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ОглавлениеTHE FORMATION OF A REVOLUTIONARY PRIEST
The educational and spiritual formations of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Henri Grégoire were similar, and both men possessed a worldly intellectual independence in their seminary days, Sieyès searching for meaning in philosophy and Grégoire in poetry. They were formed in an era when Catholic seminary education was a combination of the high ideals reset for priests at the Council of Trent and the practical worldliness of French social life at all levels. According to Trent, priests were to be mediators between God and the people in a ministry of preaching the gospel and presiding at worship, Mass, confession, and the other sacraments. The preaching and sacramental activity in the early careers of Sieyès and Grégoire has left few traces, especially for Sieyès, but even his silence about his priesthood could not hide the years of saying Mass. A major Sieyès biographer, Jean-Denis Bredin, writes, “One can doubt that he stayed away from [celebration of] the sacraments, for it was not that easy for an important vicaire to never ‘do’ priest. It is sure in any case that at Chartres he said Mass.”1 Though Grégoire was the totally dedicated priest and revolutionary, either one of two other major figures might have been considered as alternates to Sieyès: (1) Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, one of those priests by default from the aristocracy, who in his last act as bishop of Autun assured the valid consecration of the first constitutional bishops, and thus apostolic continuity; (2) Joseph Fouché, member of the Catholic teaching congregation of the Oratorians, who emerged as a thoroughly secularized, even violent promoter of revolution, and who, under Napoleon, helped assure the incorporation of the constitutional bishops into the concordatory church. But of Talleyrand’s seminary days no documentation of intellectual and quasi-spiritual developments has survived, and Fouché was not an ordained priest. The theme here is formation, in any case.2
In major writings, published before the opening of the Estates General, Sieyès laid down a program for the rehabilitation of the state, and Grégoire, a program for the rehabilitation of religion in general by the regeneration of the Jews (of Europe) in particular. Sieyès and Grégoire were arguably the most influential priestly voices in French public life in the first three years of the revolution. They are impossible to miss in Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished yet famed canvas of the Tennis Court Oath of 12 June 1789: Sieyès seated at the central table faite podium for the reader of the oath (Jean-Sylvain Bailly, dean of the Third Estate) and Grégoire standing in the foreground slightly left, in a common embrace with the Carthusian monk, Dom Christophe Gerle, and the Protestant pastor Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne. Dom Gerle, painted in as an appropriate actor by David, was absent that day, which leaves Sieyès and Grégoire as the featured priests. When they both arrived on the national scene, Sieyès had jettisoned the minimal God talk of his earlier years and Grégoire had jettisoned the worldly cultural discourse of his earliest essays. Whereas Sieyès was a political revolutionary for whom priesthood was little more than a job category, Grégoire was an engaged priest who was at the same time a political revolutionary. Sieyès and Grégoire represented the two polarities of revolutionary priesthood—total secularism and total commitment to ministry in the new political era—with Sieyès far above the religious “isms” in his own realm of philosophy and political theory, and with Grégoire firmly planted in mainline Gallicanism, leaning Jansenist in some ways, and much more Richerist when he was opposing Old Regime bishops than when he was presiding as a bishop of the Constitutional Church.3
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès
Neither before nor after ordination did the abbé Sieyès appear to have any of the formal religious commitment promoted in the Catholic theological and spiritual writings of the day. But he was the last in a long line of Old Regime priests who balanced their secularism and even, at times, total lack of religious faith with dedication to their intellectual and administrative tasks.4 As a young man, his drive for social advancement was uncomplicated by moral or professional vision. Short in stature, plain in looks, afflicted with poor skin, his physique and personality were perhaps no worse than average. His parents were dedicated churchgoers in Fréjus, the southern French city of Sieyès’s birth and upbringing, and his two older sisters, whom he said he loved more than all the other siblings, eventually joined the convent. The father, Honoré Sieyès, was the one who talked of God and morality in his correspondence with the future priest. Sieyès himself had only those practical, “get ahead” concerns, accepting the clerical state as a natural setting for the realization of social status and financial security, and any efforts he made on behalf of his brothers were geared toward the same goals.5 Neither as a youth nor as an adult of any age did Sieyès display any interest in female companionship or sexual pleasure. A misanthrope on the personal level, he eventually became, nevertheless, a passionate student of the human condition.6
Formation and Clerical Life
The Jesuits at Fréjus were Sieyès’s first teachers, but whether he left their school because his father wished it (as is said in the autobiographical Notice that has come down to us from the mature Sieyès) or because he simply was not invited to go on there, we do not know.7 He continued his studies at Draguignan with the Doctrinaires, a congregation that in southern France was on a par with the Jesuits, and he flirted briefly and fancifully with the idea of a military career. Inasmuch as priesthood was his family’s goal for him from the beginning, he prepared, in the totally unsystematic way of his day, for entrance into the clerical state. When he arrived at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris at the age of seventeen and a half, he had already been tonsured—officially, then, a cleric. The top seminary in France at that time, Saint-Sulpice had never fully realized the goals of the Council of Trent or the hopes of its founder, Jean-Jacques Olier. Instead, there was at best a conflict of disciplinary styles and at worst an apparent certification of spiritually directionless hangers-on.
