 section 30 the French Revolution this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org the French Revolution by Hilaire Bellock section 30 chapter 5 concluded the military aspect of the revolution I have said that many reasons are given to account for the disaster of tracoring one of the very few in which a British force has been routed upon the continent but I confess that if I were asked for an explanation of my own I would say that it was simply due to the gross lack of synchrony on the part of the allies and that this in its turn was taken advantage of by the power both a vigil and of marching which the French troops still inferior in most military characteristics had developed and maintained and which a more important matter their commanders knew how to use this heavy blow delivered on the 18th of May in spite of a successful rally a week later finally convinced the emperor that the march on Paris was impossible 11 days later on the 29th it was announced in the camp of tourney upon which the allied army had fallen back that the emperor had determined to return to Vienna the allied army was indeed still left upon that front but the French continued to pour up against it it was again their numbers that brought about the next and final victory far off upon the east of that same line the army which is famous in history and in song as that of the sombré at muse was violently attempting to cross the sombré and to turn the line of the allies coberg reinforced his right opposite the French left but numbers had begun to bewilder him the enthusiasm of st. Just the science of carno decided victory at this eastern end of the line six times the passage of the sombré had failed reinforcements continue to reach the army and the seventh attempt succeeded charleroi which is the main fortress blocking the passage of the sombré at this place could be and was invested when once the river was crossed by the French it capitulated in a week but the evacuation of charleroi was but just accomplished when coberg seventy thousand strong appeared in relief of the city the plateau above the town where the great struggle was decided is known as that of floris and it was upon the 26th of June that the armies were there engaged never before had forces so equal permitted the French any success it had hitherto been the ceaseless requisitioning of men to supply their insufficient training and command which had accomplished the salvation of the country at floris though there was still some advantage on the French side the numbers were more nearly equal the action was not determined for ten hours and on the French center and left was nearly lost when the reserves and Marceau's obscency in front of floris village itself at last decided it the consequences of the victory were final as the French right advanced from floris the French left advanced from your prayers and the center became untenable for the allies the four French fortresses which the enemy still garrisoned in that Belgian belt of which I have spoken were invested and recaptured by the 10th of July the French were in Brussels the English were beaten back upon Holland the Austrians retreating upon the Rhine and a continuous success of the revolutionary armies was assured while these things were proceeding upon land however there had appeared a factor in the war which modern desire for comfort and above all for commercial security has greatly exaggerated but which the student will do well to note in its due proportion this factor was the military weakness of France at sea in mere numbers the struggle was entered upon with fleets in the ratio of about two to one while to the fleet of Great Britain already twice as large as its opponent must be added the fleets of the allies but numbers did not then nor will they in the future really decide the issue of maritime war it was the supremacy of English gunnery which turned the scale this triumphant superiority was proved in the battle of the first of June 1794 the English fleet under Lord Howe attacked the French fleet which was waiting to escort a convoy of grain into breast the forces came in contact upon the 28th of May and the action was a running one of three days two examples must suffice to prove how determining was the superiority of the British fire the Queen Charlotte in the final action felt herself caught between the Montaigne and the Jacobin we have the figures of the losses during the dual of these two flagships the Queen Charlotte lost 42 men in the short and furious exchange the Montaigne alone 300 again consider the total figures the number of the crews on both sides was nearly equal but their losses were as 11 to 5 it cannot be too often repeated that the initial advantage which the English fleet gained in the great war which it maintained an increased as that war proceeded and which it made absolute at Trafalgar was an advantage mainly due to the guns the reader must not expect in a sketch which ends with the fall of Robespierre and a treatise however short upon the effect of sea power in the Revolutionary Wars it has of late years been grossly exaggerated the reaction which will follow this exaggeration may as grossly belittle it it prevented the invasion of England it permitted the exasperation and wearing out of the French forces in the peninsula but it could not have determined the fate of Napoleon that was determined by his Russian miscalculation and by his subsequent and consequent defeat at Leipzig upon the early success of the Revolution and the resulting establishment of European democracy with which alone these pages deal sea power was of no considerable effect the end of section 30 the end of chapter 5 section 31 the French Revolution this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the French Revolution by Hilaire Bellock section 31 chapter 6 the Revolution and the Catholic Church the last and most important of the aspects which the French Revolution presents to a foreign and in particular to an English reader is the antagonism which arose between it in the church as this is the most important so it is the most practical of the historical problems which the revolution sets the student to solve for the opposition of the church's organization in France has at once been the most profound which the revolutionists had to encounter the most active in its methods and the only one which has increased in strength as time proceeded it is hardly too much to say that the revolution would in France at least have achieved its object and created a homogeneous centralized democracy had not this great quarrel between the Republic and the church arisen and one may legitimately contrast the ready-appliancy of men to political suggestion and the easy story of their institutions where men knew nothing of the church with the great storms that arise and the fundamental quarrels that are challenged whenever men are acquainted with the burning truths of Catholicism finally the struggle between the Catholic Church and the revolution is not only the most important and the most practical but also by an unhappy coincidence the most difficult of comprehension of all the matters presented to us by the great change we have seen in this book that one department of revolutionary history the second in importance perhaps to the religious department was also difficult of comprehension to wit the military department and we have seen or at least I have postulated that the difficulty of following the military fortunes of the Republic was due to the mass of detail to the technical character of the information to be acquired and to the natural unfamiliarity of the general reader with the elements of military science in other words an accurate knowledge of great numbers of facts the proper disposition of these facts in their order of military importance and a correlation of a great number of disconnected actions and