Religion and Anti-clericalism

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Religion and Anti-clericalism

• Dr Chris Pearson

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Protesters against ban on veils in French
schools, 2004
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Lecture Outline

• Religious practice during the ancien régime
• The church in the revolutionary period
• Catholics vs. Republicans during the nineteenth
  century

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The Catholic Church in the 1780s

• 170,000 members of the clergy (0.6 of the
  population)
• Powerful landowner owned 7 of national
  territory
• Wealthy tithe provided 150 livres annually
• 90 church attendance rates
• Figures from MacPhee, Social History of France,
  p. 18

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A less than cheery worldview

• The joys, the pleasures, the happiness of life
  are always dangerous and almost always fatal the
  games, laughter and amusements of the world are
  like the mark of damnation and are gifts given to
  us by God in his anger. Whereas tears and
  suffering are the signs of Gods piety and a
  certain promise of salvation.

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The Revolution and the Church

• Proposal of the deputies of the Third Estate
  reduction of dioceses, sale of Church lands,
  abolition of tithes etc
• The National Assembly nationalizes church lands
  and grants religious freedoms to Protestants and
  Jews
• Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy
  (July 1790)
• 50 of clergy, along with the King, Pope, and
  most bishops rejected the oath
• Oath exposed a Catholic/anti-clerical fault-line
  running through French society

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Destruction and renewal

• Clergy attacked as anti-patriotic
• Revolutionary calendar, Armées revolutionnaires
  attack church property
• By 1794, only 150 churches giving mass
• Churches re-open (1795), émigré priests return
  (1796)
• Catholic revival grassroots, led by women

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Painting by Gérard François Pascal Simon
(1770-1837)
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The Concordat, 15 July 1801

• Signed between Napoleon and the Vatican
• The Catholic Church was restored and the state
  recognized Catholicism as the religion of the
  majority of Frenchmen.
• State funding for the church
• but also state control over bishops and priests

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Napoleon on religion

• Society cannot exist without inequality of
  wealth, and inequality of wealth cannot exist
  without religion. When a man is dying of hunger
  next to another who has plenty, it is impossible
  for him to accept this difference unless there is
  an authority that tells him God wills it so,
  there have to be both poor and rich in the world,
  but afterwards and for all eternity things will
  be different.

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The legacy of conflict

• The revolution created so bitter a division
  between Catholics and republicans that it would
  be impossible, for nearly another two centuries,
  for the two to understand each other. Too much
  blood was spilt in the 1790s, too many atrocities
  committed by both side, for either to forgive or
  forget
• Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French
  Catholicism (1989), p. 30

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Charles Xs coronation (1825)
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Republican-Catholic bones of contention

• Two incompatible forms of belief
• Catholic education establishments (Comte de
  Falloux 1852 law)
• Pope Puis IXs Syllabus of Errors (1863)
• Ultramontanism
• Catholics unpatriotic?

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• The Jesuit was a creature of extremes, a
  warning both of the perils of losing ones
  masculinity, and the dreadful consequences of
  pushing the qualities of manhood to unreasonable
  lengths.
• Timothy Verhoeven, Neither Male nor Female,
  Modern and Contemporary France (2008), 44

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The seductive Jesuit

• How many convents have opened the door to them.
  Deceived by their sweet voice and now they speak
  firmly there, and everyone is afraid, everyone
  smiles while trembling, and everyone does what
  that say.
• Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet, quoted in
  Verhoeven, Neither Male nor Female, 45

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The (alleged) power of Jesuit education

• Under the Second Empire they have made
  enormous progress in our country, and have
  particularly sought to take control of the
  education of our youth, in order to destroy the
  principles which our society is built on and to
  mould the new generations in the ideas of
  clericalism.
• Larousse encyclopaedia (1887)

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Priests steal the conscience of our women.
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Lourdes symbol of the feminization of religion?
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The Sacré-Coeur
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• If the building of the monument of the
  Sacré-Coeur became a metaphor for the moral
  reconstruction of France, pilgrims to it were
  voting with their feet and demonstrating the
  vitality of the Church and its vision in contrast
  with the spiritual impoverishment of republican
  France. Pilgrimage was a sacred instrument in a
  holy war for the future of France.
• Raymond Jonas, Pilgrimage, Politics and the
  Sacré-Coeur, Historical Reflections/Réflexions
  historiques (1994), p. 123

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• For eighty years two world views have been
  present, dividing hearts and minds and fomenting
  conflict, a desperate war in the heart of
  society. The lack of unity in education means
  that we have been continually thrown from revolt
  to repression, from anarchy to dictatorship,
  without any chance of stability
• Léon Gambetta

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Republicans fight back (late 1870s-early 1880s)

• Clericalism is the enemy Gambetta in 1877
• Petitions, celebrations of Voltaire, hero of the
  enlightenment
• Anticlerical decrees e.g 29 March 1880 Jesuits
  dissolved
• Lay education in state-run schools

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Secular schools important for state security
and future republican generations Jules Ferry
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The end of the Concordat

• Law of 9 December 1905 separates the church and
  the state
• The state would no longer pay the salaries of the
  clergy, but the Vatican could now appoint bishops
  
• Creation of the république laïque secular
  Republic

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• Anticlerical arguments against the temporal
  power of the Catholic Church increasingly became
  arguments against belief itself. Religion, in
  this new formulation, whether Catholic or
  otherwise, was superstition, a primitive set of
  beliefs rendered obsolete by the progressive
  refinement of human reason
• John Warne Monroe Cartes de visite, French
  Historical Studies (2003), p. 120

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Charles Péguy (1873-1914) Between Republicanism
and Catholicism?