The University of Texas at Arlington French Catholics, the Church, and Belief History 5331 Jason Carr "The tragedy of the eighteenth century lies, indeed, not in its wars, nor in the journees of the Revolution, but in the dissolution and reversal of the ideas which had illumined and dominated the seventeenth." Pierre Gaxotte. "The Enlightenment as Doctrinaire, Irreligious, and Conspiratorial."<1> The Gaxotte statement is important; he has stumbled accidentally on top of a critical idea. The importance of the French Revolution is lost by those who study carefully the "wars" and Days of the revolution. The violent reordering of French society was a sensational manifestation of a deeper, more nebulous reality. The certainty of life under a Divine Right king had slipped away, and the French were left with a system based on a morally imperfect king and an intellectually restrictive church. The French "master fiction" had broken down.<2> The need for structure still existed, though, and this frustrated need expressed itself in the violence of the Revolution. This paper intends to provide a backdrop for the revolution, to illustrate the spiritual milieu in which the Revolution occurred. The events of the Revolution are to be considered of secondary importance, if even that. The core emotional animus, or depth ontology (to mutilate Heidegger) of the events is the reality of that concerns us. This method was influenced by Lynn Hunt's assessment of events as a "symbolic system related to the revolutionaries' general political aspirations and hopes."<3> The "desacralization" of the monarchy will be briefly glossed before pursuing the relationship of French Catholics to the Church in Pre-Revolutionary France.<4> This will provide a useful, if flawed, handle on French needs at the outbreak of revolution. The French Cultural Frame<5> The French revered the memory of their good kings almost to the point of personality cult. The emotional and traditional baggage tied up in the monarchy was overwhelming. The coronation ceremony will serve to illustrate. The Holy Ampulla of Clovis provided part of the oil for the anointing of the king's person, and the king participated in the glorious past by wearing Charlemagne's sword and crown. He was given "the ring that symbolized indissoluble marriage with the kingdom."<6> This ritual " . . . bound the French people as a whole to the God of their ancestors and illustrate their veneration for their collective past."<7> The king himself, preparing himself for the coronation rite, could not remain unaware of precedent: the king went to mass at St. Peter's, and as he knelt in prayer before the alter [sic] Pope Leo set a crown upon his head, while all the Roman populace cried aloud, "Long life and victory to the mighty Charles, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans, crowned of God! [emphasis added]<8> Thus we have a steadfast believer in the eighteenth century professing that "God himself had designed society in the abstract and the society of the ancien regime in particular."<9> This system works as long as the weak link (the king) in the king-God partnership holds up. But Enlightenment philosophy was eating away at the idea of king representing God on earth, and installing the idea that the king was the representative head of a social contract involving all citizens. The old system, "one that needs no justification," breaks down when justification is demanded by philosophy.<10> Weak Kings Louis XIV hammered the monarchy into absolutism, the extreme form of divine right monarchy. He seems to have consciously attempted to [eliminate the Protestants], to abase the pride of the nobles, to bring back all [the king's] subjects to their duty, and to elevate [the king's] name among foreign nations to the point where it belongs.<11> Louis XV and Louis XVI did not have the power to state "L'etat, c'est moi." The French were already running in that mode, however, and the French national myth began to lose force when headed by profligate kings. In an almost Arthurian development the degeneration of the King affected the spiritual health of his country. Cobban noted that Louis XV inherited a position that was "beyond his capacity."<12> It was not so much that he was Louis XV as the fact that he was not Louis XIV. The Sun King set up an absolute monarchy that no one but he could handle, and that was impossible for successors to dilute without contradicting the great king. Louis XV was not unaware of his relative powerlessness: At my coronation I acquired the gift of being able to be the instrument of the grace of God for the curing of scrofula, but for this I must be in a state of grace myself, and it has been some time since this has happened.<13> The ironic distance between the sanctity of the coronation ritual and the personal character of the monarch was not lost on the people. Because of the identity of the person of the king and the cultural frame of reference any monarchial failing was serious. When the king was not beyond suspicion everything else became suspect. The French people . . . voiced skepticism about the miraculous power attributed to the king but also dismissed the legend of the Holy Ampulla as a fraud, characterized the twice- anointed Pepin as a usurper, and even condemned the fanatical crusades of Saint Louis.