The French Revolution and the Church

On 2 November 1789 the National Assembly of France decreed that all the church’s estates were at the disposal of the nation, which was to provide in return for worship, the clergy and the poor (Anderson, Constitutions and Documents of France, no. 6A, pp. 15–16). The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 12 July 1790 then reorganised the church itself. Each department became a diocese (Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Title I, art. 1). Bishops and parish priests were to be chosen by election; a new bishop was not to ask the pope for confirmation but to write to him as the visible head of the universal Church, in witness of unity of faith (Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Title II, arts. 1–3 and 19). The clergy were to be paid by the nation (Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Title III, art. 1). A decree of 27 November 1790 required bishops and parish priests to swear to maintain the constitution; those who did not were held to have resigned (Anderson, Constitutions and Documents of France, no. 6D, pp. 22–23).

Pius VI answered on 13 April 1791 (Pius VI, Charitas closing line). He wrote that almost all the bishops and most of the parish priests had refused the oath (Pius VI, Charitas 9). He judged the Civil Constitution heretical in many of its decrees and in others sacrilegious and schismatic (Pius VI, Charitas 11), suspended every cleric who had taken the oath unless he withdrew it within forty days, and declared the elections of the new bishops void and their consecrations unlawful (Pius VI, Charitas 20–22).

The abbé Barruel, an exile in London who in 1794 published accounts gathered from fellow refugees (Barruel, History of the Clergy, dedication), tells what happened to priests imprisoned for refusing the oath in the church of the Carmelites in Paris. On Sunday 2 September 1792, he writes, armed men broke into the garden where the priests were walking and began to kill them; the archbishop of Arles was among the first to die (Barruel, History of the Clergy, part 3, pp. 61–65). In April 1793 the Convention ordered clergy who had not sworn the oath of liberty and equality shipped to French Guiana, on pain of death within twenty-four hours if they returned (Anderson, Constitutions and Documents of France, no. 29B, pp. 134–135); in October it ordered priests liable to deportation who had returned to France put to death, and offered a hundred livres for denouncing one (Anderson, Constitutions and Documents of France, no. 29C, pp. 135–136). From September 1794 the Republic paid no clergy, and a decree of February 1795 allowed worship while refusing it salaries and buildings (Anderson, Constitutions and Documents of France, nos. 29F–G, pp. 138–139).

The First Consul of France from the end of 1799 was Napoleon Bonaparte (Anderson, Constitutions and Documents of France, no. 58 (dated 13 December 1799, p. 270), art. 39, p. 275). The convention between him and Pius VII, done at Paris on 26 Messidor of the Year IX (15 July 1801) (Concordat of 1801, closing line), recognised the Catholic religion as that of the great majority of French citizens (Concordat of 1801, preamble). Its worship was to be free and public, within such police regulations as the government judged necessary (Concordat of 1801, art. 1). The pope would ask the existing bishops to resign; the First Consul would name new ones, the pope would institute them, and they would swear fidelity to the government (Concordat of 1801, arts. 3–6). Churches not sold were returned, the pope undertook not to trouble the buyers of church lands, and the government was to pay the clergy (Concordat of 1801, arts. 12–14). A French law of 8 April 1802 added that no papal document might be published in France without the government’s leave (Anderson, Constitutions and Documents of France, no. 64B, Title I, art. 1, p. 299).