historique Rhône-Alpes), arranged my situation as a guest associate of RESEA and LARHRA with generosity and great good humor. Thanks to the Chopelins, Bernard Hours, Yves Krumenacker, and Christine Chadier, we were able to arrange for a colloquium on the constitutional bishops, the springboard for our continuing work on both bishops and priests of the Revolution. It is not possible to name all the participants here, but I do wish to note the patronage of the virtual dean of church–state studies of the revolutionary era, Bernard Plongeron, whose unparalleled erudition I was finally able to encounter face to face; the assistance of Jacques-Olivier Boudon, the Sorbonne scholar who years ago encouraged the pursuit of any useful prosopography of the clergy of the era; and the expertise of Philippe Bourdin, cordial érudit of the Université Blaise Pascal. It was also the occasion to integrate into a wider framework the accomplishments of our original research group for the study of the constitutional bishops, Rodney Dean, Jean Dubray, Emmanuel Lecam, Michel Deblock, Valérie Murger, and Guillaume Colot. Both Valérie Murger and Fabien Vandermarcq of the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal were the principal insurers of my successful work at that veritable shrine of Constitutional Church sources.
I have had several extended conversations with Jacques Guilhaumou, to whom I am especially indebted for interpretation of the complexities of the early career of the abbé Sieyès and for delivering me from the redoubtable task of transcribing all of Sieyès’s Sur Dieu ultramètre, the centerpiece of my study of Sieyès in chapter 1. Alyssa Sepinwall graciously supplied guidance at every turn on the career of the abbé Grégoire—along with encouragement and the example of a scholar at the service of the field of history and the fellow scholars who work there.
This is not my first experience publishing with Penn State University Press: in fact, brief portions of chapters 5, 7, and 11 derive from chapter 1 of my Catholic and French Forever (Penn State, 2005). I continue to be amazed, however, at the intelligence, dedication, and cordiality of the whole équipe, beginning with Kendra Boileau, omnicompetent and a lover of French history and literature, who has been at once my history editor, editor-in-chief, and ever-encouraging adviser. Whatever faults this book may have are certainly, then, mine alone.
At Oklahoma State University, my essential aid in working up the présentation of my work has been the master of illustration and digitizing, David Thompson of the OSU Library. From my early attempts to get the relevant illustrations from the Bibliothèque nationale into my first manuscript through the digitizing of the final version for the Penn State Press, David has furnished expertise, lots and lots of time, and unfailing good humor. And Michael Larson of the Geography Department refined for my needs the maps that I have used in this book. The History Department has provided funds for research on several my chapters, and the supervising secretaries, Susan Oliver and Diana Fry, have handled all the logistics of manuscript production carefully, rapidly, and with salt-of-the-earth kindness; furthermore, colleagues have been uniformly supportive of the book. Overall, I want to highlight in particular the support of my dear friend Tonia Sharlach.
Across the many years, my daughter Veronica Byrnes and my son Michael Byrnes have been at the center of my real life, as much in Boston and Chicago as at home. I have here neither adequate words nor sufficient space to express my love and appreciation. To them I dedicate this book.
“People get the priests they deserve” is the old Russian proverb, which is true if a good-living and successful community of people is served by a good priest, or a troubled and failed community by a bad priest. But you do not have to study history to know that the proverb is not always true. French aristocrats of the revolutionary era would have denied it, some of them complaining, “It is the screwed-up priests who have caused the Revolution,” and wondering how could they have deserved that?
There were about 115,000 priests on French territory in 1789, certainly a large professional class.1 They made what they could of the long and evolving tradition of priesthood, at its double levels of priest and bishop: mediators with another world, moral guides, or simple teachers. There is no reason to assume that in their day-to-day lives they were innocent of the regular run of personal deficiencies stemming from upbringing, sexual development, and competitiveness. The challenge of making sense of the Christian tradition can be formidable in any era, but this challenge was especially formidable for those priests required at the very beginning of 1791 to take an oath of loyalty to the new government, and thereby to accept the religious reforms promoted in a new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. More than half did so at the beginning (recent calculations put the number as high as 61 percent), and those who were subsequently consecrated bishops became the new official hierarchy of France.2 Their writings, public testimony, and recorded private confidences furnish the story of a national Catholic church, the so-called Constitutional Church, which was rejected as schismatic by Rome and eventually rejected as an alien force by the revolutionary government.
These men lived out creative and sometimes destructive versions of priestly ministry as it had been handed on to them. Haunted by the besetting ghosts of the monarchical past, priests and bishops had to deal with the radical revolutionary conversation that quickly dominated their national and local government assemblies, coursed along their city streets, and quietly or noisily entered their villages. Certainly resentment of Old Regime episcopal power animated some of the most outspoken and politically effective curés—parish priests—in 1789. Those who were deputies to the Estates General railroaded their own First Estate into revolutionary partnership with the Third (commoner) Estate, to the chagrin of the aristocracy of the Second Estate. As the Estates General was transformed into the official French legislature, priest diarists recorded the heated discussions of the clergy among themselves. Then, once the Constituent Assembly was established, a special ecclesiastical committee began work on church reform.
The resulting Civil Constitution of the Clergy coordinated church dioceses with the new system of counties (départements) in France. Curés and bishops (previously ordained or consecrated within the church system, of course) were to be elected to their parishes and their dioceses, the bishops no more needing a mandate from the pope to occupy their sees than they did in the early church. The state was guaranteed freedom from church interference and the right to help with reform. The pope had begrudgingly supported Old Regime Catholicism, which gave the papal court general ecclesiastical jurisdiction while reserving certain prerogatives in the appointment of bishops for the monarchical state. But the Constituent Assembly reserved for itself and its ecclesiastical committee every operative decision, and the pope and his entourage considered this an unacceptable arrangement.3 It is clear that whatever chance there had been to sell genuine republic-oriented Catholicism to the legislators of the Republic quickly failed in the face of high-level enthusiasm for republic-oriented deism: a civil religion presented earlier by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and promoted in the first half of the revolutionary decade by Maximilien Robespierre. The move to Rousseau had been natural enough, given the diffusion of Rousseauian ideas, among both the intelligentsia and broad areas of the population.4 Deistic religion continued on, of course, as a major competitor to the Constitutional Church, all the more potent because the campaign against Catholicism, the famous “dechristianization” efforts of the central years of the revolutionary decade, gave a pass to deism even as it persecuted Catholicism. But the constitutional bishops and priests believed that they were the last great hope for revolutionary, or republican, Catholicism in France. The French church they administered, in coordination with the revolutionary government, tried to avoid the Scylla of Old Regime Catholicism with its assumption of papal control moderated only by monarchical order, if not divine right monarchy, and the Charybdis of the civil religion that ex-Catholic or post-Catholic
