Nearly fifty years ago, Canon Leflon wrote the life of Monsieur Emery, Superior General of St Sulpice, le petit prêtre, as Napoleon called him, who did so much for the survival and revival of the Church in France from revolution to restoration. 'Malheureusement', said the Canon, 'la vie mystique du XVIIIe siècle attend toujours son historien.' If the historian has arrived since then, 1 have not come across him. But Canon Leflon indicated for us the lines of enquiry which would help us to understand how the spiritual decline of the eighteenth century led to the religious crisis of 1789. He also said that one day we might know more of the underground source that came to light in the teachings of Père de la Clorivière and Père Grou and that kept the Church alive throughout the crisis.
If the spiritual life itself still awaits its historian, scholarship galore has investigated the factors that shaped and nourished it. This paper attempts to give an account, all too incomplete, of some of the work that has been done and of some of the lines of enquiry that might increase our understanding of the minds and hearts, of the plans, successes and failures of those who lived and handed on their faith in the circumstances of one of the most turbulent generations in the history of the Church.
When people say "There is peace and security', then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape. But you are not in darkness, brethren, for that day to catch you like a thief (1 Thess 5:3-4).
Surprises such as that of 1789 and its aftermath have so frequently been sprung on the Church that we should by now have learnt our lesson. It is dangerous to settle down to build episcopal palaces, seminaries to house hundreds, monasteries confident of their future. Visit, for example, the Abbey of Valloires, in the Somme, not far from Boulogne. In 1789 the Cistercians had just built themselves a great abbey church and attendant monastery, raising the funds from the felling of part of their forests - enough to pay for the operation, hardly enough to be noticed. In the church, baroque angels appeared to fly through the air (they were made of papier mâché,) and a built-in stove and flue made it possible to announce abbatial elections to the watchers outside in just the same way as papal elections are still announced in Rome. The Revolution came, the religious departed and only the grandeur of stone remains.
The opening words of Alexis de Toqueville's L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution (1856) provide a classic commentary on this theme:
No great historical event is better calculated than the French Revolution to teach political writers and statesmen to be cautious in their speculations; for never was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable and yet so completely unforeseen.
'So completely unforeseen': to quote de Toqueville again:
By and large - and despite all the obvious shortcomings of some of its members - there has probably never been a clergy more praiseworthy than that of Catholic France just before the Revolution; more enlightened, more patriotic, less wrapped up in merely private virtues, more concerned with the public good, and, last but not least, more loyal to the faith - as persecution clearly proved in the event. When I began my study of the old order I was full of prejudices against our clergy; when I ended it, full of respect for them (Collins/Fontana, 1966, p. 138).
As Olwen Hufton has said, the parish priest was 'arguably the most overworked individual in Old Regime France'.[1]
[1] 'The French Church' in Callahun, W.J. and Higgs, D. (Eds),Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the eighteenth centlury, Cambridge, 1979, p.24.
What had they done, these conscientious men, to bring persecution, imprisonment, exile and death upon themselves? Were they in darkness, that the day should 'catch them like a thief? In the most important sense, no. They were ready for whatever came. This is evident from their presence of mind and courage in coping with persecution and exile. [2]
[2] See Edwin Bannon, Refractory Men, Fanatical Women: fidelity to conscience during the French Revolution. (Gracewing, 1992). Among the French priests who made a new life for themselves by starting and building up parishes in England, the name of the Abbé Voyaux de Franous, who founded St Mary's, Cadogan Street, Chelsea, is exemplary.
But in another way, they were not able to discern the long-term forces, those factors so far back in the past, theological or otherwise, that had gone to build an unbalanced Church, a Church that had to undergo change in order to be brought more closely in harmony with the message it believed and taught. Can we distinguish in the way in which Christian faith was interpreted and lived, not only the strengths that always provoke opposition and that enabled believers to overcome it, but the weaknesses that contributed to bringing the events upon them?
It is, as we have seen, dangerous to settle down. Ambitious and impressive building programmes are so often the forerunners of disaster, as they were then: the episcopal palaces and the vast four-square seminaries that eighteenth-century bishops wanted to build for themselves if they possibly could.
