With eighty-three dioceses and only a handful of Old Regime bishops available, new bishops had to be chosen from the ranks of the constitutional priests. Talleyrand, assisted by Gobel and Miroudot, consecrated Fathers Louis-Alexandre Expilly and Claude-Eustache-François Marolles, who then got right to the task of producing more new bishops, consecrating around fifty by the end of the first month.73 When regional governments organized the election of the curés, immediate problems ensued. Only a limited number of parishioners took part in the elections, incumbent curés were unwilling to go, and elected curés were often unwilling to take up the posts to which they were called. Most often a nonjuror was replaced with a juror, although many nonjurors proved impossible to replace. Antagonisms quickly multiplied, with violence perpetrated by rough-and-ready types offended by the constitutional clergy, their anger heated up by some of the more embittered or extreme refractories. Constitutional bishops, in their new dioceses, were met sooner or later with mockery, accompanied at times by violence.
Accepting or rejecting their new priests, the common people were inevitably engaged: in some regions the peasants were quite fond of their old curé or the traditional modes of church life. Constitutional bishops and priests themselves were resentful of troublesome refractories, but occasionally reached out with, or responded to, kindness. As far as the government was concerned, the constitutionals were the real priests of France. They were to control all the parish registers, and thus records of baptisms, marriages, deaths—matters of vital public record. Refractories were occasionally emboldened to resist, and the political clubs struggled with them all the more. The parish of Saint-Sulpice in Paris was able to get around the restrictions by turning over jurisdiction to a religious order, the Theatines. Constitutional bishops, their authority so often in question, could maintain that authority only by formal rejection of refractory ministries; they were aided by the passage on 14 May 1791 of the Le Chapelier Law requiring that recalcitrant clergy be brought to court.74
In Paris, the only other bishop in the Constituent Assembly who had taken the oath with Talleyrand, Jean-Baptiste Gobel, was elected bishop, receiving five hundred votes, as opposed to the fifty-six votes for Louis Charrier de la Roche, then a canon from Lyon, and the twenty-six votes for Sieyès, who declined to be a candidate anyway. Gobel had an indifferent reputation in Alsace, where he was serving as bishop after a position as auxiliary bishop of Bâle: the main problem seemed to be his debts, resulting from high though probably not immoral living. Income was a factor in his choice of the see of Paris over those of Colmar, Langres, and Agen. There were even some reports that he was willing to negotiate his submission to the Holy See for a certain sum. He turned out to be an inconsistent leader, alternately showing pastoral concern and submission to revolutionary dechristianization. His correspondence with government officials contained little explicit talk about spirituality, theology, or ministry. His priestly personality can be glimpsed only in a few rare texts, such as one letter to a local government committee about his Paris seminarians, who straddled residency in the nearby parish of Saint-Magloire and liturgy in the cathedral. A principal issue for Gobel was their health! “There is no one who does not feel that we would endanger the health of the young men by forcing them, in winter especially, to come back to Saint-Magloire after the morning office, only to return to Notre-Dame for the [evening] office after dinner, and by requiring [subsequently] that they remain for two or three hours after they arrive soaked by rain or covered with snow.”75 The seminarians are good for the cathedral and the cathedral is good for them, because they assist in teaching catechism (Gobel developed four catechisms since taking charge of the diocese), and they get the opportunity to hear good preachers. It all might have worked out in less trying times.
One revolutionary priest who had established his reputation in Paris before Gobel was elected bishop there was Claude Fauchet. Right in the middle of the violent storming of the Bastille, Fauchet, the churchman closest to the men who fought and died there, was at the center of Parisian political and religious life. Later bishop of Calvados, he was the revolutionary priest and constitutional bishop who animated the radical activity that spread from the capital to the provinces. Both by his life and by his writings, he proved to be an essential “priest of the French Revolution.”
CLAUDE FAUCHET AT THE BASTILLE
Brilliant as a young student and pious as a seminarian, Claude Fauchet taught members of the nobility early in his clerical career, and even preached before the king and queen. Yet he championed the Revolution as a Christian enterprise by animating a powerful political circle and several political journals. He eventually became the high-profile vicaire prédicateur of the Paris church of Saint-Roche, appropriately responsible, then, in 1789 for the clergy cahier de doléances, and one of the electors who chose delegates to the Estates General.1 A large minority of the Paris clergy, and a genuine majority of the clergy around Paris, eventually followed in his revolutionary footsteps.2
On 14 July 1789, Fauchet was a member of the deputation, sent by a Paris assembly headquartered at the Hôtel de Ville, to negotiate with the marquis de Launay, governor of the Bastille, in order to forestall violence and bloodshed. Although the story got about that he was in the front lines of the attackers, saber in hand, reports agree that he was a member and then leader of the two deputations that tried and failed to get through to the governor. Fauchet himself told the story during a funeral commemoration on 5 August for those who died at the Bastille. First, he had proposed the decree ordering the commander of the Bastille to turn over the place to the care of the city. He was then given the dangerous task of delivering it: “We flew across those perils; we placed ourselves beneath the blazing guns; with our entreaties we held back the desperate people who were vainly trying to get to the top of the battlements and the cowardly assassins who were raining down death upon them. We then handed over the pacification decree.” There he was, Claude Fauchet, “a legal expert, and a priest, accoutered only for peacemaking,” whereas “they responded with weapons of war.” Back he went with the others three times, and three times they were fired upon: “We stayed alive, by some miracle of providence.” Then a second deputation with a more obvious identification, a lowered flag, was sent with the same results. On the third try, he could only encourage his companions, “intrepid warriors, invincible soldiers of France, worthy of this great name which you justify by ranging yourself on the side of the fatherland to oppose its oppressors.”3 One year later, he added details about his narrow escape from death: “I saw the Bastille artillery fire at me, its murderous shells piercing my clothing and felling those citizens who were by my side; I did not fall back; I pressed on.”4 He was more precise about dates in the Journal des Amis at the beginning of 1793: “On 12 July, the people who had gathered at the Hôtel-de-Ville named me one of the principal officials of the insurrection. On 14 July, I wrote out and I myself carried the civil injunction to the governor of the Bastille, asking him to hand over immediately and without bloodshed that fortress of despotism; three times I braved outbursts that the artillery fired at me.”5 He saved his bullet-torn, long black cassock, subsequently seeing himself as “permanently at the Bastille.”
Later, as constitutional bishop of Calvados, Fauchet set his memories of the Bastille drama in a talk on the union of gospel and revolution: “The gospel, too, is incendiary. The liberator of the human race wanted to extend to all the earth the sacred fire of universal fraternity. He held despots in horror: he was their victim; he loved all peoples; he
