wit, the priests--were now for the most part the enemies of
the new democratic Constitution that was in preparation. They would not
take the oath of loyalty to it: they were everywhere in secret rebellion
against it and, where they were dispossessed of their cures, in open
rebellion. The clergy, therefore, that is the non-juring clergy (and the
conforming clergy were an experiment that soon became a fiction), were
after April 1791, in the eyes of all the democrats of the time, the
plainest and most tangible form of the opposition to democracy.
To the way in which I have presented the problem a great deal more might
be added. The very fact that the democratic movement had come after a
period of unfaith, and was non-Catholic in its springs, would have
tended to produce that quarrel. So would the necessary attachment of the
Catholic to authority and the easy confusion between the principle of
authority and claims of a traditional monarchy. Again, the elements of
vanity, of material greed, and of a false finality which are to be
discovered in any purely democratic theory of the State, will between
them always bring this theory into some conflict with religion. The
centuries during which the throne and the altar had stood as twin
symbols, especially in France, the very terminology of religious
metaphor which had been forged during the centuries of monarchical
institutions in Europe, helped to found the great quarrel. But, I
repeat, the overt act without which the quarrel could never have become
the terribly great thing it did, the master blunder which destroyed the
unity of the revolutionary movement, was the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy.
So much for the first year of the schism, May 1790 to May 1791. The
second year is but an intensification of the process apparent in the
first.
It opens with the King’s flight in June 1791: that is, with the first
open act of enmity taken against the authority of the National
Parliament since, two years before, the National Parliament had declared
itself supreme. Already the Court had been generally identified with the
resistance of the clergy, and a particular example of this had appeared
in the opinion that the King’s attempted journey to St. Cloud in April
had been prompted by a desire to have communion at the hands of a
non-juring priest.[8] When, therefore, the King fled, though his flight
had nothing whatsoever to do with the clerical quarrel, it was
associated in men’s minds with the clerical quarrel through his attempt
to leave Paris in April and from a long association of the Court with
the clerical resistance. The outburst of anti-monarchical feeling which
followed the flight was at the same time an outburst of anti-clerical
feeling; but the clergy were everywhere and could be attacked
everywhere. The Declaration of Pillnitz, which the nation very rightly
interpreted as the beginning of an armed European advance against the
French democracy, was felt to be a threat not only in favour of the King
but in favour also of the rebellious ecclesiastics.
And so forth. The uneasy approach of war throughout that autumn and
winter of 1791-92, the peculiar transformation of the French
temperament which war or its approach invariably produces--a sort of
constructive exaltation and creative passion--began to turn a great part
of its energy or fury against the very persons of the orthodox priests.
The new Parliament, the “Legislative” as it was called, had not been
sitting two months when it passed, upon November 29, 1791, the decree
that non-juring priests should be deprived of their stipend. And here
again we must note the curious lack of adjustment between law and fact
in all this clerical quarrel! For more than a year public money had been
paid to men who, under the law, should not during the whole of that year
have touched any salary! Yet, as in the case of the oath, special action
was necessary, and moreover the Parliament added to this tardy and
logical consequence of the law a declaration that those who had not so
taken the oath within eight days of their decree should be rendered
“suspect.”
The word “suspect” is significant. The Parliament even now could not
act, at least it could not act without the King; and this word
“suspect,” which carried no material consequences with it, was one that
might cover a threat of things worse than regular and legal punishment.
It was like the mark that some power not authorised or legal makes upon
the door of those whom that power has singled out for massacre in some
city.
Three weeks later Louis vetoed the decree refusing stipends to
non-jurors, and the year 1791 ended with the whole matter in suspense
but with exasperation increasing to madness.
The first three months of 1792 saw no change. The non-juring clergy were
still tolerated by the Executive in their illegal position, and, what is
more extraordinary, still received public money and were still for the
most part in possession of their cures; the conception that the clergy
were the prime, or at any rate the most obvious, enemies of the new
_régime_ now hardened into a fixed opinion which the attempted
persecution of religion, as the one party called it, the obstinate and
anti-national rebellion of factious priests, as the other party called
it, was rapidly approaching real persecution and real rebellion.
With April 1792 came the war, and all the passions of the war.
