Children of the Revolution Read online

  Another area of mixed confessions, and of sharp religious conflict, though here only between Catholic and Protestant, was the Cévennes hills and the lowlands around Nîmes. Here the Protestant population was Calvinist and had been deprived of civil and political rights and persecuted after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. In the early eighteenth century the Calvinists of the Cévennes had risen in revolt, the so-called Camisard wars, which provided them with a myth of resistance. Banned from office and the professions, Protestants turned to trade and a rich bourgeoisie of silk-merchants and bankers, based on Nîmes, emerged. It was this elite which benefited from the concession of civil and political rights at the Revolution, five of the eight deputies of the Third Estate from the Gard in 1789 being Protestant. An attempt by Catholics to prevent them taking over the municipality of Nîmes led to the four-day slaughter of the bagarre de Nîmes in June 1790, when the Protestant National Guard, reinforced by Protestant volunteers from the Cévennes, clashed with Catholic irregulars, after which the Protestants established their ascendancy in the administration of Nîmes and the Gard for most of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period.29

  Hostility to Protestant emancipation was thus a driving force behind Catholic counter-revolution in the region, based on an alliance of landowning nobles excluded from power and poor peasants and workers who felt exploited by Protestant employers and mobilized in irregular militias, the miquelets. Their chance of revenge came after the Hundred Days, when Protestant supremacy crumbled with Napoleonic rule, and Catholic royalists unleashed a White Terror to force their way back into power.30 While the Restoration favoured the Catholics, the July Revolution brought the Protestants back into power. Now there was less violence but the rivalry was just as intense. Emmanuel d’Alzon, from a Catholic noble family in the Cévennes, one of whose ancestors had died in the Wars of Religion and another fighting the Camisards, was originally destined for a military career and when he became a priest dedicated himself to continuing the struggle against Protestants. He set up a Catholic college in Nîmes, even before it became legal under the Falloux law of 1850, staffed by priests belonging to the Assumptionist order he had founded, his intention being to ‘batter the Lycée, and gradually to draw off the whole Catholic population’, turning the lycée into a Protestant ghetto.31 Catholic–Protestant competition ensured a high level of religious commitment on both sides, even in industrial towns which might be expected to be less religious. At Lodève, a town in the Cévennes making woollen cloth for the army, Audiganne noted that ‘the Catholic religion reigns alone; its practices are observed with a remarkable fervour,’ with hooded workers belonging to societies of penitents presiding over funerals and a ‘quite extraordinary’ cult of St Fulcran, a former bishop of the town.32 At La Grand’Combe, a mining town further north in the Cévennes, between 30 and 50 per cent of miners took Easter communion in 1880, so that the bishop of Nîmes, Mgr Besson, himself a native of the very Catholic Doubs, reported that the town was one of the most fervent parishes in his diocese.33

  The west of France, like much of the Midi, was a bastion of Catholic practice. In Brittany there were no religious minorities, and there was an overwhelming opposition to the Revolution, with 83 per cent of non-jurors in the diocese of Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine department).34 The diocese of Saint-Malo straddled the western part of Ille-et-Vilaine and the eastern parts of the Côtes-du-Nord and Morbihan and was a laboratory of Counter-Reformation activity. It was abolished under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but left its shadow as the part of Upper Brittany where religious practice and the recruitment of priests were highest.35 A small number of districts did see some attempt to reconcile Catholicism and Revolution. In the district of Quimper, for example, 53 per cent of priests took the oath to the Civil Constitution. This gave rise to a tension between what has been called ‘blue Christianity’, accepting the principles of 1789 but trying to christianize them, and ‘white Christianity’, which opposed the Revolution in the name of Church and king, protected the non-jurors and went as far as chouan guerrilla warfare against constitutional priests, revolutionary officials and purchasers of biens nationaux.36

