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Chapter Three

CLAUDE FAUCHET AT THE BASTILLE

Brilliant as a young student and pious as a seminarian, Claude Fauchet taught members of the nobility early in his clerical career, and even preached before the king and queen. Yet he championed the Revolution as a Christian enterprise by animating a powerful political circle and several political journals. He eventually became the high-profile vicaire prédicateur of the Paris church of Saint-Roche, appropriately responsible, then, in 1789 for the clergy cahier de doléances, and one of the electors who chose delegates to the Estates General.¹ A large minority of the Paris clergy, and a genuine majority of the clergy around Paris, eventually followed in his revolutionary footsteps.²

On 14 July 1789, Fauchet was a member of the deputation, sent by a Paris assembly headquartered at the Hôtel de Ville, to negotiate with the marquis de Launay, governor of the Bastille, in order to forestall violence and bloodshed. Although the story got about that he was in the front lines of the attackers, saber in hand, reports agree that he was a member and then leader of the two deputations that tried and failed to get through to the governor. Fauchet himself told the story during a funeral commemoration on 5 August for those who died at the Bastille. First, he had proposed the decree ordering the commander of the Bastille to turn over the place to the care of the city. He was then given the dangerous task of delivering it: “We flew across those perils; we placed ourselves beneath the blazing guns; with our entreaties we held back the desperate people who were vainly trying to get to the top of the battlements and the cowardly assassins who were raining down death upon them. We then handed over the pacification decree.” There he was, Claude Fauchet, “a legal expert, and a priest, accoutered only for peacemaking,” whereas “they responded with weapons of war.” Back he went with the others three times, and three times they were fired upon: “We stayed alive, by some miracle of providence.” Then a second deputation with a more obvious identification, a lowered flag, was sent with the same results. On the third try, he could only encourage his companions, “intrepid warriors, invincible soldiers of France, worthy of this great name which you justify by ranging yourself on the side of the fatherland to oppose its oppressors.”³ One year later, he added details about his narrow escape from death: “I saw the Bastille artillery fire at me, its murderous shells piercing my clothing and felling those citizens who were by my side; I did not fall back; I pressed on.”⁴ He was more precise about dates in the Journal des Amis at the beginning of 1793: “On 12 July, the people who had gathered at the Hôtel-de-Ville named me one of the principal officials of the insurrection. On 14 July, I wrote out and I myself carried the civil injunction to the governor of the Bastille, asking him to hand over immediately and without bloodshed that fortress of despotism; three times I braved outbursts that the artillery fired at me.”⁵ He saved his bullet-torn, long black cassock, subsequently seeing himself as “permanently at the Bastille.”

Later, as constitutional bishop of Calvados, Fauchet set his memories of the Bastille drama in a talk on the union of gospel and revolution: “The gospel, too, is incendiary. The liberator of the human race wanted to extend to all the earth the sacred fire of universal fraternity. He held despots in horror: he was their victim; he loved all peoples; he is their savior.”⁶ This, of course, makes Christ a victim of despotism and an authentic revolutionary. Fauchet is not promoting violence here, but “equality, fraternal love, and divine liberty.” In that first revolutionary community, the disciples were “brothers, friends, equals, and free.” Christ and his disciples, and the early Christian community, were a real republic, which “should serve, in the fullness of time, for a universal republic.”⁷ The great symbol of the triumph of the republican way was the fall of the Bastille, in which Fauchet, no humility here, played a key role: “My eyes have seen the battlements of despotism thrown over. My voice is strong with all the power of a great people, who have chosen me to be their voice and have ordered the destruction of the Bastille in the name of the law, the true law, or the general will.”⁸ Not that he led the siege, but that he voiced the popular will for its destruction. It was a sublime moment, not only in the history of France but in the history of the world: “National sovereignty was born on that day, and now is immortal, invincible from its first moment: all of France embraced it at that moment. All the tyrants in the world were unable to harm it, and it will actually swallow them up.”⁹

Priest and Politician

When he was ten years old, Claude Fauchet was sent to the Jesuits at Moulins for secondary school, where, the story was told, he preached his first sermon at age sixteen. At Bourges he went through all levels of seminary education, up to and including his doctorate. Jules Charrier describes him, then, as “a young man, kind to everyone, of pleasing manner, noted for the gentleness of his features and his athletic build, who was, besides, genuinely pious.”¹⁰ Like many other talented young priests from the provinces, he moved to Paris in search of greater openness and opportunities. In his sermons and writings he managed sound explanations of nature and grace, sorted out the moral complications of the Crusades, and in general gained a reputation for intelligence and eloquence. Before the king and queen he preached a theologically and politically unremarkable sermon that concluded with a prayer that in no way presaged the future enemy of kings. He received a substantial clerical income, but there is no record of lavish living: “Having a sensitive and generous heart, he could not see an unfortunate person and not help out.”¹¹

