Even so, the bishops in the Constituent Assembly, with Boisgelin at their head, constrained to oppose any final church–state structures that the state would set up unilaterally, circulated an Exposition des principes on 30 October 1790. They insisted that the legislature should work with either a church council or the pope, for without that no redistribution of religious authority would be possible.69 Roman cardinals, in special session that September, were weighing the potential for schism of the redrawing of the diocesan boundaries, episcopal elections, and the relationship of bishops to Roman authority; they were to advise the pope, whose considered response the French bishops anxiously awaited.70 The king, however, was forced to approve the 27 November decree obliging the clergy to swear the oath of loyalty to the nation, the law, and the king (implying acceptance of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). Henri Grégoire actually took the oath ahead of schedule, believing that it was the only way to reconcile the church and the revolutionary government. A minority of the priests and only two of the bishops in the Assembly took the oath. In the end, only seven of the Old Regime bishops took the oath: Talleyrand and Jean-Baptiste Gobel, the Assembly members, and then Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne of Sens, Louis-François-Alexandre Jarente of Orléans, Charles de la Font de Savine of Viviers, and the non-jurisdictional bishops Jean-Baptiste Dubourg-Miroudot (titular bishop of Babylon) and Pierre-François Martial de Loménie (titular bishop of Trianopolis). The massive refusal of the bishops came out of motivations theological and psychological, but aristocratic family background certainly weighed in here. More than 50 percent of the priests in public ministry (a much higher percentage than the priests in the actual Constituent Assembly) complied. Their motives, mapped by Timothy Tackett, were more varied than the motives of the bishops, of course, and can be conjectured with reasonable confidence by reference to authority and financial stability of church appointment, theological orientation, ecclesiastical milieu, age, social position, and location of diocese. The map of the wildly varying percentages of oath takers in the different regions of France, derived from Tackett’s broad sociography of oath takers, does not show these motivational factors, and must be supplemented with his other statistics.71
Priests in their thirties and those over sixty took the oath in greater numbers, probably because they were more vulnerable financially. Curés from the aristocracy unsurprisingly rejected the oath, and curés from the formerly Jansenist—and so, still relatively anti-episcopal—areas accepted it, but those from the lowest economic strata took the oath in greatest numbers. A seminary education was an investment that poorer families did not want to lose. As for milieu, priests who lived in close proximity to colleagues were less likely to take the oath than were isolated curés, who identified more with the lay community. Personality traits are harder to pin down, although, after a sampling of ten provinces, Tackett noted “that of those young men specifically cited for their ‘piety,’ only about a fourth would take the oath.... On the other hand, some two thirds of the young priests described with the relatively neutral adjective ‘honnête’ or criticized for their ‘haughtiness’ or ‘quick temper’ would ultimately emerge oath takers.... There was apparently a tendency to those least amenable to ecclesiastical discipline to later accept the Civil Constitution.”72
With eighty-three dioceses and only a handful of Old Regime bishops available, new bishops had to be chosen from the ranks of the constitutional priests. Talleyrand, assisted by Gobel and Miroudot, consecrated Fathers Louis-Alexandre Expilly and Claude-Eustache-François Marolles, who then got right to the task of producing more new bishops, consecrating around fifty by the end of the first month.73 When regional governments organized the election of the curés, immediate problems ensued. Only a limited number of parishioners took part in the elections, incumbent curés were unwilling to go, and elected curés were often unwilling to take up the posts to which they were called. Most often a nonjuror was replaced with a juror, although many nonjurors proved impossible to replace. Antagonisms quickly multiplied, with violence perpetrated by rough-and-ready types offended by the constitutional clergy, their anger heated up by some of the more embittered or extreme refractories. Constitutional bishops, in their new dioceses, were met sooner or later with mockery, accompanied at times by violence.
Accepting or rejecting their new priests, the common people were inevitably engaged: in some regions the peasants were quite fond of their old curé or the traditional modes of church life. Constitutional bishops and priests themselves were resentful of troublesome refractories, but occasionally reached out with, or responded to, kindness. As far as the government was concerned, the constitutionals were the real priests of France. They were to control all the parish registers, and thus records of baptisms, marriages, deaths—matters of vital public record. Refractories were occasionally emboldened to resist, and the political clubs struggled with them all the more. The parish of Saint-Sulpice in Paris was able to get around the restrictions by turning over jurisdiction to a religious order, the Theatines. Constitutional bishops, their authority so often in question, could maintain that authority only by formal rejection of refractory ministries; they were aided by the passage on 14 May 1791 of the Le Chapelier Law requiring that recalcitrant clergy be brought to court.74
In Paris, the only other bishop in the Constituent Assembly who had taken the oath with Talleyrand, Jean-Baptiste Gobel, was elected bishop, receiving five hundred votes, as opposed to the fifty-six votes for Louis Charrier de la Roche, then a canon from Lyon, and the twenty-six votes for Sieyès, who declined to be a candidate anyway. Gobel had an indifferent reputation in Alsace, where he was serving as bishop after a position as auxiliary bishop of Bâle: the main problem seemed to be his debts, resulting from high though probably not immoral living. Income was a factor in his choice of the see of Paris over those of Colmar, Langres, and Agen. There were even some reports that he was willing to negotiate his submission to the Holy See for a certain sum. He turned out to be an inconsistent leader, alternately showing pastoral concern and submission to revolutionary dechristianization. His correspondence with government officials contained little explicit talk about spirituality, theology, or ministry. His priestly personality can be glimpsed only in a few rare texts, such as one letter to a local government committee about his Paris seminarians, who straddled residency in the nearby parish of Saint-Magloire and liturgy in the cathedral. A principal issue for Gobel was their health! “There is no one who does not feel that we would endanger the health of the young men by forcing them, in winter especially, to come back to Saint-Magloire after the morning office, only to return to Notre-Dame for the [evening] office after dinner, and by requiring [subsequently] that they remain for two or three hours after they arrive soaked by rain or covered with snow.”75 The seminarians are good for the cathedral and the cathedral is good for them, because they assist in teaching catechism (Gobel developed four catechisms since taking charge of the diocese), and they get the opportunity to hear good preachers. It all might have worked out in less trying times.
One revolutionary priest who had established his reputation in Paris before Gobel was elected bishop there was Claude Fauchet. Right in the middle of the violent storming of the Bastille, Fauchet, the churchman closest to the men who fought and died there, was at the center of Parisian political and religious life. Later bishop of Calvados, he was the revolutionary priest and constitutional bishop who animated the radical activity that spread from the capital to the provinces. Both by his life and by his writings, he proved to be an essential “priest of the French Revolution.”