in Revolutionary France, which deals with Constitutional Church influence in the context of independent lay Catholic religious activity; and Nigel Aston’s particularly valuable study of bishops at the waning of the Old Regime, The End of an Elite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution, 1786–1790, originally a dissertation done under the direction of John McManners, which can be complemented by his more recent Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804, an omnium-gatherum of specialized studies of specific national and local Constitutional Church events and personalities. However, a new generation of scholars has focused the agenda for study of church and state during the Revolution on regions, cities, and individual personalities in context. Paul Chopelin examines with profound insight the values and problems of both the constitutional and the refractory clergy on the regional level in his Ville patriote et ville martyre: Lyon, l’église et la Révolution, 1788–1805. And the most notable study of an individual clergyman is his local setting is Caroline Chopelin-Blanc’s De l’apologétique à l’Église constitutionnelle: Adrien Lamourette (1742–1794).8
Priesthood: The Catholic and French Heritage
The book is not only for historians. Members of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches have an active, personal interest in the identity and behavior of the priests of their traditions, because so much of the health and wealth of these churches has depended on that very identity and behavior. Full parishes and successful universities can be indications of a vital faith and successful priests, both together. Countries where Catholic Christianity played a major role in shoring up dynasties, reinforcing ethnic communities, and directing charities would periodically go into political crises that played back into religious crises. The French story I tell here, of the enterprise and heroism of the priests who tried to ensure the safety and good health of their people, and the cruel mutation of some of the priests into men of violence, may well have bearing on today’s religious dramas, both American and European. In Europe, for example, note the end of Catholic clerical control of both Irish and Polish popular culture, and the even more dramatic cases of the destruction of the all-embracing Orthodox Christian culture in Russia in the years following 1917 (with its striking recovery following the fall of the Soviet Union, to be sure) or the diminishment to minuscule numbers of churchgoers in the Anglican Church in England and the Lutheran Churches of Scandinavia. Note, too, the intensity of priests’ engagement in politics as a form of religion, and religion as a form of politics in the Yugoslav states, where clergy of the different traditions have used Catholicism to define Croatian politics and culture and Orthodoxy to define Serbian politics and culture.
Historians of religion and sociologists have collected examples of “priestly” identities from across the literature and traditions of ancient, medieval, and modern cultures. Historical scholarship is vague on the religious functionaries of the Egyptian kingdoms, the Jewish Second Temple, or the Roman Republic. In the performance of their duties, priests overlapped with government figures, teachers, healers, magicians, and soldiers.9 We know their sacred books, their myths, and their rituals, but not the direct effect of this religious practice on political, social, and individual life. The challenge in examining the tradition of Christian or Catholic priesthood is that each succeeding generation of believers has altered the priestly job profile to meet the needs of its own era. In fact, the Christian priest was not to be the sacred figure of the old Jerusalem priesthood. Rather he was called presbyteros or elder (presbyter), helping the episcopos or superintendent of local Christian communities in directing, teaching, and presiding at worship. This person was never called iereus, the term used of the temple priest, though the Christian community as a whole was labeled “priestly.” Both superintendents and elders took on the qualities of priestly sacredness and the role of mediator. The function, panoply, and theology of the Old Testament priesthood was appropriated, along with the function, panoply, and theology of the Sabbath. We can assume that images of sacrificial blood and ascending smoke were never far away, but the presbyter was not strictly speaking a priest, nor was Sunday (the first, not the last, day of the week and the day of the Resurrection) the Sabbath.
The roles of priest as prayer leader at Eucharist and bishop as guarantor of apostolic succession (transferring spiritual authority from the apostles) became central only gradually. If we stay in the Roman world, in order to get a look at modern France, we have some solid information on papal Rome, monastic Ireland, and parts of Gaul. From the fourth century onward, we have sermon collections of noted bishops, liturgical sources, and archeological remains. But clear evidence of the development of the parish priest as we now know him comes only from the eighth century, when systems of parishes were put in place: in urban centers at the beginning and later to outlying areas.10 Writings from Charlemagne’s era make the parish priest a model of pastoral concern and personal holiness.11 Here, monks, canons, and other priestly functionaries were as likely to staff parishes as much as some kind of “pure” parish priest. In fact, the curé in the strict sense of the word, with a system of parish priests under the bishop (to go with an already long existing system of randomly staffed parishes), was a development of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It could be said that the status of the French priest in society was established by the Concordat of 1516 between Pope Leo X and King Francis I, making the whole system depend on papal and monarchical authority. The Edict of Nantes, although according basic but limited rights of worship to Protestants, did not diminish the priority of Rome. Public worship was reserved for Catholicism alone and legal cases involving churchmen were in a class by themselves. In the realm of finance, churchmen experienced both privilege and subjugation. Estimates of the extent of church properties range from one-tenth to one-sixth of the national territory; churchmen paid minimal taxes. But these goods basically originated with crown and government. And in return for control of education, the Church, naturally, had the duty of providing it.
The major Catholic Church Council of Trent (1545–63) stated that “the priest is a mediator between the faithful and God; set aside for the ministry of the Eucharist and forgiveness of sins, he must identify himself completely with Christ the mediator, at once sacrificial victim and intercessor for his flock.”12 Until the twentieth century, eucharistic ministry was more important than preaching ministry, of course, and the Eucharist was seen more as an act of sacrifice than a sacramental encounter. Bishops were expected to ensure the quality of this new priest, but the records they kept reveal curé resistance to the reforms. The ultimate goal of clerical enlightenment was popular enlightenment. The old residency foibles were looked into, and attempts were made to monitor preaching, all these efforts issuing in effective change of clergy behavior, even though the Council of Trent was not officially promulgated in France due to political complications. The best of the curés of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, formed in a specifically French school of spirituality associated with the name of Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, combined ideals of sanctity and intellectuality with a concern for the masses of believers.
Bérulle, from the highest levels of the aristocracy, was a marvel of spiritual engagement and political clout. He sustained all dramatic Counter-Reformation efforts, whether in championing the work of the Jesuits or in establishing the French version of St. Philip Neri’s Oratorians. He was politically prominent enough to be the temporary political nemesis of Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII. The central Christian teaching of the Incarnation was concretized in a theology of total submission to God, striving to interpret and relive the interior spiritual states of the divine–human Christ. This theology cum spirituality was further institutionalized in the preaching, writing, and organizational work of the most prominent French clerical leaders of the generations to follow, including Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the Sulpicians, and Louis Grignion de Montfort, a missionary preacher in some measure responsible for the high-profile traditional Catholicism in the Vendée.13
Beyond the Bérullian spirituality of the dedicated clergy, three diffuse and vague sets of attitudes—Gallican, Jansenist, and Richerist—complicated clerical life and authority. Gallicanism promoted a distinct French structure and style of Roman Catholicism. The Latin Ecclesia Gallicana was simply a problem-free label for the French church, which was obviously part of the Latin Western, and therefore Roman, tradition. Political