plans will alone permit us to grasp the function of the armies in the development and establishment of the modern state through the revolutionary wars now in this second and greater problem the problem of the function played by religion it is an exactly opposite method which can alone be a service we must examine the field generally and still more generally we must forget details that here only be wilder and see in the largest possible outline what forces were really at issue why their conflict occurred upon what points that conflict was vital any more particular plan will lend us as it has laid it so many thousands of controversy lists in mere invective on one side or the other till we come to see nothing but a welter of treason on the part of priests and a massacre on the part of Democrats men would did they try to unravel the scheme by analyzing the documents of the Vatican or of French archives come apparently upon nothing but a host of pity base and often personal calculations or again did they attempt to take a local sample of the struggle and to follow it in one department of thought they would come upon nothing but a whirl of conflict with no sort of clue to the motives that lay behind the contrast between the military and the religious problem of the French Revolution is like the contrast between the geological composition and the topographical contours of a country side to understand the first we must bore and dig we must take numerous samples of soil and subject them to analysis we must make ourselves acquainted with detail in its utmost recesses but for the second the more general our standpoint the wider our gaze and the more comprehensive our judgment the more accurately do we grasp the knowledge we have set out to seek we must then approach our business by asking at the outset the most general question of all was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel between the doctrines of the revolution and those of the Catholic Church those ill acquainted with either party and therefore ill equipped for reply commonly reply with assurance in the affirmative the French and still more than on French Republican who may happen by the accident of his life to have missed the Catholic Church to have had no intimacy with any Catholic character no reading of Catholic philosophy and perhaps even no chance view of so much as an external Catholic ceremony replies unhesitatingly that the church is the necessary enemy of the revolution again the emigre the wealthy woman the recluse anyone of the many contemporary types to whom the democratic theory of the revolution came as a complete novelty and today the wealthy families in that tradition reply as unhesitatingly that the revolution is the necessary enemy of the church the reply seems quite sufficient to the Tory squire in England or Germany who may happen to be a Catholic by birth or by conversion and it seems equally obvious to let us say a democratic member of some Protestant Church in one of the new countries historically and logically theologically also those who affirm unnecessary antagonism between the Republic and the church are in error those who are best fitted to approach the problem by their knowledge both of what the revolution attempted and of what Catholic philosophy is find it in proportion to their knowledge difficult or impossible to answer that fundamental question in the affirmative they cannot call the revolution a necessary enemy of the church nor the church of democracy what is more minds at once of the most active and of the best instructive sort are the very minds which find it difficult to explain how any such quarrel can ever risen French history itself is full of the names of those for whom not so much a reconciliation between the revolution and the church as a statement that no real quarrel existed between them was the motive of politics and almost in proportion to a man's knowledge of his fellows in Catholic societies almost in that proportion is the prime question I have asked answered by such a man in the negative a man who knows both the faith and the Republic will tell you that there is not and cannot be any necessary or fundamental reason why conflict should have a reason between a European democracy and a Catholic church when we examine those who concern themselves with the deepest and most abstract side of the quarrel we find the same thing it is impossible for the theologian or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher to put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the revolution and say this doctrine is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic morals conversely it is impossible for the Republican to put his finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and to say this Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the state thousands of active men upon either side would have been only too willing during the last hundred years to discover some such issue and it is proved undiscoverable in a word only those Democrats who know little of the Catholic Church can say that of its nature it forbids democracy and only those Catholics who have a confused or imperfect conception of democracy can say that of its nature it is antagonistic to the Catholic Church much that is taught by the purely temporal theory of the one is indifferent to the transcendental and supernatural philosophy of the other in some points where there is contact as in the conception of the dignity of man and of the equality of men there is agreement to sum up the Republican cannot by his theory persecute the church the church cannot by her theory excommunicate the Republican why then it must be asked has there in practice a risen so furious and so enormous a conflict a conflict whose activity and whose consequences are not narrowing but broadening today it may be replied to the second question which is only less general than the first in one of two manners one may say that the actions of men are divided not by theories but by spiritual atmosphere as it were according to this view men act under impulses not ideal but actual impulses which affect great numbers and yet in their texture correspond to the complex but united impulses of an individual personality thus though there be no conflict demonstrable between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of the revolution yet there may be necessary and fundamental conflict between the persons we call the revolution and the church and between the vivifying principles by which either lives this is one answer that can and is given or one may give a totally different answer and say there was no quarrel between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of the revolution but the folly of this statement the ill drafting of that law the misconception of such and such an institution the coincidence of war breaking out at such and such a moment and affecting men in such and such a fashion all these material accidents bred a misunderstanding between the two great forces led into conflict the human officers and the human organizations which directed them and conflict once established feeds upon and grows from its own substance the end of section 31 section 32 the French revolution this is a Libra box recording all Libra box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libra box.org the French revolution by Hill Air Belog section 32 chapter 6 continued the revolution and the Catholic Church now if that first form of reply be given to the question we have posed though it is sufficient for the type of philosophy which uses it though it is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels and though it in particular satisfies a particular modern school of thought it is evident that history properly so-called cannot deal with it you may say that the revolution was the expression of a spirit far more real than any theory