The French Revolution and religion in global perspective freedom and faith 978-3-319-59683-9, 3319596837, 978-3-319-59682-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxxi
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
The Huguenot Diaspora and the Politics of Religion in Revolutionary France (Bryan A. Banks)....Pages 3-24
Counter-Revolution and Cosmopolitan Spirituality: Anquetil Duperron’s Translation of the Upanishads (Blake Smith)....Pages 25-48
Religion and the Atlantic World: The Case of Saint-Domingue and French Guiana (Erica Johnson)....Pages 49-71
Secularization by Stealth? Émigrés in Britain During the French Revolution (Kirsty Carpenter)....Pages 73-94
Front Matter ....Pages 95-95
Alexis de Tocqueville: Civil Religion, Race, and the Roots of French Universalism, 1830–1857 (Whitney Abernathy Barnes)....Pages 97-119
Out of the Cloister and into the World: Catholic Nuns in the Aftermath of the Revolution (Sarah A. Curtis)....Pages 121-143
Lamennais’ Dilemma: Reconciling Religion and Revolution (Thomas Kselman)....Pages 145-172
Religion and Secularization in Bavaria in the Age of Revolution, 1777–1817 (Morten Nordhagen Ottosen)....Pages 173-201
Comparative Republican Religion: Eighteenth-Century France and Twentieth-Century Turkey (Hakan Gungor)....Pages 203-219
Back Matter ....Pages 221-232

Citation preview

The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective Freedom and Faith Edited by Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson

War, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 Series Editors Rafe Blaufarb Florida State University Tallahassee, United States Alan Forrest University of York United Kingdom Karen Hagemann University of North Carolina Chapel Hill United States

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14390

Bryan A. Banks · Erica Johnson Editors

The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective Freedom and Faith

Editors Bryan A. Banks SUNY Adirondack Queensbury NY, USA

Erica Johnson Francis Marion University Florence SC, USA

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 ISBN 978-3-319-59682-2 ISBN 978-3-319-59683-9  (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944572 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © De Luan/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

The century from 1750 to 1850 was a seminal period of change, not just in Europe but across the globe. The political landscape was transformed by a series of revolutions fought in the name of liberty—most notably in the Americas and France, of course, but elsewhere, too: in Holland and Geneva during the eighteenth century and across much of mainland Europe by 1848. Nor was change confined to the European world. New ideas of freedom, equality and human rights were carried to the furthest outposts of empire, to Egypt, India and the Caribbean, which saw the creation in 1801 of the first black republic in Haiti, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. And in the early part of the nineteenth century they continued to inspire anti-colonial and liberation movements throughout Central and Latin America. If political and social institutions were transformed by revolution in these years, so, too, was warfare. During the quarter-century of the French Revolutionary Wars, in particular, Europe was faced with the prospect of ‘total’ war, on a scale unprecedented before the twentieth century. Military hardware, it is true, evolved only gradually, and battles were not necessarily any bloodier than they had been during the Seven Years War. But in other ways these can legitimately be described as the first modern wars, fought by mass armies mobilized by national and patriotic propaganda, leading to the displacement of millions of people throughout Europe and beyond, as soldiers, prisoners of war, civilians and refugees. For those who lived through the period these wars would v

vi  Series Editors’ Preface

be a formative experience that shaped the ambitions and the identities of a generation. The aims of the series are necessarily ambitious. In its various volumes, whether single-authored monographs or themed collections, it seeks to extend the scope of more traditional historiography. It will study warfare during this formative century not just in Europe, but in the Americas, in colonial societies, and across the world. It will analyse the construction of identities and power relations by integrating the principal categories of difference, most notably class and religion, generation and gender, race and ethnicity. It will adopt a multi-faceted approach to the period, and turn to methods of political, cultural, social, military, and gender history, in order to develop a challenging and multidisciplinary analysis. Finally, it will examine elements of comparison and transfer and so tease out the complexities of regional, national and global history.

Foreword

In many respects, the first half of the nineteenth century was an age of religious fervor comparable only to the Reformation and its Catholic response. A wave of church building and missionary activity, the founding of seminaries and Bible societies, and the creative expression of popular piety—from pilgrimages and apparitions, to reading groups and revivals—all attest to the vitality of faith in this period and for much of the succeeding century. It is one of the virtues of this fine collection that it helps to more fully explain and contextualize this phenomenon, accounting for religion’s reinvention and reinvigoration in the nineteenth century and beyond. If religion, to take Dale Van Kley’s terms, was a “casualty” of modernity, it was also a “chrysalis.”1 And as the essays in this volume make abundantly clear, the Revolution helped to incubate and hatch its new forms. Indeed, the very same period that witnessed the ravages of dechristianization was also an age of religious creativity and invention, preparing the re-awakening that ensued, and in the process ensuring that religion, which was present at the founding, would retain a central place in the subsequent construction of the modern world. That this process was global in its dimensions is another novel feature emphasized in this volume, which effectively brings together two vital strands of recent historiography that have not been sufficiently connected. On the one hand is the rich study of religion and religious Enlightenment in the long eighteenth century, which over the last several decades has complicated facile understandings of secularization and vii

viii  Foreword

disenchantment, and demonstrated the degree to which the various confessions showed themselves to be both accommodating and creative in the face of modern developments. On the other hand is the “global turn” in the eighteenth century and Revolutionary studies, which has succeeded in demonstrating Europe’s inextricable links to forces and peoples beyond its frontiers, while at the same time correcting for a certain provincialism in the study of the Revolution itself. That these two developments should have overlapped and reinforced each other stands to reason, and the essays in this volume make clear that they did. From those Huguenots dispersed throughout the Atlantic world who claimed the right of revolutionary return in the 1790s to the radical monks and missionaries who sided with formerly enslaved Africans in their uprising in Saint-Domingue to the disbanded nuns and imperial administrators who took their ignited devotion overseas in the nineteenth century, the Revolution proved a germinating source of religious life, spreading its energies abroad and drawing those of the world back to European soil. Well into the twentieth century, moreover, and arguably still today, the Revolution served a critical function for religious actors all over the world, who no less than their anti-clerical counterparts, saw in this world-historical event both promise and pitfall, making it a critical reference point for assessing the place of religion in modern life. In all of these ways, as the editors note, Alexis de Tocqueville was even more right than he knew when he described the French Revolution as a “religious revolution.” Once viewed as a place of termination, the French Revolution in this account becomes a place of rebirth and reinvention, which opened new chapters in the story of religion’s place in the modern world. Darrin M. McMahon Dartmouth College

Note 1.  Dale Van Kley, “Christianity as Casualty and Chrysalis of Modernity: The Problem of dechristianization in the French Revolution,” America Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1081–1104.

Foreword

  ix

Darrin M. McMahon  is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor at Dartmouth College. He is the author, most recently, of Divine Fury: A History of Genius and the editor, with Joyce Chaplin, of Genealogies of Genius (Palgrave, 2015).

