Priests of the French Revolution. Joseph F. Byrnes

       Chapter One

       THE FORMATION OF A REVOLUTIONARY PRIEST

       Sieyès and Grégoire

      The educational and spiritual formations of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Henri Grégoire were similar, and both men possessed a worldly intellectual independence in their seminary days, Sieyès searching for meaning in philosophy and Grégoire in poetry. They were formed in an era when Catholic seminary education was a combination of the high ideals reset for priests at the Council of Trent and the practical worldliness of French social life at all levels. According to Trent, priests were to be mediators between God and the people in a ministry of preaching the gospel and presiding at worship, Mass, confession, and the other sacraments. The preaching and sacramental activity in the early careers of Sieyès and Grégoire has left few traces, especially for Sieyès, but even his silence about his priesthood could not hide the years of saying Mass. A major Sieyès biographer, Jean-Denis Bredin, writes, “One can doubt that he stayed away from [celebration of] the sacraments, for it was not that easy for an important vicaire to never ‘do’ priest. It is sure in any case that at Chartres he said Mass.”¹ Though Grégoire was the totally dedicated priest and revolutionary, either one of two other major figures might have been considered as alternates to Sieyès: (1) Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, one of those priests by default from the aristocracy, who in his last act as bishop of Autun assured the valid consecration of the first constitutional bishops, and thus apostolic continuity; (2) Joseph Fouché, member of the Catholic teaching congregation of the Oratorians, who emerged as a thoroughly secularized, even violent promoter of revolution, and who, under Napoleon, helped assure the incorporation of the constitutional bishops into the concordatory church. But of Talleyrand’s seminary days no documentation of intellectual and quasi-spiritual developments has survived, and Fouché was not an ordained priest. The theme here is formation, in any case.²

      In major writings, published before the opening of the Estates General, Sieyès laid down a program for the rehabilitation of the state, and Grégoire, a program for the rehabilitation of religion in general by the regeneration of the Jews (of Europe) in particular. Sieyès and Grégoire were arguably the most influential priestly voices in French public life in the first three years of the revolution. They are impossible to miss in Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished yet famed canvas of the Tennis Court Oath of 12 June 1789: Sieyès seated at the central table faite podium for the reader of the oath (Jean-Sylvain Bailly, dean of the Third Estate) and Grégoire standing in the foreground slightly left, in a common embrace with the Carthusian monk, Dom Christophe Gerle, and the Protestant pastor Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne. Dom Gerle, painted in as an appropriate actor by David, was absent that day, which leaves Sieyès and Grégoire as the featured priests. When they both arrived on the national scene, Sieyès had jettisoned the minimal God talk of his earlier years and Grégoire had jettisoned the worldly cultural discourse of his earliest essays. Whereas Sieyès was a political revolutionary for whom priesthood was little more than a job category, Grégoire was an engaged priest who was at the same time a political revolutionary. Sieyès and Grégoire represented the two polarities of revolutionary priesthood—total secularism and total commitment to ministry in the new political era—with Sieyès far above the religious “isms” in his own realm of philosophy and political theory, and with Grégoire firmly planted in mainline Gallicanism, leaning Jansenist in some ways, and much more Richerist when he was opposing Old Regime bishops than when he was presiding as a bishop of the Constitutional Church.³

      Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès

      Neither before nor after ordination did the abbé Sieyès appear to have any of the formal religious commitment promoted in the Catholic theological and spiritual writings of the day. But he was the last in a long line of Old Regime priests who balanced their secularism and even, at times, total lack of religious faith with dedication to their intellectual and administrative tasks.⁴ As a young man, his drive for social advancement was uncomplicated by moral or professional vision. Short in stature, plain in looks, afflicted with poor skin, his physique and personality were perhaps no worse than average. His parents were dedicated churchgoers in Fréjus, the southern French city of Sieyès’s birth and upbringing, and his two older sisters, whom he said he loved more than all the other siblings, eventually joined the convent. The father, Honoré Sieyès, was the one who talked of God and morality in his correspondence with the future priest. Sieyès himself had only those practical, “get ahead” concerns, accepting the clerical state as a natural setting for the realization of social status and financial security, and any efforts he made on behalf of his brothers were geared toward the same goals.⁵ Neither as a youth nor as an adult of any age did Sieyès display any interest in female companionship or sexual pleasure. A misanthrope on the personal level, he eventually became, nevertheless, a passionate student of the human condition.⁶

      Formation and Clerical Life

      The Jesuits at Fréjus were Sieyès’s first teachers, but whether he left their school because his father wished it (as is said in the autobiographical Notice that has come down to us from the mature Sieyès) or because

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