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Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

Instead of the label “revolutionary priest,” I have used in my title the most open expression possible, “priests of the French Revolution.” The priests who moved into, out of, or parallel to the constitutional clergy had their own degrees of dedication to the revolution as represented by the governments between 1789 and 1802. Those priests who detested the national government after the disappearance of the reformed monarchy, those priests who lost all political interest after the trauma of the Terror, those priests who supported the different extremes of Directory politics...were they all the same kind of revolutionary? Hardly. In fact, the word “revolution,” with its implications of violence, was never in full favor, and, after the Terror, was more a label for violence than reform. We could just as well have used the label “republican,” for it was in a republic, or at the beginning in a constitutional monarchy, that the bishops and priests wanted to activate their mission.

But then, why “priests of the French Revolution,” when so many of my featured “saints and renegades” are presented as bishops? In fact, most all of them were priests as the Revolution began, and were chosen and consecrated bishops precisely because they were revolutionary priests. A Catholic theological tradition, dating back to the early Christian church, would have it that bishops possess the fullness of the priesthood. The bishops necessarily saw their ministry as priestly.

For this book, I take my cue from John McManners, who more than forty years ago published the first sympathetic study of the constitutional priests, as well as the refractory priests (i.e., those who refused to take oath), urging further attempts to understand the motivation of the apparent “renegades” from the constitutional clergy.⁵ Here I study of the religious attitudes and psychological experiences that underpinned the behavior of representative bishops and priests on the constitutional/revolutionary side, some of them major players on the political and church scene and some of them near-anonymous figures whose intense commitment to or rejection of the constitutional experiment merits attention even so. I play individuals against groups and religious teaching against political action, in order to tell a balanced story of saints and renegades. They were not all saints and renegades, of course. Those labels may seem somewhat fanciful, but certainly the priests of France, as revolutionaries or at least as republicans in a new and radically changing political era, were driven to creatively serve or creatively, and often destructively, reject the versions of the priestly ministry that had been handed down to them. I have researched and studied the archival and primary source material to explain the priests of the French Revolution precisely as priests, on the premise that their priestly commitment, with its mutations, is the primary explanation of their behavior.⁶ It is a study of what these priests and bishops made of priesthood, Catholic and French, and what they tried to accomplish in their priestly ministries, across the revolutionary decade.

Readers will naturally question at times my choice of personalities and events, and here I issue a promissory note: this book is of a piece with two other projects that involve encyclopedic completeness, a dictionary of the 118 bishops of the Constitutional Church, both the original and the reconstituted versions, and an online repertoire of all the priests of France who engaged themselves by oath in the constitutional apostolate—beginning with those thousands who figure in the already published repertoires. As this book goes to print, the initial dictionary entries are being edited, and a search committee has set up the collaborative structures for the online dictionary.⁷ For now, I offer a simple appendix with a complete listing of constitutional bishops by dioceses, and full statistics on the priests’ initial oath taking in these dioceses, and all constitutional bishops who are presented in the body of the book will be asterisked in the appendix.

This study stands on its own and in relationship to the monumental contributions made by my fellow historians over the years: the institutional histories of the Constitutional Church by Rodney J. Dean, the political and theological interpretations of the constitutional enterprise and leading constitutionals by Bernard Plongeron, and the fundamental sociography and social analysis of the tens of thousands of priests who took the oath of loyalty that originally gave the church its identity by Timothy Tackett. Dean’s L’Église constitutionnelle, Napoléon et le Concordat de 1801 is a reconstruction of developments within the Constitutional Church before and during the negotiations between the pope and Napoleon, and L’Abbé Grégoire et l’Église constitutionnelle après la Terreur, 1794–97 is a record of the first years of revival after the fall of Robespierre: two masterful theses that now stand as the fundamental reference works for all future studies of the Parisian and nationwide functioning of the Constitutional Church after the Terror. Bernard Plongeron and generations of his students have made available an enormous range of archival data on religion and the Revolution, and established several basic politico-theological orientations for Constitutional Church study. Plongeron’s prodigious output begins with his dissertation, published as Les Réguliers de Paris devant le serment constitutionnel, through his general but highly original study in volume 10 of Histoire du Christianisme, up to his recent work, gathered together in Des Résistences religieuses à Napoléon (1799–1813). The fundamental contemporary research on the constitutional clergy remains Timothy Tackett’s Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791, for all practical purposes a definitive study of the priests’ revolutionary motives, some of it handily resumed in the Atlas de la Révolution française, vol. 9: Religion, which Tackett edited with Claude Langlois and Michel Vovelle.