Sieyès worked out his own range of studies and readings, primarily philosophical and social scientific. Music had real importance for him then; theology, none. In a manuscript labeled Projet de bibliothèque, he set about structuring his intellectual life. Otherwise he went about his serious study at the nearby Sorbonne (transferring from Saint-Sulpice to the nearby Vincentian seminary of Saint-Firmin) before taking on the full clerical obligations that came with ordination to the subdiaconate. The range of courses that were prerequisites to his licentiate forced him back into theology and church history, to the detriment of his social scientific studies. But, even so, by the time he was ordained in 1772, two years before finishing the licentiate, he had already laid the foundation of his future intellectual life.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve highlights, in his Causéries de lundi, Sieyès’s culture and originality: “Sieyès was a born master” in the sense that “he did not make use of any of the masters of his day: neither Encyclopedists nor Condillac nor Rousseau. Even politically, one cannot say that Sieyès had been a disciple of Rousseau; he had early passed judgment on, and refuted, him.”8 Probably he was preoccupied more with the observation of himself in the act of analyzing society, the economy, and the possibilities of revolution. Sainte-Beuve wrote that Sieyès’s sciences sociales consisted above all in the divisions of work, applied to the different functions and powers in society, and that an art social consisted in controlling popular energy: “Sieyès, the enemy of every privilege and of all aristocracy, had nonetheless distanced himself from pure democracy. And he believed that the art [social] consisted primarily in making popular energy reasonably applicable for modern nations, by means of a system of representation that he put together with infinite ingenuity.”9 His tabula rasa approach to politics and the economy extended to history also: “It seems to me that judging what is taking place by that which has already happened, is to judge the known by means of the unknown. It is better to judge the past on [the basis of] the present, and to acknowledge that so-called historical truths have no more reality than so-called religious truths.”10
Therefore, people as social, political, and economic actors were the objects of his interest. Later, in the autobiographical Notice, he wrote, “I really believe that I am traveling among an unknown people; I have to study the customs.”11 Even supposing the everyday lives of people to be “unknown” to him, he was not heartless. His genuine concern for the poor was probably related to his hatred of nobility and his vestigial identity as a cleric.
Humiliation by, and jealousy of, the highborn and well-off haunted him all his life, even into old age. His aversion to noble titles was intense, and the reason for the aversion clear. Without the money needed to compete for a canonry (canonicat) early in his career, he and his father groveled to obtain a miserable benefice. Shortly thereafter, he went north, to Tréguier in Brittany in 1775, beginning there a long association with Bishop Jean-Baptiste de Lubersac that was to end in the diocese of Chartres. Sieyès appears to have been happy there. Though he attended every diocesan chapter meeting, he was never made vicar general of the diocese of Tréguier as he had hoped. More important for his later career was his attendance at the États de Brétagne, a proximate preparation for his maneuvering at the Estates General. Bastid says, “From this moment on, Sieyès embraced the cause of the people. He who disdained history, consecrated two notebooks to a study of the origins of the Estates General.”12 But the great preoccupation and disappointment of his early clerical career was his failure to become chaplain for the king’s aunt, Madame Sophie, in 1778. In a letter to his father, he said, “He [the bishop] is not thoughtful [délicat] enough to help me in any way that does not turn to his own profit....It is the only reason that can have caused him to fail to support me plain and simple, to miss the Madame Sophie appointment, to astonish all who know me.”13
The bishop and the canons of Chartres had different reservations about the man. Lubersac was overheard excluding Sieyès as a potential candidate for an office because he was not a “gentilhomme.” And by 1790, the canons of Chartres wanted him removed as vicar general: “In view of the scandalous principles spread throughout the writings of M. Sieyès, chancellor of this diocese, is it not appropriate to write to the bishop to ask him to withdraw his support from M. Sieyès and to rescind his appointment as vicar general of this diocese?”14 But this was 1790, and Sieyès had a high secular and political profile. In his formative years, religious life was philosophical life and he never envisaged religious activity as anything other than social and political action. One might say that the life and ministry promoted by the Council of Trent mutated into a purposeful living and political engagement, and this did not disqualify someone as a priest in Sieyès’s era. While at Chartres, he participated, naturally, in the ecclesiastical “chamber” in his area, but his political experience of the period came more from membership in the Orléanais provincial assembly.