With talents recognized early in his career, Fauchet had both political and ecclesiastical clout that brought him into conflict with another high-profile ecclesiastic in the Constituent Assembly, his opposite number, the conservative abbé Maury. Fauchet was the rising star who was later elected to both the Legislative Assembly and the Convention. He was even asked to preach at the funeral of Philippe d’Orléans, father of Philippe Egalité. His principal theme was forgiveness of sinners and generosity to all. In several of his talks he rejected Jansenist notions of salvation, yet he also espoused a sort of Richerism in his enthusiasm for the story of St. Ambrose’s popular election to the episcopacy. He said, “I am completely dedicated to the Revolution; you will find me at it until death.”¹² He objected to the nobility’s monopoly of the episcopate, although he was able to make sense out of the life of an Old Regime bishop. In the presence of the king he had preached a concern for the poor using, ten years before the Revolution, the words people, freedom, and fatherhood.¹³ Contemporary enthusiasm for his preaching may have derived somewhat from its social character: “Voltaire himself, if he could have heard him, would have embraced him and cried out, ‘I am a Christian.’”¹⁴ It is clear from his writings that the social and economic welfare of people was at the heart of his morality.

On National Religion

Jules Charrier called De la religion nationale a type of manifesto of Fauchet’s orientations on religion, philosophy, and the economy.¹⁵ Like most of the tracts of the times, it lacks philosophical originality and narrative grace, but has—Fauchet was a deservedly esteemed preacher of the period—a certain rhetorical flourish. To begin with, he says, “in order to have full rights of the citizen, one must profess the national religion,”¹⁶ which, ratcheting it up a notch, means “one is a citizen, that is to say French, to the extent that one is a Catholic.”¹⁷ The first part of the book deals with the vital importance of religion in supporting the “laws” against human passions, here meaning in particular the rule of law as protection against the passions of tyrants and crowds. In the second part, he analyzes the “combination of the laws of the Catholic church with the laws of the temporal power.”¹⁸ Here Fauchet considers public need and religious orders, universities, appropriate titles for bishops, the value of celibacy, and most of all, the role of the government in the choice of church leaders. The third part of the book takes on the relation of religion to the temporal order embodied in civil law, a jumble of issues having to do with tolerance, agrarian law, marriage law, paternal authority, legal successions, the theater, and Sunday rest. Here, too, he defended freedom of the press.

People have the right to choose their ministers. Fauchet privileges the assemblies of the faithful, based on the historical commonplace that orderly, fair elections were the norm in the early centuries of Christianity. But of course, simple elections could reinvigorate the French church at all levels, limited as it was by the top-heavy aristocratic domination of all areas of public and private life. Fauchet’s promotion of elections—in particular elections of bishops—came to be the norm in the new Constitution of the Church. A principal target of his work here was the Concordat between Pope Leo X and King Francis I that gave the monarchy such great control. As a countermeasure, Fauchet proposes a structure for episcopal elections, with all parts of the diocese getting together to propose three candidates, the king choosing one of them, and the pope providing “canonical investiture.”¹⁹ Fauchet gives the king a substantial role even in the elective system because he believes monarchs have a good chance of rising above local intrigues. The pope simply gives rubber-stamp ecclesiastical approbation. The state, then, has a considerable role to play in controlling the abuses of religion, but it does not have arbitrary authority. Religious properties cannot be taken away, for example, when church people are in proper exercise of their apostolate. But the multiple benefices of former days must not be allowed any longer. Neither bishops nor pastors should have elaborate living quarters. In fact, amid all the bells, costumes, and trinkets, the only objet of any importance is the bishop’s cross.²⁰

Religious orders, too, must show goodness and simplicity, and be useful to the faithful. Fauchet gives high marks to the Trappists and Carthusians for their continuing fervor. Seminary education must be pruned of its arbitrary strictness and promotion of puerile thought and religious routines. And the theology programs of the day only encourage the rush for degrees in order to secure a better position in the church. Exalted titles of all sorts should be dropped, beginning with Monseigneur. For all his radicalism, Fauchet was a defender of celibacy, consistent in that he believed celibates could be more at the service of the people, “since their love is not concentrated inside their house.”²¹