<14> Here the danger of the situation is apparent. The powerful mythic system was destroying itself because of the weakness of the king. Religion was carried down in this destruction. Catholicism was showing signs of strain and abandonment. Weakened by it's ties to a failing monarchy, the Church saw its role as cultural anchor dissolving. The remainder of this paper will deal with the relationship of different classes of French Catholics to their religion. Frenchmen and the Catholic Church The seventeenth century was a period of intense pious (counter-) reformation on the part of the Catholic Church. Following tenets set down by the Council of Trent (1545-64), priests were being formally trained in seminaries, lived less secular lives, and tried to revive an atmosphere of respect in their parish churches.<15> The church was trying to suppress low forms of Catholicism, to impose orthodoxy on the parish churches: "The shock troops of Tridentine catholicism were a new a reformed clergy. This was a clergy trained in the seminaries whose foundation in each diocese had been decreed by the Council of Trent."<16> These priests were often from the parish itself, and this may have caused a problem of overfamiliarity with the flock. The church was highly interested in disengaging the priest from all lay activities (economic, sexual, or recreational) and to create a model in which the clergyman's identity would be shaped by his attachment to the Church hierarchy and ecclesiastical society rather than to the secular society.<17> The Church realized there is a bond between the parishioners and the cur‚ that may interfere with the Church's interest. Even with this new focus on the solemnity and seriousness of the cur‚ and his parish church, there were troublesome developments. The sense of church as inviolable sanctuary in the Old Testament sense was weakened.<18> Peasants and the Church The world was still a scary place for peasants. It was filled with supernatural presences, ghosts and demons. The peasants were highly superstitious and mystic, and "still feared witches."<19> The fear of the supernatural was perhaps not so severe, however, as in the seventeenth century which was "for old half-demented women . . . the most perilous age in European history."<20> The peasants held onto pagan beliefs relating to all areas of their lives.<21> Crosses were planted in fields, bells were rung in rainstorms, devils were cast out. It seems that the local clergy were overwhelmed to some degree by the omnipresence of this pagan influence. Notes Gibson, ". . . the clergy was often compelled, or even happy, to add a Christian gloss to ancient pagan practices connected with the crops, fertility and healing."<22> Other cur‚s were not so accommodating. One derided the "mistaken zeal for religion which intrudes itself everywhere, and principally among the simple, the feeble-minded, common folk, women, the super-pious."<23> It was sometimes possible to regulate to some degree the social and religious life of the misguided if you could group them together after hours. This manipulation was often easiest through the establishment of confraternities. "Confraternities were . . . chief devices of the clergy for maintaining a sense of religious discipline and controlling and refining manifestations of popular piety."<24> Unfortunately, membership in these confraternities dwindled during the eighteenth century, and those that survived underwent a perversion towards a social, secular orientation. Gibson saw this as a natural evolution, a reaction to the popularity of fraternal groups such as the Masons.<25> <26> Even when the priest could keep the people herded into loosely religious groups, there were real concerns about the peasants' understanding of Christianity, including such complex problems as which came first, God the father or the Virgin Mary. Amazingly, some of the believers got this one wrong.<27> Subtleties, such as that of One God in Three Persons, were routinely mutilated by the peasants. It is safe to assume that the intricacies of predestination versus free will were not the suppertime topic of discussion in the peasant's house. The theology was not important. The details worked out by apologists are not of great concern. What was important was the cultural frame, the system that "endowed the critical moments of life with a transcendental significance, celebrated the sense of unity of family and community, and reinforced an overall cosmological order and wholeness.<28> It is when the peasants and cur‚s come together for worship or ceremony that things really get interesting. From above we have a legalistic, pious orthodoxy seeking to assert itself, and from below there is lusty, vibrant Catholic/pagan syncretism bubbling up almost uncontrollably. The holy Processions and masses could get rowdy: . . . the mass was a time for socializing, which meant gossiping eating, drinking, wandering about in the nave during the liturgy; cemeteries were social centres, for dancing and carousing; baptism and marriage were social festivals as mich and more than they were sacraments; religious processions were village outings or picnics; religious festivals were occasions for feasting and fornication.<29> An ecclesiastical observer asked, "does it not seem that one is watching bacchantes and savages rather than Christians?"<30> It must have seemed that way. And it certainly didn't help to have the parishioners interrupting the service or getting in the way. It was believed that " . . . women who inserted themselves into ecclesiastical processions among the priests would be cured of fever."