For all de Toqueville 's respect for the clergy, the Church's influence was in decline. For an account of the state of the Church at the time, I recommend the first chapter of Robert Gibson's Social History of French Catholicism, 1789-1914, from which I would like to quote at some length (see eg p 15), because it puts forward a view that will need to be considered by anyone seeking to estimate French Catholic spirituality at the time of the Revolution:
It was not that the Church was particularly ignorant or corrupt. . . It was rather that this was the Church of the Catholic Reformation,... and it was trying to impose on the mass of French men and women a particularly difficult and demanding religion, a religion developed by and for a small urban elite. . . an intellectual's religion hostile to popular culture; it rejected the world as a vale of tears and a den of iniquity; it emphasised morality... rather than spiritual values; it was dominated by clerics... and it relied heavily on the threat of damnation to keep the faithful in line.
That is a view that may be overmuch inspired by a post-Vatican II mood that has led us to 'accentuate the positive'; but it sums up the verdicts pronounced these days by some leading scholars. In this paper, I would like to suggest that it needs further consideration. In making that judgement [3] about the pessimism and strictness of the eighteenth-century Church, have Robert Gibson and the authors on whom he depends listened too uncritically to one part of the evidence, that provided by Voltaire, Rousseau and their friends?
[3] cf. Gibson p.28, 'In many ways, Jansenism was not so much a heresy as the logical extreme of Orthodox Catholicism.' The perennial resistance of orthodox and official Catholicism to Jansenism ought at least to have won it the credit of not being tarred with precisely the same brush.
A very different view of Christianity was available at the time. Montesquieu, one of the great figures of the Enlightenment, provided what Lacordaire regarded as the finest apology for Christianity of the eighteenth century:
A religion which speaks to all the passions; which is not more concerned with actions than with desires and thoughts; which does not hold us bound by a few chains, but by innumerable threads; which leaves behind human justice and opens the way to another justice; which is so made as to lead us ceaselessly from repentance to love, and from love to repentance; which sets between the judge and the criminal a great mediator, and between the just man and the mediator a great judge [4].
[4] De l'Esprit des Lois, 24, 13. See Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu, 1961, p 352, a brilliant biography that sheds light on the whole movement of ideas at the time, and on the challenge of the Enlightenment to Christianity in particular.
But a positive appreciation of this kind was far from current in the predominating spiritual climate, which encouraged a facile confidence in the inherent goodness of the human race and its ability to live life happily without referring to any kind of supernatural end. Voltaire and Rousseau taught a religion without mysteries, without sin and without sanctions, a religion whose good and gentle priests shed sweetness and light all round them, and where all was harmony and ease, without the guilt and anxiety imposed upon us by the dogma of original sin and the severity of a Church that still held on to censorship, violent punishment and hellfire.
By exaggerating all the duties laid upon us, Christianity makes them unattainable and so useless (Rousseau, Emile, Book 5).
Trust in sentiment was enough; we had only to follow the promptings of our nature for all to be well.
Jansenism and a generalised policy of strictness in the confessional, with absolution frequently being postponed, led to widespread alienation from the Church. Not until the teaching of Alphonsus de Liguori had made its way in France in the early nineteenth century was a more pastoral and encouraging policy accepted. And quarrels over the intricacies of mystical theology contributed to its discredit.
An illustration may serve to sum up the atmosphere in which even the most learned and balanced of spiritual teachers found it difficult to make an impression; it indicates that teaching more representative of the classical tradition of the Church was then to be found, even if it was not sufficiently understood and appreciated.
As an eminent Sulpician heir to the teaching of the Ecole Franc, aise who was at the same time closely in touch with Carmelite spirituality, M. Emery published in 1775 a study entitled L'Esprit de Sainte Therèse. His choice of texts brought out the practical side of her teaching as well as the spiritual heights. He explained that 'she teaches us to give a spiritual character to our relations with the world and to make our spirituality human, however sublime'. The saints show that ' virtue is not unsociable, but rather by being all things to all men becomes attractive and accessible to everyone, and does not put off those who are not acquainted with her'.
In his presentation of St Teresa, M. Emery was therefore careful to omit anything that might alarm eighteenth-century taste, such as visions and revelations which readers would instantly dismiss. Even so, his efforts } did not entirely succeed. He sent his volume to a friend in Geneva. M. Bonnet, a student of natural history, who still found that there was too much mysticism in it:
The time has come when religion must show herself to us in that noble and majestic simplicity that has characterised her since her beginnings. Study her in the Gospel and compare the admirable picture of human perfection that you find there with those that are given in too many productions of the monastic spirit (op.cit. p.71).