that the spirit is no more susceptible of analysis or definition than is the personality of a single human character and that this reality was in conflict with another reality to wit the Catholic Church you may even as some minds by no means negligible have done pass to the field of mysticism in the matter and assert that really personal forces wills superior and external to man demons and angels drove the revolution against the Catholic Church and created the Republic to be an anti-Catholic force capable of meeting and of defeating that church which by its own definition of itself is not a theory but the expression of a personality and a will to put it in old-fashioned terms you may say that the revolution was the work of anti-Christ but with that kind of reply I repeat history cannot deal if it be true that in spite of an absence of contradictory intellectual theories there is a fundamental spiritual contradiction between the revolution and the Catholic Church then time will test the business we shall see in the case a perpetual extension of the quarrel until the revolution becomes principally a force for the extinction of Catholicism and the Catholic Church appears to the supporter of the revolution not as his principle but as his only enemy such a development has not arisen in a hundred years a process of time far more lengthy will alone permit us to judge whether the supposed duelo is a real matter or a phantasm the second type of answer the answer which pretends to explain the antagonism by a definite series of events does concern the historian proceeding upon the lines of that second answer he can bring his science to bear and use the instruments of his trade and he could show as I propose to show in what follows how although no quarrel can be found between the theory of the revolution and that of the church an active quarrel did in fact spring up between the revolution in action and the authorities of Catholicism a quarrel which a hundred years has not appeased but accentuated behind the revolutionary quarrel lay the condition of the church in the French state since the settlement of the quarrel of the reformation with what that quarrel of the reformation was the reader is sufficiently familiar for roughly speaking a hundred years from the first years of the 16th century to the first years of the 17th from the youth of Henry the Eighth to the boyhood of Charles the First in England a great attempt was made to change as one party would have said to amend as the other would have said to denaturalize the whole body of western Christendom a general movement of attack upon the inherited form of the church and in general resistance to that attack was at work throughout European civilization and either antagonist hoped for a universal success the one of what he called the reformation of religion the other of what he called the divine institution and visible unity of the Catholic church at the end of such a period it became apparent that no such general result had been or could be obtained all that part of the west which had rejected the authority of the sea of Rome began to appear as a separate territorial region permanently divided from the rest all that part of Europe which had retained the authority of the sea of Rome began to appear as another region of territory the line of cleavage between the two was beginning to define itself as a geographical line and nearly corresponded to the line which centuries before had divided the roman and civilized world from the barbarians the province of britain had an exceptional fate though roman in origin and of the ancient civilization in its foundation it fell upon the non-roman side of the new boundary while ireland which the roman empire had never organized or instructed remained alone with the external parts of europe in communion with Rome italy spain and in the main southern or romanized germany refused ultimately to abandon their tradition of civilization and of religion but in gall it was otherwise and the action of gall during the reformation must be seized if its modern religious quarrels are to be apprehended a very considerable portion of the french landed and mercantile classes that is of the wealthy men of the country were in sympathy with the new religious doctrines and the new social organization which had now taken root in england scotland holland northern germany and scandinavia and which were destined in those countries to lead to the domination of wealth these french squires and traders were called the huganots the succeeding hundred years from 1615 to 1715 let us say were a settlement not without bloodshed of the unsatisfied quarrel of the preceding century all englishmen know what happened in england how the last vestiges of catholicism were crushed out and all the social and political consequences of Protestantism established in the state there was even in that same 17th century a separate but futile attempt to destroy catholicism in ireland in germany a struggle of the utmost violence had only led to a similar regional result the first third of that hundred years concluded in the peace of westphalia and left the protestants and catholic territorial divisions much what we now know them in france however the peculiar phenomena remained of a body powerful in numbers and what was far more important in wealth and social power scattered throughout the territory of the kingdom organized and by this time fixedly anti-catholic and therefore anti-national the nation had recovered its traditional line and had insisted upon the victory of a strong executive and that executive catholic france therefore in this period of settlement became an absolute monarchy whose chief possessed tremendous and immediate powers and a monarchy which incorporated with itself all the great elements of the national traditions including the church it is the name elui the 14th of course which symbolizes this great time his very long reign precisely corresponds to it he was born coincidentally with that universal struggle for a religious settlement in europe which i have described as characteristic of the time he died precisely at its close and under him it seemed as though the reconstructed power of gall and the defense of organized catholicism were to be synonymous but there were two elements of disruption in that homogeneous body which louis the 14th apparently commanded the very fact that the church had thus become in france an unshakable national institution chilled the vital source of catholicism not only did the hierarchy stand in perpetual suspicion of the roman sea and toy with the conception of national independence but they and all the official organization of french catholicism put the security of the national establishment and its intimate attachment to the general political structure of the state far beyond the sanctity of catholic dogma or the practice of catholic morals that political structure the french monarchy seemed to be of granite and eternal had it indeed survived the church in gall would be doubtless in spite of its attachment to some mondana thing as the crown have still survived to enjoy one of those resurrections which have never failed it in the past and would have returned by some creative reaction to its principle of life but for the moment the consequence of this fixed political establishment was that skepticism and all those other active forces of the mind which play upon religion in any catholic state had full opportunity the church was so to speak not concerned to defend itself but only its method of existence it was as though a garrison forgetting the main defenses of a place had concentrated all its effort upon the security of one work which contained its supplies of food with good verse sincere enthusiasm a lucid exposition of whatever in the human mind perpetually rebels against transcendental affirmations were allowed every