<31> Worse, the behavior of the flock sometimes crept into the shepherd. A small example of bad habits among the cur‚s: snuff stains were "not uncommon" on the cassocks of the rural priests. Again, the bond between parish and cur‚ evidences itself even if in poor behavior. The cur‚ was one of the locals, granting requests to bless fields, houses, cast out demons and the like. There was, however, a sociopolitical bond between the parish and the cur‚: both resented the luxurious lifestyle of the bishops and those higher up in the hierarchy. The peasants knew that they were paying a tithe and that their cur‚ was seeing very little of it. Only in the West did the local church get to keep any great amount of the tithe. Even in this situation, where the cur‚ was able to live something of a privileged lifestyle (which the peasants might envy), "similar complaints against the clergy were altogether rare. Not only did the cur‚s and vicaires perform important day-to-day services for the villagers, but most of the revenues they received remained in the parish."<32> It would appear that this Western financial security of the cur‚s was accepted by their flocks. The position of the cur‚ in the hierarchy (with its sporadic privilege) was not much of an issue. Tackett notes that attacks on the clergy were related to "certain moral failings on the part of the priest: physical violence, anger and vindictiveness, the use of foul language or impropriety with women.<33> The priestly antagonism toward those higher up was also involved Richerist thought which was running around the lower echelons of the church. Under Richerisme, the local priests would exercise much more control over themselves -- a sort of micro-Gallicism. "Richerism here was a weapon . . . because authority refused to recognize the rightful status of the parish priest."<34> It is possible that Richerist-tinged sermons tended to cement the flock to their cur‚ and distance them from the Church hierarchy. This would run parallel to the peasants' already existing frustration with the privileged classes. Requests on behalf of the cur‚s showed up in Third Estate cahiers: "Ah! above all else let a sympathetic regard be paid to the cur‚s, those worthy pastors, who relieve the poor and console the broken-hearted, let their lot be ameliorated . . . let them be given a living wage and freed from the degrading necessity of collecting door-to-door."<35> Tackett notes that "the very nature of the priestly order in these villages made it more difficult to maintain the sense and the reality of clerical separation. Here, the solitary priests, residing for decades relatively alone in the midst of the peasantry, deprived of daily contact with ecclesiastical society, were probably far more dependant and vulnerable in their relations with their flocks."<36> Groethuysen's Enlightened Middle Class and the Church Groethuysen has developed the idea of an enlightened (Jansenist-influenced?) bourgeoisie. After noting the presence of the fanatical peasantry and the apathetic, worldly nobles (see section below), he observes that . . . alongside these two types of Catholics, each representing a perfectly legitimate form of belief in their church, we find a new breed of men emerging in the eighteenth century. They were men who, without being qualified to take part in the government of the Church or to serve as 'teachers,' had lost the character of ordinary believers. These were people who argued and wanted to analyze before believing."<37> This development complicated the situation of the cur‚ immensely. The cur‚ could handle a misguided flock: give them a shove in the right direction and they probably will not do too much theological damage. The nobles were not a problem, either. Some were actually paying the salary of the clerics; most just stayed out of the way. These enlightened bourgeois, though, could not be handily dismissed. They argued, they questioned: ". . . basically, the bourgeois no longer believed that God had anything to do with good and bad crops, whereas the faith of the humble found it inconceivable that God should not be concerned with them."<38> Worse, the bourgeois skepticism tended to contaminate others. One contemporary priest lamented that "an unassuming pamphlet, attractively written, makes a thousand unbelievers in a day."<39> And they had little natural respect for their parish priests. One of the bourgeois claimed that "They [the cur‚s] are boorish men, of little intelligence, no education and no manners."<40> Beurier called these priest- mockers anti-priests, and wrote that "They [the anti-priests] seek to ridicule and disfigure them with a thousand biting barbs of satire and mockery; every weakness is exposed; everything they do is regarded as a crime, so that all the attacks on them may be turned against religion itself."<41> Groethuysen thinks that this aggressiveness was not arbitrary; rather, the self-aware man was testing his strength, exercising his mind. "This struggle against the clergy was the first one he undertook to establish his superiority. In these skirmishes . . . where he pitted himself against the servants of the church, he was preparing himself for his great conquests."<42> The enlightenment of the bourgeois spread in two directions: to the clergy and to the peasantry. It is not surprising that the clergy would be affected -- we have already seen their susceptibility to assimilation (or reflection) of the habits of the peasants. As Groethuysen noted, " . . . the clergy accused them of wrongheadedness, but at the same time could not avoid adopting themselves to their attitude."<43> Likewise, some of the peasantry started to pay attention to the enlightened bourgeois. After all, the bourgeois were of the same estate. This attention of the peasants to the critical attitudes of the enlightened bourgeois was worrisome to the cur‚s. They hoped the peasants would not start thinking for themselves. One cur‚ addressed his parishioner thusly: "Your children have been to school; they have learned to read and write . . .Does that make them more proficient in tilling the soil?"