Children of the Revolution Read online

  The priest who arrived in the parish was no callow youth and today he might be called a late developer. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney was thirty-two, but had been ordained only three years previously, in August 1815. Of peasant origin, his parents had a small 12-hectare farm at Dardilly, just outside the north-west suburbs of Lyon. He had worked on the farm from the age of seven, the Revolution having interrupted his prospects of a regular education. After the 1801 Concordat, which re-established organized religion in France, Vianney attended the vicarage school in the neighbouring village of Écully, where the curé saw him as a prospect, and he was confirmed at the late age of twenty in 1807. In 1809 he was called up to fight in Napoleon’s armies, but avoided military service first by falling sick, then by going into hiding and lastly by having his younger brother François go in his stead, in return for signing over the 3,000-franc portion of the inheritance due to him. His brother died on campaign in 1813 while Vianney attended the petit séminaire and graduated to the grand séminaire, but his grasp of Latin was so weak that he was expelled in 1813 and finished his theological education at the feet of the curé d’Écully. The shortage of priests after the Revolution was so severe that Vianney was duly ordained, served as a curate at Écully for three years, and was then sent out to rechristianize the forgotten parish of Ars.

  Vianney was not a learned priest and his sermons were cobbled together from theological cribs. However, he set a powerful example of personal piety, at prayer in the church from 4 a.m., was always available for confession, and visited his parishioners in their homes. He was uncompromising in his campaign to impose religious observance in the parish, clamping down on what he saw as the three evils of Sunday: labour, taverns and dancing. He allied himself with a core group of pious women in the parish, spinsters or mothers of priests, and a number of influential families. He trained a body of young girls, recruited into the guild of the Rosary, who recited the chapelet after vespers on a Sunday evening, and sent two of them, Catherine Lassagne and Benoîte Lardet, to train for a year in a community of nuns in order to open a school for girls in the village, which doubled as an orphanage for girls at risk. He mobilized the support of the chatelaine, Mlle Garnier des Garets, known as Mlle d’Ars, aged sixty-four when he arrived and with perfect Ancien Régime manners. Her brother the Vicomte François, who lived in Paris and was childless, became a major benefactor of the parish, rebuilding the church with a number of side-chapels, confessionals and larger choir, having a new bell-tower and bells made, and providing reliquaries, a tabernacle for the holy sacrament, and a dais and banners to carry in processions.

  The influence of Vianney was not confined to his parish. In 1823 he assisted the Carthusians of Lyon who were preaching a mission in nearby Trévoux, gaining a reputation as a great confessor, and later that year led a pilgrimage which brought out two-thirds of his parishioners, travelling by boats drawn by horses along the Saône to the chapel of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, on a hilltop above Lyon, to give thanks for the benefactions of the vicomte. The July Revolution, which was in part an anticlerical revolt against the close alliance of Church and reactionary monarchy, affected Ars as elsewhere. A minority on the municipal council tried to unseat him, appealing to the subprefect against the mayor’s banning of dancing on the church square on the festival of the village’s patron saint. Vianney replied by keeping the young girls in the church after vespers, doing their rosaries as usual, and sabotaging the ball. Despite his campaign against popular vices, he was prepared to make use of popular religion too, especially saint-worship, in order to further his crusade. When Pauline Jaricot, a silk-merchant’s daughter known to him in Écully, returned in 1836 cured of her heart condition from the Naples shrine of St Philomena, he begged her for a relic and placed it in a side-chapel at Ars, dedicated to the saint. Of ninety-four girls he baptized between 1836 and 1855, thirty-nine were christened Philomena. Not only the saint cult but also his personal reputation led to pilgrims and penitents coming from all over the region to be confessed and set on the right course by the curé d’Ars. In 1845 there was an eight-day waiting list for the confessional, even though he might be confessing up to fifteen hours a day, and he remained a curé in the same parish until his death in 1859.1