The Political Dialogue

Fauchet focused on the everyday qualities of life, love, and truth in his journal Bulletin de la Bouche de fer, named for a letter box placed on the publication-office door of his political society.²² His first address to the Confédération universelle des amis de la vérité presented what he took to be real religion to his political colleagues, beginning with a frank look at the problems caused by religion. Whereas religion should have softened intolerance, liberated thinking, strengthened virtue, and brought happiness, in fact religion has been divided against itself, tormented consciences, and been a source of great unhappiness. In reality, “there can be only one true religion, that which says to men, ‘Love one another,’ and which gives them the most gentle and powerful motives for accomplishing this unique duty. This religion exists; it is eternal as is the law of love; men, separated from one another by the laws of discord that rule empires, have not known it. It should be shown to them in its chaste nudity and in its pure truthfulness; and the human race, taken with its divine beauty, will adore it with one heart.”²³

In a second discourse published in Bouche de fer, Fauchet opens an enthusiastic dialogue with Freemasons, increasingly favored targets of clerical Catholicism. First he distinguishes between good and bad in masonic membership. At its best Freemasonry is an experience of a “living light” and “great fervor,” even though for some it can lead to an unfortunately phony vision and unruly imagination. But Fauchet emphasizes the good: “The real composers of the ancient and new mysteries of the lodges are the sure friends of humanity, who aspire only to the happiness of a universal regeneration and who must reach for it by the worthy means of the height and beauty of their hopes.” Nevertheless, he recognizes that the others are dangerous, not so much in their goals as in the means they choose: “Superstitious corruption, terrible destruction, and mighty ruins seem necessary to them in order to erect the temple of concord and harmony.”²⁴ Evil men, who are “false interpreters of the masonic allegories, and who have loaded them with hateful symbols, and with horror-filled trials,” are in the shadow of virtuous men, the only ones who count.²⁵

Fauchet admires the Freemasons, finds their goals of universal religion and reorganization of society to be the same as his, and appreciates the friendship and belief in God that they preach. And so he owes them an explanation of his reasons for not joining: “Venerable brothers! Worthy friends of mankind! I have not wished to, nor ought I to have been, initiated into your mysteries, because the truth of them escapes me...but I know enough to be sure that none of you can deny the facts that lie at the base of your doctrinal traditions.”²⁶ He could not follow them in their explanation of the great mysteries and in their secrecy, then; but he certainly gives his full support to their effort to improve the lives of people everywhere. By saying that they will be the “patrons of humanity everywhere on earth,” he is clearly hoping for their worldwide success.²⁷

Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself, “the great genius who has rendered such a great service to humanity,” was not a nemesis for Claude Fauchet, who seeks a balance between the “social contract” and Christianity.²⁸ Love of all people, the creation of laws that benefit them, these were Rousseau’s themes, but Fauchet finds that he is misused, no longer properly understood. Other great writers share his lot, but Rousseau least of all deserves this fate: “We could submit to the same test...Montesquieu, the weighty Mably, the eloquent Raynal, and all the profound legislative writers: but Rousseau suffices, for he has said in substance all that is best in the best authors who have spoken on law.”²⁹ Of course, for Fauchet the gospel is the great message and the great text, because it gives human love its divine quality, and maintains a special type of equality among all peoples because it makes of them a human family under God: “It is the only religion in the entire world that has this ultimate basis.” But it is a less ecumenical Fauchet, who says in the next sentence, “All the others are exclusive, hateful, and alien to our views of full concord, just as they are [alien] to the true well-being of men.”³⁰

In another discourse on the same subject, we find a different, even highly critical, view of Rousseau, noting that Voltaire, too, had major criticisms. Fauchet’s respect for “the great man” stands firm, but, as for his ideas: “We will not adopt them because of the genius of his speech and our belief in his importance. We will examine them in their own right, with as much impartiality as if the author were unknown to us.”³¹ Fauchet’s problems with Rousseau do not seem to come from his own immersion in the gospel, but from a very positive philosophy of revolutionary fraternity. He finds “inexact” the Rousseauian axiom, “Man is a loving being by nature and finds his happiness only in fraternity,” and the conclusions Rousseau draws from it, that family is the only natural society and is such only to the extent that each individual enjoys full development, are “completely false.”³² On the contrary, says Fauchet, “man never ceases to relate to his fellows by natural means; and it is universal relationships out of nature that constitute the true unity of society.” Otherwise, society could not exist and people would “vegetate, isolated in the forests.”³³ He then proposes his own philosophical program to go beyond Rousseau, social philosophy with a Christian ethical base: “The whole series of principles of natural sociability, which do not stop at all with the family in society, as Rousseau neglected to say, but which, on the contrary, extend, always in the order of nature, to the city, to the nations, to neighboring peoples, to all men, to the university, and unto eternity.”³⁴