<44> The interaction of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry was not entirely a benevolent one, however. The Barges did not simply set a good example on how to deal with authority by use of reason. There are darker aspects as well. There is evidence that the cahiers of the Third Estate did not reflect the interests of the peasants, but that of the lawyers and locally successful bourgeois: that is, the enlightened bourgeois. According to Tackett ". . . the opinion represented in these local cahiers . . . should most certainly not be equated with peasant opinion."<45> The enlightened bourgeois were questioning the authority of the church, but they were not perceived as decadent by the lowers, as the nobles often were. This is mainly because the bourgeois rejected ecclesiastical authority but did not reject Christianity as a virtue-based ethical system. Indeed, Christianity, well implemented, would provide the proper social matrix for commerce and upward mobility. This need for rules (but no need for theology) manifested itself in a peculiar bourgeois morality with "intense emphasis on moral behavior, its obsession with sin and guilt, rather than with more strictly spiritual values."<46> Gibson describes their brand of Catholicism as somewhat "sterile."<47> This sterile religion of a self-aware bourgeoisie, able to rise above their station in life and responsible for their own fate, is powerfully evocative of Protestantism. The Nobles and the Church The nobles, quite different than the confused but fervent peasants, were not at all interested in the goings-on at church. It all seemed so terribly vulgar. On the other hand, they were not causing many problems. They just did not go to church, preferring to read (but " . . . the number of works on religion to be found on the bookshelves of notables declined drastically or disappeared."<48> After all, the theater was infinitely more amusing than church. It is possible that some of the liberal nobles were voicing dissent in proto-salons amongst their friends. Tackett is one of these who feel that discussion amongst the nobles may have had some trickle down effect on the peasantry: "Historians . . . have overlooked the importance and concentration of chambres de lectures and soci‚t‚s litt‚raires . . . "<49> More likely, however, this kind of intellectual osmosis would have a greater effect on the enlightened bourgeoisie, as defined (discovered?) by Groethuysen. Conclusion So we have a peasant class mired in superstition but pricking up their ears at the sound of dissent, an antagonistic middle class, a passively dechristianized nobility often seen as decadent, and a parish priest caught between his heritage and the stringencies of the Church. The other half of this dualistic equation is the divine right monarchy, manned by weak individuals. The national myth was hemorrhaging and there was no way to fix the damage. "All the civil institutions are linked to Catholicism. To disturb the Catholic religion is therefore to risk making the state collapse."<50> The priests were the caretakers of the community, literally from birth onward. A cur‚ was there at birth, marriage, at death and even could be paid to hold mass for those who had departed. The cur‚ was the provider of alms, of charity, of consolation. The cur‚ blessed the crops, the children, the houses, the weather, and caused the bells to ring on time. " . . . The Church created a whole universe for the believer, a universe which, like the other one, called upon all his faculties and surrounded him completely."<51> The people, for as long as they could remember, had been looking at the stained glass and portal sculpture on the churches, absorbing the dogma. The centering of French society on the king/church system was pragmatic. The peasants weren't devoted to the Church because it was the One True Religion of the One True God. Rather, it was a system that gave the people a frame on which to hang their experiences, their existence. This is why the peasants were willing to integrate the pagan folk superstition into Catholicism: it was just one more tool in their mental toolbox. If the church needed another room, a sacristy for example, it was just added on. If the people needed an explanation for why it was hailing, they just added it onto their religious framing. The research of social historians about areas of dechristianization, or zones of juring/nonjuring priests become immaterial. The metatruth is that the people were searching for a stable system to live by. It did not particularly matter if it was Catholic, or Revolutionary, or Lockean or anything else.<52> As Toqueville observed, "When religion was expelled from their souls, the effect was not to create a vacuum or a state of apathy; it was promptly, if but momentarily, replaced by a host of new loyalties and secular ideals that not only filled the void but (to begin with) fired the popular imagination."<53> Given this assumption about the people's mental situation it is not inconsistent for some of them to have abandoned the Church so quickly to join into the Revolutionary processions. After all, a procession is a procession. The people used the Catholic processions for social purposes, and those of the Revolution would do just as nicely. They both would "reinforce the cohesiveness and solidarity of the village society."<54>The state quickly took over the duties of the cur‚: birth, death, marriage (and now divorce) records were made by the Civil Clergy.