latitude and provoked no effective reply but overt acts of disrespect to ecclesiastical authority were punished with rigor the end of section 32 section 33 the french revolution this is the libre vox recording all libre vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libre vox.org the french revolution by hill air bellach section 33 chapter 6 continued the revolution and the catholic church while in the wealthy the bureaucratic and the governing classes to ridicule the faith was an attitude taken for granted seriously to attack the privileges or position of its ministers was ungently and was not allowed it did not shock the hierarchy that one of its apostolic members should be a witty atheist that another should go hunting upon corpus christi nearly upset the blessed sacrament in his gallop and forget what day it was when the accident occurred the bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their body to be loose livers or in some of them openly presenting their friends to their mistresses as might be done by any great lay noble round them that a diocese or any other spiritual charge should be divorced from its titular chief seemed to them as natural as does to us the absence from his modern regiment of some titular foreign colonel unquestioned also by the bishops were the poverty the neglect and the uninstruction of the parish clergy nay and this is by far the principal feature the abandonment of religion by all but a very few of the french millions no more affected the ecclesiastical officials of the time than does the starvation of our poor effect let us say one of our professional politicians it was a thing simply taken for granted the reader must seize is that moribund condition of the religious life of france upon the eve of the revolution for it is at once imperfectly grasped by the general run of historians and is also the only fact which thoroughly explains what followed the swoon of the faith in the 18th century is the negative foundation upon which the strange religious experience of the french was about to rise france in the generation before the revolution was passing through a phase in which the catholic faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the preaching and establishment of it in gall this truth is veiled by more than one circumstance thus many official acts notably marriages and the registration of births took place under a catholic form and indeed catholic forms had a monopoly of them again the state war catholic clothes as it were the public occasions of pomp were full of religious ceremony few of the middle classes went mass in the great towns hardly any of the artisans but the churches were official great sums of money including official money were at the disposal of the church and the great ecclesiastics were men from whom solid favors could be got again the historic truth is masked by the language and point of view of the great catholic reaction which has taken place in our own time it is safe to say that where one adult of the educated classes concerned himself seriously with catholic faith and practice in france before the revolution there are five today but in between lies the violent episode of the persecution and the catholic reaction in our time perpetually tends to contrast the supposed pre-revolutionary catholic society with the revolutionary fury look say its champions at the dreadful way in which the revolution treated the church and as they say this the converse truth appears obvious and they seem to imply think how different it must have been before the revolution persecuted the church the very violence of the modern reaction towards catholicism has exaggerated the revolutionary persecution and in doing so has made men forget that apart from other evidence of the decline of religion it is obvious that persecution could never have arisen without a strong and continuous historical packing you cannot have had a diacletian in the 13th century with the spirit of the crusaders just preceding him you could not have had a Henry the 8th if the england of the 15th century just preceding him had been in england devoted to the monastic profession and you could not have had the revolutionary fury against the catholic church in france if the preceding generation had been actively catholic even in a considerable portion as a fact of course it was not and in the popular indifference to or hatred of the church the principal factor was the strict brotherhood not so much of church and state as of church and executive government but there was another factor we were describing a little way back how in france there had arisen during the movement of the reformation a wealthy powerful and numerically large Huguenot body in mere numbers it dwindled but it maintained throughout the 17th century a very high position both of privilege and what was its characteristic of money power and even today though their birth rate is of course lower than the average of the nation the french Huguenots number close upon a million and are far wealthier upon the average than their fellow citizens it is their wealth which dominates the trade of certain districts which exercises so great an effect upon the universities the publishing trade and the press and in general lends them such weight in the affairs of the nation now the Huguenot had in france a special and permanent coral with a monarchy and therefore with the catholic church which precisely because it was not of the vivid and intense kind which is associated with popular and universal religions was the more secretly ubiquitous his coral was that having been highly privileged for nearly a century the member of a state within a state and for more than a generation free to hold assembly separate from an often antagonistic to the national government these privileges had been suddenly removed from him by the government of louis the 14th a century before the revolution the coral was more political than religious it was a sort of home rule coral for though the Huguenots were spread throughout france they had possessed special cities and territories where in their spirit and to a certain extent their private self-government formed enclaves of particularism within the state they had held this position as i have said for close upon a hundred years and it was not until a date contemporary with the violent settlement of the religious trouble in england by the expulsion of james the second that a similar settlement less violent achieved as it was thought a similar religious unity in france but that unity was not achieved the Huguenots though no longer permitted to exist as a state within a state remained for the hundred years between the revocation of the edict of nantes and the outbreak of the revolution a powerful and ever watchful body they stood upon the flank of the attack which intellectual skepticism was making upon the catholic church and they were prepared to take advantage of that skepticism's first political victory and since the revolution they have been the most powerful and after the Freemasons with whom they are largely identified the most strongly organized of the anti-clerical forces in the country the jews whose action since the revolution has been so remarkable in this same business were not in the period immediately preceding it of any considerable influence and their element in the coalition may be neglected such then was the position when the revolution was preparing within memory of all men living the church had become more and more official the masses of the great towns had wholly lost touch with it the intelligence of the country was in the main drawn to the deist or even to the purely skeptical propaganda the powerful Huguenot body was ready prepared for an alliance with any foe of Catholicism and in the eyes of the impoverished town populace notably in Paris which had long abandoned the practice of