  Although it might be imagined that ‘white Christianity’ corresponded to the Breton-speaking western half of Brittany and ‘blue Christianity’ to the French-speaking eastern half, in fact this was far from being the case. In the Morbihan, for example, constitutional priests were concentrated in the Breton-speaking west of the department, while most non-jurors came from the French-speaking east, which had belonged to the pious diocese of Saint-Malo before 1789, and left its imprint with a score of only 10 per cent of juring priests. This may suggest that the historic weight of religious practice was more important than language in determining attitudes to the Civil Constitution and the Revolution.37 It was not, however, that the Breton-speaking areas were less religious. The Lenten address of the bishop of Quimper, Mgr Graveron, born near Brest, highlighted ‘the close ties that exist between a people’s language and its beliefs, its customs and its morals, its habits and its virtues’, and warned that the erosion of Breton by French was bringing impiety.38 In fact the whole of Brittany was religious, with a quasi-unanimous attendance of both sexes at mass, although some Bretons were more prepared to compromise with the Revolution than others.39

  The peculiar intensity of religious life in Brittany may in part be attributed to a symbiosis between official Catholicism and popular religion, the former using the latter to underpin official religion rather than attempting to crush it as ‘superstition’. Ernest Renan, brought up in Tréguier, in the Breton-speaking west, a town which nurtured the cult of St Yves, noted that there were between ten and fifteen little chapels in each parish which were ‘dedicated to a saint who has never been heard of in the rest of Christendom’, for whom masses were said once a year. These cults, he said, were ‘merely tolerated by the clergy; if they could, they would suppress them.’40 New saints were being invented right down to the Revolution. The body of a chouan victim of the republican armies, known as Le Bonhomme, buried at Le Theil (Ille-et-Vilaine), was exhumed in 1830 and found to be in a remarkable state of preservation. The burial-place became a site of pilgrimage, and a fountain near by was said to cure fevers. The clergy did not suppress the cult but in 1870 built a chapel close by, dedicated to Our Lady of Beauvais, seeking to channel popular piety into the cult of the Virgin Mary which was developing in the nineteenth century as a way to fuse popular and official religion.41

  The most spectacular example of a popular cult being transformed into official religion was of course at Lourdes. In the Pyrenees, as in Brittany and elsewhere, trees, fountains and stones were widely invested with religious significance, and local shrines, the objects of local pilgrimage and prayer, were thick on the ground. The apparition of a woman in white to a fourteen-year-old shepherdess, the daughter of a ruined miller, on 11 February 1858 at a grotto outside Lourdes was nothing out of the ordinary, except that it happened on a number of occasions and crowds gathered, 7,000 strong on 4 March, to see her fall into a trance as the vision reappeared. People began to bring gifts and started to build a chapel to the Virgin Mary, much to the confusion of the local authorities, who removed the gifts and tried to close the site in the name of public order. The bishop, Mgr Laurence, might have joined the authorities in their reservations, but he was persuaded by the story that on 24 March the apparition had declared, in the local patois, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’ This echoed a doctrine proclaimed by Pope Pius IX in 1854, to the effect that the Virgin Mary was herself preserved from all trace of original sin when her mother conceived her. In 1861 he therefore bought the grotto from the commune and had a Gothic chapel erected above it, which was proclaimed the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in 1874, while Bernadette, the shepherdess, was removed as a sick pauper into the care of the Sisters of Nevers, dying in 1878. Thus a spontaneous and popular outpouring was taken over by the Church hierarchy and regularized as part of the Marian revival that was p
aying increasing dividends in the nineteenth century.42

