Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution

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"Dechristianization" redirects here. For other uses, see Dechristianization (disambiguation).

The aim of a number of separate policies conducted by various governments of France during the

laïcité
policies.

The French Revolution initially began with attacks on Church corruption and the wealth of the higher clergy, an action with which even many

deistic Cult of the Supreme Being and the atheistic Cult of Reason,[5] with the revolutionary government briefly mandating observance of the former in April 1794.[6][7][8][9][10]

Religion and the Catholic Church under the monarchy

Before 1789

In

Lutherans in Alsace) and Jews still lived in France at the beginning of the Revolution. The Edict of Versailles,[11] commonly known as the Edict of Tolerance, had been signed by Louis XVI on 7 November 1787 did not give non-Catholics in France the right to openly practice their religions but only the rights to legal and civil status, which included the right to contract marriages without having to convert to the Catholic faith. At the same time, libertine thinkers popularized atheism and anti-clericalism
.

The

registry
of births, deaths, and marriages and was the only institution that provided hospitals and education in some parts of the country, it influenced all citizens.

Between 1789 and 1792

General collection of writs and instructions relating to the French Revolution (Collection generale des brefs et instructions relatifs a la revolution francoise) of Pope Pius VI, 1798

A milestone event of the Revolution was the abolition of the privileges of the First and Second Estate on the night of 4 August 1789. In particular, it abolished the tithes gathered by the Catholic clergy.[13]

The

Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
of 1789 proclaimed freedom of religion across France in these terms:

Article IV – Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law.

Article X – No one may be disturbed for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.

On 10 October 1789, the National Constituent Assembly seized the properties and land held by the Catholic Church and decided to sell them to fund the assignat Revolutionary currency.

On 12 July 1790, the assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that subordinated the Catholic Church in France to the French government. It was never accepted by the Pope and other high-ranking clergy in Rome.

Fall of the monarchy in 1792

Main articles: Insurrection of 10 August 1792 and September Massacres

New policies of the revolutionary authorities

The programme of dechristianization waged against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included:[14][15][2][need quotation to verify]

Fête de la Raison ("Festival of Reason"), Notre Dame, Paris, 10 November 1793

An especially notable event that took place in the course of France’s dechristianization was the

Notre Dame Cathedral
on 10 November 1793.

The dechristianization campaign can be seen as the logical extension

the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, while for others with more prosaic concerns it provided an opportunity to unleash resentments against the Catholic Church (in the spirit of conventional anti-clericalism) and its clergy.[17]

The Revolution and the Church

In August 1789, the state cancelled the taxing power of the Church. The issue of Church property became central to the policies of the new revolutionary government. Declaring that all Church property in France belonged to the nation, confiscations were ordered and Church properties were sold at

public auction. In July 1790, the National Constituent Assembly published the Civil Constitution of the Clergy
that stripped clerics of their special rights—the clergy were to be made employees of the state, elected by their parish or bishopric, and the number of bishoprics was to be reduced—and required all priests and bishops to swear an oath of fidelity to the new order or face dismissal, deportation or death.

French priests had to receive

abjuring priests ("jurors"), also known as "constitutional clergy
", and nonjuring priests as "refractory clergy".

Map of France showing the percentage of juring priests in 1791. The borders of the map are those of 2007, because the data come from archives of the modern departments.

In September 1792, the Legislative Assembly legalized divorce, contrary to Catholic doctrine. At the same time, the state took control of the birth, death, and marriage registers away from the Church. An ever-increasing view that the Church was a counter-revolutionary force exacerbated the social and economic grievances and violence erupted in towns and cities across France.

In

Collot d'Herbois. Hundreds more priests were imprisoned and made to suffer in abominable conditions in the port of Rochefort
.

Anti-Church laws were passed by the

French Republican Calendar which abolished the sabbath, saints' days and any references to the Church. The seven-day week became ten days instead.[20] It soon became clear, however, that nine consecutive days of work were too much, and that international relations could not be carried out without reverting to the Gregorian system, which was still in use everywhere outside of France. Consequently, the Gregorian Calendar was reimplemented in 1795.[21]

Tuileries garden in a ceremony to inaugurate the new faith. His execution occurred shortly afterward, on 28 July 1794.[19]

By early 1795, a return to some form of religion-based faith was beginning to take shape and a law passed on 21 February 1795 legalized public worship, albeit with strict limitations. The ringing of church bells, religious processions and displays of the Christian cross were still forbidden.

As late as 1799, priests were still being imprisoned or deported to penal colonies. Persecution only worsened after the French army led by General

Roman Republic, and also imprisoned Pope Pius VI, who would die in captivity in Valence, France in August 1799. However, after Napoleon seized control of the government in late 1799, France entered into year-long negotiations with new Pope Pius VII, resulting in the Concordat of 1801
. This formally ended the dechristianization period and established the rules for a relationship between the Catholic Church and the French state.