  The curé d’Ars was exceptional, a parish priest who was beatified in 1905 and canonized in 1925. And yet he was in many ways representative of the parish clergy who were faced by the challenge of rechristianizing France after the Revolution. France was desperately short of priests after a decade of persecution during which virtually no training or ordination had taken place. In 1809 there were only 31,870 secular priests compared to 60,000 in 1789, of whom 10,613 or a third were over sixty, and in 1814 numbers were down to 24,874.2 In the diocese of Guéret (Creuse department) in 1820, to take one example, they were either old, born before 1770, aged over fifty, or young, born after 1785, and under thirty-five; there were virtually none in the generation born between 1770 and 1785.3 Whereas priests in the eighteenth century were overwhelmingly of urban and bourgeois origin, in the nineteenth century they were overwhelmingly rural and of peasant or artisan stock. In the diocese of Rennes in the early nineteenth century 84 per cent of the population were of rural origin and so were 82 per cent of the priests, while between 1803 and 1869 in the diocese of Guéret 42 per cent of priests were sons of peasants, 42 per cent sons of artisans or small traders, and only 16 per cent were bourgeois.4 The abolition of tithes and the confiscation of church lands made the priesthood a far less attractive career than before the Revolution. Under the Concordat priests to the level of cantonal capital or deanery were paid a stipend by the state of 1,200–1,500 francs, but rural curés were paid only 500 francs by the state, rising to 700 francs in 1816 and 800 francs in 1830, the parish or commune being expected to make it up to a living wage.5 Only for those of rural or peasant origin did the parish priesthood offer any degree of stability or respect; indeed, as in the case of Vianney, it might provide a solution to the question of too many heirs chasing a farm that was too small to be divided further. Yet the curé de campagne could exercise great authority as an intermediary between the parish from which many people rarely moved and the outside world, as a notable alongside the notary and doctor but speaking the language, literally, of the peasants, as an ally of the chatelain but not necessarily ‘the château’s man’, as a figure vested with local authority like the mayor but also a spiritual leader, healer and protector of the parish at time of crisis, such as the cholera epidemic of 1832.6

  The work of Vianney at Ars mirrored what went on to a greater or lesser extent in a thousand parishes. Everywhere the destruction wrought by the Revolution had to be set right. In the diocese of Angers over 200 churches were built or rebuilt in a diocese of about 360 parishes before 1870, with neo-Gothic and stained glass all the rage.7 The restoration of church bells, slowly under the Empire, faster after 1830, was of immense significance. Ringing the bells of Notre-Dame on Easter Day 1802 to celebrate the Concordat symbolized for many the end of the Revolution. The bell was at the centre of the parish’s religious life, although bell-ringing remained an issue between the government and the parish, which constantly tried to multiply the occasions on which bells could be rung, and trusted in them to ward away thunderstorms, disease and evil spirits.8 The Restoration period saw a vast movement of purificatory missions, preached by a regular clergy back in harness, inviting penitence for sins committed during the Revolution and a return to the true faith in order to recover God’s protection of France, culminating in the raising of huge mission crosses, many of which were knocked down by anticlericals after 1830.9 For nearly a generation after 1792, however, the apparatus of organized religion in the form of churches, parish priests and popular education had been sorely deficient, so that local populations had fallen back on traditional popular practices, many of which smacked of magic and superstition. While pushing forward the official religious revival, parish priests also had to accommodate the popular rites of their flock, as a means of
bringing them back to more orthodox practices. So while they did what they could to eliminate the profanity of drinking and dancing, they blessed candles at Candlemas to guard against storms and take dead souls to heaven, blessed box-tree sprigs on Palm Sunday (preferred to palm leaves) to protect homes and stables from illness, and holy water at Easter to sprinkle on beds and in farmyards, led the Fête-Dieu or Corpus Christi procession across the fields to bless the crops and accompan ied popular pilgrimages to local shrines which were said to cure one ailment or another, ensuring that they remained orderly and sober.10

  PRACTISING AND NON-PRACTISING

  FRANCE

  The raw material of Vianney’s parish was not promising, and his achievements were exceptional. That said, what most parish priests and the Catholic hierarchy in general could achieve was very much conditioned by the intensity of religious faith in the locality or region, which varied greatly from one part of France to another. Why this varied so much may be debated. One theory is that growing urbanization and industrialization progressively detached the working classes from organized religion, while the backward and traditional countryside remained more religious. Another is more historical and looks to the impact of events such as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the ill-fated Church reforms of 1791, for an explanation. A third is geographical and contrasts religious practice in the outlying areas of France with those in the core. A fourth looks to the coexistence of competing religious communities, Catholic and Protestant, or Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, where rivalry between faiths may have pushed up religious practice. A final explanation brings in the question of linguistic barriers, suggesting that minority languages may have acted as a dam against anticlericalism and impiety carried by the French language.

  A study of the population of Paris, published in 1863, seems to provide evidence for the theory that urbanization and industrialization undermined religious practice.