Other important studies include the early work of Catholic clergy who in varying degrees felt obliged to point out the dogmatic and moral errors of the constitutionals. The abbé Augustin Sicard and Dom Henri Leclercq found little of value in the “schism,” whereas the Institut Catholique priest–historian Paul Pisani, although writing in an ultramontane Catholic mode, tried to be evenhanded in his dictionary of all the constitutional bishops, Répertoire biographique de l’épiscopat constitutionnel of 1907 and in his multivolume L’Église de Paris et la Révolution, published in the years immediately following. Building on Pisani’s Histoire de l’Église de Paris, the abbé Jean Boussoulade published after World War II a history of the church in revolutionary Paris with special attention to the years after the Terror, L’Église de Paris du 9 thermidor au Concordat. Three major Anglophone historians have offered vital interpretations of the religion in the revolutionary era as part of their own agendas: Dale Van Kley in The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, with a chapter on the role of residual Jansenism in the shaping of the Constitutional Church; Suzanne Desan in Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France, which deals with Constitutional Church influence in the context of independent lay Catholic religious activity; and Nigel Aston’s particularly valuable study of bishops at the waning of the Old Regime, The End of an Elite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution, 1786–1790, originally a dissertation done under the direction of John McManners, which can be complemented by his more recent Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804, an omnium-gatherum of specialized studies of specific national and local Constitutional Church events and personalities. However, a new generation of scholars has focused the agenda for study of church and state during the Revolution on regions, cities, and individual personalities in context. Paul Chopelin examines with profound insight the values and problems of both the constitutional and the refractory clergy on the regional level in his Ville patriote et ville martyre: Lyon, l’église et la Révolution, 1788–1805. And the most notable study of an individual clergyman is his local setting is Caroline Chopelin-Blanc’s De l’apologétique à l’Église constitutionnelle: Adrien Lamourette (1742–1794).⁸

Priesthood: The Catholic and French Heritage

The book is not only for historians. Members of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches have an active, personal interest in the identity and behavior of the priests of their traditions, because so much of the health and wealth of these churches has depended on that very identity and behavior. Full parishes and successful universities can be indications of a vital faith and successful priests, both together. Countries where Catholic Christianity played a major role in shoring up dynasties, reinforcing ethnic communities, and directing charities would periodically go into political crises that played back into religious crises. The French story I tell here, of the enterprise and heroism of the priests who tried to ensure the safety and good health of their people, and the cruel mutation of some of the priests into men of violence, may well have bearing on today’s religious dramas, both American and European. In Europe, for example, note the end of Catholic clerical control of both Irish and Polish popular culture, and the even more dramatic cases of the destruction of the all-embracing Orthodox Christian culture in Russia in the years following 1917 (with its striking recovery following the fall of the Soviet Union, to be sure) or the diminishment to minuscule numbers of churchgoers in the Anglican Church in England and the Lutheran Churches of Scandinavia. Note, too, the intensity of priests’ engagement in politics as a form of religion, and religion as a form of politics in the Yugoslav states, where clergy of the different traditions have used Catholicism to define Croatian politics and culture and Orthodoxy to define Serbian politics and culture.