religion the human organization of the church the hierarchy the priesthood and the few but very wealthy religious orders which still lingered on in dwindling numbers were but a portion of the privileged world which the populace hated and was prepared to destroy it is upon such a spirit and in such conditions of the national religious life that the revolution begins to work in the national assembly you have the great body of the commons which determines the whole touched only here and there with men in any way appointed with or devoted to Catholic practice and those men for the most part individual and eccentric that is uncatholic almost in proportion to the genuineness of their religious feeling among the nobility the practice of religion was a social habit with some as a mental attitude the faith was forgotten among all but very few among the clergy a very wealthy hierarchy no one of them prepared to defend the church with philosophical argument and almost unanimous in regarding itself as a part of the old political machine was dominant while the representatives of the lower clergy strongly democratic in character were at first more occupied with the establishment of democracy than with the impending attack upon the material and temporal organization of the church the end of section 33 section 34 the french revolution this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the french revolution by hill air bellach section 34 chapter 6 continued the revolution and the catholic church now that material and temporal organization offered at the very beginning of the debates an opportunity for attack which no other department of the old regime could show the immediate peril of the state was financial the pretext and even to some extent the motive for the calling of the state's general was the necessity for finding money the old fiscal machinery had broken down and as always happens when a fiscal machine breaks down the hardship it involved and the pressure upon individuals which she had involved appeared to be universal there was no immediate and easily available fund of wealth upon which the executive could lay hands save the wealth of the clergy feudal dues of the nobles if abandoned must fall rather to the peasantry than to the state of the existing taxes few could be increased without peril and none with any prospect of a large additional revenue the charge for debt alone was one half of the total receipts of the state the deficit was in proportion to the revenue overwhelming face to face with that you had an institution not popular one whose public functions were followed by but a small proportion of the population one in which income was most unequally distributed and one whose feudal property yielded induce an amount equal to more than a quarter of the total revenue of the state add to this a system of ties which produced nearly as much again and it will be apparent under what a financial temptation the assembly lay it may be argued of course that the right of the church to this ecclesiastical property whether in land or in titles was absolute and that the confiscation of the one or of the other form of revenue was mere theft but such was not the legal conception of the moment the wealth of the church was not even and this is most remarkable defended as absolute property by the generality of those who enjoyed it the tone of the debates which suppressed the tithes and later confiscated the church lands was a tone of discussion upon legal points presidents public utility and so forth there was not heard in it in any effective degree the assertion of mere moral right though in that time the moral rights of property were among the first of political doctrines it was not however the confiscation of the church lands and the suppression of the tithe which founded the quarrel between the revolution and the clergy no financial or economic changes ever more than a preparation for or a permissive condition of a moral change it is never the cause of the moral change even the suppression of the religious houses in the beginning of 1790 must not be taken as the point of departure in the great quarrel the religious orders in France were at that moment too decayed in zeal and in numbers too wealthy and much too removed from the life of the nation for this to be the case the true historical point of departure from which we must state the beginning of this profound debate between the revolution and Catholicism is to be found in the morning of the 30th of may 1790 when a parliamentary committee the ecclesiastical committee presented to the house its plan for the reform of the constitution of the church in Gaul the enormity of that act is now apparent to the whole world the proposal at the bidding of chance representatives not elected ad hoc to change the diocese and the seas of catholic France the decision of an ephemeral political body to limit to such and such ties and very feeble they were the bond between the church of France and the holy sea the suppression of the cathedral chapters the seemingly farcical proposal that bishops should be elected may priests also thus chosen the submission of the hierarchy in the matter of the residence and travel to a civil authority which openly declared itself indifferent in matters of religion all this bewilders the modern mind how we ask could men so learned so enthusiastic so laborious and so closely in touch with all the realities of their time make a blunder of that magnitude much more how did such a blunder escape the damnation of universal mockery and immediate impotence the answer is to be discovered in what is just been laid down with so much insistence the temporary eclipse of religion in France before the revolution broke out the men who framed the constitution of the clergy the men who voted for it nay even the men who argued against it all had at the back of their minds three conceptions which they were attempting to reconcile of those three conceptions one was wholly wrong one was imperfect because superficial and the third alone was true and these three conceptions were first that the catholic church was a moral bond superstition secondly that it possessed in its organization and traditions a power to be reckoned with and thirdly that the state its organs and their corporate inheritance of action were so bound up with the catholic church that it was impossible to affect any general political settlement in which that body both external to France and internal should be neglected of these three conceptions had the first been as true as the last it would have saved the constitution of the clergy and the reputation for common sense of those who framed it it was certainly true that Catholicism had for so many centuries been bound up in the framework of the state that the parliament must therefore do something with the church in the general settlement of the nation it could not merely leave the church on one side it was also superficially true that the church was a power to be reckoned with politically quite apart from the traditional union of church and state but only superficially true what the revolutionary politicians feared was the intrigue of those who commanded the organization of the Catholic Church men whom they knew for the most part to be without religion and the sincerity of all of whom they naturally doubted a less superficial and more solid judgment of the matter would have discovered that the real danger lay in the animosity or intrigue against the civil constitution not of the corrupt hierarchy but of the sincere though ill instructed and dwindling minority which was still loyally attached to the doctrines and discipline of the church but even this superficial judgment would not have been fatal had not the judgment of the national assembly been actually erroneous upon the first point the vitality of the faith had the Catholic Church been as