  The immense majority of the Parisian working class is Catholic by baptism [but] Catholic ceremonies are a dead letter for the people. Only women and above all children preserve a few feeble ties between the people and the Church… People are so anticlerical that the few faithful on whom the Church can rely are the targets of sarcasm as much as the few who oppose democracy. The typical Paris worker is an apprentice freethinker.11

  This explanation blamed not the growing exploitation in large factories or the atomization of communal life in the large cities but politics: the alliance of the Church with reaction. The Revolution of 1848, according to this account, had provided the Church with a great opportunity to link religion and liberty. Initially the clergy had blessed liberty trees and baptized the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, but then fear had driven them, once again, into ‘the camp of adversaries of the Revolution’ and the people and religion were forced apart.12

  This political interpretation suggests that sociological factors were not the most important when it came to explaining religious practice. Indeed, low religious practice was a phenomenon observed not only in Paris but across the Paris basin and central France, not only in urban areas but in rural ones too. ‘In the regions near the capital of the kingdom,’ noted the bishop of Chartres in 1842, ‘religion is practically abandoned by the menfolk; for many, their first communion is also their last.’13 When Félix Dupanloup was appointed to the bishopric of Orléans in 1850 he greeted it as a ‘terrible cure of souls’ with ‘500 indifferent parishes’. ‘Faith is declining visibly in this unfortunate region,’ reported his archdeacon of Pithiviers, responsible for the Beauce region, where the rate of Easter communion among women was 12.5 per cent and among men 2 per cent.14 The central French area of low religious practice extended as far as the Limousin in the Massif Central. The main factor here was the high rate of priests swearing the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy – 75 per cent in the Creuse, 65 per cent in the Haute Vienne, which may have reflected some attempt by priests and their parishioners to find common ground between religion and Revolution.15 However this attempt failed, ending up with the persecution of priests and the closure of churches and, unlike at Ars, these populations did not return to the churches when they reopened.

  If many rural areas were irreligious, there were many industrial areas where religious practice among the working classes was surprisingly high. When coal mines began to be sunk in the Pas-de-Calais, where only 17 per cent of clergy had taken the oath to the Civil Constitution, local clergy worried that religious life would suffer from women dressing up as men and going down mines alongside them, leading to ‘the corruption of girls and boys, infidelity among spouses and a diabolical life in households’. However, miners were overwhelmingly of rural origin and retained the religious practice they brought from their home regions, albeit combined with a certain occupational superstition. Thus they crossed themselves before descending the pit, kept the box-tree sprigs from Palm Sunday in the house, celebrated St Barbe, the patron saint of miners, on 4 December, and took funerals extremely seriously.16 In the Nord, up against the Belgian frontier, religious practice was high not only in the rural, Flemish-speaking part of the department, but in the huge textile towns of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, while the rural south of the department around Cambrai was much less fervent. This was partly because of the rural, Belgian origin of many textile workers, but also because of the ex perience of the department during the Revolution. The reorganization of dioceses under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy deprived the bishop of Ypres of his parishes in France, and he protested, anathematizing those who took the oath and continuing to appoint priests to French Flemish parishes. Only 15 per cent of the clergy took the oath in the Nord, and only 5 per cent in the Flemish-speaking arrondissement of Hazebrouck, and many non-jurors who exercised their ministry from beyond the frontier returned to France in the wake of the Austrian army in 1792.17

  The proximity of a frontier beyond which there was a strongly practising region offered a good deal of protection to religious practice. Franche-Comté, which like Flanders had been part of the very Catholic Habsburg Empire before 1678, was divided up into three departments and dioceses by the Civil Constitution. The diocese of Besançon (Doubs department) was particularly fervent in its religious practice, and the upper Doubs a fertile area for the recruitment of priests. Only 29 per cent took the oath to the Civil Constitution and the non-juring bishop of Besançon, Mgr de Durfort, organized his non-jurors from the Catholic canton of Fribourg over the border in Switzerland. When he died in 1792 responsibility for French non-jurors was taken over by the bishop of Lausanne, who was resident in Fribourg, and fifty-nine Franc-Comtois priests were ordained in Fribourg during the revolutionary period. The first bishop appointed under the Concordat, the former constitutional bishop of Rennes, Claude Le Coz, remained in place from 1802 to 1815 but had little authority in his diocese.18 The non-juring priesthood was ready to jump back into harness and the upper Doubs around Pontarlier, perched high in the Jura, where only 18 per cent of priests took the oath, resumed its role as a nursery for priests.19 Not for nothing did Montalembert, who was elected deputy of the Doubs in 1849, call it the ‘French Tyrol’.

