The French Revolution and Its Effects on the Papacy Vhe French Revolution was a period of major social changes in France which began in 1789 and ended in 1799. It was aimed at changing the relationship between rulers and those governed, and to redefine the nature of political power. It abolished the hereditary monarchy of the Old Regime (ancien régime) and established constitutional monarchy Since the Church and the state were interwoven in the share of the prerogatives of the aristocratic power, it also struck the Church. 4.1 The Estates General of 1789 The French Revolution began as a nonviolent political action aimed at reforming the French government. King Louis XVI had convoked the Estates General in 1789 to deal with a financial crisis. It was a general assembly representing the French estates of the realm: the clergy (First Estate), the nobility (Second Estate), and the commoners (Third Estate). It comprised of 1200 selected deputies. At the gathering, the deputies from the Third Estate (commoners) numbering 600 decided that a more comprehensive reform was needed than that suggested by the king. They wanted a representative government and the abolishment of the hereditary monarchy. Arbitrary government was to be replaced with constitutional government. All privileges due to birth were to be abolished too. They demanded too that political power be transferred to the middle class. The Estate General declared that the king would no longer be allowed to rule as a monarch but has to share power with the elected representatives of the people. Unable to convince the deputies otherwise and unwilling to use force, the king acquiesced. The deputies became the representatives of the nation and the Estate General became the National Assembly. Later, the king tried to use military force to re-establish his absolute power. But the people formed their own army, the National Guard, and a general uprising in the country put power into the hands of the revolutionaries. The king had to capitulate in order to retain some measure of authority. But by constantly trying to undermine the revolution, he alienated himself from the people. The revolutionaries executed him and established a republic. The revolution had turned bloody. 4.2 The Revolution and the Church In 1789 the Church still held a privileged position in France as the only form of public worship allowed by the state. Its clergy, numbering about a hundred thousand, formed the First Estate. It controlled education and public relief (social welfare). Its parish priests were the sole registrars of births, marriages, and deaths. Its officials had also the power of censorship over publications deemed harmful to faith and morals. But in 1789 there were already voices calling for the sale of Church lands, end of payments to Rome and the reduction or dissolution of the monastic orders - as shown in the cahiers! drawn up by the Third Estate during the Estate General. At first there was no conflict between the Revolution and the Church. In fact, the First Estate (the clergy) saved the revolution by voting with the Third Estate against the nobility and the king in favour of constituting a National Assembly. The clergy willingly surrendered their privileges and the Church allowed its property to be confiscated by the state in order to deal with the country's bankruptcy. On their part, the revolutionaries recognised the Catholic Church as the official form of worship but also accorded civil rights to Protestants and Jews. ' The cahiers were the lists of grievances drawn up by each of the three Estates in France, between March and April 1789. Their compilation was ordered by King Louis XVI who convened the Estates General of 1789.But conflict with the Church started when the National Assembly took up the reform of the Church through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The revolutionaries of the National Assembly dissolved the chapters attached to cathedrals, pastors were given a decent income, and new parochial and diocesan boundaries were drawn up. But the Civil Constitution also sought to democratise the Church by providing for the election of bishops and priests and (o eliminate all control of the Pope over its internal affairs. The revolutionaries then tried to force the clergy to accept these reforms by mandating compliance oath for all office holders without which they would lose their office. They probably did not reckon with resistance from the clergy; for they thought that the clergy may not want to lose office or would not want to turn against the revolution they helped create. Because it feared that a national council of bishops over the matter may become an opportunity for anti-revolutionary propaganda, the National Assembly forbade the convocation of such a council. The clergy had to appeal to the Pope to allow them take the oath. The Pope waited for 8 months before he took the decision to condemn the oath and forbid the clergy from taking it. It was already too late. The clergy had already been forced to take a stand. Seven bishops and about half the French clergy rejected the oath because they felt that the spiritual sovereignty of the Church was at stake in the matter. For them, the National Assembly had overstepped its authority by legislating in ecclesiastical matters on their own authority and demanding obedience before the Church has taken a stand over the issue. The other bishops and clergy took the oath. The clergy became divided into jurors (those who took the oath) and non-jurors (those who refused to take the oath). Along these lines the entire French Church became divided between the Constitutional Church (bishops and clergy who took the oath) and Non-constitutional or Non-juring Church (bishops and clergy who refused the oath). The National Assembly ordered the replacement of all non-constitutional clergy with the constitutional clergy. This led to some resistance and even to violence in some places. Initially, the non-constitutional