To say that the Catholic Church asked too much of human nature is to make too sweeping a judgement; in spite of their efforts, the most reasonable of apologists still found themselves opposed in the name of a rationalism that excluded any kind of divine revelation.
Let us now look at some particular aspects of Church life: first at the sense of being a distinctive Gallican Church, then at the pattern of life adopted by bishops and priests, and then the Christology in the name of which they proposed to act.
In the first place, this was emphatically the Church of France, still holding to the Gallican Articles of 1682, a Church therefore with a strong sense of its own distinctive character as a local church owing respect to royal authority, which in temporal matters was not subordinate either directly or indirectly to Rome. The Catholic Church in France still revolved round the monarchy. The Sun-King, Louis XIV, had left his mark upon it. The alignment of monotheism and monarchy that began with Constantine had been strengthened in his reign, and although the sacred character of French kingship had suffered some blows at the hands of the philosophes and from the conduct of public affairs well before 1789 [5], it remained a living factor in Catholic minds, to emerge later in the service of Napoleon and of royal interests. There are never complete and lasting revolutions in human affairs, only breakdowns and realignment of forces. This was certainly true in France. At the Restoration, Philip Mansel has told us, the court of France was again the most splendid and influential in Europe. The raison d'etre of the Restoration court was to enhance the monarch's authority: 'In the chapel the gardes du corps presented arms when he entered, knelt down and stood up, and at the Domine Salvum Fac Regem' [6]. At the consecration of Charles X, the Archbishop of Rheims continued to defend the theory that royal power came directly from God to the King.
[5] See. for instance. Dale K. van Kley. The Damiens Affair and Ihe Unraveling (sic) of the Ancien Regime.1750-1770, Princeton, 1984.
[6] Philip Mansel, The Court of France, 1789-1830, Cambridge, 1988, 149-50.
The clergy who served both King and Church in 1789 had long been sharply divided into higher and lower echelons, between which there was a great gulf fixed. The long-standing predominance of secular culture over biblical exegesis in this matter can be seen in the Projet pour l'établissement d'un séminaire dans un diocèse (1651) of Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the Compagnie de Saint-Sulpice. Commenting on 1 Peter 2:9: 'You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart', he tells us that St Peter was there describing and listing the various Orders to be found in the Kingdom: 'The regale sacerdotium, the royal priesthood, resides eminently in the person of the bishops, and occupies the first place. After them he puts the clergy, whom he calls the gens sancta, 'holy and sacred persons assigned to the altars and to the worship of God. And finally he describes the whole body of the faithful in these words, populus acquisitionis, people acquired by Jesus Christ'.
The thought does not occur to him that St Peter was applying all three epithets to the whole People of God the 'chosen race', and not restricting them to particular groups within the People.
The reformation of bishops and priests as separate groups and on distinct lines by the Council of Trent rather reinforced than corrected this long-standing pattern of Church life, so that the seventeenth-century revival of Catholicism and its eighteenth-century consolidation had given France a church sharply divided by social class, justifying this situation by an appeal to Scripture.
In 1789, every one of the 130 bishops ruling the dioceses of France was of aristocratic stock. Their late nineteenth-century historian, the Abb6 Sicard, carefully points out that the absence of the particule de from the family names of six of them must not be taken to indicate middle or lower class origin; it was simply an eccentricity, permissible in persons of that class: 'Not one bishop, on the eve of the Revolution, blotted the rich escutcheon of the prelature'. The estates and incomes of bishops, their powers in local government and their recruitment from a particular range of families, identified the Church with privilege and political control. With the King and for the King, they were governing France itself, and not just the Church. When their rule was inspired by Gospel principles, its beneficent character could be recognised by all, including their ideological enemies, the philosophes; but their exclusive access to large areas of the national income and the equation they maintained between Catholic orthodoxy and political loyalty could only lead to conflict, once faith itself had been undermined. With the bishops one must include the other higher clergy: the abbots and abbesses, canons, vicars general and administrators of the most important sees, all holding their positions as of family right. Financially they could be far better off than the lower clergy, with incomes amounting to 140 times that of a curé, and 240 times that of a vicaire.
The benefices that the middle and lower class candidates for ordination hoped to secure left them far less privileged; this fact, and their un-der-representation in the government of the Church, left them ready to side with the Third Estate in 1789 and so helped to precipitate the constitutional breakdown.