Historians of religion and sociologists have collected examples of “priestly” identities from across the literature and traditions of ancient, medieval, and modern cultures. Historical scholarship is vague on the religious functionaries of the Egyptian kingdoms, the Jewish Second Temple, or the Roman Republic. In the performance of their duties, priests overlapped with government figures, teachers, healers, magicians, and soldiers.⁹ We know their sacred books, their myths, and their rituals, but not the direct effect of this religious practice on political, social, and individual life. The challenge in examining the tradition of Christian or Catholic priesthood is that each succeeding generation of believers has altered the priestly job profile to meet the needs of its own era. In fact, the Christian priest was not to be the sacred figure of the old Jerusalem priesthood. Rather he was called presbyteros or elder (presbyter), helping the episcopos or superintendent of local Christian communities in directing, teaching, and presiding at worship. This person was never called iereus, the term used of the temple priest, though the Christian community as a whole was labeled “priestly.” Both superintendents and elders took on the qualities of priestly sacredness and the role of mediator. The function, panoply, and theology of the Old Testament priesthood was appropriated, along with the function, panoply, and theology of the Sabbath. We can assume that images of sacrificial blood and ascending smoke were never far away, but the presbyter was not strictly speaking a priest, nor was Sunday (the first, not the last, day of the week and the day of the Resurrection) the Sabbath.

The roles of priest as prayer leader at Eucharist and bishop as guarantor of apostolic succession (transferring spiritual authority from the apostles) became central only gradually. If we stay in the Roman world, in order to get a look at modern France, we have some solid information on papal Rome, monastic Ireland, and parts of Gaul. From the fourth century onward, we have sermon collections of noted bishops, liturgical sources, and archeological remains. But clear evidence of the development of the parish priest as we now know him comes only from the eighth century, when systems of parishes were put in place: in urban centers at the beginning and later to outlying areas.¹⁰ Writings from Charlemagne’s era make the parish priest a model of pastoral concern and personal holiness.¹¹ Here, monks, canons, and other priestly functionaries were as likely to staff parishes as much as some kind of “pure” parish priest. In fact, the curé in the strict sense of the word, with a system of parish priests under the bishop (to go with an already long existing system of randomly staffed parishes), was a development of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It could be said that the status of the French priest in society was established by the Concordat of 1516 between Pope Leo X and King Francis I, making the whole system depend on papal and monarchical authority. The Edict of Nantes, although according basic but limited rights of worship to Protestants, did not diminish the priority of Rome. Public worship was reserved for Catholicism alone and legal cases involving churchmen were in a class by themselves. In the realm of finance, churchmen experienced both privilege and subjugation. Estimates of the extent of church properties range from one-tenth to one-sixth of the national territory; churchmen paid minimal taxes. But these goods basically originated with crown and government. And in return for control of education, the Church, naturally, had the duty of providing it.

The major Catholic Church Council of Trent (1545–63) stated that “the priest is a mediator between the faithful and God; set aside for the ministry of the Eucharist and forgiveness of sins, he must identify himself completely with Christ the mediator, at once sacrificial victim and intercessor for his flock.”¹² Until the twentieth century, eucharistic ministry was more important than preaching ministry, of course, and the Eucharist was seen more as an act of sacrifice than a sacramental encounter. Bishops were expected to ensure the quality of this new priest, but the records they kept reveal curé resistance to the reforms. The ultimate goal of clerical enlightenment was popular enlightenment. The old residency foibles were looked into, and attempts were made to monitor preaching, all these efforts issuing in effective change of clergy behavior, even though the Council of Trent was not officially promulgated in France due to political complications. The best of the curés of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, formed in a specifically French school of spirituality associated with the name of Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, combined ideals of sanctity and intellectuality with a concern for the masses of believers.