priests were only removed from their offices. But soon, they were suspected of being disloyal to the revolution. When the Austrian and Prussian troops invaded France to put down the revolution, a persecution of all those suspected of being potential traitors started. The National Assembly passed a decree according to which every non-constitutional priest who has been denounced by twenty citizens was to be deported. Thereafter, about forty thousand priests were driven into exile. In 1793 the death penalty was imposed on any of them who dared to return to France. But a good number of non-constitutional priests heroically remained and secretly exercised their ministry in France. Some of them even secretly gave absolution to those to be executed. The persecution of priests became quite bloody when the Duke of Brunswick approached Paris with his cavalry'. Full of hysteria and panic, a mob rushed to the prisons and lynched those to be deported being held there. The first 20 to be lynched were priests. In the bloodbath that followed (September 1793), 3 bishops and 220 priests were killed. For the constitutional clergy, things went well at first. But when they opposed the execution of the king, they too became suspect. 4.3. The Revolution Secks To Dechristianize France At the root of the persecution of the clergy was actually the desire of the revolutionaries to replace Christianity with a religion of the revolution. Soon, the revolution began to take the form of a religion. Patriotic ceremonies involving sacred oaths and sacred trees were created. In some places, the religious names of some streets were replaced with patriotic names. The names of the saints were replaced with the names of revolutionary " part of an army that fought on horses. ‘Today, « cavalry is the part of an army that fights on armoured vehicles. 13heroes, Children were given un-Chrisuan baptismal names. Church bells and chalices were seized and melted, A strong tension arose between the values of Christianity and the values of the Revolution, Anticlerical revolutionaries attacked the clergy for being celibate and demanded that the clergy marry in order to increase the number of patriots Ina move to remove all vestiges of Christianity from France, the revolutionaries discarded the Gregorian calendar! and adopted a Republican calendar on 7th Octobe 1793, The Christian Sunday and the seven-day week were replaced with a ten-day week All religious holidays were cancelled, A new era dating from the start of the French Republic (2nd September 1792) was established to replace the old dating from the birth OF Christ, Every reterence to the bitth of Christ was dropped Another attempt at dechristianizing France was begun by an ex-priest named Fouché Ay an agent of National Convention? Fouché unveiled a bust of Brutus (a saint to revolutionaries) in the church of Sain-Cyr at Nevers on 22nd September 1793 and denounced ‘religious sophistry’ from the pulpit, From there, he travelled to many places turning the churches into ‘temples of reason’, He presided over ceremonies caricaturing the Catholic liturgy. He pressured many priests to resign and to marry. He ransacked many churches and ordered the burial of all citizens in a common cemetery whose gates he marked with the sign: "Death is an eternal sleep" ~ a mocking of the Christian belief in the resurrection, Many other agents of the National Convention began to imitate the same thing all over France About the same time, the city government (commune) of Paris ordered the closure of all churches in Paris, ‘The constitutional bishop of Paris was woken from sleep by a rabble and ordered to resign, He did and went back to sleep. In Notre Dame an actress was enthroned on the high altar as Reason’s goddess, The cult of reason had now a liturgy. By the middle of 1794, the cathedrals and parish churches of most towns and villages in France were turned into temples of Reason’, In rural areas, the dechristianization had to be done by armed force because the people still wanted their Christian religion. ‘The radical revolutionaries who were trying to dechristianize France also succeeded in cither forcing or convincing many clergy to marry as a proof of their break with Catholicism, At Beauvais, the bishop and fifteen priests married. All over France a total of about 4000 priests married during the Revolution, Some simply faked marriage t avoid persecution, Many of such married their housekeepers. Others married because they had always wanted to. For such, celibacy is only an ecclesiastical law. Some priests even left the priesthood and joined in the dechristianization of France. About 20,000 priests, most of who were constitutional priests, left the priesthood during the Revolution, ‘This apostasy discredited the constitutional Church considerably. Now, the revolutionaries believed that no state can survive without religion. So they decided to replace Christianity with a 'philanthropic Deism’, For the liturgy of this new religion they imitated the Paris ‘cult of Reason’, enthroning young girls as symbols of Reason or Liberty or Nature. In many towns many young girls were decked in this way and led processions (o altars erected to this new religion. Another new religion was also founded by a certain Maximilien de Robespierre. It called ‘the cult of the Supreme Being’. Robespierre succeeded in getting the National Convention to approve a motion on 7th May 1793 which dedicated France to this cult According, to him, the new cult has only one dogma ~ the immortality of the soul- and only one precept do your duty as @ man, ‘The liturgy of his new religion was * Greyorian calendar 4» a solar dating, system proclaimed in 1582 by Pope Gregory NU and which is in use today. 1 replaced the Julian vakendar {he agents of the National Convention were men sent out 10 deal with the eme jon created by the invasion of France and the counterrevalation within the country, They had almost uatimited powers. 