Acknowledgements

Several of the chapters in this volume were first presented at the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era annual meeting at High Point University in 2014. We would like to thank those in attendance for their insightful commentary and criticism, as well as Carol Harrison, who encouraged the creation of this volume. The anonymous reviewers at Palgrave provided thoughtful feedback on the following collection. The editorial team at Palgrave had faith in this volume. We greatly appreciate their efforts.

xi

Contents

Part I Religion and Revolution in Global Perspective The Huguenot Diaspora and the Politics of Religion in Revolutionary France Bryan A. Banks

3

Counter-Revolution and Cosmopolitan Spirituality: Anquetil Duperron’s Translation of the Upanishads Blake Smith

25

Religion and the Atlantic World: The Case of Saint-Domingue and French Guiana Erica Johnson

49

Secularization by Stealth? Émigrés in Britain During the French Revolution Kirsty Carpenter

73

Part II Global Legacies of Religion and the French Revolution Alexis de Tocqueville: Civil Religion, Race, and the Roots of French Universalism, 1830–1857 Whitney Abernathy Barnes

97 xiii

xiv  Contents

Out of the Cloister and into the World: Catholic Nuns in the Aftermath of the Revolution Sarah A. Curtis Lamennais’ Dilemma: Reconciling Religion and Revolution Thomas Kselman

121 145

Religion and Secularization in Bavaria in the Age of Revolution, 1777–1817 Morten Nordhagen Ottosen

173

Comparative Republican Religion: Eighteenth-Century France and Twentieth-Century Turkey Hakan Gungor

203

Epilogue 221 Index 227

Editors

and

Contributors

About the Editors Bryan A. Banks  is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Adirondack. He specializes in the religious history of France and the Atlantic World and has published works on the history of Protestantism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Erica Johnson is Assistant Professor of History at Francis Marion University. She specializes in the French Atlantic world and has published on memory in the founding of Haiti.

Contributors Whitney Abernathy Barnes  is a doctoral candidate at Boston College. Her work focuses on the connections between race, religion, and capitalism in the early decades of France’s post-Revolutionary empires. Kirsty Carpenter Associate Professor of History at Massey University, New Zealand, is a specialist on the émigrés (refugees) who left France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars returning in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Her research involves work on minority cultures and European literature. An edition of the novel Eugénie et Mathilde by Madame de Souza was published by the MHRA: Critical xv

xvi  Editors and Contributors

Texts, Vol. 26 in 2014. She is the author of: The Novels of Madame de Souza in Social and Political Perspective (2007), Refugees of the French Revolution, Émigrés in London 1789–1802 (1999), and The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution 1789–1814 edited with independent scholar, Philip Mansel. She is currently writing a book on Exiles and Activism in the Revolutionary Era. Sarah A. Curtis  is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France and Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire, and numerous articles. Hakan Gungor is Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Ordu University in Turkey. After he completed his Doctorate Degree at the Florida State University in the United States, he has been working on Turkish Neutrality in International Law. He is currently working on Modern Turkish and Middle Eastern History and as well as the U.S.-Turkish Relations. Thomas Kselman is Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He has published Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, and Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France. Morten Nordhagen Ottosen is Associate Professor of History and Strategy at the Norwegian Military Academy in Oslo and has also taught as a visiting scholar at Florida State University. His publications include Experiences of War and Nationality in Denmark and Norway, 1807– 1815 (2014, co-authored with Rasmus Glenthøj), Popular Responses to Unpopular Wars: Resistance, Collaboration and Experiences in Norwegian Borderlands (2012), and the forthcoming Scandinavia between Napoleon and Bismarck: Scandinavianism as a Pan-National Movement, 1814– 1870 (co-authored with Rasmus Glenthøj). He has also published several articles and book chapters on nationalism, constitutionalism, and popular war experiences in Scandinavia and Continental Europe during and after the Napoleonic period and is currently completing a monograph on the Napoleonic Empire for the Scandinavian market.

Editors and Contributors

  xvii

Blake Smith is a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His research on European interactions with Asia has been published in journals, such as History of European Ideas, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, French Cultural History, and Outre-mers: revue d’histoire.

Introduction

The French Revolution, though political, assumed the guise and tactics of a religious revolution. Some further points of resemblance between the two may be noticed. The former not only spread beyond the limits of France, but, like religious revolutions, spread by preaching and propaganda.1

It is easy to read the nineteenth-century politician and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville’s allusion to France’s religious revolution in 1789 in strictly metaphorical terms—French revolutionaries ­proselytized beyond France’s borders, sending secular preachers of modernity throughout the world, waging secular warfare, and ritualizing their own political ideals through revolutionary festivals. Yet, Tocqueville’s characterization of the French Revolution as a “religious revolution” may sit uncomfortably with contemporary readers who have even the slightest knowledge of the breakdown of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy in France, the refractory priests who turned to clandestine worship and renegade counter-revolution, and what became known as the “dechristianization” campaign at the height of the Terror. How could a “religious revolution” manifest itself through anti-religious violence? The chapters in this volume interpret Tocqueville’s assertion in a different way, envisaging a revolutionary experience and modernity deeply indebted to religion rather than opposed to it. Like Tocqueville, Edmund Burke was an astute interpreter of the French Revolution in religious terms. Burke recognized that the revolutionary leaders, who xix

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he called “atheistical fathers … learned to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk.”2 The “secular” language of the French Revolution was a recalibration of the religious in the modern world, rather than its death knell. According to theorists like Charles Taylor, the secular is better understood as the ever-changing boundary between religious and non-religious belief and identity.3 In short, this collection explores how the balance between the profane and the sacred changed during the French Revolution, while avoiding teleological understandings of an anti-religious modern world. By latching onto varied experiences and discourses both during the Revolution and afterwards, we are able to call into question the Revolution’s place in the larger narrative of the rise of secularization. The “disenchantment of the world” did not set in as Max Weber once posited, nor did a complete and total Durkheimian “transfer of sacrality” occur during the French Revolution.4 Similarly, what some have called the “privatization of religion,” or the increased separation of rights of the public citizen and the private believer, was not wholesale.5 Many were driven to act publicly because of “private,” personal religious reflection. Rather than propagate the classical secular thesis then, the chapters included in this volume examine how both profane and sacred spheres shifted. “Dechristianization” coincided with “rechristianization.” Anti-clericalism gave way to new republican faiths, like the Cult of the Supreme Being and Theophilanthropy, but more often, people simply returned to or revamped their traditional, predominantly Catholic faith. For the first half of the twentieth century, scholars of the Revolution sided with Karl Marx’s focus on class struggle over Tocqueville and religion as a category of historical analysis largely fell by the wayside. The revolutionary rejection of Catholicism was symptomatic, not systemic, of the ascendency of the bourgeoisie to power in 1789 according to Marxist historians.6 Yet, following the Revisionist turn’s rejection of the orthodox Marxist model and Post-Revisionist turn to political culture, a sizable body of scholarship has emerged on the French Revolution and religion in the recent years.7 Archival work done to further contextualize the Old Regime and the Revolution encouraged historians to pull religion from the dustbin of history. “Those who dissented from received culture and creed,” Alan Charles Kors aptly notes, “had been formed by received culture and creed.”8 Dale Van Kley pioneered an approach to the Old Regime in his The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, which returned weight to theological controversy. For Van Kley, the dissent of the French Catholic sect, Jansenism issued the greatest challenge