Responding with positive warmth to the radical revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots, Fauchet appears to find a kindred spirit. In his writings live “the spirit of liberty and love of men” that is expressed with “a most proud and ardent eloquence.” Fauchet tells Cloots that his “good opinion of me was correct; the present persuasion that is unfavorable to me is fortunately without basis, and your fairness will bring you back to your first viewpoint.”³⁵ With Cloots, Fauchet plays the master diplomat, or the man of great openness. Certainly he is inclusive: “I love good Jansenists, good Quakers, good Protestants, good Masons, good men, and finally, all the truly good in nations, religions, viewpoints, and societies.”³⁶ There is truth everywhere and he cherishes the truth. He explains, too, why he is a constitutional bishop: “You will find me always ready to use my feeble talents to work with others for the well-being of men.”³⁷ Modestly, perhaps a little too modestly, he adds that others could do it better but that he will do his best.

Praise of Voltaire and his work here is a striking example of Fauchet’s use of all that is good. Voltaire had great talent and worked for people, “despite his errors and pretensions.” Fauchet’s admiration was realistic: “As wonderful as he was, he was a man; and the men I admire the most I do not adore.”³⁸ He dares to label Voltaire an “aristocrat” (in society and literature), because it is a simple historical fact, and so the statement cannot be offensive in any way. Assuming that he and Cloots are in cahoots on this, Fauchet criticizes Enlightenment intellectuals (probably because they were so little concerned for the people) and praises the Freemasons: “I am at as much of a remove as you could be from the Illuminés of Germany, in Prussia and elsewhere, who live by such cruel illusions.”³⁹ If they are Freemasons, then they are disfiguring Freemasonry.

Fauchet repeats for Cloots his conviction that Christianity is a religion of total love, found in the gospel and nowhere else. It is only theologians who merit the antagonism to religion: “It is not the small and barbaric religion of the theologians that I profess.”⁴⁰ He prefers the unbeliever to the theologian, because “the first can use natural rectitude in controlling sentiments, in a way different from the second who no longer listens to nature and sanctifies his fanaticism by his zeal.”⁴¹ This is why he can work things out with Cloots, a man of honest sentiment who goes by the natural law (“for lack of the gospel”), and who is incapable of any dissimulation. The fanatical theologian, however, twists the gospel for his own ends, and here Fauchet offers no explicit criticisms. Fauchet’s “universal religion” embraces all people of goodwill and hopes for the repentance of others. It is a religion of kindness and goodness, and Fauchet is happy to proclaim in conclusion, “Noble Cloots, you have it deep in your heart.”⁴²

The Constitutional Bishop

Biographer Charrier was always ready to decry Fauchet’s faults and see all opposition and dislike in a positive light. Thus his election as constitutional bishop was seen as a combination of default and self-promotion: others were not interested in the position, few people wanted Fauchet, but he pushed his candidacy just enough to get through. In fact, Claude Fauchet had a number of qualities (elsewhere noted by Charrier) that made him a proper candidate, even a very good one. He was one more constitutional intellectual who had a good preaching reputation and was politically engaged. Passing through Lisieux, Caen, and Bayeux in taking charge of the diocese of Calvados, he met with a much more positive reception than had some of his colleagues in the constitutional episcopacy. There were many receptions: the official departmental reception, the municipal reception, and especially receptions in the clubs. By this time, Fauchet had worked his way into the good graces of the Jacobins as well. His political position was probably more stable than his ecclesiastical position. True, given his competence, the refractory priests were not in a position to degrade him; but there was formal opposition, including condemnation by the Old Regime bishop of the region. Even Charrier admits that Fauchet cut a fine figure at that time: “Attractive in appearance, manners that, for all their exuberance, did not exclude dignity; with an open and generous heart, he exercised a great power of seduction over those around him.”⁴³ For all his intellectual and personal flash, Fauchet was still preoccupied with his image as a worker in the vineyard, dedicated to the improvement of everyday life for the simplest people.

