Priests of the French Revolution. Joseph F. Byrnes

those priests who supported the different extremes of Directory politics...were they all the same kind of revolutionary? Hardly. In fact, the word “revolution,” with its implications of violence, was never in full favor, and, after the Terror, was more a label for violence than reform. We could just as well have used the label “republican,” for it was in a republic, or at the beginning in a constitutional monarchy, that the bishops and priests wanted to activate their mission.

      But then, why “priests of the French Revolution,” when so many of my featured “saints and renegades” are presented as bishops? In fact, most all of them were priests as the Revolution began, and were chosen and consecrated bishops precisely because they were revolutionary priests. A Catholic theological tradition, dating back to the early Christian church, would have it that bishops possess the fullness of the priesthood. The bishops necessarily saw their ministry as priestly.

      For this book, I take my cue from John McManners, who more than forty years ago published the first sympathetic study of the constitutional priests, as well as the refractory priests (i.e., those who refused to take oath), urging further attempts to understand the motivation of the apparent “renegades” from the constitutional clergy.⁵ Here I study of the religious attitudes and psychological experiences that underpinned the behavior of representative bishops and priests on the constitutional/revolutionary side, some of them major players on the political and church scene and some of them near-anonymous figures whose intense commitment to or rejection of the constitutional experiment merits attention even so. I play individuals against groups and religious teaching against political action, in order to tell a balanced story of saints and renegades. They were not all saints and renegades, of course. Those labels may seem somewhat fanciful, but certainly the priests of France, as revolutionaries or at least as republicans in a new and radically changing political era, were driven to creatively serve or creatively, and often destructively, reject the versions of the priestly ministry that had been handed down to them. I have researched and studied the archival and primary source material to explain the priests of the French Revolution precisely as priests, on the premise that their priestly commitment, with its mutations, is the primary explanation of their behavior.⁶ It is a study of what these priests and bishops made of priesthood, Catholic and French, and what they tried to accomplish in their priestly ministries, across the revolutionary decade.

      Readers will naturally question at times my choice of personalities and events, and here I issue a promissory note: this book is of a piece with two other projects that involve encyclopedic completeness, a dictionary of the 118 bishops of the Constitutional Church, both the original and the reconstituted versions, and an online repertoire of all the priests of France who engaged themselves by oath in the constitutional apostolate—beginning with those thousands who figure in the already published repertoires. As this book goes to print, the initial dictionary entries are being edited, and a search committee has set up the collaborative structures for the online dictionary.⁷ For now, I offer a simple appendix with a complete listing of constitutional bishops by dioceses, and full statistics on the priests’ initial oath taking in these dioceses, and all constitutional bishops who are presented in the body of the book will be asterisked in the appendix.

      This study stands on its own and in relationship to the monumental contributions made by my fellow historians over the years: the institutional histories of the Constitutional Church by Rodney J. Dean, the political and theological interpretations of the constitutional enterprise and leading constitutionals by Bernard Plongeron, and the fundamental sociography and social analysis of the tens of thousands of priests who took the oath of loyalty that originally gave the church its identity by Timothy Tackett. Dean’s L’Église constitutionnelle, Napoléon et le Concordat de 1801 is a reconstruction of developments within the Constitutional Church before and during the negotiations between the pope and Napoleon, and L’Abbé Grégoire et l’Église constitutionnelle après la Terreur, 1794–97 is a record of the first years of revival after the fall of Robespierre: two masterful theses that now stand as the fundamental reference works for all future studies of the Parisian and nationwide functioning of the Constitutional Church after the Terror. Bernard Plongeron and generations of his students have made available an enormous range of archival data on religion and the Revolution, and established several basic politico-theological orientations for Constitutional Church study. Plongeron’s prodigious output begins with his dissertation, published as Les Réguliers de Paris devant le serment constitutionnel, through his general but highly original study in volume 10 of Histoire du Christianisme, up to his recent work, gathered together in Des Résistences religieuses à Napoléon (1799–1813). The fundamental contemporary research on the constitutional clergy remains Timothy Tackett’s Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791, for all practical purposes a definitive study of the priests’ revolutionary motives, some of it handily resumed in the Atlas de la Révolution française, vol. 9: Religion, which Tackett edited with Claude Langlois and Michel Vovelle.

      Other important studies include the early work of Catholic clergy who in varying degrees felt obliged to point out the dogmatic and moral errors of the constitutionals. The abbé Augustin Sicard and Dom Henri Leclercq found little of value in the “schism,” whereas the Institut Catholique priest–historian Paul Pisani, although writing in an ultramontane Catholic mode, tried to be evenhanded in his dictionary of all the constitutional bishops, Répertoire biographique de l’épiscopat constitutionnel of 1907 and in his multivolume L’Église de Paris et la Révolution, published in the years immediately following. Building on Pisani’s Histoire de l’Église de Paris, the abbé Jean Boussoulade published after World War II a history of the church in revolutionary Paris with special attention to the years after the Terror, L’Église de Paris du 9 thermidor au Concordat. Three major Anglophone historians have offered vital interpretations of the religion in the revolutionary era as part of their own agendas: Dale Van Kley in The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, with a chapter on the role of residual Jansenism in the shaping of the Constitutional Church; Suzanne Desan in Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France, which deals with Constitutional Church influence in the context of independent lay Catholic religious activity; and Nigel Aston’s particularly valuable study of bishops at the waning of the Old Regime, The End of an Elite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution, 1786–1790, originally a dissertation done under the direction of John McManners, which can be complemented by his more recent Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804, an omnium-gatherum of specialized studies of specific national and local Constitutional Church events and personalities. However, a new generation of scholars has focused the agenda for study of church and state during the Revolution on regions, cities, and individual personalities in context. Paul Chopelin examines with profound insight the values and problems of both the constitutional and the refractory clergy on the regional level in his Ville patriote et ville martyre: Lyon, l’église et la Révolution, 1788–1805. And the most notable study of an individual clergyman is his local setting is Caroline Chopelin-Blanc’s De l’apologétique à l’Église constitutionnelle: Adrien Lamourette (1742–1794).⁸

      Priesthood: The Catholic and French Heritage

      The book is not only for historians. Members of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches have an active, personal interest in the identity and behavior of the priests of their traditions, because so much of the health and wealth of these churches has depended on that very identity and behavior. Full parishes and successful universities can be indications of a vital faith and successful priests, both together. Countries where Catholic Christianity played a major role in shoring up dynasties, reinforcing ethnic communities, and directing charities would periodically go into political crises that played back into religious crises. The French story I tell here, of the enterprise and heroism of the priests who tried to ensure the safety and good health of their people, and the cruel mutation of some of the priests into men of violence, may well have bearing on today’s religious dramas, both American and European. In Europe, for example, note the end of Catholic clerical control of both Irish and Polish popular culture, and the even more dramatic cases of the destruction of the all-embracing Orthodox Christian culture in Russia in the years following