Unfinished: The Civil Constitution of the Clergy and its Repercussions during the French Revolution

This is an unfinished term paper about the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and its affect on the rest of the French Revolution. I say "unfinished". Although I describe the initial public reaction to the document, I fail to provide examples of how its reception turned sour and ultimately contributed to several of the bloodiest episodes of the Revolution: specifically, the Vendee Rebellion, the September Massacre, and the Reign of Terror. When I have time, I intend to amend this essay to include passages describing these events and how the Civil Constitution of the Clergy helped to exacerbate them.


HIS392
Balsamo
7 August 2009

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy and its Repercussions during the French Revolution

On July 12, 1790, The National Assembly passed a new decree: The Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The Civil Constitution, in its zeal to denounce the Church and elevate the State, “combined a religious reform with a political” one (McManners 38), thereby angering people from all theaters of French society. Widely regarded as a momentous event that created an internal schism between the religious and secular groups within France, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was the first notable division among Revolutionaries and Counter-Revolutionaries and therefore a precursor of the bloody Radical Revolution that was to follow. This paper will address some of the reforms to the Catholic Church proposed by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and underscore the document’s importance as a turning point in the French Revolution.

According to the French dictionary Larousse, laicism or “laïcité” is the “conception and organization of a society founded upon the separation of Church and State, which removes the Church from all political or administrative power; and, in particular, from the educational system”(Larousse online - see footnote). Although the word itself wasn’t coined until the early 20th century, the concept of a separation between powers was very important to the fundamentals of the French Revolution, and was instrumental in creating a division between the secular and the spiritual.
One of the issues that spearheaded the push to revolutionize France was the enormous debt that the country found itself in, after years of war and luxurious living by the upper classes. Moreover, the system of taxation was so inefficient as to be consistently losing money. “French government was finally on the verge of complete insolvency” (Popkin 22) and national financial ministers realized that major reforms to the system were the only way to get the country out of debt. They realized an obvious way to make some money was to sell some of the vast landholdings which belonged to the Catholic Church. In 1789, the National Assembly voted to “expropriate the Church’s accumulated property” in an attempt to pay off the national debt; however, this decision proved to have an extensive effect on both the clerical and taxation systems in France. These problems escalated until there was a pressing obligation upon the National Assembly to “undertake a thorough restructuring of the Church” (Popkin 51), a restructuring which ultimately manifested itself as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

The main purpose of the document was to enact change, to simplify and reform the Church in a way that would benefit the nation and consequently the third estate. Due to the longstanding tradition of primogeniture, nobles in France who were not the firstborn were often left without land. Because they were members of the upper classes and used to luxuriant standards of living, these second and third-born nobles often became members of the clergy as an alternative. Thus the Church was rife with people who held very high offices, but who were not there necessarily for religious reasons; they had joined instead rather as a means of perpetuating their lavish lifestyles. In an effort to abolish the practice of overpaying the undeserving fatcats within the Church, the National Assembly proposed that the salaries of clergy members be standardized. In Title III, Article V of the Civil Constitution, we can read explicitly the rules to which this new system of standardization apply: “The salaries of the parish priests shall be as follows : in Paris, six thousand livres; in cities having a population of fifty thousand or over, four thousand livres; in those having a population of less than fifty thousand and more than ten thousand, three thousand livres; in cities and towns of which the population is below ten thousand and more than three thousand, twenty-four hundred livres”. In this way, the State could better monitor the goings-on of the clergy, and monitor the government’s respective expenditures for each individual.

One of the most important features of the legislature in the Civil Constitution (and arguably the most incendiary) was the new system of democratic elections of bishops and curés by departmental electoral assemblies. According to Title II, article III of the Civil Constitution: “The election of bishops shall take place according to the forms and by the electoral body designated in the decree of December 22, 1789, for the election of members of the departmental assembly”. Under this new legislation, instead of the King’s choosing the bishops (and favoring those members of the nobility who were perhaps in his pocket somehow), in true revolutionary spirit the power of election would now be in the hands of the people. Unfortunately, as with many ideological reforms in the early revolution, this also proved to be a problem. According to Title II, Article XXI of the Civil Constitution:

XXI. Before the ceremony of consecration begins, the bishop elect shall take a solemn oath, in the presence of the municipal officers, of the people, and of the clergy, to guard with care the faithful of his diocese who are confided to him, to be loyal to the nation, the law, and the king, and to support with all his power the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by the king.

This article is extremely important because it is very telling as to the ultimate motives of the National Assembly. This new reform caused debate because it “overturned the hierarchical structure of the Church, under which authority descended from God through the Pope to the bishops, who in turn consecrated priests” (Popkin 52). Where once the clergy swore allegiance only to the king (and, more importantly, the Pope), here they are required to take an oath that implies that the “nation” takes precedence over both of those authorities. In order to create a new order and a new France, revolutionary authorities were determined in all areas to put nation first. Any dissent was seen as disloyalty to the nation, counter-revolutionary, and potentially treasonous. We would see the gross escalation of this sentiment just a few years later, during the Reign of Terror, in which disloyalty to the state could and often did prove deadly. It is important to acknowledge that the concepts of “loyalty to the nation” and “putting the nation first” were integral to the formation of the French revolution and later became the driving force behind the Reign of Terror.