The known hostility of the King to the Revolution was now become
something far worse: his known sympathy with an enemy under arms. To
force the King into the open was henceforward the main tactic of the
revolutionary body.
Now for those whose object was forcing Louis XVI to open declarations of
hostility against the nation, his religion was an obvious instrument. In
no point could one come to closer grips with the King than on this
question of the Church, where already, in December 1791, he had
exercised his veto.
On May 27, 1792, therefore, Guadet and Vergniaud, the Girondins, moved
that a priest who had refused to take the oath should be subjected to
transportation upon the mere demand of any twenty taxpayers within that
assembly of parishes known as a “Canton.” It was almost exactly two
years since the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had first been reported
to the House by the Ecclesiastical Committee of the Constituent or
National Assembly.
It must not be forgotten under what external conditions this violent
act, the first true act of persecution, was demanded. It was already a
month since, upon the 20th of April, the war had opened upon the Belgian
frontier by a disgraceful panic and the murder of General Dillon; almost
contemporaneous with that breakdown was the corresponding panic and
flight of the French troops in their advance to Mons. All Europe was
talking of the facile march upon Paris which could now be undertaken;
and in general this decree against the priests was but part of the
exasperated policy which was rising to meet the terror of the invasion.
It was followed, of course, by the decree dismissing the Royal Guard,
and, rather more than a week later, by the demand for the formation of a
camp of volunteers under the walls of Paris. But with this we are not
here concerned. The King vetoed the decree against the non-juring
priests, and in the wild two months that followed the orthodox clergy
were, in the mind of the populace, and particularly the populace of
Paris, identified with the cause of the re-establishment of the old
_régime_ and the success of the invading foreign armies.
With the crash of the 10th of August the persecution began: the true
persecution, which was to the growing bitterness of the previous two
years what a blow is to the opening words of a quarrel.
The decree of the 27th of May was put into force within eleven days of
the fall of the Tuileries. True, it was not put into force in that
crudity which the Parliament had demanded: the non-juring priests were
given a fortnight to leave the kingdom, and if they failed to avail
themselves of the delay were to be transported.
From this date to the end of the Terror, twenty-three months later, the
story of the relations between the Revolution and the Church, though
wild and terrible, is simple: it is a story of mere persecution
culminating in extremes of cruelty and in the supposed uprooting of
Christianity in France.
The orthodox clergy were everywhere regarded by this time as the typical
enemies of the revolutionary movement; they themselves regarded the
revolutionary movement, by this time, as being principally an attempt to
destroy the Catholic Church.
Within seven months of the fall of the monarchy, from the 18th of March,
1793, the priests, whether non-juring or schismatic, might, on the
denunciation of any six citizens, be subjected to transportation.
There followed immediately a general attack upon religion. The attempted
closing of all churches was, of course, a failure, but it was firmly
believed that such attachment as yet remained to the Catholic Church was
due only to the ignorance of the provincial districts which displayed
it, or to the self-seeking of those who fostered it. The attempt at mere
“de-christianisation,” as it was called, failed, but the months of
terror and cruelty, the vast number of martyrdoms (for they were no
less) and the incredible sufferings and indignities to which the priests
who attempted to remain in the country were subjected, burnt itself, as
it were, into the very fibre of the Catholic organisation in France, and
remained, in spite of political theory one way or the other, and in
spite of the national sympathies of the priesthood, the one great active
memory inherited from that time.
Conversely, the picture of the priest, his habit and character, as the
fatal and necessary opponent of the revolutionary theory, became so
fixed in the mind of the Republican that two generations did nothing to
eliminate it, and that even in our time the older men, in spite of pure
theory, cannot rid themselves of an imagined connection between the
Catholic Church and an international conspiracy against democracy. Nor
does this non-rational but very real feeling lack support from the
utterances of those who, in opposing the political theory of the French
Revolution, consistently quote the Catholic Church as its necessary and
holy antagonist.
The attempt to “de-christianise” France failed, as I have said,
completely. Public worship was restored, and the Concordat of Napoleon
was believed to have settled the relations between Church and State in a
permanent fashion. We have lived to see it dissolved; but this
generation will not see, nor perhaps the generation succeeding it, the
issue of the struggle between two bodies of thought which are divided by
no process of reason, but profoundly divorced by the action of vivid and
tragic historical memories.