The way to a bishopric in the second half of the eighteenth century was by appointment as vicar general to an uncle or a cousin in the episcopate as soon as one left the seminary; until such time as a vacancy occurred, a chaplaincy could be sought to one or the other member of the royal family. While the lives of a few were scandalous, many were conscientious administrators and some gave liberally to the poor and to institutions to help the poor.
But none took seriously the first duty of a bishop: to proclaim the Gospel. Engagement with the great body of secular and anti-Christian thought that was being built up in France and eventually became dominant in the French mind, leaving the practice of religion as a fagade ready for collapse, was not their métier. Neither the defence of Christian credentials and teaching nor the reformation of individuals or of society was undertaken by this aristocratic but unintellectual elite.
Les évèques enseignent un catholicisme presque sans dogme, les religieux vivent presque sans règle [7].
[7] Lestocquoy. He points out that the authors of diocesan histories of the time find very little to say about the prelates of the second half of the eighteenth century (op. cit., 229, 230).
When, however, they were faced with taking the oath to the Civil Constitution in 1790, all but four of the bishops refused. They had been ready to accept, indeed to bless, many of the changes brought in by the Revolution, but they also had the moral and spiritual strength necessary to stand firm on a matter of fundamental principle.
There was one thing that bishops and priests had in common, and that was their training in the seminary. The eighteenth century saw the provision of a seminary for almost every one of the dioceses of France. These buildings, making up a considerable part of the extensive construction programmes of the time, were above all dedicated to forming priests in their professional competence and in their consecration as beings separated from the world. General education, philosophical and theological studies, these were pursued elsewhere, in colleges and universities. The seminaries were for spiritual training, for acquiring a knowledge of Scripture, of the laws of the Church, of the administration of the sacraments; above all for conversion and for the acquisition of the way of life, the sentiments, the conversation and the exterior deportment of worthy priests.[8]
[8] Plongeron, op..cit, 56. In Sicard's words, speaking of the bishops, 'les fonctions du clergé et l'habitude de la representation, ont maintenu dans ses rangs la gravité des manières et la noblesse du port'.
The good priest, the bon curé whose care for his flock won the approval even of the philosophes, did not aspire to episcopal rank. He was not and did not expect to be a grand seigneur. He was a good priest because he was obedient and did nothing against authority, being reluctant to take on responsibility. A good priest did not act on his own initiative. He did not disturb the bishop, and he did not disturb the intellectuals either; since he looked after the servants, keeping them happy and contented with their lot, he had a useful place in the free-thinkers' scheme of things.
We have been looking at the social structure and the theology of Orders that limited and directed churchmen in their policies and their reaction to events. When we examine their Christology we shall perhaps be nearer to the heart of their spirituality, to the principles that most fundamentally controlled and conditioned their attitudes and judgements.
At a time when the Papacy was constantly in difficulties over the claims of secular powers to control the Church, Roman theologians used the image of Christ the King to support the Church's claim to temporal as well as spiritual power. In this they were opposed by the Gallican theologians, writing both against Rome and against the philosophes. Against Rome, they asserted the spiritual character of Christ's kingdom, and against the philosophes, who drew a portrait of Jesus as a seditious challenger of the established order, they defended his injunction to give obedience to Caesar. In both ways, royal authority was reinforced: kingship on earth was an emanation of the Kingship of Christ. In obeying kings, one obeyed God.
The authority of the Bishop of Meaux, with his Politique tirée de l'Ecriture Sainte (1675), continued to predominate among the Gallican writers and preachers of the eighteenth century. Bossuet's presentation of the Kingship of Christ and of earthly monarchs drew out particularly the theme of Christ's obedience. Jesus was 'a king who has come down from his throne'. Developing this thought, writers of the eighteenth century insisted that even an unjust power must be obeyed; the model set by Jesus required unconditional obedience to the established powers. The only limits placed to this obedience arose over resistance to the interference of the royal power in the rights of the Gallican church herself.
Jesus's authority was commended by theologians before the Revolution by pointing to his influence on society; the legal systems of Christian peoples had benefited from his teaching, and his defence of human rights had tempered the harsh arbitrariness of barbarian laws. The Abbé Bergier, in La Certitude des Preuves du Christianisme, used Montesquieu in support of the view that the Gospel is essentially opposed to despotic rule.
A minority of Christian authors entered into the spirit of the Enlightenment to the extent of arguing that Jesus was the defender of fundamental political rights. But in the last third of the century churchmen were more inclined to turn away from stressing common ground with the philosophes and to take up arguments based on injunctions to the ruler to win the reverence of his subjects by adopting a concern for justice, guided by the thought of the ultimate tribunal of God.