Bérulle, from the highest levels of the aristocracy, was a marvel of spiritual engagement and political clout. He sustained all dramatic Counter-Reformation efforts, whether in championing the work of the Jesuits or in establishing the French version of St. Philip Neri’s Oratorians. He was politically prominent enough to be the temporary political nemesis of Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII. The central Christian teaching of the Incarnation was concretized in a theology of total submission to God, striving to interpret and relive the interior spiritual states of the divine–human Christ. This theology cum spirituality was further institutionalized in the preaching, writing, and organizational work of the most prominent French clerical leaders of the generations to follow, including Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the Sulpicians, and Louis Grignion de Montfort, a missionary preacher in some measure responsible for the high-profile traditional Catholicism in the Vendée.¹³

Beyond the Bérullian spirituality of the dedicated clergy, three diffuse and vague sets of attitudes—Gallican, Jansenist, and Richerist—complicated clerical life and authority. Gallicanism promoted a distinct French structure and style of Roman Catholicism. The Latin Ecclesia Gallicana was simply a problem-free label for the French church, which was obviously part of the Latin Western, and therefore Roman, tradition. Political Gallicanism prioritized government rights over church structure and style, and an ecclesiastical Gallicanism prioritized the French bishops’ rights to control their own ecclesiastical destinies within the Roman ecclesiastical system. Jansenism was a profoundly moral reform movement that had marked French religion since the 1600s in much the same way as Puritanism had marked English religion. Distrustful of a hierarchical church structure that counted on worldly success and human righteousness, Jansenism had been condemned by Rome as antiauthority and Protestant, even though it was, in fact, a Catholic response to the values of Calvinism. Jansenists believed that they were promoting the true Catholic Christian theology transmitted by Augustine from the early church. Years of controversy, of dissembling, and, from time to time, of underground existence had given the movement a fluid shape and scattered demography that made it impossible to clearly condemn and round up: even so, the pope had condemned Jansenism in his Bull, Unigenitus, and the government of Louis XV had outlawed both public organization and expression. Richerism (after the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sorbonne theologian Edmond Richer) demoted the authority of bishops to promote the authority of priests. Episcopal authority as such was not rejected, but Richer developed a theology of priestly character and rights that, he believed, came from apostolic times: Christ gave a commission to the apostles to be the first bishops, but other disciples (the seventy, according to the Gospel of Luke, chap. 10) were commissioned separately, with their own rights and duties.¹⁴ At times, Gallican, Jansenist, and Richerist influences dominated priestly identity and behavior and must be noted, but certainly not as much as the earthy, human attempt to live up to church-wide models for priesthood and the expectations of local parishioners.

Clergy were too much a part of society to protect themselves from its worldliness. The aristocratic bishops and the commoner priests belonged to different social teams, each of which required its own theological backing. There were the scandalous extremes, where bishops’ palaces were frequently the setting for worldly pleasures and poor curés were totally unwelcome, but even in good times, the split was all too obvious. Priests, too, could sometimes ensure their fortune by procuring good positions in cathedral chapters or by currying favor with the aristocracy. Parish priests and members of religious orders were at odds within their own circles and across the divide, their jealousies deriving from their funds, their education, their workload, their social status, and such. Curés had special sources of money, orders had wealthy chapters at times. A dedicated curé could resent an idle monk; a learned and prayerful monk could be scandalized by a benefice-hunting curé.

Priests and Bishops in 1789

By the end of the Old Regime, the object of seminary education, in conformity with the decrees of the Council of Trent, was to make of the priest, a being separate from the world, the “religious [as if in a religious order] of God according to the priestly spirituality of the French school of the seventeenth century.”¹⁵ Sulpicians, Spiritains (Congregation of the Holy Spirit), Lazarists (Vincentians), and Doctrinaires (Fathers of Christian Doctrine, disbanded during the Revolution) ran the 130 to 140 French seminaries in place in 1789. This does not take into account the minor seminaries, earnestly promoted after 1750.¹⁶ But education for priesthood did not mean years in a seminary; there were other means of acquiring the requisite knowledge and getting experience necessary for the métier. The obligation to spend time in the seminary dated from 1696, at least for Paris; by 1789, the average amount of time spent in a Parisian seminary was sixteen months.¹⁷ Boys could not be tonsured before their fourteenth year. Later they received the four minor orders, then subdiaconate with the obligation to continue on to diaconate and priesthood. Even the great central Paris seminary of Saint-Sulpice was often little more than a career opportunity for young men, concerned more about intellectual and cultural development. In this setting, wigs and musical studies often weighed more heavily than did prayer and theology. Priesthood was conferred, in principle, at twenty-four years of age. And the majority of the ordinands came from the middle classes, which gave importance to recruitment in an urban setting.¹⁸