Introduction

  xxi

to Catholic tradition. Jansenists expounded on God’s divine will and predestination, challenging the normative, Gallican claims of man’s free will. This religious debate undermined the Catholic institution, eroding the theological structure that elevated the priest above the lay individual.9 Jansenist ecclesiology also imagined God to be distant as well as enigmatic—an image conducive to a sphere of political power separate from the church with mirrored rites, rituals, and modes of identification, namely nationalism.10 Such an argument was fairly typical to Marx’s contemporary historians, except Protestants were often depicted as the champions or culprits of secularization.11 Like Van Kley, Suzanne Desan, Ronald Schechter, Nigel Aston, Timothy Tackett, and Joseph F. Byrnes in the Anglophone world have challenged the dialectic between secular and sacred during the French Revolution.12 They have shown how religious groups and ideas about religion played a fundamental role in the shaping of the revolutionary experience and the political culture of the Revolution itself. They have also shown how the Revolution rejected religious tradition. Religious and sociological factors prompted a veritable civil war in the Vendée, while women in the Yonne transformed their Catholic conventions, marrying their piety with political principle. An entire Constitutional Church formed, while runaway refractory priests led rogue attacks in the countryside bearing crucifixes and the white Bourbon flag. Yet, in all of these works, the scope is limited to the French hexagon, or even solely to a single province. Many of these works focus on how individuals used departmental boundaries to their advantage, but have neglected larger national and international spaces. This collection fills this rather noticeable lacuna by examining the French Revolution and religion in a global perspective. Alphonse Aulard, arguably the first professional historian of the French Revolution and Napoleon asserted that “the French Revolution differed from other revolutions in being not merely national, for it aimed at benefiting all humanity.”13 The nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel also noted the “World-Historical” character of the Revolution.14 The more recent The French Revolution in Global Perspective takes up the problem of globalization and the global origins of the French Revolution; however, with the exception of one chapter, religion remains missing.15 This turn to the transnational and global was inherent in Tocqueville’s original understanding of the Revolution. Looking back on the last decade of the eighteenth century and having lived through the

xxii  Introduction

tumultuous 1848 revolutions, Tocqueville understood “political and civil revolutions” as movements “confined to a single country. The French Revolution had no country; one of its leading effects appeared to be to efface national boundaries from the map.” He continued: “No similar feature can be discovered in any other political revolution recorded in history. But it occurs in certain religious revolutions.”16 Tocqueville’s definition of religion mirrored his notion of the Revolution’s aims— “affecting mankind in the abstract,” regulating the “reciprocal duties of men toward each other, independently of social institutions.”17 The socially transcendent nature of religious revolutions naturally transcended real and imagined boundaries. Using religion as a lens by which to bring the French Revolution into global perspective reveals the multi-directional approaches available to scholars. As David Bell notes in his “Questioning the Global Turn,” globalization can refer to “outward,” “integrated, transnational,” and “inward processes.”18 As such, in this volume, globalization examines the impacts of the French Revolution abroad, the role the Revolution played in broader transnational shifts, and the impact other peoples, cultures, and events had on the French Revolution. As Bell warns, such a focus on global connections and trajectories threatens to overtake the particular and location-specific. It is, therefore, necessary, in examining the global, to not lose sight of the local. Many of our chapters emphasize both the particularity of “place” and as well as the traversal of “space” as themes. The French Revolution’s political culture and the politics of religion are thus central themes. Two themes divide the collection. Part I of this collection, entitled “Religion and Revolution in Global Perspective,” examines the ways in which religious rhetoric evolved from 1789 to 1799, with particular emphasis on the ways “foreign” faiths and religious peoples impacted the political culture of the French Revolution. Part I also explores the religious lives of individuals during the French Revolution who were forced from France for religious, social, and political reasons. Bryan Banks’ chapter explores the role of the Huguenot diaspora in the Revolution’s political culture. Rather than focus on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) as augur of the Revolution, Banks examines the discourse used by members of the revolutionary government in shaping a peculiar policy in September 1792 that granted citizenship to Huguenot émigrés. This same law also theoretically returned ancestral

Introduction

  xxiii

lands still held in the monarchy’s domains to the descendants of their previous Huguenot owners upon their return to France. These efforts resulted in the return of an important cadre of Huguenots including the politician and author Benjamin Constant, the sculptor James Pradier, the writer Paul-Jérémie Bitaubé, and the diplomat Charles Guillaume Théremin. A study of rappel des religionnaires fugitifs untangles the fraught relationship between religion and citizenship, while exploring the state’s memory of the Revocation and their efforts to make reparations. Blake Smith analyzes the impact of the French Revolution on the work of eighteenth-century France’s most eminent scholar of Asian religions, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron. Considered by scholars to be a cosmopolitan liberal and “enlightened” figure, Anquetil, in fact, was an opponent of the French Revolution. Through an examination of Duperron’s pioneering translation of the Sanskrit Upanishads, Smith shows how Orientalism could critique the Revolution and the Enlightenment. Synthesizing Christian theology, Neo-Platonism, Kabbalah, and the Upanishads, Anquetil appealed to non-European traditions in his criticism of the Enlightenment thought and established a pattern later used by mystics and right-wing intellectuals, such as Réné Guénon and Julius Evola. In a surprising move, Duperron’s text promoted a universal spirituality (common to Hinduism and Catholicism alike), which shored up his counter-revolutionary politics in a decidedly modern, cosmopolitan, and “radical” way. Erica Johnson focuses on the rather resolute character of religious orders in the Caribbean World at a time when France faced a slave revolt in Saint Domingue, led in part by French clergy, and an insurgent, counter-revolutionary movement led by renegade refractory priests, who rebuked the Revolution’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Many of les religieux supported philanthropic, anti-slavery positions and played key roles in the revolt. At the same time, the French Revolution deported priests to French Guiana for rehabilitation. Deportations overloaded an already strained colonial structure, so Guiana, in turn, ordered the deportation of priests already in the colony to the United States and other French colonies. Johnson compares and contrasts the experience of the Church in both Saint-Domingue and French Guiana. Both parts of the Caribbean World were extensions of and responded to the French Revolution. Therefore, Johnson shows how the Caribbean became a

xxiv  Introduction

space occupied and shaped by les religieux at the onset of the nineteenth century’s wave of imperialism. Kirsty Carpenter examines another castaway community—the counter-revolutionary of French Catholic émigrés in London. Carpenter focuses on their emigration experience, in order to emphasize how distance and the turmoil of forced relocation could transform religious communities. Unlike Johnson’s chapter, which focuses on the creation of Atlantic and Caribbean networks, Carpenter’s chapter explores the ways distance denigrated connections and culture. Physical distance from Catholic churches damaged the Catholic belief and practice of many French émigrés. The financial and social constraints incurred by their exile caused many to abandon their former institutional church, taking up membership at those churches available to them in exile. Carpenter argues that these small religious enclaves can be understood as microcosms of unintentional acculturation and secularization, or the shifting nature between sacred and profane concerns. Part II—“Global Legacies of Religion and the French Revolution”— examines the legacies of the French Revolution in both physical and political terms over the course of the long nineteenth century. We remove another imaginary boundary the Revolution crossed and affected people’s religious lives—the temporal. The authors move beyond the confines of the eighteenth century to examine the impact the Revolution had on religion into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters in this section demonstrate how the French Revolution became a turning point for the religious history of the world in so much that it inspired religious policy in the French empire, affected the religious ­conscience of French thinkers, and challenged the secular developments of foreign nations. By examining the function of religion within Tocqueville’s varied writings, Whitney Abernathy Barnes postulates that Christianity, far from becoming less central to French identity and political life after the revolutionary period, is a critical element in understanding French identity formation in the nineteenth century. Christianity’s civic influences proved to be multifaceted and contradictory in Tocqueville’s writings. When regarding the metropole, he invoked France’s Christian heritage to propagate moderation, equality, and liberty in civil society. When discussing the colonies, Tocqueville employed France’s Christian identity to discursively justify French political and military intervention in Algeria.

