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.