Interpreting Religion
For Sieyès, religion was one small part, but an important one, of the great world of philosophy, economics, and political thought.15 According to Jacques Guilhaumou, “It is a matter of scattered remarks about religion, unexpected in the Grand cahier métaphysique but which send us to the ‘religious’ manuscripts of Sièyes, that are few in number but quite significant.”16 Sieyès did not ignore the abstractions of metaphysics and the problem of God, keeping over the years the aforementioned Grand cahier. First in line is Condillac and the sensing statue that engendered major discussion of the reality of the self and self-knowledge. Here, Sieyès enthusiastically worked out a philosophical position that owed less to French philosophy than it did to German and Anglo-Scottish empiricism, fashioned in conformity with Sieyès’s long-term understanding of language and rhetoric. At the end of the first half of the Grand cahier, Sieyès limns a set of religious reflections—dating, it would appear, from 1773. On the uselessness and usefulness of religion as such, Sieyès wrote, “Revelation of supernatural dogmas, useless,” and this, for two reasons: (1) the “revelation of truths that are useful in the arts and sciences” belongs to reason; and (2) the “revelation of moral precepts, or ways leading to happiness, founded on the nature of man and of physical laws,” are clear from observation and experience. Religion can be useful as part of an open natural learning experience, but in an informed and ordered society it is not necessary. In such a society, the individual is guided by a combination of self-interest and common interest, and needs no religious sanctions to get him to behave.17 Societies can actually eliminate religion and maintain morality by wholesome teaching about the meaning of human actions. If, however, society does want to make use of the religion in its midst, then that religion should be enlisted in “teaching the means of arriving at natural happiness.” For, on its own, natural religion “has no foundation; everything is false in the exposition and refutation of all that is said to belong to the worship of the divinity.” As far as revealed religion is concerned, Sieyès says that “nothing in all of that can be useful,”18 and that Christianity, in comparison with other religions, “has done the most harm”: “(1) by the dogmas to which people must submit in faith, (2) by its precepts and counsels, (3) because in replacing the natural motives for human actions it has annulled the force [of the actions], (4) by the ignorance of morality that it foments in forbidding the use of reason, (5) by its maintenance of ministers [of religion].”19
The most substantial text for viewing Sieyès’s unique combination of Enlightenment rationalism and vestigial religious sentiment, a formal set of reflections on God, is Sur Dieu ultramètre et sur la fibre religieuse de l’homme (On God beyond Measure and on Man’s Religious Fiber), written, in would appear, around 1780.20 In this work, Sieyès continues to decry “the revelation of useless supernatural dogmas” promoting “natural morality” as the “revelation of moral precepts or the ways leading to happiness.” Only this latter kind of religion is useful because here “man is guided by his own self-interest; in an ordered society, public interest results from individual interests, for which there is no need of religious sanction.” That Sieyès considered ethics to be religion at all is intriguing. He does hold out for calling some good behavior and attitudes “religion.”21 Condemning the standard philosophical and theological presentations of God, he searches for the only type of useful religion, the only God-reality. Although he refuses to promote full-fledged atheism, he sees clericalism as a major obstacle to the functioning of an otherwise healthy society: “Do not tolerate the existence of a clergy, by which I mean a corporation, for every corporation other than the open establishment of a large national alliance [association] is an evil in the social machine.”22
Disarmingly, Sieyès says that he is attacking the opinions of no one. He is only searching, and can make mistakes himself. This being a personal search, he is not trying to become the teacher of all. To the basic question, “Can I come to the knowledge of God without the aid of reason?” he offers sentiment as the alternative to reason and use of cognitive faculties: “Because I cannot understand God, nor come up with any ideas of him, I search to see if one can get there by sentiment.” God is unknowable and no amount of verbal dexterity can make it otherwise: “It is certain and acknowledged that no human idea, supposing even the most exalted, can attain God. You would add if you could infinity to all human faculties and imagining, and you would not have any better idea of God. We have here two different natures. It involves the existence not only of the unknown but of the unknowable.”23
The reality of God is found in the reality of the human being, for the simple reason that there is no reality outside of the world of human beings. Under these conditions, it makes no sense to Sieyès to negate the reality of God: God may be incomprehensible, but he is real.24 Of course, Sieyès would need to push further than this, because a reality in the mind does not necessarily mean a reality outside the mind, although philosophers from Anselm through Descartes to Kant have managed to get to the reality of God from this same starting point. But here Sieyès cleverly sketches a dialogue on the strengths and weaknesses of words to express reality. We note that the Q[uestioner] and the R[esponder] do not always play their roles; it is a mixed-up conversation, cited here at length:
Q. Are you an atheist?
R. What do you mean by that?
Q. In other words, do you believe in an intelligent, infinite, eternal, and immense being who is not nature, but from whom nature derives its temporal existence?