Introduction

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Ultimately, Tocqueville’s constant references to France’s Christian identity in his discussions of the “secular” areas of politics and imperial policy reveal the ways in which religion influenced French colonial policy and contemporary understandings of French universalism. Tocqueville employed religious language to universalize France’s noble appeal to the enslaved and barbaric even as he utilized France’s Christian identity to reinforce religious and cultural difference in French Algeria. Focusing her attention on the Revolution’s displacement of nuns, Sarah A. Curtis shows how the closing of convents birthed missionary activities in the nineteenth century. She argues that the expansion of French Catholicism inside and outside of France would not have been possible without the transformations in women’s religious life initiated by the French Revolution—thus revealing the rather unexpected legacy of the anti-Catholic measures taken by revolutionaries. By destroying an old system with limited energy and little potential for expansion and by creating an existential threat to the church itself, the Revolution inspired and empowered Catholic women to recreate religious life on their own terms to new, global ends. While Carpenter’s lay Catholics lost their faith, Curtis’ nuns find their faith reinvigorated abroad. In Curtis’ chapter, distance provided a safe haven from the long arm of French Revolutionary law. Thomas Kselmen emphasizes the ways in which the globalization of religion influenced individual belief through a biographical sketch of the priest, philosopher, and political theorist Felicité Lamennais. Lamennais grew up in the turbulent political and religious atmosphere of the French Revolution. The assault on Catholicism in the 1790s interrupted his ­religious formation, but Lamennais decided as a young man that both his personal salvation and the future of France could be secured only by a return to Catholicism. During the Restoration, Lamennais referred to the Revolution in a series of polemical writings that made him one of the most effective defenders of ultramontanism. However, after an extended period of painful soul-searching, Lamennais left the Church, insisting to his friends that to act otherwise would be to violate his individual conscience. This final step in Lamennais’ career as a Catholic suggests the larger problems posed by the Revolution to the Catholic Church. Could the Church accommodate itself to liberal political regimes and the enhanced claims of the rights of the individual conscience? The struggle

xxvi  Introduction

within the Church to answer these questions constitutes an important legacy of the French Revolution, mirrored in the Lamennais’ career. The last two chapters in this collection reflect on the political legacy of the French Revolution in regimes directly and indirectly affected by the revolutionary tumult. Morten Nordhagen Ottosen’s contribution examines the process and impact of secularization and religious reforms in Bavaria across three decades of revolution and upheaval. He traces the origins and implementation of the reforms. In doing so, his chapter questions whether the French Revolution marked a point of departure for Bavarian reformers or provided a context in which Bavarian reforms that predated the revolution could be successfully implemented. Moreover, Ottosen assesses the relationship between spiritual and political, legal and social considerations on the part of the Bavarian government in implementing the reforms, as well as how the common people experienced secularization and religious reform. His conclusions hint at a larger thesis wherein the French Revolution’s disruption, in fact, slowed the development of religious tolerance rather than expedited it. Hakan Gungor takes a step a little further afield to show how the leaders of the Turkish War of Independence in 1919 legitimated their own secular designs based on the republican legacy of the French Revolution. Gungor then explores the similarities and differences between the French and Turkish republican experience in terms of political and material culture. He explains how, similar to Old Regime France, the clergy were also royal subjects in the Ottoman Empire and had more or less extensive authority over the middle class and the peasants. Further, while revolutionaries challenged Catholic authority in eighteenth-century France, in the twentieth century, the Turkish clergy was suppressed, exiled, and sometimes even executed. Gungor contends that while Turkey seems to be secular, it constantly blurs together religion and politics, giving rise to continual conflict, raising questions as to whether or not the French Revolutionary concept of secularism is applicable to Turkey or other Muslim states. In tackling the issue of the global religious question in the French Revolution, this volume inevitably focuses on the dominant religion of France and the French Empire—Catholicism. As Jules Michelet once noted, the “Revolution continues Christianity, and it contradicts it. It is, at the same time, its heir and its adversary.”19 As Smith’s chapter shows particularly well though, the French Revolution extended to non-Christian parts of the world. French Orientalism was shaped by the French

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Revolution, and as such French ideas of eastern religions and their subsects were cast at a moment of radical ideas concerning religion. French men and women found confirmation of their ideals or their biases in these cultes’ alterity. Smith uncovered a vision of Hinduism, which critiqued the French Revolution’s rejection of religion and bolstered a sense of universal spirituality. Gungor also examines the ways in which French Revolutionary ideas applied to Islam in Turkey. Similarly, the Jewish population figured prominently in the imaginations of French men and women during the French Revolution, but they played a role in France as well. Abbé Grégoire, like many of his revolutionary contemporaries, found the Jewish population paradoxical. They were clannish, insular, as well as degenerated from the earliest Talmudic, Jewish communities; yet, they were also capable of regeneration. Alsatian, Portuguese, Ashkenazi, and Avignonese Jews figured significantly in debates over public office and the rather lackluster decree in 1791 that amounted to a “revocation of restrictions” more than a clarion call for full religious equality.20 Muslims would figure more prominently in 1798 during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition.21 Entangled with the transnational and the French Revolution’s legacy, gender is another focus in this collection. Women had unique experiences with religion and the French Revolution. Yet, far from being monolithic, their encounters varied based, among other factors, on their geographic locations. Curtis examines how revolutionary religious transformations in France emancipated nuns from their cloisters, making it possible for them to evangelize globally. Johnson reveals how nuns associated with the Constitutional priests of the Capuchin order took up the cause of equality for their female pupils of color in revolutionary SaintDomingue. While the French Revolution empowered these Catholic women, émigré women in Britain struggled to practice their Catholic faith. Carpenter explores the social, financial, and logistical obstacles these women had to overcome to attend mass, eventually reducing its importance among the priorities for the French in Britain during the Revolution. Conflict and war act as both agent and specter in this collection. The counter-revolutionary conflict, what some historians refer to as the French Civil War, forced French aristocrats abroad as seen in Carpenter’s chapter. The Vendée and other rural conflicts called into question the position of Catholicism in the French society. Smith’s chapter examines