nearly all educated men then imagined a more abundant superstition had the phase of decline through which it was passing been a phase comparable to that through which other religions have passed in their last moments had it been supported by ancient families from mere tradition clung to by remote peasants from mere ignorance and isolation abandoned as it was in towns simply because the towns had better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences had in a word the imaginary picture which these men drew in their minds of the Catholic Church and its fortunes been an exact one then the civil constitution of the clergy would have been a statesman like act it would have permitted the hold of the Catholic Church upon such districts as it still retained to vanish slowly and without shock it proposed to keep alive at a reasonable salary the ministers of a ritual which would presumably have lost all vitality before the last of its pensioners was dead it would have prepared a bed as it were upon which the last of Catholicism in Gaul could peacefully pass away the action of the politicians in framing the constitution would have seemed more generous with every passing decade and their wisdom in avoiding offense to the few who still remain faithful would have been increasingly applauded on the other hand and from the point of view of the statesman the civil constitution of the clergy found strictly to the state and made responsible to it those ancient functions not yet dead of the episcopacy and all its train it was a wise and a just consideration on the part of the assembly that religions retain their machinery long after they are dead and if that machinery has ever been a state machinery it must remain subject to the control of the state and subject not only up to the moment when the living force which once animated his fled but much longer up indeed to the moment when the surviving institutions of the dead religion break down and perish so argued the national assembly and its committee and I repeat the argument was just and statesman like prudent and full of foresight say for one miscalculation the catholic church was not dead and it was not even dying it was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death but the catholic church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any other it fructifies and expands immediately under the touch of a lethal weapon it has at its very roots the conception that material prosperity is stifling to it poverty and misfortune nutritious the end of section 34 section 35 the french revolution this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox dot org the french revolution by hilare bellock section 35 chapter six continued the revolution and the catholic church the men of the national assembly would have acted more wisely had they closely studied the story of ireland then but little known or had they even made themselves acquainted with the methods by which the catholic church in britain after passing in the 15th century through a phase somewhat similar to that under which it was sinking into gall in the 18th was still under henry and elizabeth but the desire of the men of 1789 was not to kill the church but to let it die they thought it dying their desire was only to make that death decent and of no hurt to the nation and to control the political action of a hierarchy that had been wealthy and was bound up with the old society that was crumbling upon every side the civil constitution of the clergy failed it lit the civil war it dug the pit which divided catholicism from the revolution at the moment of the foreign invasion it segregated the loyal priest in such a fashion that his order could not but appear to the populace as an order of traders and it led in the furnace of 1793 to the great persecution from the memories of which the relations between the french democracy and the church have not recovered it is important to trace the actual steps of the failure for when we appreciate what the dates were how short the time which was left for judgment or for revision and how immediately disaster followed upon error we can understand what followed and we can understand it in no other way if we find an enduring quarrel between two families whose cause of contention we cannot seize and whose mutual hostility we find unreasonable to learn that it proceeded from a cataclysm too rapid and too violent for either to have exercised judgment upon it will enable us to excuse or at least comprehend the endureances of their antagonism now it was a cataclysm which fell upon the relations of the church and the state immediately after the error which the parliament had committed a cataclysm quite out of proportion to their intentions as indeed are most sudden disasters quite out of proportion to the forces that bring them about it was as we have seen in the summer of 1790 upon the twelfth of july that the civil constitution of the clergy was approved by the assembly but it was not until the 26th of august that the king consented to sign nor was there at the moment any attempt to give the law effect the protests of the bishops for instance came out quite at leisure in the month of October and the active principle of the whole of the civil constitution to with the presentation of the civic oath which the clergy were required to take was not even debated until the end of the year this civic oath which is sometimes used as a bugbear in the manner was no more than an engagement under the sanction of an oath that the bishop or priest taking it would maintain the new regime though that regime included the constitution of the clergy the oath involved no direct breach with catholic doctrine or practice it was indeed a folly to impose it and it was folly based upon the ignorance of the politicians and of many of the bishops of the day as to the nature of the catholic church but the oath was not nor was it intended to be a measure of persecution many of the parish clergy took it and most of them probably took it in good faith nor did it discredit the oath with the public that was refused by all say four of the acting bishops for the condition of the hierarchy in pre-revolutionary France was notorious the action of the bishops appeared in the public eye to be purely political and the ready acceptance of the oath by so many though a minority of the lower clergy argued strongly in its favor nevertheless no catholic priest or bishop or layman could take that oath without landing himself in disloyalty to his religion and that for the same reason which led Saint Thomas of Canterbury to make his curious and fruitful stand against the reasonable and inevitable as much as against the unreasonable governmental provisions of his time the catholic church as an institution of necessity autonomous it cannot admit the right of any other power exterior to its own organization to impose upon it a modification of its discipline nor above all a new conception of its hierotic organization the reader must carefully distinguish between the acceptation by the church of a detail of economic reform the consent to suppress a corporation at the request of civil power or even to forego certain traditional political rights and the admission of the general principle of civil control to that general principle the assembly in framing the constitution of the clergy was quite evidently committed to admit such a coordinated external and civic power or rather to admit a superior external power is in theory to deny the principle of Catholicism and in practice to make of the Catholic Church what the other state religions of Christendom have become I have said that not until the end of the year 1790 was the debate opened upon the proposition to compel the clergy to take the oath it is a singular commentary upon the whole affair that compulsion should have been the subject for debate at all it should