R. What a pile-up of words that do not bring any distinct idea to mind. All my reflections bring me back to the clear idea that I am only a human being and that any idea of the superhuman means nothing to me; that it is not even an idea. I can thus answer you that I do not understand you. But now let me ask you what patîma or other nonsense syllables might mean.
Q. Let us see where you want to lead me. All right, patîma is only a word.
R. This is the reproach I made to you when I asked what is God. It is only a word unless you explain it to yourself.
Q. But your word signifies nothing, whereas the name God doubtlessly signifies something because I deny his existence.
R. It will mean as much or as little as you wish. Can a word contain anything other than the ideas that you can put there? And can you put there anything other than human ideas? I can also mark with the label patîma a completely different range of ideas, or what I will name, following your example, ideas that are unknown; that is, I cover over as you did, an empty space...physical syllables that strike my ear without imprinting anything on, or recalling anything to, my brain.
Q then says that intellection counts more than desire here, without adding to the observation, but R continues on the drawbacks of any God discussion:
R. If what you understand is a reality, then why do you deny it? If it is nothing, then you have made a great discovery. You declare to me that by the word God, you do not mean anything real; I believe that. It is as if you said to me, “Nothing is nothing.”
Q. Well, we will soon not even be able to discuss this together. From your side of things, tell me what your thought is on God.
R. I would like to, even without hope of giving you satisfaction. I have, like many others and for a long time, talked nonsense about these matters and beaten about in empty space. The research was in vain. So I have come back to man as the central goal of philosophy, as the source from which every human activity proceeds.25
So, there is no concept of God that works. “God” is a nonsense syllable, and the search for ultimate meaning in human reality must start elsewhere.
The essence of the human being is found, however, in his or her needs, which are at the center of all human faculties. Sieyès concludes the section on “the needs of man” with this admonition: “Everything is there. Every search, every movement that does not go toward this goal is a false step, a loss of human strength. The need for subsistence, the need for protection against changes in the atmosphere, the need for social exchange, the needs arising from curiosity, the imagination, and hope. Man is, therefore, a being with needs. Around him nature has placed an infinity of concentric circles that are so many depositories open to his needs, open to the progressive development of his faculties and whatever is useful for life.”26 Here, then, hope expressed as God is the ultimate need of humans. If you stay with science and the material reality, thinking that you can go from the known to the unknown, you will never come to God as reality/idea.27 You cannot simply study the evidence: you have to pose questions and then arrive at some kind of state where curiosity rests; that is, you have to traverse those concentric circles of reality. The need to live, the need to ask, the need to know, is a drive that takes a person beyond any concept of truth: “It is not in the order of truths, but in the order of needs that I have placed myself....The order of truths must remain outside of every idea of God, it is true, but its necessity is visible to the human being in the order of his needs.”28
Our needs are useful, in that they lead us to the “beyond”: “Can we get something out of it for our own needs? Certainly if I am only speaking of the closest beyonds and not of the farthest, the response is indubitable.”29 Sieyès uses strange terminology whereby he assures us that the discussion does not shoot for the ineffable infinite. The “beyond” is outside human measure, but it can serve as some kind of goal: “Let us not dream of discovering the beyond, or discovering if there is a question of a true beyond, that which I can call God or what is better designated by the name of ultramètre, beyond human measure....Can the ultramètre be useful to our needs? I would like to respond with clarifications that will give you all my thoughts on the topic”30 Does an attempt to look beyond this world serve any useful religious purpose? “No,” answers Sieyès, “if religion kills the energy that has its own animation; yes, if it has added to and continues to add to this [energy].” Priests regularly kill the energy when they say such things as “your sufferings are the will of God.”31
God is attained through intuition and feeling, not through reasoning: “Everything that is not in the order of our needs we can reject, I see; but God felt and not conceptualized seems to be part of this order [of needs].” God is not a “rational truth,” which does not mean that he is in opposition to truth.32 There are parallels to other disciplines here. You can say that “God is heterogeneous to the order of truths,” but you can say the same thing about geometry relative to sentiment, about color or hardness relative to abstract geometric shapes: “Everyone carves out this notion in his own way; it [the notion] is relative to what each person can best believe.” God is “beyond all senses [hypo-sens],” beyond all goodness, beauty, virtue, knowledge, justice, and power.33 And yet in the end, God is a reality: “God is incomprehensible and unknowable, agreed. Thus he is a reality grasped by the sentiments.”34
In sum, God is at the heart of human action, human exchange, human goodness, at the heart of the action of the religious “fiber.” The God that is experienced, or felt, here does not interfere, however, with the progress of reason. He is the reality of goodness in moral activity. With Sieyès, the Frenchman, we see a teaching that presages German liberal religion and philosophy from Schleiermacher to Fichte.35 But for Sieyès it was a dead end, probably because with his lexical acumen there were too many elements within measuring distance and not ultramètre, especially politics and economics, that won his attention.