  INTELLECTUAL WAR

  The battle that was fought between religion and Revolution in the parishes was also fought in the media. It was to be won or lost not only on the ground but in the world of ideas. There was a theory prevalent in conservative circles that the Revolution had been caused not by any fundamental crisis in French society or government but gratuitously, by the inflammatory ideas of philosophes of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire and Rousseau, which had taken hold of the educated elite and percolated down, in vulgarized and perverted forms, to the people. If therefore the threat of revolution were to be dissipated, it would ultimately have to be done by winning the battle of ideas. Men of religion who wrestled with these issues nevertheless confronted a fundamental problem. Were the ideas emanating from the Revolution to be rejected lock, stock and barrel, or was there a way of christianizing some of those ideas and modernizing religion in order to combat the modern world more effectively? This was an option that was posed each time a revolution shook France, and each time a new generation wrestled with it. The main stumbling block to this strategy, repeatedly manifested, was that the Catholic hierarchy invariably opposed such accommodation, leaving Catholic thinkers to choose between following the logic of their ideas and remaining within the bosom of the Church.

  When Chateaubriand returned to France in 1800 he recalled seeing ‘only abandoned churches, whose dead had been thrown out, belltowers without bells, cemeteries without crosses, statues of saints without heads, stoned in their niches’. He wanted to bring France back to religion, and he also yearned for reconciliation with his mother, who had died in 1798 as a result of her imprisonment during the Terror, while he was in exile. He himself had been seduced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, but his mother had written to him, asking him to return to the religion in which he had been brought up. ‘I cried, and I believed,’ he declared, and wrote the Genius of Christianity both as ‘a mausoleum to my mother’ and as a beacon for the faithful, seeking a way back to ‘God’s house’.43

  The task Chateaubriand set himself was to rescue religion from the sarcasm of the philosophes, to demonstrate that it was ‘neither barbarous, nor ridiculous, nor the enemy of arts and genius’. He argued that the existence of God was proved by ‘the marvels of Nature’, and that Christianity had inspired art and literature, poetry and music. Forests were ‘the first temples of the Divinity’, and Gothic cathedrals were like petrified forests. Without Christianity, he wrote, we would be just like the Romans, corrupt, cruel and servile under tyranny: ‘Christianity saved society from total destruction by converting the Barbarians.’44 Published in 1802, the Genius of Christianity became the handbook of the Concordat, used by Bonaparte to reconcile the regime with Rome, and Chateaubriand was rewarded with the post of under-secretary at the French embassy in Rome. Chateaubriand later claimed that when he fell from power Napoleon declared that no other work had done more to undermine him.45 There was, in fact, little political about it, and the generation that came to maturity in 1815 needed something less rhetorical and mystical, a more doctrinal demolition of the principles of 1789.

  Félicité Lamennais, fourteen years younger than Chateaubriand, was the son of a shipowner of Saint-Malo ennobled in 1788. His mother died when he was five and he went to live with his uncle, reading Rousseau and other philosophes in the library. Sickly and melancholic, he did not find his vocation until the Hundred Days demonstrated how close France was to succumbing again to Revolution, and may thus be considered one of the generation of 1800. ‘It is not without a kind of joy that I feel the corrupted and corrupting world shaking under my feet,’ he wrote in July 1815. He decided to dedicate himself to ‘the victory of the Church and the triumph of its head’.46 Ordained in 1816 he published the Essay on Indifference the following year. This was a direct attack on the Revolution as a narcissistic impulse by which man, ‘adoring himself as man’, usurped the sovereignty of God and set himself up as sovereign instead. This sovereign man, guided only by his own reason, treated God as a usurper and destroyed the institutions of the Church. Then, when the king was executed, ‘society as a whole perished’. ‘There is no society and no order without religion,’ he stated, and by religion he meant a law, vested in the Church, which defined the relationship between man and God, subject and sovereign.47 Lamennais defended the Church against the Revolution, but saw the revolutionary attempt to reform it as merely the last episode of the state’s attempts at control that could be traced back to Louis XIV. He was thus an ultramontane rather than a Gallican, believing in a universal Church rather than in a series of state Churches. He opposed state control of the Church, but he also saw that the use by the state of the Church as a source of legitimacy and even as a system of police drove away from it those who might otherwise remain in the fold.