xxviii  Introduction

how the French Civil War caused one Frenchman to look to Hinduism in order to come to terms with the conflict over religion during the Revolution. Johnson’s chapter too shows how the French Revolutionary Wars spilled over into the Atlantic and Caribbean worlds. In the second section, Ottosen explores how the French Revolutionary Wars spread to the German lands and disrupted a much longer process of secularization, while in Turkey, Gungor shows that the Revolutionary Wars provided a model for the Turks. Considerations of outright war and serious conflict in both obvious and unexpected ways shape the content of each chapter in this volume. In sum, this volume reveals some of the ways that religion and a critical, historical reflection on secularity can open up new avenues to think about the French Revolution in a global perspective. In doing so, we take Tocqueville’s insistence on the religious character of the French Revolution seriously, while testing his thoughts with our current historical tools. The French Revolution crafted new political forms that sought to replace Old Regime power politics guided by impulses simultaneously democratic and dominating. This schism, which may have invented our modern notion of “human rights,” felt like the abandonment of an individual’s claim to religious autonomy, the thrashing of religious community in favor of nationalistic forms of identity. Such a paradox sat at the heart of the French Revolution’s quintessential expression of religious equality.22 “No one should be disturbed for his opinions, even in religion, provided that their manifestation does not trouble public order as established by law.” A protection of religious opinion and public security remained incongruous. This incongruity liberated persecuted religious minorities and persecuted those with religious privilege, thus casting a fraught legacy of secularization with which individuals, communities, and states would have to contend. Bryan A. Banks Erica Johnson

Notes 1.  Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la Révolution (Paris, 1856), 40. 2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1821), 155.

Introduction

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3. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 4. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1922) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 270; Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 239; Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution [1976] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 262–282. 5. On the privatization of religious thesis, see Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1990). 6.  There are a couple notable exceptions. See, François-Alphonse Aulard, Le culte de la raison et le culte de l’être suprême: 1793– 1794: essai historique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1892); Michelle Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle; les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973). 7.  Michelle Vovelle, Timothy Tackett, and Elisabeth Tuttle, “Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies, vol. 16, no. 4 (Autumn, 1990); 749–755. See also Suzanne Desan, “What’s After Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies vol. 23, no. 1 (2000): 163–196. 8. Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 288. 9. Dale Van Kely, The Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 1560–1791 (Yale University Press, 1996). See also Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la nation: Le Jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). 10. See David Bell, The Cult of the Nation: Inventing Nationalism in France, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. Ch 1; Charly Coleman, “Resacralizing the World: The Fate of Secularization in Enlightenment Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 82, no. 2 (2010): 368–395; Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), esp. Part I.

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11.  Bryan A. Banks, “The Protestant Origins of the French Revolution: Contextualizing Edgar Quinet in the Historiography of the Revolution, 1789–1865,” in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, vol. 42, (2016). 12. Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000); Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in EighteenthCentury France: The Ecclesiastical Oat of 1791 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Joseph F. Byrnes, Priests of the French Revolution: Saints and Renegades in a New Political Era (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). 13.  François-Alphonse Aulard, “The French Revolution and Napoleon” in Arthur Tilley, ed. (1922), Modern France. A Companion to French Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 115. 14. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 285. 15. See Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Andrew Jainchill’s chapter entitled “1685 and the French Revolution” focuses on Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution and expulsion of the Huguenot population. 16. Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la Révolution, 39. 17. Ibid., 40–41. 18. David A. Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 4. See also Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015).

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19. Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. by C. Cocks (London, 1857), 18. 20. Schechter, 151. 21. Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 31. 22. See the tenth article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

PART I

Religion and Revolution in Global Perspective

The Huguenot Diaspora and the Politics of Religion in Revolutionary France Bryan A. Banks

In 1685, Louis XIV promulgated his Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which forced French Calvinists into clandestine, countryside worship, sparked armed conflict in the Cévennes, and expelled roughly 200,000 French Calvinists from the country. Louis XIV’s Gallican Articles of 1682, which purportedly stripped the Pope of explicit secular authority in France, had emboldened the une foi, une loi, un roi of the absolutist state to the point that Louis XIV chose to tear down Henri IV’s Edict of Nantes (1598), which had ended the French Wars of Religion. Calvinists, who remained in France, entered, what historians have called, the Désert period.1 Calvinists sought refuge in the wilderness, hid in forests and old barns, and continued to worship even in the absence of their pastors, many of whom were forcibly converted to Catholicism or chased out of the kingdom. Roughly one-fifth of the Calvinist population left France at the end of the seventeenth century, relocating to countries where earlier generations of displaced Huguenots had settled. The Dutch Republic, England, Prussia, and the Swiss cantons were the first to receive the “refugees”—a term re-appropriated for those weary B.A. Banks (*)  SUNY Adirondack, Queensbury, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_1

3

4  B.A. Banks

Calvinists seeking refuge. Soon, Huguenots moved on to the German States, Russia, Scandinavia, and across the Atlantic World to Surinam, South Africa, and the English colonies in North America.2 In short, the Revocation shaped the religious make-up of eighteenth-century France, several European countries, and the wider Atlantic World. While the Revocation fundamentally altered the global religious landscape, it also ushered in a new period of religious politics. The French Calvinist community that remained in the country represented a pockmark on the supposed religious uniformity of France, and those that fled came to symbolize unjust alienation, persecution, as well as national loss. Over 105 years after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the shortlived French Constitution of 1791 included in its definition of citizenship those “born in a foreign country and descended in any degree whatsoever from a French man or a French woman expatriated because of religion.”3 In short, the foreign-born Huguenot population had the right to return to France and enjoy the civil benefits associated with French citizenship. This clause in the Constitution was the result of a series of efforts to create a policy that granted citizenship to Huguenot refugees, which also included a little known provision designed to return ancestral lands to French Calvinists and ex-pat Huguenots, provided they remained in the monarchy’s domains. At the center of the revolutionary debate over the place of French Protestants in France was the memory of the Wars of Religion and the Revocation. As David Bell has noted, the Wars of Religion remained the “most basic political reference point” of the Old Regime.4 Enlightenment historian, Paul Hazard, similarly noted the powerful impact of the Revocation on the eighteenth century. Louis XIV’s efforts to homogenize, at least in religious terms, France in 1685 and the years to follow created a “crisis of European consciousness.”5 Renewed persecution of French Protestants led to an exile community willing and able to criticize the monarchy and the continued presence of Calvinists in the country undermined the King’s attempts to create a homogenously Catholic kingdom. Calvinist efforts alongside the increasing legalistic community used the religion to challenge the monarchy, which in part, whittled away the King’s authority and made the French Revolution thinkable. Andrew Jainchill’s chapter in the edited collection entitled, The French Revolution in Global Perspective, draws an abstract, causal connection between the Revocation and the French Revolution’s origins. For him, the presence of French Calvinists in the country and