4inaugurated in June 1794, But soon afterwards, Robespierre died and his cult of Supreme Being died with him. There were a number of other Deistic cults but none of them lasted. There was even a ‘Republican Lord's Prayer’ which wore off very quickly. ‘The new religions gradually faded away and by 1794 dechristianization had died down, On 21st February 1795 4 decree was promulgated which guaranteed the free exercise of any religion. And there was a rush to open the churches again 4.4 Napoleon, the Church and the Pope Just as the French Church was recovering from the devastation caused by the French revolution, another crisis arose, this time between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Pope Napoleon served in the French army and supported the revolution. He rose rapidly in the French army after he saved the governing French Directory’ by firing on royalist insurgents. He rose to become the leader of the French army. In 1796, Napoleon invaded Italy, occupied Milan and set up a number of republics in northern Italy according to the French model. In 1797 he invaded Rome, taking Pope Pius VI prisoner. He ordered the Pope to be removed to France, so that the Austrian army may not try to rescue him. The 81 year old pope died on the way at Valence. The Conclave, which took place at Venice, elected Pope Pius VII. Meanwhile, Napoleon had defeated many other Italian cities and made himself the master of Staly. His programme was the spreading of the value of the French Revolution ~ equality of all citizens before the law, the right of the individual to choose his profession, the supremacy of the lay state, and religious freedom. But he was ready to curtail individual liberty in the interest of government. Wishing religious peace in his kingdom, Napoleon strove to reconcile the divided Church of France but along the lines of the Civil Constitution. This he could achieve only if he got the non-constitutional clergy, who were in the majority, to agree to his plans. Here again, he needed the co-operation of the Pope. In 1801, an agreement was reached between Napoleon and the Pope. On Easter 1802 the Concordat containing the agreement was signed at Notre Dame Cathedral. This ended the division between the constitutional and non-constitutional Church in France. The chief points of the Concordat were fi all bishops, both constitutional and non- constitutional had to tender their resignation to the Pope; ii) the First Consul (Napoleon himself) had the right to name the bishops, and the Pope had the right to institute them canonically; iii) the Church would not seek to recover its alienated property; iv) the clergy would derive their income from salaries paid by the state; v) the practice of the Catholic religion would be subject to whatever police regulations were required for the public order. With the last article, Napoleon intended to minimize papal control over the French Church and make it Gallican. He later unilaterally attached seventy-seven (77) articles to this last article which severely limited communications between Rome and the French bishops. He also made the teaching of the Gallican articles of 1682 obligatory in all seminaries. But this peace did not last long. Napolcon soon learned that the Pope would not allow himself to be used as a puppet. Napoleon wanted the Papal States to join in a blockade against England. But the Pope refused this because he did not want to compromise the neutrality of the Papal States. Napoleon seized the Papal States and the Pope excommunicated him. In 1808, Napoleon had the Pope arrested and carried off to French Directory (also called French Directorate) was the governing, five-member committee in the French First Republic which ruled France from 2nd Ni 11795 9 November 1799 when Napoleon overthrew it 1 4 Coup and replaced it with the Cor 15France, where he was held in captivity for almost 6 years. On his side, the Pope refused {0 institute any new bishops canonically, By 1814 many French dioceses had become vacant. After Napoleon was defeated in Russia and faced enemies in all fronts, he allowed the Pope to be restored to Rome. 4.5 The Church after the War The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars came to an end in 1814 when Napoleon was defeated by a coalition of European nations. The Congress of Vienna (1814 — 1815) restored monarchies to power in Europe. The Pope was restored as the monarch of the Papal States. But the Congress could not undo the work of the Revolution, The division between a considerable body of Frenchmen and the Church was final. Dechristianization failed but anticlericalism took its place. The secular spirit continued to spread. Civil marriage, civil divorce, and the secular school system were its most visible expressions. In Germany, the Catholic prince bishops lost their political power. Church property was taken over and monasteries dismantled. The Church was reduced to an agency of the state. Its schools and clergy were supported by the state, 4.6 The Effect of French Revolution on the Papacy On the whole, French Revolution was beneficial to the papacy. This is because it helped to create the more powerful papacy of the 19th century. This it did in several ways: 4) Because only the Pope and Napoleon settled the fate of the French Church, the papacy was viewed once again as a very powerful institution. ii) The heroic stand of Pope Pius VII against Napoleon enhanced papal image. iii) In destroying ancient monarchies, the Revolution liberated the Church from the servitude of these monarchs who had their puppets elected as popes, installed puppet bishops in their kingdoms, and co-opted Catholic missionaries for their colonial aims. In the end, the Pope became once again the leader of the Catholic world. Rome became once more the centre of Catholicism. Although Gallicanism was not completely stamped out, the clergy was increasingly looking up to the Pope for leadership. The overseas missions too were taken over by the Pope and were revived. 16