have followed one would have imagined normally from the law but so exceptional had been the action of the assembly and as they were now beginning to find so perilous that a special decree was necessary and the king's signature to it before this normal consequence of a measure which had been law for months could be acted upon here let the reader pause and consider with what that moment the end of 1790 coincided the asignates paper money issued upon the security of the confiscated estates of the church had already depreciated 10 percent those who had first accepted them were paying throughout France a penny in the liver or as we may put it a penny farthing on the shilling for what must have seemed to most of them the obstinacy of one single corporation and that an unpopular one against the decrees of the national assembly it was now the moment when a definite reaction against the revolution was first taking shape and when the populace was first beginning uneasily to have suspicion of it it was the moment when the court was beginning to negotiate for flight it was the moment when though the populace did not know it Maribau was advising the king with all his might to seize upon the enforcement of the priests oath as an opportunity for civil war the whole air of that winter was charged with doubt and mystery in the minds of all who had enthusiastically followed the march of the revolution the short days of that rigorous cold of 1790 to 91 contain passages of despair and a very brief period was to suffice for making the clerical oath not only the test of democracy against reaction but the wedge that should split the nation in two with the very opening of the new year on the fourth of january the bishops and priests in the assembly were summoned to take the oath to the king the nation and the law but that law included the civil constitution of the clergy and they refused within three months Maribau was dead the flight of the king determined on the suspicion of paris at white heat the oath taken or refused throughout france and the systematic priests introduced into their parishes it may be imagined with what a clamor and with how many village quarrels in that same fortnight appeared the papal brief long delayed and known as the brief caritas denouncing the civil constitution of the clergy six weeks later at the end of may the papal representative at the french court was withdrawn and in that act religious war declared throughout this quarrel which was now exactly of a year's duration but the acute phase of which had lasted only six months every act of either party to it necessarily tended to make the conflict more violent not only was there no opportunity for conciliation but in the very nature of things the most moderate council had to arrange itself on one side or the other and every public act which touched in any way upon the sore point though it touched but indirectly and with no desire on the part of the actors to browse the passions of the moment immediately appeared as a provocation upon one side or the other it was inevitable that it should be so with a population which had abandoned the practice of religion with the attachment of the clerical organization to the organization of the old regime with the strict bond of discipline that united the priesthood of the church in France into one whole and above all with the necessity under which the revolution was at this stage of finding a definite and tangible enemy this last point is of the very first importance public opinion was exasperated and inflamed for the king was known to be an opponent of the democratic movement yet he signed the bills and could not be overtly attacked the queen was known to be a violent opponent of it but she did not actually govern the governments of europe were known to be opponents but no diplomatic note had yet appeared of which public opinion could make an object for an attack the resistance therefore offered by the clergy to the civil constitution had just that effect which a nucleus will have in the crystallization of some solution it polarized the energies of the revolution it provided a definite foil a definite negative a definite counterpoint a definite but here was a simple issue men wearing a special uniform pursuing known functions performing a known part in society to wit the priests were now for the most part the enemies of the new democratic constitution that was in preparation they would not take the oath of loyalty to it they were everywhere in secret rebellion against it and where they were dispossessed of their cures in open rebellion the clergy therefore that is the non-jewering clergy and the conforming clergy were an experiment that soon became a fiction were after april of 1791 in the eyes of all the democrats of the time the plainest and most tangible form of the opposition to democracy the end of section 35 section 36 the french revolution this is a libre vox recording all libre vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librevox.org the french revolution by hill air bellock section 36 chapter 6 concluded the french revolution and the catholic church to the way in which i have presented the problem a great deal more might be added the very fact that the democratic movement had come after a period of unfaith and was non-catholic in its springs would have tended to produce that quarrel so would the necessary attachment of the catholic to authority and the easy confusion between the principle of authority and claims of a traditional monarchy again the elements of vanity of material greed and of a false finality which are to be discovered in any purely democratic theory of the state will between them always bring this theory into some conflict with religion the centuries during which the throne and the altar had stood as twin symbols especially in france the very terminology of religious metaphor which had been forged during the centuries of monarchial institutions in europe helped to found the great quarrel but i repeat the overt act without which the quarrel could never have become the terribly great thing it did the master blunder which destroyed the unity of the revolutionary movement was the civil constitution of the clergy so much for the first year of the sism may 1790 to may 1791 the second year is but an intensification of the process apparent in the first it opens with the king's flight in june 1791 that is with the first open act of an enmity taken against the authority of the national parliament since two years before the national parliament had declared itself supreme already the court had been generally identified with the resistance of the clergy and a particular example of this had appeared in the opinion that the king's attempted journey to st. claude in april have been prompted by a desire to have communion at the hands of a non-juring priest footnote this opinion has entered into so many Protestant and non-catholic histories of the revolution that it is worth criticizing once again in this little book the king was perfectly free to receive communion privately from the hands of orthodox priests did so receive it and had received communion well within the canonical times there was little ecclesiastical reason for the attempted leaving of Paris for st. claude on monday the 18th april 1791 save the custom not the religious duty of communicating in public on Easter Sunday itself it was a political move when therefore the king fled though his flight had nothing whatsoever to do with the clerical quarrel it was associated in men's minds with the clerical quarrel through his attempt to leave Paris in april and from a long association of the court with the clerical resistance the outburst of anti-monarchial feeling which followed the flight was at the same time an outburst of anti-clerical feeling but the clergy were everywhere and could be attacked everywhere the declaration