Political Commitment
Less than ten years later, in Qu’est-ce que c’est le tiers état? Sieyès promoted the political rehabilitation of the social majority, in effect, the entire population, apart from the clergy and nobles.36 Looking forward to the revival of the old parliamentary legislature, which had not assembled since 1614, Sieyès hammers away at the obvious: the legislature is divided into three Estates or houses, two of them (clergy and nobles) representing only a tiny portion of the total French population. The Third Estate, which ideally should be representing the commoners, would have at best a third of the political clout on the national scene. And Sieyès found that this derisory one-third of the legislative force was yet further limited by unfair voting practices.
Why did Sieyès want so much to rehabilitate the majority? Probably because he identified with the majority in its suppressed state, and avenging them certainly had to do, in part, with avenging himself. In his personal life, he had used the church as a stand-in for the broader society, and now, trying to make his mark in that broader society, he was working for all his compatriots. Sieyès placed the word nation in high relief in this (and other) writings, defining it in this text as “a body of associates living under common laws and represented by the same legislative assembly.”37 “What does a nation require to survive and prosper,” he asks, and he proceeds to enumerate the principal private activities that “support society.”38 Public services are the army, the law, the church, and the bureaucracy, and even there, with aristocrats and clergy so often in charge, it is the common people who do all the work. “What, then, is the Third Estate? All; but an ‘all’ that is fettered and oppressed,” because “the privileged have succeeded in usurping all well-paid and honorific posts.”39 There follows a tirade against the aristocracy which, “from infirmity, incapacity, incurable idleness, or a collapse of morality, performs no functions at all in society.”40 Aristocrats are a burden for the nation without being part of it. They hold themselves exempt from any common obligations and they have political rights distinct from all the other members of the population.
In his third chapter, “What Does the Third Estate Want to Be? Something,” Sieyès complains bitterly about the humiliating control of this estate by the aristocracy, even as he works on the primary theme of the Estates General voting methods.41 Instead of voting by head, so that a critical mass of commoner and commoner-sympathetic votes could be secured, the voting was to be done by orders. The First Estate with its aristocratic bishops dominating, and the Second Estate made up completely of aristocrats, would always outvote, two to one, the Third Estate. Consequently, “First claim of the Third Estate: that the representatives of the Third Estate be chosen solely from among citizens who really belong to the Third Estate.”42 It has been too easy for aristocrats, new and old, to be chosen by their districts, where they dominate the local people, as representatives in the Third Estate. And even if they do not go themselves, they can make sure that their Third Estate representatives do their dirty work. The “second claim” that Sieyès lays down is that the deputies to the Third Estate “be equal in number to those of the two privileged orders.”43 Apparently tolerant of the disproportions in representation that occurred in much earlier centuries, he is indignant that two hundred thousand clergy and nobles of his own day should be allowed to dominate twenty-five or twenty-six million citizens. Voting by head, then, is, of course, the third claim of the Third Estate: “It is quite certain that unless votes are counted by head the true majority may be set aside, which would be the supreme difficulty, since it would render legislation null and void.”44
Naturally, a government dominated by aristocrats could not fairly and successfully go about reform, even though they have at times seemed more eager for reform than have been the torpid members of the Third Estate itself. In his fourth chapter, Sieyès finds once again that the members of the other Estates can do no right. If they want to help, it is in their own interest. If they make a move to pay taxes, it will be so that the Estates General will not have to meet at all: “More likely, one suspects, the nobility is trying to hoodwink the Third Estate at the price of a kind of anticipation of justice, in order to divert it from its current demands and so distract it from its need to be something in the Estates General.”45 Other major examples of the unequal treatment meted out by the government are the use of taxes (to help poor nobility) and the tracking down and sentencing of criminals: “Who are the citizens the most vulnerable to personal harassment by the regular agents [agents de file] and by their subordinates in all parts of the administration? The members of the Third Estate.”46
Basic principles of operation and a statement of future agenda constitute the last two chapters. The nation is not part of some other entity; it is the whole. Consequently, the orders who stand apart from the citizenry are not part of the nation, and means for getting to and tabulating the population are essential. Another shot at the nobles, then: “There was once a time when the Third Estate was in bondage and the nobility was everything. Now the Third Estate is everything and the nobility is only a word.”47 He is chagrined that, even so, the aristocracy can pretend to a new authority, more repressive than the previous authority. The Third Estate has to be true to itself. It should not see itself as an order, one of three Estates. It is the nation, and “its representatives constitute the whole National Assembly.”48 More immediately, Sieyès’s expressed intransigence in discussion of the role of the Third Estate, equating it with the legislature, energized the Tennis Court scenario. Others, such as the comte de Mirabeau, feared going all the way, but on 17 June 1789 the Third Estate affirmed its identity as the National Assembly.