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the antagonistic writings of those in exile, challenged and aided in the general “desacralization” of the monarchy in the last century of the Old Regime, but in this chapter, Jainchill says very little about the French Revolutionaries and their understandings of 1685 and the Huguenot diaspora.6 In order to place the French Revolution and its religious policies in a global perspective, the Revocation and the larger Protestant international need a prominent position in the narrative of the eighteenth century.7 One of the central arguments of this chapter is that the memory of the Revocation influenced revolutionary politics and as such the revolutionaries retroactively connected their religious policies with Louis XIV’s attacks on French Calvinists.8 The memory of the Revocation stood as a political point of reference, as an unjustified example of royal and Catholic “tyranny,” which in turn caused the revolutionaries to promote a secular vision of citizenship capable of reabsorbing the Huguenot community abroad. Jainchill’s argument signals a return to a nineteenthcentury narrative often posited by republican, Whig historians like Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet.9 For these historians, the Revocation occupied a key narratological or intellectual position in the national histories they wrote. For Edgar Quinet, the Reformation introduced France to religious liberty and freedom of conscience. The failure of the French Crown to embrace Luther and Calvin’s doctrines meant that the French revolutionaries had not been sufficiently weaned off of the authority of the king by 1789. The Gallican Articles and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes signaled the monarchy’s official renunciation of the Reformation for Quinet. Calvinists embraced the Revolution a century later in part because they saw their theological code embedded in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Catholics, however, remained bound to spiritual and secular authority and could not embrace the liberty of the Revolution entirely. Quinet, a devout republican, witnessed the fall of the French Second Republic, and then, faced years of exile while Napoleon III reigned over France. His contemporary moment reminded him of the First Republic and its demise at the hands of Napoleon I. Quinet’s historical narrative of the French Revolution was meant to be political and drew from the self-conscious fashioning of the French Revolution itself. Rather than detail the long-term connections between the Revocation and the Revolution, this chapter explores the series of arguments concerning the status of French Calvinist community in France and the

6  B.A. Banks

Huguenot community abroad in the years following the Edict of Toleration (1787) through the 1790s. Calvinists gained the ability to register their births, marriages, and deaths before civil authorities as well as practice certain professions in 1787 with the king’s edict, but they were still refused the rights to assembly and public worship. While the Edict of Toleration may have ended the period of legal persecution initiated by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and known to historians as the Désert period, it did grant full toleration or rights to French Calvinists.10 The transition to full citizenship would develop piecemeal over the coming years and into the tumult of the Revolution itself. Therefore, an examination of the discourse surrounding French Calvinists and Huguenots reveals the secular-religious side of the process of “revolutionary self-definition,” as Suzanne Desan has discussed.11 Debates over the status of Calvinism during the 1780s and 1790s hinged upon issues of toleration, religious difference, the place of religion in public spaces, and the characteristics of the ideal subject or citizen. The increasing call for religious toleration and concomitant religious freedom in the 1780s raised questions of secular citizenship and religious privilege. While the Revolution stripped most privileges away from the Catholic Church early on in the Revolution, many of its leaders, like Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Boniface-Louis-Andre de Castellane, le comte de Marsanne, and Bertrand Barère, questioned the needs to balance the scales in the other direction. For the French Huguenot community, this meant making fiscal amends or at least overtures of such efforts. As such, the memory of the Revocation actively shaped the French Revolution’s religious policy and secular self-definition.

The Semantics of Religious Identity and Toleration Historians tend to bookend the eighteenth-century narrative of religious toleration in 1787.12 In this view, the Edict of Toleration caps the period of legal persecution, offering to Calvinists what could no longer be refused. Rather than see 1787 as the triumphant conclusion of the Enlightenment, the language used in the actual Edict reads as an acknowledgement of failure. Specifically, the Edict reflects on the practice of forced conversions and their inability to produce so-called true believers. The argument against forced conversion was well trodden by the 1780s. The Swiss encyclopedist and theologian Jean-Edme Romilly

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noted the disconnect between opinion and torture in his article on “Tolerance” in the Encyclopedie. “Iron and fire” could not change opinions, for Romilly, only “evidence and reasoning” could produce such a conversion.13 The presence of Calvinists in southern France and their popularized cause in recent years provided further evidence that their conversion efforts were lackluster at best. In the preamble to the Edict, the lackluster admission of religious toleration became apparent: But, while waiting for divine Providence to bless our efforts and effect this happy revolution [the conversion of all non-Catholics], justice and the interest of our kingdom do not permit us to exclude any longer from the rights of civil status those of our subjects or resident foreigners in our empire who do not profess the Catholic religion. A rather long experience has shown that harsh ordeals are insufficient to convert them: we should therefore no longer suffer that our laws punish them unnecessarily for the misfortune of their birth by depriving them of the rights that nature constantly claims for them.14

This statement strikes modern readers as passively tolerant and as such, as a small conceptual step towards greater inclusion for Protestants in France. It speaks of “no longer suffering” Calvinists for the “misfortunes” of their births. As such, the Edict of Toleration imposed a kind of negative religious toleration or a toleration, which reified Catholic spiritual authority. Behind the Edict of Toleration was the French preoccupation with foreign-born Huguenots and other Protestants and their wealth. Peter Sahlins has shown how foreign-born Protestants often acquired special privileges during the Ancien Regime and challenged the “fiction of a Catholic France” in the process.15 As Sahlins notes, the actual legal status of Protestant refugees before and after 1685 often fluctuated according to the “crown’s episodic attempts to attract both foreign Protestants (and their commercial wealth) back to the kingdom, and to resolve the status of the sons and daughters of the Huguenot diaspora.”16 Moreover, the popular myth of the wealthy and skilled Protestant emerged in the wake of the Revocation as a type of Protestant apologetic cast in secular terms. Louis XIV’s own military advisor, the Marquis de Vauban prepared a memorandum entitled Mémoire pour le rappel des Huguenots in 1689 only to revise it again in 1691 and 1693. Implicit in his argument was that the Huguenot population was somehow more adept at economic production than their Catholic neighbors

8  B.A. Banks

and that economic benefit should outweigh religious homogeneity. He lamented the loss of 80,000 to 100,000 people of all professions, but most of all the hundreds of army officers and thousands of trained sailors and soldiers—the cost of which threatened the military supremacy of Louisquatorzian France. In addition, the lost capital, commerce, and manufacturing skills, largely unknown outside of France, he added, would inevitably “cause the ruin of the most considerable part of [French] commerce.”17 Such a myth stood to explain the perceived economic decline of the early eighteenth century and as a critique of the king’s religious policies. Such a connection, however loosely constructed, between French Calvinists and economic prosperity, remained popular well into the Revolution a century later.18 Despite these positive characterizations of Protestantism, Calvinists and Huguenots remained skeptical of the Edict of Toleration. In 1789, when unbridled religious freedom, at least, seemed like a possibility, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, a Calvinist pastor and strident defender of French Calvinism in France, derided Louis XVI’s Edict of Toleration (1787) and the religious policy it detailed for the alienated Calvinist population as insufficient, if not bordering on insufferable. Saint-Étienne identified the problem at the heart of the Edict as the concept of “tolerance” itself, which implied a “proper” patriarchal religious body (Catholicism) linked to a secular power (the Bourbon throne) benignly policing a too often benighted religious minority or minorities.19 Saint-Étienne was not the only Calvinist who read the Edit of Toleration in such a negative way. Even after the Edict of Toleration in 1787, Lyonnaise Protestants of the lower class remained skeptical, interpreting the edict through their historical lenses. Accustomed to continuous persecution by the government and the Catholic Church, these Protestants refused to publicly proclaim their faith out of fear of reprisal. In 1787, only sixty-five certificates of birth, marriage, and death were presented to the city, where over 1000 known Protestants lived.20 Their common heritage and experiences forced this portion of the Protestant population to guard their faith, rather than immediately accepting King Louis XVI’s promise of religious tolerance. Despite the reluctance to trust the State, many Protestants openly celebrated the decision. The remaining Protestant nobles and bourgeoisie welcomed the formal recognition of their civil status. In the department of Hérault, a surviving hymn praised Louis XVI for raising the entire