On the whole, then, Christian apologists and preachers set out to defend absolute monarchical rule, tempered by the king's awareness of God's judgement. But they qualified this teaching by expounding the theme of Jesus the benefactor, who has laid upon us the duty of doing good to others and has himself set before us an example of well-doing (bienfaisance, a somewhat diluted form of charity).
In the Discours sur la Cène that the Abbé Gros des Besplas pronounced before Louis XVI in 1777, he urged the king to be more active in concerning himself with the great mass of poor people in the kingdom and to take up a programme of social reform in their favour.
Concerned by the anti-Christian basis of the political and social aims of the Enlightenment, apologists pointed to the special role of the Church in society. In a Sermon pour l'Assemblée extraordinaire de Charité (1782), the Abbeé Boismont argued that if the reformers of the Enlightenment were to take away from the Church the handling of economic and political matters in which its influence had been exercised, they still could not take away the works of charity that the founder of Christianity assigned to its care.
Some Christian thinkers were prepared to go further, commending Christianity for its promotion of the values prized by the Enlightenment. The religion of the Gospel, they maintained, is the best way of freeing the Church from the abuses deriving from fanaticism and superstition. The writings of the Abbeé Millot, the Discours sur les Préjugés contre la Religion, of 1759, for example, show that one could think of oneself as a chrétien éclairé well before the Revolution, and seek to separate the Church from its alliance with absolute monarchy so as to promote toleration, liberty and equality as fundamental human rights. Among the writings on this theme is to be found Le Ciel ouvert a tout l'Univers, by a Benedictine, Dom Louis, who wrote to commend the English constitution and also to argue that the values taught by Jesus demanded an end to all compromises with secular power, including the Church's part in the censorship of the press and publishing.
Once the Estates General had been called, the challenge to meet the revolutionary demand to substitute popular sovereignty for rule by divine right could not be avoided. The Abbé Bergier reacted in a short work entitled Quelle esti la source de toute Autorité?, maintaining that absolute authority is of divine institution, and that Jesus by his own example of obedience had confirmed what was already the Old Testament teaching. He had indeed expressly repudiated the theory of popular sovereignty, for when the people wanted to make him king, he had eluded their efforts (John 6:15).
Another work, published in 1789, Maultrot's Origine et Etendue de la puissance royale suivant les livres saints et la tradition, interpreted that episode differently. It showed, first of all, that the people believed themselves to have the right to give themselves a king, and secondly, that Jesus wanted to indicate the spiritual nature of his kingdom, not to reject popular sovereignty itself.
In De la Religion Nationale, the Abbeé Fauchet accepted the revolutionary principle. Following Rousseau, he argued that laws are only legitimate if they are an expression of the general will. In states with a despotic regime - and he included the French monarchy in that category - where the law is the expression of the will of the ruler, revolt is not permitted, but passive resistance to injustice may be necessary. The strength of public opinion should be drawn on to replace the absolutist regime with one founded on the general will.
These being his premises, he maintained that the situation in France had arisen from a decadent theology that had lost touch with Scripture. The Old Testament shows the people giving themselves a king. In the New Testament (Matt 17:25-27 and 22:21), Jesus had taught that the Jews should remember their tradition of national independence and popular sovereignty, and not just a simple commendation of general obedience to the civil power. It was his concern for the true order of things for his people that had brought him to his death. He had condemned the revolt of a few as leading to bloodshed, but not the resistance of many that could replace out-of-date institutions.
A fuller survey than I have been able to provide is needed to do justice to the attempts being made at the time of the French Revolution to relate the teachings of the Gospel to the realities of social and political life. Those who suffered in the events of 1789 and after were not witnessing to a single view of the Church or even a single interpretation of the teaching and person of Christ. We may believe that the experience of the last two hundred years has given us a clearer understanding. But whatever the differences of interpretation that engaged their loyalty, the survival and rebirth of the Church in France and in Britain came about through the shared spirituality of two communities of exiles that was given expression in 1791 by the Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne, which I shall leave in its native French: Si dans le temps de calme nous avons été faibles; si dans les jours de la prospérité il nous est échappé des fautes, il est temps de les expier. C'est dans les grands malheurs que la foi se réveille. [Quoted in Aston, op. cit. p.246]