Henri Grégoire
Grégoire was born in the commune of Vého, which was once a province of the Holy Roman Empire known as Les Trois Évêchés, a region distinct from Lorraine proper. He complained that historical errors had led to misunderstandings about the entire western region of France, about Alsace-Lorraine in general and Les Trois Évêchés in particular. Yet he called Lorraine “our Lorraine” when he reviewed some of the hurts visited upon it from the Middle Ages onward.49 His earliest religious experience would have been colored by the Jansenism of his mother, who herself was simply following the local curé.50 Receiving his early education from the Jesuits, he clearly distinguished, in his Mémoires, the role of good Jesuits in his own formation from the role played by the whole order in church life. “I will carry with me to my grave a respectful attachment to my teachers, even though I do not at all like the spirit of the defunct society,” he wrote, in the belief that a revival of the society might well bring new problems to Europe.51 Youthful intellectual impressions stayed with him across the years. Antimonarchical texts such as De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione and Vincidiae contra tyrannos were the foundation of his antipathy to the monarchy of Louis XVI. And he never forgot how one elderly librarian responded to his search for books to “to amuse” himself with: “We only give out books here to learn from.”52
From Humanist to Pastor
Both Pierre-Joseph de Solignac, secretary of the Polish king, Stanislaus, and author of a five-volume history of Poland, and Canon Gautier, who had published studies in science and history, helped Grégoire in his early attempts at poetry. He said that he loved “the joyful allure [aspect riant] of the Vosges, made to stir up the imagination.”53 At Nancy, he studied one year of philosophy, and was then introduced by De Solignac to the “Jewish question” of the day. On to Metz for a second year of philosophy, a year of fundamental theology, and the lively influence of Adrien Lamourette, who believed that a return to the ways of the primitive Jerusalem church would bring about a golden age of Christianity. Antoine Sutter says of Lamourette’s early influence on Grégoire, “He not only hoped for regeneration and the primitive purity [of the church], he sang its praises, and his student was not deaf to the song.”54 Grégoire ended his studies with two years of dogmatic theology at Pont-à-Mousson under the abbé Sanguiné, who won him over to Richerism, with its exaltation of the priest’s role in the church.
In 1773, Grégoire entered a major essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Nancy with his Éloge de la poésie, recently cited by Alyssa Sepinwall as a capital text in distinguishing the early from the later Grégoire.55 Here, too, there was little religious reference, certainly no specific Christian religious reference, but in its engaged, perhaps overheated, aestheticism it parallels Sieyès’s philosophically engaged, perhaps overblown, discussion of religion. Poetry is his “faithful lover,” the embodiment of perfection because it conjoins usefulness and pleasure.56 Philosophical treatises, in contrast, have produced much less: “Philosophy persuades the mind and makes little progress; the poet leads the heart and wins over the person.”57 There is praise of Virgil, Homer, Corneille, and the muses, and condemnation of those he considered promoters of vice: Catullus, Tibullus, and Ovid. Biblical poetry is praised subsequently: “The most sublime poetry, the most majestic, and all the riches of the secular Muses will never equal it.”58 This was followed by virtually the only extended reference to God in the text: “Sometimes I see a merciful God who opens his hand, and the earth swims in abundance. Sometimes it is a terrible God who arms himself with wrath and makes the universe tremble from the sound of his lightning.”59 Grégoire invokes the great and ringing sounds of praise in the Temple and the laments of the Jews in exile: “I open David’s Psalms. What energy, what nobility, what images.”60 Nevertheless, as Sepinwall puts it, in this essay “Grégoire sounded like any classically trained young man using romantic metaphors.”61
In the Éloge, there is a non-moralizing appreciation of the tenderness of women: “To hold back the destructiveness of your charms, must we add oriental cruelty to our own ways.”62 There is also great discretion in talking of the depths of his soul. One assumes he is speaking of Christ in the following lines, but is he necessarily? “For a long time my wavering heart searched for repose in the bosom of a friend.” There were other bonds of love that he broke when, as he said, “I learned to discern a true friend from those muddied souls that have only the tawdry jewelry of friendship; after such effort, I found my dear J....[sic].”63 Grégoire exalts the role of poetry as a moral guide, but also shows its didactic importance in such diverse areas of life as astronomy, painting, and agriculture. Beauty is understood to be found in every area of life. He interpolates words of praise for Stanislas, father-in-law of the French king and ruler of the Les Trois Évêchés: “O Stanislas...an immortal crown is on your head, and the wishes of Lorraine are at your feet. The rare geniuses who have enlightened the universe are there.”64 Cultures and empires have celebrated and consolidated their greatness through poetry: Greece, Rome, the France of Louis XIV, and the Russia of Peter the Great. Fallen cultures, such as the Trojan, or even corrupt cultures can be later celebrated and valorized by the muses. Poetry can delight and transform the old as well as the young, and has something for people of all walks of life.