Victims of the Reign of Terror totaled somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000. According to one estimate, among those condemned by the revolutionary tribunals about 8 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 14 percent middle class, and 70 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion, and other purported crimes.[25] Of these social groupings, the clergy of the Catholic Church suffered proportionately the greatest loss.[25]

Anti-Church laws were passed by the

laïcité
on 11 December 1905.

Toll on the Church

Under threat of death, imprisonment, military conscription, and loss of income, about twenty thousand constitutional priests were forced to abdicate and hand over their letters of ordination, and six thousand to nine thousand of them agreed or were coerced to marry. Many abandoned their pastoral duties altogether.[1] Nonetheless, some of those who had abdicated continued covertly to minister to the people.[1]

By the end of the decade, approximately thirty thousand priests had been forced to leave France, and several hundred who did not leave were executed.

sacraments. Any non-juring priest faced the guillotine or deportation to French Guiana.[1] By Easter 1794, few of France's forty thousand churches remained open; many had been closed, sold, destroyed, or converted to other uses.[1]

Victims of revolutionary violence, whether religious or not, were popularly treated as Christian martyrs, and the places where they were killed became pilgrimage destinations.

heterodox practices all became more common.[1] The long-term effects on religious practice in France were significant. Many who were dissuaded from their traditional religious practices never resumed them.[1]

Gallery

  • "Disaffectation" of a church, Jacques François Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines, 1794
    "Disaffectation" of a church, Jacques François Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines, 1794
  • Festival of the Supreme Being, 8 June 1794
    Festival of the Supreme Being, 8 June 1794
  • Notre Dame of Strasbourg turned into a Temple of Reason.
    Notre Dame of Strasbourg
    turned into a Temple of Reason.

See also

Notes and references

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Tallett 1991, p. 1-17.
  2. ^ a b c Spielvogel 2006, p. 549.
  3. ^ a b Tallett 1991, p. 1.
  4. ISBN 978-0-7513-0467-1
    . At first the new revolutionary government attacked Church corruption and the wealth of the bishops and abbots who ruled the Church -- causes with which many Christians could identify. Clerical privileges were abolished ...
  5. ISBN 9780300044263
    .
  6. ISBN 9780804730877
    .
  7. ^ Heenan, David Kyle. Deism in France 1789-1799. N.p.: U of Wisconsin--Madison, 1953. Print.
  8. ^ Ross, David A. Being in Time to the Music. N.p.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Print. "This Cult of Reason or Deism reached its logical conclusion in the French Revolution..."
  9. ^ Fremont-Barnes, p. 119.
  10. ^ Tallett, Frank Religion, Society and Politics in France Since 1789 pp. 1-17 1991 Continuum International Publishing
  11. ^ Encyclopedia of the Age of Political Revolutions and New Ideologies, 1760-1815, p. 212, retrieved July 17, 2016
  12. ^
    ISSN 0962-9610
    .
  13. ^ Furet, François. "Night of August 4," in François Furet, and Mona Ozouf, eds. A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1989) pp 107-114.
  14. ^ Compare Tallett (1991): "During the course of the year II much of France was subjected to a campaign of dechristianization, the aim of which was the eradication of Catholic religious practice, and Catholicism itself. The campaign, which was at its most intense in the winter and spring of 1793-94 [...] comprised a number of different activities. These ranged from the removal of plate, statues and other fittings from places of worship, the destruction of crosses, bells, shrines and other 'external signs of worship', the closure of churches, the enforced abdication and, occasionally, the marriage of constitutional priests, the substitution of a Revolutionary calendar for the Gregorian one, the alteration of personal and place names which had any eccesiastical connotations to more suitably Revolutionary ones, through to the promotion of new cults, notably those of reason and of the Supreme Being."
  15. ^
    ISBN 978-0-7876-4004-0
    .
  16. ISBN 978-1581345360
    .
  17. ^ Lewis (1993, p. 96): "Many of the Parisian Sections eagerly joined in the priest-hunt...."
  18. ISBN 978-1-134-93741-7
    . Retrieved 9 May 2017.
  19. ^ a b Vovelle 1991, p. 180, 182.
  20. doi:10.1093/fh/15.1.4
    . Retrieved 5 March 2017.
  21. ISBN 9788461617296
    .
  22. ISBN 978-1-108-06772-0
    .
  23. ^ a b Censer and Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, pp. 92–94.
  24. ISBN 9780313334467
    . The cult was a deliberate attempt to counter the unsuccessful efforts at dechristianization, and the atheistic Cult of Reason, which reached its high point in the winter of the previous year.
  25. ^ a b Harvey, Donald Joseph FRENCH REVOLUTION, History.com 2006 (Accessed 27 April 2007)[dead link] Archived 14 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  26. ^ Lewis 1993, p. 96.

Further reading

In English

In French

  • La Gorce, Pierre de, Histoire Religieuse de la Révolution Française. 10. éd. Paris : Plon-Nourrit, 1912–5 v.
  • Langlois, Claude, Timothy Tackett, Michel Vovelle and S. Bonin. Atlas de la Révolution française. Religion, 1770–1820, tome 9 (1996)

External links
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