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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.