Whether in response or on their own, legislators passed laws proclaiming religious liberty—hitherto limited in Catholic France—and restricting professional organizations in a way that could neutralize the efforts of the French clergy who refused to take the oath.
Priests and Bishops
Chapter 1. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Henri Grégoire, two priests with strong and visible personalities, worked for government reform in the months of preparation for the Estates General, France’s first parliamentary assembly since 1614. Their personal orientations reveal the polarities of revolutionary priesthood in 1789: the cranky and secular Sieyès, in fact minimally a priest, trying to bracket religion to bring about a new political era; and the imposing and pastoral Grégoire trying to reform religion to bring about a new political era as well. As a seminarian, Sieyès had developed a distinct philosophy, or rhetoric, of religion, as well as a refined musical taste. His tract Sur Dieu ultramètre et sur la fibre religieuse de l’homme (On God beyond Measure and on Man’s Religious Fiber) is a suggestive dialogue on religion that bears comparison with later German philosophy. Grégoire, three years before ordination, produced an essay on poetry as a way to beauty, truth, and, through scripture, to God. Their early lives and seminary educations gave both of them the opportunity to develop the roles they played as members of the Estates General and thereafter.
Chapter 2. The political efforts of Sieyès and Grégoire were abetted by the great numbers of priests in France who demanded reforms in the clerical cahiers de doléances, collected and submitted as part of the national program to inform the deputies to the Estates General of the complaints and demands of their constituencies. When the priests who were actual deputies to the Estates General began their own official discussions of religious and political change, they took sides, for and against this change, in weeks of clerical haggling recorded best by the abbé Jacques Jallet but also by other priests who were present at the Assembly meetings. The decision of these members of the First Estate, the clergy, to join the Third Estate, the commoners, in a new National (Constituent) Assembly was a confused affair: a wide range of assumptions and misunderstandings was behind the actual move. Subsequently, priests and bishops on the Ecclesiastical Committee, appointed by the National Assembly, were dominated by lay canon lawyers. Together, they were responsible for the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the founding document for the July 1790 revolutionary reorganization of French Catholicism in the Constituent Assembly.
Chapter 3. Henri Grégoire’s highly influential colleagues were Claude Fauchet, the most visible of the revolutionary priests in Paris, and Adrien Lamourette, mentor to Grégoire across the years and a theological adviser to key members of the Constituent Assembly. The derring-do of Fauchet as he scampered about in a rain of gunfire during the taking of the Bastille can be partly explained by his theology, but more from his personal and political engagement in the new political era. His major book, De la religion nationale, had been published a month and a half before the attack on the Bastille. In the very first years of the Revolution, he was at the center of radical political dialogue and journalism. But he was above all a constitutional bishop, high profile of course, given his earlier deeds and publications, and creative in his response to opponents of the Constitutional Church with its new bishops.
Chapter 4. Lamourette’s work alongside a leading figure of the early Revolution, the comte de Mirabeau, is displayed both by his theology and by his day-to-day practical ministry. He articulated both the role of the church for a new political era and a more-or-less systematic theology—“ecclesiology” is the technical label—for a renewed and enlightened church. Lamourette should be situated between Mirabeau, whom he advised, and Camus, the lay canon lawyer, whose work was one of the bases of his own theology. Elected as constitutional bishop of the primatial see (first in dignity of the French dioceses) of Lyon, he is best known for his intervention as a delegate to the successor to the Constituent Assembly, the so-called Legislative Assembly; it was a passing moment of reconciliation in 1792, and so, a flash forward in this part of the narrative (see Chronology, Part II: Survival, 1791–1795) on behalf of a constitutional monarchy, only a month before both assembly and monarchy disappeared.
Chronology
1789
| 24 January | Modalities of election to the Estates General officially set up. |
| February | Publication of Sieyès’s What Is the Third Estate? |
| 4 May | Procession and Mass for opening of Estates General. |
| 30 May | Publication of Fauchet’s De la religion nationale. |
| 13 June | Three curés led by Jallet join the Third Estate. |
| 17 June | The Third Estate led by Sieyès proclaims itself the National Assembly. |
| 19 June | Vote of the clergy to join the National Assembly. |
| 20 June | Tennis Court Oath, with Grégoire and Sieyès in attendance. |
| 9 July | The National Assembly proclaims itself the Constituent Assembly. |
| 14 July | Fall of the Bastille. |
| 4 August | Renunciation of aristocratic privileges by members of the former Second Estate. |
| 11 August | Clergy abandon the tithe, which was paradoxically defended by Sieyès. |
| 26 August | Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. |
| 2 November | Nationalization of church lands. |
1790
| 5 February | The Assembly adds new members to its Ecclesiastical Committee. |
| 13 February | Law proposed by Jean-Baptiste Treilhard, a delegate especially engaged in church reform, withdrawing official recognition of monastic vows. |
| 12 April | Motion of the Carthusian Dom Gerle to recognize Catholicism as the religion of the French. |
| 12 June | Avignon, the papal enclave, asks to be attached to France. |
| 13 June | Counterrevolutionary insurrection at Nîmes with massacre of Protestants. |
| 12 July | Text of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy approved. |
| 14 July | First revolutionary festival, supported by both revolutionary and conservative clergy. |
| 30 October | Archbishop Boisgelin’s Exposition des principes attempts to bridge gap between Rome and the Constituent Assembly. |
| 27 November | Decree imposing clerical oath of allegiance to the nation, the law, and the king, implying acceptance of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. |
| 26 December | King sanctions the decree of 27 November. |
1791
| 3 January | Clergy ordered to take the oath of allegiance to the nation, the law, and the king within twenty-four hours. |
| February | Beginning of election and consecration of the constitutional bishops (through May), the first consecration performed by Talleyrand of Autun with two auxiliary bishops. |
| 10 March | Pius VI condemns the Civil Constitution. |
| 2 April | Death of Mirabeau. |
| 13 April | Pope reiterates his condemnation of the Civil Constitution. |
| 7 May | Proclamation of religious liberty. |
| 14 June | Le Chapelier Law forbidding worker/professional organizations and strikes is invoked by constitutional bishops to control refractory clergy. |