At the beginning of his first pastoral letter, Fauchet reminds his people that they have a special relationship with him because they elected him: “Your will brought me up to the top rank of your pastors; it will put me down if I do not fulfill your goals.” He claims to function at their beck and call and goes so far as to say that they represent for him “the voice of God”—in the elections.⁴⁴ Proper, then, to review the history of election in scripture and the early church. It was the election process that set St. Peter straight, and it would be the election process that would set straight the church of France. Fauchet gets a bit ahead of his argument here, because Peter, he has to admit, was appointed directly by Christ and mandated to strengthen others in the faith. But with a little spin, Fauchet gets a version of Peter, who is converting to the beliefs of the brethren and so strengthening them: “Brought back to the common faith of the brethren, did he not adhere to and confirm their beliefs?”⁴⁵ The role of the brethren in maintaining Peter in his high office is definitely clearer in later events (no spin needed here). The scripture story has Paul admonishing Peter for his insistence on observance of the Mosaic law. And, far from resisting, Peter had a special love and gratitude toward Paul from then on. “With what admiration, what modesty, what tenderness, he spoke of the teaching of his very dear brother Paul!” says Fauchet.⁴⁶ All this means, of course, that those exercising the Petrine Office—the popes—should be like Peter, who insisted that “pastors should form their minds and hearts at the good pleasure of their flock, and thereby become for all the faithful a model of wisdom!”⁴⁷

Fauchet believes that the malaise in the church runs deep. But working with governments could keep churchmen more effective and honest: “Public order and common sense share the same space, and observation is necessary for any concerted and harmonious effort.”⁴⁸ Churchmen have true authority and should be consulted, to be sure, but consulting the church produces fewer good results when its organization is faulty. One must be wary of the bishops. It is one thing to accept their divinely guided teaching: there they had to monitor themselves, “because the entire church would have rejected them, and the Holy Spirit would have inspired the truth in people’s souls, to constrain the majority of pastors to the doctrinal infallibility they owe to the guidance of Jesus Christ.”⁴⁹ But their organizational programs have been utterly selfish and self-serving—and unsuccessful. And here Fauchet takes off on Trent, a council that was more interested in correcting Protestants than in correcting abuses in the church, all of this due to “papal despotism and the aristocratic rule of the bishops.”⁵⁰

The National Assembly, then, is the means of correcting the chronic problems of overextended church authority: “The consent of the people, a consent always expressed in the old laws, is it lacking in the new decrees of the National Assembly, which is today bringing the clergy to its original form?”⁵¹ In fact, it belongs both to the “essence of the church” and to the “substance of the nation” to work together for the preservation of “gospel truths.”⁵² And Fauchet urges the people to keep bishops in line. The bishops would never do it on their own, most recently showing their intransigence by stubborn resistance and even flight from the country. He further proposes that the people must be assured that the new constitutional episcopacy never sink to the ways of the Old Regime. Their consecration secures divine authority, but “it is from you, dearest brethren, from you who are the family of Jesus Christ and his faithful people, that they receive the right orientation in the use of this divine power.”⁵³

Claude Fauchet was elected to the new Legislative Assembly some months after the publication of his first pastoral letter. There, he took a strong stand against the refractories, although this antagonism may have been tied to a personal vendetta against the minister of the interior, Jean-Marie de Lessart, reputed to be sympathetic to the refractories.⁵⁴ He also praised the restraint of his Comité de surveillance (in Calvados) in contrast to a smaller comité in Marat’s commune (in Paris). A contemporary reporter, knowing that Fauchet could bring tough politics into church, was surprised to hear at Notre-Dame a “very mystical sermon that could as well have been preached in 1400 as in 1791.”⁵⁵ To the chagrin of constitutional colleagues, he was still in favor of a lavish episcopal guard.⁵⁶ His pastoral letter of 1792, written one year after his installation as bishop, began with a clever résumé of the church–state ideas he had come to espouse across the years, beginning with the supremacy of the gospel as “the only religion of holy liberty.”⁵⁷ It is true that the human passions have caused major harm, but they will never gain universal control, because they “will only make people seek refuge in the true religion.”⁵⁸ Fauchet pairs republic and church works at every turn: “The more the pure light of reason is propagated in the human mind, the more evident will be the great principles of religion. The more the taste for republican virtues and universal fraternity win hearts, the more will the need for evangelical Catholicism make itself felt in all souls.”⁵⁹ In the design of providence, the rule of reason will serve the gospel and the good of the world. But ultimately reason will fail, and then there will only be the gospel: “[The human race], feeling itself torn apart again by the terrible anarchy of the passions, and by the impotence of reason by itself, will turn toward heaven and find...the peace brought by virtue, the bond holding people together, and the happiness of the universe.”⁶⁰ In government, then, let all support the rule of law.

Fauchet never doubted the evangelical advantages of a revolutionary government, and in the Convention he would pursue his alliance with the Jacobins in a final attack on the king—although a regicide he was not (see chap. 6). One of the earliest influences on his religious program, however, was Adrien Lamourette’s theology of the church, which must now be seen in its setting.