  The alliance of Church and state, throne and altar, was never closer than under Charles X. It was manifested in his coronation at Reims and in a spate of laws sponsored by the Villèle government: a sacrilege law which imposed the death penalty for stealing chalices and violating the sacred host, a law making it easier for male religious congregations to re-establish themselves, and bills to tighten press censorship. There was a widespread feeling that these laws were inspired by Jesuits, who were formally banned in France yet pulled the strings of the government.48 After the fall of Villèle a law of 1828 prohibited Jesuits from teaching either in petits séminaires or in the secondary schools that were part of the university, a corporation of teachers founded by Napoleon in 1808 that alone could deliver the baccalauréat and degrees. Penalizing Jesuits, however, did not solve the problems of the regime. The Catholic Church was felt to legitimate the old Bourbon monarchy so powerfully that when, on 14 February 1831, mass was said in the Paris church of Saint-Germain L’Auxerrois for the Duc de Berry, the Bourbon heir assassinated in 1820, the Paris mob sacked the church and the archbishop’s palace next door.

  The July Revolution had a great impact on the thought of Lamennais. It became clear to him that by bolstering reactionary regimes in return for their support the Church would only ever attract the backing of reactionaries and provoke the hostility of the mass of people. In August 1830 he published the prospectus of a new paper, L’Avenir, the motto of which was ‘God and Liberty’. On the one hand, he said, ‘sincerely religious people have not embraced the teachings of liberty’; ‘on the other hand, ardent friends of liberty are darkly defiant of the religion professed by twenty-five million French people.’49 Events seemed to justify this new credo of meshing religion and liberty. The Belgian revolt of September 1830 against its forced incorporation into the United Netherlands was undertaken in the name of both Catholicism and freedom. The Polish revolt of November 1830 against Russian tyranny was also under the banners of Catholicism and freedom. It was a message that fired a new generation of Catholics, both clergy and lay, born around 1800. Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, who began a career as a barrister before ordination in 1827, and was a chaplain at the Collège Royal Henri IV, joined Lamennais at his Breton retreat of La Chesnaie in May 1830 and was involved in the Avenir project from the start.50 Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, the son of an émigré who had married into an old Irish-Scottish Catholic family, the Forbes, visited Ireland in 1830 to study the struggle of O’Connell and the Catholic Association against British tyranny and wrote to Lamennais professing his ‘love of Catholicism and liberty. I am only twenty.’51

  Lamennais, Lacordaire and Montalembert became very close friends, as well as being involved in a common enterprise. When Montalembert lost his father in 1831 he told Lacordaire that Lamennais ‘promises to act as my father’, while Lacordaire wrote to Montalembert, ‘Be always good, tender, pious, and pray for me, please, lest I love you too much.’52 And yet a rupture was in sight. The Church authorities were hostile to the line of L’Avenir and the three went on a pilgrimage to Rome to solicit the support of the pope. They were unable to see him and were on their way home, at Mu
nich, in August 1832, when they received the pope’s encyclical, Mirari vos, condemning L’Avenir. Lacordaire and Montalembert tried to persuade Lamennais to reconsider his doctrines, but he became even more radical, publishing Les Paroles d’un croyant, in which he argued that Jesus Christ the carpenter’s son was betrayed by ‘the scribes and the pharisees, the doctors of the law, Herod and his courtiers, the Roman governor and the priests’ princes’. It was up to the people, who had always kept faith with Christ, to build the city of God according to the gospel of liberty, justice and love.53 This was in turn condemned by Rome in June 1835, and Lacordaire and Montalembert were torn between loyalty to their master and obedience to the Church, which tolerated no heresy. ‘I would rather throw myself into the sea with a millstone round my neck’, Lacordaire wrote to Montalembert, ‘than maintain a centre of hopes, ideas, even of good works, next to the Church.’54 Montalembert in turn wrote to Lamennais, ‘I remained faithful to you, and you know with what zeal and love, as far as the frontiers of Catholicism.’55