After ordination in 1776, Grégoire became preoccupied by the far-from-poetic abuses inherent in an aristocratic society. Witnessing the death of an old man who had masqueraded as a salt worker, the priest Grégoire was hardened against a regime that would hound the poor with a heavy tax on salt pits and streams. Prison life had killed the old fellow, “a poor octogenarian who had pulled up a little water to make his wretched soup.”65 As pastoral assistant at Marimont-lès-Bénestroff, Grégoire completely dropped his work in poetry for the sake of the great causes. When he joined the Société philanthropique at Nancy, he was constitutionally attracted to the 1779 Strasbourg concours of the society, using the occasion to prepare a report on the “Jewish question,” based on a study tour of parts of Alsace. Then he combined a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame des Ermites near Zurich with a study of Swiss democracy. He became the friend of the social work–oriented Protestant pastor Jean-Frédéric Oberlin of Ban-de-la-Roche, and then began a study of the treatment of Gypsies in Europe. His apostolate as curé of Emberménil, begun in 1782, remained for him the happiest and most fulfilling period of his career, serving his Catholic parish and working to know and understand the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Lorraine, concentrated in Metz, Nancy, and Lunéville.
Out of his own formation Grégoire fashioned a life and ministry that was priestly and pastoral in the tradition of the Council of Trent: there’s no question that he saw himself as mediator and teacher. If he wrote little about his celebration of Mass as a young priest, he exalted the values of confession, which “establishes in the Catholic religion relations that are more direct between pastors and the faithful than in societies that have suppressed this element of the sacrament of penance. In general, the confidence of my parishioners was such that if I had not placed some limits on their spontaneous revelations, they would have gone too far.”66
Regenerated Political Society: Jews and Christians
In 1788, Grégoire put together a treatise that promoted the acceptance of Jews into European society, with the accompanying training and restraints necessary to make this reform work.67 On the one hand, he insists that if these people are treated fairly they can fill all roles, accomplish all tasks. But on the other hand, he seems to accept all the old prejudices. Christian Europeans, he says, have contributed in no small measure to the physical, moral, and political plight of the Jews of his day, but the majority of the condemnations and criticisms of Jewish physical, moral, and political degeneration are valid. God has made them pay for their past sins. It is not for Christians to replay God’s vengeance, but to offer the Jews justice, charity, and the possibility of a happy life. The low estate of the Jews is not permanent: they can be regenerated.
To begin with, Grégoire evokes the destruction of Jerusalem and the persecutions in Europe. He makes the case that many Christian bishops, and the popes themselves, were defenders of the Jews against the murderous attacks of princes and populations. Wherever they have gone, they have been massacred, burned alive, victims of pillage and pursuit. The Jews have suffered the equivalent of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre hundreds of times. Grégoire does note, however, that here and there Jewish society did bring on persecution by its reprehensible behavior. And he does accept the notion that “the blood of Jesus Christ has fallen upon the Jews as they once desired: since the day of blood at Calvary, they have become a spectacle to all the earth as they wander across it looking for a Messiah.”68
More often than not, the Jews were made to suffer unjustly, “for imaginary crimes.”69 How could they, then, love their rulers, or the peoples who made common cause against them? They could only be jealous of Christians, whose religion has completely eclipsed their own. When you persecute a religion, you render it more precious to its members; they become more committed to the values for which they have suffered. Grégoire admits that Jews, like everyone else, are given to vice, but he lists also their many virtues, and he rehearses many persecutions they have endured, concluding that “in their place we would have perhaps been worse.”70
Then Grégoire paints a collective portrait of decadence and degradation, in which he lists a wide variety of dangerous, even murderous, rabbinical influences, with no real questioning or downplaying of reports he transmits. “What to conclude from all of this?” he asks. “That we must hunt down the Jews and destroy them: No! which clearly proves that we need to regenerate this people.”71 And thus, beginning with the perversion of usury and working down the list of their evil tendencies, recognizing that in the end their usury in particular resulted from the oppression they suffered. It is the “height of inconsequence” to reproach them for their crimes “after having forced them to commit them.”72 The many governments of Europe have taken away from them all other means of subsistence.