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population to a level of prosperity and equality. Drawn from Psalm 24, the hymn reads: Louis returned our rights he is the most just of kings like the most cherished of fathers after the storm, he is gentle The dawn of a more prosperous day.21

The congregation of Hérault exalted Louis XVI for his just and gentle nature in the wake of the turbulent eighteenth century. From the perspective of the pastor and the author of this hymn, State-sponsored toleration of the Protestant faith meant economic and moral prosperity for the Protestant people. A pastor from Sainte-Foy remarked that “in the future, one can be French without being Catholic; the conscience is independent from the magistrate in all matters that do not consider public order.”22 The inclusion of Huguenots as citizens in France required a semantic shift, a vocabulary capable of indicating the religious minority without casting them in sectarian terms. Such a goal proved paradoxical and the task itself nearly impossible. The language of intolerance in pre-revolutionary France had seeped its way into the very religious taxonomy of the period. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French court referred to the Calvinists primarily as “la religion prétendue réformée,” often abbreviated as “R.P.R.” This designation—“the so-called reformed religion”—was used only for Calvinists and underscored their “heretical” and purported reformed beliefs. Other sources used such terms as “Calvinists,” “religionnaires,” or simply “réformées.” If one used the term “Protestant” in eighteenth-century France, most likely they had Calvinists in mind, unless otherwise qualified. The term by which the Anglophone world denotes the French Calvinist, “Huguenot,” was rarely used in the eighteenth century to refer to Calvinists still in France. Initially, French Protestants wanted to safeguard their faith following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They needed to separate themselves from such profanations. In response, the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French Calvinists began to reserve the term “Huguenot” for their historical forebearers—those who had scattered across seas and over mountains in the face of royal, absolutist persecution and the destructive appetite of the dragonnades.

10  B.A. Banks

In the global perspective, “Huguenot” became a term associated with those who had left France. The most obvious proof of this transition can be found from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, when ethnonationalist identities led to the formation of national societies intended to commemorate the Huguenot religious heritage. The Huguenot Society of America was founded in New York in 1883. The Huguenot Society of London (later renamed the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland) and the Huguenot Society in South Carolina began work two years later in 1885. German Huguenots founded the Deutsche Hugenotten-Gesellschaft in 1890. Since then, the Huguenot Society of Virginia (1922), the Huguenot Foundation of South Africa (1953), and the Dutch Nederlandse Hugenoten Stichting (1975) were created to further foster the Huguenot identity. While all of these institutions employ the term Huguenot, the French Protestant society in France goes by a different name—La  Société  de l’histoire du protestantisme français— founded in 1852. Huguenot communities emphasized their common persecuted past in order to define their “imagined community” more than a century after the Revocation. In France, where persecution from Catholics remained a constant threat in the eighteenth and to an extent into the nineteenth century, Calvinists deemphasized their troubled past by choosing not to use the term “Huguenot.”23 To avoid anachronism then, I have chosen to follow their suit, referring to French Calvinists in France as such or simply as Protestants. For those in the refuge, I use the word Huguenot. The curious fact of the Edict of Toleration is that Louis XVI chose to use a relatively open-ended designation for French Calvinists. The word “Protestant” appears once in the preamble in order to limit toleration to the Calvinist community. Elsewhere in the edict, non catholique is used. Catholiques maintained a predominant position in society; Protestants were to be tolerated, once again noting the hierarchical religious spectrum in France. In order to institute tolerance then, the semantics of religion and civil society needed to change. The enlightened idea of civil tolerance proved more inclusive of religious minorities, but did not cease to recognize them as such. Tolerance further engrained a religious hierarchy at a time when many wanted to abolish it, in favor of a secular definition of citizenship—a feat pursued during the Revolution.

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The Problem of the Public Unbridled freedom of religion accompanied the “end of the Old Regime” during the night of August 4, as Michael Fitzsimmons notes, but further discussion on the exact parameters of religious freedom re-emerged a couple weeks later, when François de Bonal, bishop of Clermont, asserted that the French constitution should rest on religious—specifically Catholic—foundations.24 It was clear that a State religion would necessarily limit the rights of religious minorities. In response, Boniface-Louis-Andre, comte de Castellane, put forward a motion for complete religious freedom in both private belief and public worship. Immediately, questions of public order, sectarian conflict, and instability riled up the deputies. The Wars of Religion cast a long shadow on French memory in the eighteenth century, but so too had the Revocation evidenced the ills of an intricately bound church and state.25 With this in mind, the revolutionaries recognized that the idea of religious freedom would be found balanced between individual freedoms and collective security, between complete and uninhibited pluralism and the declaration of Catholicism as the state religion. Clearly, the Edict of Toleration still hung heavy in the air in 1789. With it, came the primary concern of many present in the National Assembly over the place of religion in public spaces. The first article of the Edict of Toleration reflected a fundamental tension in France over the place of religion in the public sphere: Article 1. The Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion will continue to enjoy alone, in our kingdom, the right to public worship, and the birth, marriage, and death of those of our subjects who profess it will only be registered, in all cases, according to the rites and practices of the said religion as authorized by our regulations.26

The Edict further banned “non-Catholic” religious leaders, ministers, or pastors from representing either the state or their community before the state. Bonal and Castellane held polar opposite positions—state recognition of Catholicism or complete religious freedom. Soon questions of public security were raised; specifically, what entity would guarantee the religious rights of Frenchmen and women. Would it be the Catholic Church and State? Or would the State sans Église secure public order?