  Just north of the Franche-Comté, Alsace-Lorraine offered another example of a region that was far from being dechristianized. The working population of the textile town of Mulhouse, which was mainly Catholic, noted Armand Audiganne in 1860, ‘has maintained a religious observance which, if it has little influence on their morality, has a powerful hold on their minds. Each Sunday morning men and women crowd into a church which would have been large enough at the beginning of the century but was now thronged by a thousand Catholics.’ This religious fervour, which did not prevent them from being dead drunk on Monday morning, may have owed something to the confessional mix of the town, 40,000 or 73 per cent Catholics, 12,000 or 22 per cent Protestants, and 3,000 or 5 per cent Jews.20 In Strasbourg the confessional mix was more balanced, with 50 per cent Catholics, 46 per cent Protestants and 3 per cent Jews in 1806, and again r
eligious observance was sharpened by religious rivalry.21 Catholics were antagonized by the triumphalism of the Protestant celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Reformation in 1817, while Protestants reacted against the Jesuit mission of 1821 and that of 1825, which ended with a ‘gigantic cross’ being raised near the cathedral. When mixed marriages took place the Catholic clergy insisted that the children be brought up as Catholics, and at Boux-willer (Bas-Rhin) in 1833 the priest refused to bury a Catholic doctor who had married a Protestant and allowed his children to be brought up as Protestants. The shortage of churches until after 1850 meant that a ‘simultaneum’ system operated, with the Catholics using the choir and Lutherans the nave at different times of day, but conflicts often arose. At Gundershofen (Bas-Rhin) in 1842, for example, the Catholics erected a balustrade at the entrance to the choir which the Protestants pulled down. Between 1840 and 1870, however, such rivalry stimulated the building of 200 churches, mostly in a powerful neo-Gothic style, and Alsace sustained its reputation as ‘the land of organs’ with 600 of them in 1844.22

  The presence of a Jewish minority which was emancipated at the Revolution and had acquired an economic grip over non-Jews stimulated an anti-Semitism which may be interpreted as a kind of religious fervour. Alsace-Lorraine had 26,000 Jews in 1818, which was 79 per cent of the Jewish population in France.23 Emancipation allowed them to move from village communities not unlike the Polish shtetl into the towns, to move from being pedlars, horse- and cattle-merchants and moneylenders to owning land and taking up trades previously closed to them. However, they were now criticized for remaining middlemen and declining the opportunity to exercise ‘useful trades’ such as crafts or farming, charging extortionate interest to peasants who borrowed from them to buy biens nationaux, while continuing to speak a separate ‘Judaeo-Alsatian’ language and marrying only those of their own faith.24 A popular hostility to Jewish usury was reported in January 1806 by the prefect of Bas-Rhin at Strasbourg to Napoleon, as he returned from Austerlitz. Napoleon fumed that he ‘could not consider Jews who suck the blood of true Frenchmen to be French themselves’, and called both a Jewish assembly of notables and a Sanhedrin of rabbis later in 1806 to incite the Jewish population to reform its practices.25 While the assembly of notables, dominated by cultivated Portuguese Jews from Bordeaux, was conciliatory, the Sanhedrin refused to budge on usury and endogamous marriage, so Napoleon issued his ‘infamous decree’ of 17 March 1808 protecting Gentiles in debt to Jews, forcing Jewish traders to register each year with the prefect and subjecting them to military service.26 Such stringent measures headed off popular anti-Semitism provisionally, but in 1832 and 1848 there were pogroms against Jews in Alsace, their neighbours pillaging their homes and attacking them with forks, sticks and axes.27 Increasingly Alsatian Jews moved out of the villages to the relative safety of the city, and from Alsace to Paris. Jacob Dreyfus, a pedlar from Rixheim (Haut-Rhin), moved to Mulhouse after the pogrom of 1832, and his son Raphael married a butcher’s daughter, became a commission agent seeking clients for Mulhouse manufacturers, and in 1862 set up his own cotton mill. After the annexation of Alsace by Germany in 1871 two of his sons, Jacques and Léon, remained at Mulhouse, now part of the Reich, to look after the business, while two others, Mathieu and Alfred, went to Paris to continue their education.28