<55> Charity functions were shifting towards the state. Again, the peasantry did not care about the framework, as long as there was some kind of structure there. McManners had asked, referring to the peasants and their carryings-on, "to what extent were all the inhabitants celebrating the gift of sacramental grace, and to what extent were they merely indulging in a taste for civic pageantry and fairground frolics?"<56> It is plain that they weren't celebrating the gift of sacramental grace at all. They were participating in an event that addressed their needs to social expression and liberation from tedium. Those that abandoned Catholicism during the revolution did not dismantle their Catholic background. That system was available for later use: "although Catholicism was profoundly challenged by the revolution, the cultural fluidity of the 1790s and the breakdown of the clerical hierarchy also enabled lay Catholics to transform their own rituals and to redefine the sacred within the community."<57> Toqueville noted that the Revolution was incredibly disorienting because the people had left no anchor -- they uprooted both the church and the state. They had no choice. The system of divine right monarchy and Catholic church had failed (as feudalism had) and necessitated the construction of a new "master fiction."<58> NOTES <1> Pierre Gaxotte, "The Enlightenment as Doctrinaire, Irreligious and Conspiratorial," in The Influence of the Enlightenment on the French Revolution, ed William F. Church (Lexington: Heath and Co, 1974), 80. <2>Lynn Hunt, "Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution," In The French Revolution and Intellectual History, ed. Jack R. Censer (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989), 167. <3>Jack R. Censer,ed., The French Revolution and Intellectual History, (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989), 166. This is from Censer's introduction of Hunt's article "Hercules . . ." <4>Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), [from the title]. <5>Hunt, 167. <6>Merrick, 17. <7>Merrick, 17. <8>Einhard's description of the coronation of Charlemagne, in Great Documents of Western Civilization, ed. Milton Viorst (New York: Bantam, 1965), 21. <9>Merrick, 7. <10>Hunt, 167. <11>Richelieu, Political Testament, in Viorst, 132. <12>Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France Volume 1: 1715-1799 (New York: Penguin, 1963), 53. <13>Letter of Louis XV to Ferdinand of Parma, quoted in Merrick, 20. <14>Merrick, 20-1. <15>Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism (London: Routledge, 1989), 19. <16>Gibson, 16. <17>Timothy Tackett, "The West in France in 1789: The Religious Factor in the Origins of the Counterrevolution," Journal of Modern History 54 (December 1982): 722-3. <18>By 1993-4 peasants of the Perigord used the church as a setting for anti-seignorial demonstrations involving the destruction of pews and chairs owned or rented by the privileged. See Steven G. Reinhardt, "The Revolution in the Countryside: Peasant unrest in the Perigord, 1789-90," in Essays on The French Revolution: Paris and Provinces, ed Steven G. Reinhardt and Elisabeth A. Cawthon (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992), 29. <19>John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Regime (Manchester: Manchester Press, 1960), 22. <20>Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 7. <21>Here pagan is used in its original sense: relating to country folk. Their religious system is cyclic and crop- oriented. "Pagan" is not intended in this paper to connote apostasy from the Church. <22>Gibson, 21. <23>McManners, 22. <24>McManners, 22. <25>Gibson, 7. <26> We grieve at the loss of some of the more interesting confraternities, such as the Brotherhood of Death whose duties included accompanying prisoners on the route to their executions. They: walked in procession in front of the victim, singing Miserere sadly. Round the victim walked several religious with large drawings of scenes from the Passion which they held in front of his eyes. At the square the brotherhood lined up from one side to the other . . . While the victim stood on the scaffold, the brotherhood knelt in the square saying aloud the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary. Meanwhile Capuchins . . . preached sermons to bring them to hate their crimes. Chadwick, 39. <27>Gibson, 13. <28>Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, (Ithaca: Cornell university Press, 1990), 207. <29>Gibson, 19. <30>Gibson, 20. <31>McManners, 21. <32>Tackett, 722. <33>Timothy Tackett, Priest and Parish in Eighteenth Century France: a Social/Political Study of the Cur‚s in a Diocese of Dauphine 1750-1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 190-1. <34>McManners, 11. <35>McManners, 220. <36>Tackett, 724. <37>Groethuysen, 6-7. <38>Groethuysen, 19. <39>Groethuysen, 24. <40>Groethuysen, 31. <41>Groethuysen, 30. <42>Groethuysen, 31. <43>Groethuysen, 44 <44>Groethuysen, 6. <45>Tackett, 740. <46>Gibson, 23. <47>Gibson, 19. <48>Tackett, 730. <49>Tackett, 731. <50>Merrick, 14. <51>Groethuysen, 2. <52>This was certainly an issue to the people themselves, but from the twentieth century all of these systems look equally valid (assuming they would serve utilitarian ends). <53>Alexis de Toqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co, 1955), 80. <54>Tackett, Priest and Parish . . ., 204. <55>Note here how the old Catholic system was translated into a secular system by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The need for a coherent system was recognized, it just could not have a religious base. <56>McManners, 19. <57>Desan, 2. <58>Hunt, 167. http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/