of pillnates which the nation very rightly interpreted as the beginning of an armed european advance against the french democracy was felt to be a threat not only in favor of the king but in favor also of the rebellious ecclesiastics and so forth the uneasy approach of the war throughout that autumn and winter of 1791-92 the peculiar transformation of the french temperament which war or its approach invariably produces a sort of constructive exaltation and creative passion began to turn a great part of its energy or fury against the very persons of the orthodox priests the new parliament the legislative as it was called had not been sitting two months when it passed upon november 29th 1791 the decree that non-jewering priests should be deprived of their stipend and here again we must note the curious lack of adjustment between law and fact in all this clerical moral for more than a year public money had been paid to men who under the law should not during the whole of that year have touched any salary yet as in the case of the oath special action was necessary and more over the parliament added to this tardy and logical consequence of the law a declaration that those who had not so taken the oath within eight days of their decree should be rendered suspect the word suspect is significant the parliament even now could not act at least it could not act without the king and this word suspect which carried no material consequences with it was one that might cover a threat of things worse than regular and legal punishment it was like the mark that some power not authorized or legal makes upon the door of those whom that power has singled out for massacre in some city three weeks later louis veto the decree refusing stipends to non jurors and the year 1791 ended with the whole matter in suspense but with the exasperation increasing the madness the first three months of 1792 saw no change the non-jewering clergy were still tolerated by the executive in their illegal position and what is more extraordinary still received public money and were still for the most part in possession of their cures the conception that the clergy were the prime or at any rate the most obvious enemies of the new regime now hardened into a fixed opinion which the attempted persecution of religion as the one party called it the obstinate and anti-national rebellion of fascist priests as the other party called it was rapidly approaching real persecution and real rebellion with april 1792 came the war and all the passions of the war the known hostility of the king to the revolution was now become something far worse his known sympathy with an enemy under arms to force the king into the open was hence forward the main tactic of the revolutionary body now for those whose object was forcing louis the 16th to open declaration of hostility against the nation his religion was an obvious instrument in no point could one come to closer grips with the king than on this question of the church where already in December 1791 he had exercised his veto on May 27 1792 therefore godet and vernon the gerondons moved that a priest who had refused to take the oath should be subjected to transportation upon the mere demand of any 20 taxpayers within that assembly of parishes known as a canton it was almost exactly two years since the civil constitution of the clergy had first been reported to the house by the ecclesiastical committee of the constituent or national assembly it must not be forgotten under what external conditions this violent act the first true act of persecution was demanded it was already a month since upon the 20th of April the war had opened upon the belgian frontier by a disgraceful panic and the murder of general dylan almost contemporaneous with that breakdown was the corresponding panic and flight of the french troops in their advance to mons all europe was talking of the fissile march upon paris which could now be undertaken and in general this decree against the priests was but part of the exasperated policy which was rising to meet the terror of the invasion it was followed of course by the decree dismissing the royal guard and rather more than a week later by the demand for the formation of a camp of volunteers under the walls of paris but with this we are not here concerned the king vetoed the decree against the non-jering priests and in the while two months that followed the orthodox clergy were in the mind of the populace and particularly the populace of paris identified with the cause of the re-establishment of the old regime and the success of the invading foreign armies with the crash of the 10th of august the persecution began the true persecution which was to the growing bitterness of the previous two years what a blow is to the opening words of a quarrel the decree of the 27th of may was put into force within 11 days of the fall of the tuleries true it was not put into force in that crudity which the parliament had demanded the non-jering priests were given a fortnight to leave the kingdom and if they failed to avail themselves of the delay were to be transported from this date to the end of the terror 23 months later the story of the relation between the revolution and the church the wild and terrible is simple it is a story of mere persecution culminating in extremes of cruelty and in the supposed uprooting of christianity in france the orthodox clergy were everywhere regarded by this time as the typical enemies of the revolutionary movement they themselves regarded the revolutionary movement by this time as being principally an attempt to destroy the catholic church within seven months of the fall of the monarchy from the 18th of march 1793 the priests whether non-jering or schismatic might on the denunciation of any sick citizens be subjected to transportation they're followed immediately a general attack upon religion the attempted closing of all churches was of course a failure but it was firmly believed that such entachment as yet remained of the catholic church was due only to the ignorance of the provincial districts which displayed it or to the self-seeking of those who fostered it the attempt at mere de-christianization as it was called failed but the months of terror and cruelty the last number of martyrdoms for they were no less and the incredible sufferings and indignities to which the priests who attempted to remain in the country were subjected burnt itself as it were into the very fiber of the catholic organization in france and remained in spite of political theory one way or the other and in spite of the national sympathies of the priesthood the one great active memory inherited from that time conversely the picture of the priest his habit and character as the fatal and necessary opponent of the revolutionary theory became so fixed in the mind of the republican that two generations did nothing to eliminate it and that even in our time the older men in spite of pure theory cannot rid themselves of an imagined connection between the catholic church and an international conspiracy against democracy nor does this non-rational but very real feeling lack support from the utterances of those who in opposing the political theory of the french revolution consistently quote the catholic church as it's necessary and holy antagonist the attempt to decristianize france failed as i have said completely public worship was restored and the concordant of napoleon was believed to have settled the relations between church and state in a permanent fashion we have lived to see it dissolved but this generation will not see nor perhaps the generation succeeding in the issue of the struggle between two bodies of thought which are divided by no process of reason but profoundly divorced by the action of vivid and tragic historical memories the end of section 36 the end of chapter six the end of the french revolution