The business of getting the final union worked out was a drawn-out affair, a tug of war between curé eagerness and episcopal reserve. But on 25 May forty-seven nobles (“among whom figure the names of the first families of the kingdom,” wrote Jallet) reinforced the clergy for Estate unification.40 In the final discussion, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld protested against the elimination of his right to meet separately with his Estate (his fellow bishops), and Mirabeau rose to say that no one had the right to protest his own will, or even cite the king’s will to the Assembly. The archbishop of Aix wanted to refute Mirabeau, but in his melodrama drew some laughter. Other bishops decided against continuing the contest, but Jallet referred to it all as an episcopal final attempt, a “swing of a club” to prevent the union of the Estates.41
And when the secretaries for the united National Assembly were chosen for the first period on 8 June, the short list comprised two nobles, two members of the Third Estate (Le Chapelier, a founder of the Jacobin Club, was one), and...the abbés Sieyès and Grégoire! These were troubled times, nevertheless. In the first days of July plans were made to call in more than thirty thousand troops to maintain the peace. Mirabeau, believing that the order would arouse the people, demanded its cancellation, Grégoire wanted to know who could have given the king such pernicious advice, and Sieyès wondered how the Assembly could have free and open discussion when surrounded by bayonets.42 Then came the storming of the Bastille, consternation at Versailles, and the deliberations as to what to do, with the coming and going of the king. Jallet combines reports of the people’s and delegates’ esteem and expressed enthusiasm for the king, with the subtle insertion of reserve and antagonism—primitive reverence and primitive rebellion in a unique alloy only two days after the storming of the Bastille. A delegation was sent from the Assembly to Paris with an archbishop at its head: “It had been received with lively joy; taken down to the Place Louis XV, they were conducted by an honor guard of the Paris militia, to the acclamations of an immense crowd demanding the return of Necker, to the Hôtel-de-Ville, where the archbishop of Paris announced the dispatching of troops.”43
The next delegation had the king at the center, but the clergy who were committed to reform were squeezed out of membership, Jallet himself finding that his name had been proposed but then arbitrarily removed.44 After a full presentation of the precautions taken against insurrection and violence in Paris, and a comment on the popularity of the duc d’Orléans, Philippe Egalité, Jallet posts his negative assessment of the king’s behavior: “The king revealed himself to the Assembly, not with the dignity of a monarch who considers it an honor to surround himself with the counsels of a noble nation, not with the goodness of a father who has just taken his place, but with the weakness of a despot, humbled by the evil success of his unjust and violent enterprises, and who has just humbled himself before those he cannot destroy, or rather with the faintheartedness of a weak king, without character, whom the counsels of those around him can make proud or craven, alternately, according to circumstances.”45
Records show, then, that the priests’ discussions were sometimes reform-oriented and sometimes intimidated by the aristocratic bishops. Only a minority felt comfortable making common cause with the Third Estate, and few, apart from reflexively fearful conservatives, fully realized the magnitude of the changes they were bringing about. One of the outspoken curés, Jean-Louis Gouttes, author of Considérations sur l’injustice des prétentions du Clergé et de la Noblesse, changed his mind within ten days, from no to yes, on the question of joining the Third Estate.46
What had happened was this. The regular run of lower clergy were clearly anxious about their relationship with the aristocratic bishops, first in their own Estate and then in the Constituent Assembly; those curés with the greatest resentment of the aristocracy were the most ready to reject their status as a separate Estate. Their suspicion of episcopal self-interest waxed and waned, depending on the liveliness of the communal discussions and the reconciliation achieved in them. All this meant that the clergy were less unified in their stand for or against union with the Third Estate than were the nobles. Back at the end of May, one of the great motivators of debate had been the Essai sur la réforme du clergé, an attack on the bishops by the curé Laurent; published probably on 20 May, it ensured intense debate by 25 and 26 May.47 Archbishop (of Aix) Raymond de Boisgelin’s warning that the clerical order would be swallowed up in a general assembly persuaded the majority of the clergy that loss of collective clout was the greater danger.48 By the middle of June, those promoting union with the Third Estate garnered enough votes to win, after several divided and inconclusive—perhaps gerrymandered—votes.49
Maurice Hutt decades ago insisted that union with the Third Estate was not what the curés had voted for: “They had voted to cross to the Third Estate’s chamber to check election returns. It was not a decision to merge the Order with that of the Third Estate....The leaders of the ‘curé party’ were prepared for voting by head and urged acceptance of verification in common to bring this about. But they realized quite clearly that this was not a view common among the lower clergy and in their speeches and pamphlets they took care to ‘manage’ this opinion.”50 This interpretation has been substantially qualified in subsequent years by Ruth Necheles, William Doyle, and Nigel Aston, who wrote that the clergy “were certainly aware of the implications of their behavior.”51 The Third Estate had actually decided two days before that they were the French “National Assembly” plain and simple, but at least some of the clergy (Hutt was not totally wrong) thought, right up through the fall of the Bastille, that they would be maintained as a distinct order. On 19 July, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld announced the full participation of the clergy in the Assembly sessions and debates, and the First Estate was no more. A number of these patriote clergy who had voted nolens volens for the crossover in June had changed their minds by the beginning of 1791, when only one-third of them (compared to more than one-half of the clergy in general) were willing to take the oath of loyalty to the Constitution and accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
With the union of orders, the Estates General became the Constituent Assembly. One-quarter of the curés seated there came from peasant or artisan families, representing, then, humbler levels of society. Grégoire’s father was a tailor; Jallet’s father, a gardener; Thibault’s father, a cobbler. More than half of the curés came from families that were considered notable in the Old Regime, and the rest came from merchant or professional families.52 Some of the curés were widely read, and some had managed to publish their own works, with or without university degrees. Work with the Estates General and Constituent Assembly developed the political inclinations of some. Priests belonged, too, to the Jacobin Club, although some of them went along with the Feuillants, constitutional monarchists, when the Jacobins turned antireligious after the end of the Constituent Assembly.53 This was late June 1789, and in the following months there was no lack of strife.
Reform in the National Assembly: The Ecclesiastical Committee
Paris militias and mobs had stormed the Bastille on 14 July. Nobles surrendered their legal and tax privileges in August, after months of rumored and real peasant attacks on the great landed estates. After issuing a balanced “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” inspired by the American founding documents, an enthusiastic reforming assembly directed that all church property was to be placed at the disposal of the nation. Radical active churchmen, reinforced and even dominated by enthusiastic laymen, worked into the following year to reform and revolutionize church structures. They established the Comité ecclésiastique on 12 August to work out the shape of the church for the new regime.
Committee members wanted a democratic church that would have as close a relationship to a constitutional monarchy as had the Old Regime church to the Old Regime state. Coming from all three Estates, they were a mixture of nobles, bishops and priests, and laymen trained in canon law—in particular, Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, Jean-Baptiste Treilhard, and Pierre Durand de Maillane. Before long, a new rostrum of members included the