Enlightenment has already begun among the Jews, he says, citing the case of Moses Mendelssohn and the attempt to return to the purity of the law: “Already a number of Jews disgusted with rabbinical mess, prune away all the human additions to the law, without harming the truth of the basic principles.”73 The Jews must be formed in the arts and crafts, as well as in agriculture. In other times and in other places they have excelled in these things. Give them a chance, he says. Grégoire combines a language of safeguards against their supposed natural tendencies and a hope for community with Christians. Ensure a sensible education and solid moral training for them, surround them with good will, and “they will learn to love enemies too generous to be hated, and they will thereby acquire a [new] sociability, sentiment, and virtue, without losing the simplicity of their ancient ways.”74 Limits can be set on Jewish commerce, but, properly integrated into life, they will be in a good position to revive languishing areas of the economy. Grégoire proposes legislation that will be fair and yet keep them away from the types of business dishonesty to which they are prone. Let commercial transactions be done in cash, but allow for old debts to be paid. When Grégoire proposes to keep the Jews away from functions that will draw them back to the old ways, he adds, “For we should never lose sight of the character of the people we are hoping to set straight.”75 His project, after all, is regeneration, and not simple liberation. Opposing ghettos, he continues his argument that the company and goodness of Christians will have a salutary effect. They should be given freedom of expression, although those elements of Mosaic practice that would not be acceptable in modern government (e.g., stoning of adulterers) are not negotiable Should they be admitted to civil office, the nobility, the academies, education, and the ownership of buildings? Yes, to all the above, and he would permit Jewish/Catholic marriages if the children could be raised Catholic.
In sum, Grégoire preaches love and fraternity: “Children of the same father, eliminate every pretext for aversion to your brothers, who one day will be reunited into the same sheepfold; open to them places of refuge when they can peaceably lay down their heads and dry their tears. And may the Jew at last, granting to the Christian a return of affection, embrace in me his fellow citizen and his friend.”76
Across the months intervening between his full engagement with the Jewish question and his first weeks in the 1789 assemblies, Grégoire did not lose his central concern for Jewish regeneration. During the 13–15 July session of the Constituent Assembly, he reprised his ideas in a motion on behalf of the Jews, published and entered into the minutes: “Now allow a Catholic pastor to raise his voice on behalf of the fifty million Jews in the kingdom, who, being men, demand the rights of citizens.”77 As Alyssa Sepinwall puts it, Grégoire was “radically inclusive” as he developed his project of regeneration with successive attention to the rights of blacks and the status of women.78
Polarities of Revolutionary Priesthood
Polarities do not define “typical,” of course, but they do define a range of priestly types, from jobber through apostle. Clear in politics and primed for revolution, the abbé Sieyès had a minimal and mutated pastoral orientation. But he was a philosophical soul who made what sense he could of the religious sentiment, everywhere present around him. His Sur Dieu ultramètre was really a window on his formation in religious thinking, abstract and random in its meandering, and ultimately separate from his public life—separate with good reason, because it was not usable within the church apostolate of his day, revolutionary or otherwise. He undoubtedly knew this, and so had no other recourse but to minimalize as much as possible a formal pastoral identity of preaching and sacraments. It was not specifically as episcopal vicar of the diocese of Chartres nor as a delegate from the clerical First Estate that he primed for action the delegates of the Third Estate, of which he was surprisingly a member (thanks to his triumphalist pamphlet Qu’est-ce que c’est le tiers état?). After weeks of tension, members of the Third Estate, believing they were locked out of their regular meeting hall, adjourned to a nearby tennis court and proclaimed themselves the final arbiter in the formation of a new government—without really posing for David’s take on them, of course. Members of the clergy and aristocracy who were already reform-minded (looking for a constitutional monarchy or even a republican government) prevailed on the recalcitrant majorities of both their estates to come over to the new assembly, soon to be called the Constituent Assembly. Immediately the Committee for Public Instruction and the Ecclesiastical Committee began work on reform documents, recasting the old French unity of throne and altar into a new state and church relationship. The reworking of church and state came to be dominated by the abbé Grégoire, standing fast for a reformed Catholicism and a solid constitutional government.
Henri Grégoire arrived at Versailles in 1789 as the First Estate delegate from the bailliage of Nancy, already known as pastorally, intellectually, and politically engaged. His youthful preoccupation with poetry was an exploration of the religious sentiment that he straightaway, but with delicacy, labeled specifically Christian. Two years before the opening of the Estates General, he had already begun to meditate on a specifically Catholic Christian program for cultural transformation, because a transformed French Catholic Church could and should bring about the regeneration of the Jews of France and the rest of Europe. His election to the Estates General was an indication of his reputation for this engagement in church and society, although his first pastoral letters of the new decade and his later memoirs of the era are clearer indications of his specifically priestly qualities than anything he wrote before the opening of the Estates General. As fate would have it, however, the abbé Grégoire, priest and revolutionary, was taking his brief turn as secretary of the Constituent Assembly at Versailles when the Bastille was stormed and taken in Paris.
Catholic priests across the revolutionary years could strip down to the pure political secularism of Sieyès, or enliven their politics with Catholic Christian faith and experience, like Henri Grégoire. Preoccupied with their parish work, the curés’ engagement with political change began during the months of preparing the cahiers de doléances locally, and, for a limited few, participation in the Estates General and subsequent Constituent Assembly.