Priests attracted both criticism and praise. The bon curé of eighteenth-century France was praised by both Catholic reformers and Enlightenment rationalists. John McManners cites Edmé-Nicholas Restif de la Bretonne, brother of the notorious revolutionary-era writer and erotic roustabout Restif de la Bretonne.¹⁹ As curé of Courgis, he prayed for hours, was totally and constantly available to his parishioners, lived abstemiously, and did everything to improve the physical and spiritual lives of his flock. The country curé was an idyllic hero and the city curé was a man of substance. On the other hand, there are records of all kinds of tipsiness, dishonesty, and vulgarity. Where there were local aristocrats to serve, receive, or otherwise appease, the curé who was on his toes had a number of proprieties to learn and observe. Generosity with parishioners and kindness to the poor stood high on the list of qualities attributed to the bon curé. Even the peasant cahiers of 1789, for all their complaints, could praise the simple, good pastor of souls.²⁰ Looking more closely at priests of the era, we note that they tended to be local, though some regions could not generate enough vocations for their needs and needed to look elsewhere, even to foreign lands. But the majority came from the town bourgeoisie and the well-off farming class. Depending on the size of the parish and its location, there could be great variations in income, with some of the clergy terribly underpaid. The Traité des devoirs d’un pasteur (1758) included a suggested list of books that every curé should have.²¹ In fact, a curé could have everything from a minimal four or five books through the library necessary to do his own research and writing in history and theology.²²

The bishops did indeed, virtually all of them, come from the aristocracy at the end of the Old Regime. By 1789, only one commoner priest had been elevated to the episcopacy, and in 1790 the brilliant Jean-René Asseline was consecrated a bishop, just in time to refuse the constitutional clergy oath, and so lose the bishopric.²³ The same pecking order of greater and lesser aristocratic dignity obtained for the noble bishops as for nobles in general: the older the pedigree and the closer connection to military service to the kings of old, the more highly honored the family name. An aristocratic family could try to obtain a good church position for a family member by appeal to the aristocratic bishop, and naturally bishops helped their own. Riches and affluence often translated into worldliness, but the ideal was a bishop who was generous to his people, protective of his clergy, and charitable across the board in his last will and testament. Stories of episcopal scoundrels are better known: Cardinal Louis de Rohan hoping for a secret tryst with Marie Antoinette, or the ethical chameleon and shameless (if brilliant) diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand. John McManners retells the story of this young, clubfooted aristocrat taking over the see of Autun with a great show of piety, earnest preaching, and commitment to service, only to pack up and leave forever, right after his hold on the position was assured.²⁴ Yet, it did make sense to have a bishop who could stand up for the diocese at the highest levels of political, economic, and social life—and all the trappings of the episcopacy cost plenty of money. The problem was that many of the bishops were seldom if ever back in their dioceses, being off in Paris or elsewhere—post–Council of Trent rules for residency, parish visitations, and confirmation be damned. Of course, even dedicated bishops maintained a clear distinction between themselves and their commoner clergy.

And so, now, to the saints and renegades of the French Revolution, the priests and bishops who played an ecclesiastical and sometimes political game of constitutional or republican reform at some point in their careers regardless of their status in the Constitutional Church. I feature the star performers (often constitutional bishops) and the dramatically important priestly activities in the government or in high-profile church work. Readers will find in these chapters the personalities, writings, and activities of national leaders, local mavericks, and whole sections of the clergy that rebelled, resigned, retracted, or totally dedicated themselves to an apostolate that was at once revolutionary and priestly. It is a drama divided into three acts, or sections—each section furnished with a general orientation, chapter introductions, and a selective chronology of state–church events²⁵—which I characterize simply as engagement, survival, and revival.