In a nutshell, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy decreed that “the people (including non-Catholics) would elect priests and bishops; [and] clerics would become, in effect, civil servants under the control of the state”. The demands of the Civil Constitution “stirred more resistance than any previously taken by…revolutionary authorities”, and the National Assembly responded to the unrest by demanding that clergy members take an oath of loyalty to the new regime or “face dismissal” (Bell 183). Just as they made the king sign the bill against his wishes, revolutionary authorities forced those religious figures who knew what was good for them to publicly state their support for the Civil Constitution.

Several goals of the Civil Constitution appeared to be beneficial; the Catholic Church under the old regime was in bad need of reform and many of the rules proposed by this new document would lead the Church in a new, more streamlined direction. However, perhaps the National Assembly were too ambitious in their enthusiasm to reform the Church, and attempting to change so drastically something that had been in place for hundreds of years was simply too much too soon. Another of the major sensitive issues raised by the Civil constitution was the granting of full civil and political rights to both Protestants and Jews. As French citizens, these religious minority groups would now be freely allowed to join departmental electoral assemblies; as a result of their being able to participate in assembly legislation, they would also have the power to vote on the elections of bishops. The idea of Catholic priests being selected by Protestants, Jews, or Atheists was particularly upsetting to groups of devout Catholics (Popkin 52). Although the Civil Constitution was disconcerting to those lay groups who were religious, many of those within the Clergy itself seemed to accept the document with open arms, at least at its introduction.

In The French Revolution and the Church, John McManners states that even though the new changes to the clerical system were harsh, the clergy as a whole did not dislike the proposals put forth by the Civil Constitution enough to reject it. “The poverty of the lower clergy, of the priests who had the care of souls, shocked the people through its flagrant injustice, by contrast with the luxury of the high dignitaries, of the bishops and archbishops—a luxury sometimes outrageous” (Aulard 29). These financial shortcomings, therefore, helped to inspire a more Revolutionary spirit within the lower clergy, and explain why so many church personnel embraced the Civil Constitution with the enthusiasm that they did. Notably, both McManners and Popkin seem to agree that the one glaring problem the clergy had with the Civil Constitution was the National Assembly’s failure to consult the Church before imposing changes. The Assembly had been reluctant to involve the Church with the proceedings out of fear that it would give the noble members of the clergy a “counter-revolutionary platform, and would be an admission that the clergy still remained an Order in the State” (McManners 42). In an enlightened society whose ultimate goals were always serve the Nation and to tear down an oppressive old regime, the prominence of the Catholic Church would have to be diminished. The Church appealed to the Pope to approve the Civil Constitution, while the National Assembly did not care about the Pope’s opinions as it was itself too concerned with the reform of the State. What ensued was a confusing clash of powers involving the Clergy, the King, and the Pope in a race against time to modify the Civil Constitution before it was officially passed into law. Eventually the Assembly lost their patience and demanded the clergy to swear an oath of allegiance to the Civil Constitution and to the State. This blatant subordination of the Church, which had once been the utmost authority, to the State, caused an irreparable rift within the history of the French Revolution, causing discord among people who had until that point unanimously supported much of the same reforms.

Various language within the Civil Constitution of the Clergy demonstrates that the tone of the document is one not only of religious reform, but of societal reform as a whole. Several points are made which underscore the Revolutionaries’ goals to reorganize Catholicism into a more modern institution, whose first and foremost loyalty was to the government of France, and not the Pope. The educated and “enlightened” classes of 18th century France found that “to be impious was to be in the fashion” and the questioning of the practices of the Catholic Church was common, even normal, among nobility (Aulard 32). These new loyalties introduced by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy underscored the growing power of the state and the lessening power of the religious establishment. Many religious-minded peasants in the countryside resented this. God (and by proxy, the Pope) were supposed to be unquestionably powerful and certainly demanded more respect than a bunch of city folk with newfangled ideas who had decided otherwise. The system had been this way for hundreds of years, and such a fundamental change to beliefs of the French populace proved hard to swallow.

In summary, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy came about as a result of the National Assembly’s effort to pay off the national debt created by years of over -expenditure. After having liquidated the lands owned by the Church in an attempt to sell them on the free market, the Assembly was forced to drastically reform the institution of the Catholic Church. The reforms presented by the Assembly were well-received by some but not by others. This created a split between counter-revolutionaries and those who supported it, not only among members of the Church but also among the laypeople, in particular the more religious peasantry of rural areas. The differences in religious and political opinion caused by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy changed the climate of the Revolution, and were an antecedent of the bloodier clashes these groups would face in the years to come.


Footnote: Laïcité (nom feminin): Conception et organisation de la société fondée sur la séparation de l'Église et de l'État et qui exclut les Églises de l'exercice de tout pouvoir politique ou administratif, et, en particulier, de l'organisation de l'enseignement. (Le principe de la laïcité de l'État est posé par l'article 2 de la Constitution française de 1958.)

Works Cited

Aulard, A. Christianity and the French Revolution. Trans. Lady Frazer. London:
Riverside Press, 1927.

Bell, David A. The Cult of the Nation in France: inventing nationalism 1680-1800.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy. March 2001. Hanover Historical Texts Project.
J.H. Robinson. 8 August 2009. http://history.hanover.edu/texts/civilcon.html

Larousse.com. 8 August 2009. http://www.larousse.com/dictionnaires/francais/laicite

McManners, John. The French Revolution and the Church.
New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Popkin, Jeremy. A Short History of the French Revolution.
New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.