12  B.A. Banks

Rabaut Saint-Étienne, French Calvinist and future president of the National Assembly, abhorred the Edict of Toleration. On August 23, 1789, Saint-Étienne was one of the last deputies to the National Assembly to speak at the rostrum on the subject of religious toleration or liberty. Known to the others in attendance for his defense of the Calvinists in southern France, Saint-Étienne espoused a religious policy that placed freedom of conscience ahead of public security. He stated: “Every man is free in his opinions; every citizen has the right to profess freely his cult and no one can be harassed because of his religion.”27 Saint-Étienne spoke of religious freedom—the right to “profess freely his cult”—not of toleration. This naturally extended to other “Others” like the Jewish population in France, not to mention actors and executioners, who were often excluded on Catholic grounds—literally and discursively.28 As you might expect, and as Lynn Hunt argues well in her Inventing Human Rights, the rejection of toleration for a discourse of universal liberty led to a “cascade” of rights, opening up the possibility of citizenship to other groups that many of the deputies simply were not prepared to embrace. Saint-Étienne attempted to claim public space in the name of religious freedom—the “public” as Charles Walton and others have recognized was equally up for debate as was religious freedom in his speech.29 Saint-Étienne did not include public order in an explicit sense like the statement that made it into the tenth article, as doing so would have amounted to protecting the rights of the majority over the minority; rather, he emphasized man’s right not to be accosted for his religious beliefs in public spaces. In short, the scales balancing religious liberty with public security needed to lean in favor of the former in order to protect the Calvinist religious minority. Saint-Étienne concluded his speech in August 1789 by insisting on the need for public worship and the rights of religious communities: I have an important point to add: it is that a free cult for which I am asking you is a common cult. All cults are necessarily cults of many. A cult [composing] of one [person] is adoration; it is prayer. But none of you can ignore that no religion has ever existed without common worship … Christians cannot deny Christians of [communal] worship, without violating their own principles, since all believe in the necessity of public worship… [Th]e idea of public, common worship is a dogma, an article of faith. It is therefore a religious opinion, in all the justice of the expression.30

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It is possible that Saint-Étienne felt himself losing the deputies towards the end of his speech, so he pulled as many threads together as he could muster to benefit his Calvinist constituency, whose primary concern was with obtaining protection for their right to worship. The obvious question to arise out of this is one of conceptual limitations: How far did religious freedom and public worship extend for Saint-Étienne? What constituted these acts of public communion? Had not public worship led to sectarian conflict? The specters of the Gallican State, the Revocation, and the lingering memory of the Wars of Religion made “universal public freedom of religion” implausible, if not impossible. Without recognizing supernatural miracles, prophetic visions, or eschatological belief as fact or religious violence as necessary for universal conversion, the revolutionaries chose to delimit religion to “opinion.” The tenth article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen states: “No one should be disturbed for his opinions, even in religion, provided that their manifestation does not trouble public order as established by law.” Neither “religious toleration” nor “religious liberty” appeared in the official article. Arguably, their absence reflected the concern with the state’s relationship with religion, more so than with the concern for universal liberties. Religious tolerance guaranteed a hierarchical system of religious beliefs and religious communities, making religious liberty impossible and religious liberty could possibly lead to sectarian conflict, making tolerance hard to police effectively.

Liberty and Land The Declaration of the Rights and Man and Citizen set a precedent for the next several years. Equality in religious opinions meant striping religious privilege from the Catholic Church and opening up areas of society and politics to religious minorities in France. Debates over Protestant access to public municipal positions were raised in December 1789. Jews were included in this round of debate, but as Ronald Schechter notes, Jews were believed by many to be incapable of assimilation. On the other hand, some like Abbé Maury insisted on drawing the line between Christians and non-Christians, rather than Catholics and non-Catholics. In the debate over the status of Jews, Abbé Maury declared that “Protestants have the same religion and the same laws as us [Catholics], but they are a different cult; however, since they already enjoy the same rights, I think that their group does not warrant discussion in this proposition.”31

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The decision to return property to French Calvinists first emerged in the cahiers and quickly became a national issue. The desire to return property to French Huguenots abroad was expressed in the cahiers from Sénéchaussée d’Aix. For its authors, such an action was a moral imperative. In the event that no one should claim such property, the cahier insisted that they be sold off and the “profit employed for public use.”32 Then on February 11, 1790, the comte de Marsanne proposed that the National Assembly “decree that every Frenchmen, whose family had been stripped of their property by virtue of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes” receive their ancestral lands without delay. Undoubtedly influenced by his constituents from the Calvinist region in southeastern France, Marsanne’s original proposition only referred to the marginalized, and until recently, illegal Calvinist sect within France. Marsanne followed with a notable exception to this plan. He only requested the restitution of that property, which the king maintained up to that date. Such a request reflected the idea of popular sovereignty, the king’s duty to his people, and the judgment that the Revocation and the original seizure of Calvinist lands were unjust. In addition, the focus on the royal domains was meant to reduce feuds over land between Calvinists and other French citizens. Under Marsanne’s plan, upon ancestral proof, property would be redistributed to the previous Protestant owners, provided the individual took up residence on the property. The last thing that Marsanne and the Assembly wished to create was another absentee land-owning class like those of the Old Regime. François Bouche, from Aix, agreed with Marsanne and the motion proceeded to the comité des domaines.33 On December 9, 1790, Bertrand Barère made the question of Calvinist property an international one. He argued that the decree give the status of French citizenship to immigrant children even if the parents refused to accept such a status for themselves. Barère insisted, “I have come to pronounce their true name – French … No, they have never ceased to be and your committee proposes to you an article as equally virtuous as political, which will assure those descendants of religious fugitives, the right to the honor of being French citizens.”34 Received by resounding applause, this motion symbolized the revolutionary desire to break with the sectarian past and to speak to the international community. By virtue of their religious heritage and history, the children of immigrant Huguenots were granted citizenship and their lands, if still remaining in the king’s domains. Such measures were ratified by official decree later on December 22, 1790.

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I emphasize “heritage and history” here because the National Assembly did not perceive the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants, as an issue for citizenship—unlike with the Jewish population. In 1789, Abbé Maury noted, “Protestants have the same religion and the same laws as us [Catholics].”35 In a sense, after Louis XVI’s Edict of Toleration in 1787, French Calvinism had already come under the supervision of the law, and thus they enjoyed the same rights as Frenchmen under the monarchy. So under the Revolution, it made sense for the revolutionaries to think of Protestants, as recognized by law and recipients of the imprescriptible rights of man—“liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”36 To defend these rights equated to returning what had been alienated in the past—property. Yet, such an action seems, at face value, to be rather paradoxical when placed against other cases of those groups alienated from their property. Had not the Revolution just recently abolished feudalism and had peasants not forcibly attacked feudal lords, seizing their property in the process? Had not the revolutionaries also stripped the Catholic Church of their lands? To recall Huguenots by promising the return of alienated lands must have seemed awfully Janus-faced, but if understood in the light of eighteenth-century memory, religious stereotypes, and the international context of the French Revolution, the decision made sense. In the wake of the Revocation, the strongest argument in favor of the Huguenot population was their propensity for industry, banking, and wealth. From Vauban to Voltaire, this stereotype was readily apparent and propagated, even turned into its own “myth” as Myriam Yardeni has more recently noted.37 According to Vauban, the loss of the Huguenot population caused “the ruin of the most considerable part of [French] commerce.”38 Commercial economics were a zero-sum game in the French imagination. The deluge of Huguenots that flooded out of the French kingdom following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes settled in Britain, the German states, the Netherlands, and the American colonies. These countries benefited from Huguenot industrial and commercial knowledge as well as their labor. Prior to the Revolution, Malesherbes argued that France should have instituted legal rights for Protestants earlier in the century in order to attract those Huguenots fleeing the American Revolution. This watershed moment represented the last chance for France to entice those émigrés to return, which would have enhanced France’s commercial and manufacturing prowess. Since the monarchy failed to pass legislation years earlier, these Protestant

16  B.A. Banks

manufacturers emigrated to England and Germany, instead of France, their “natural refuge.”39 The Revocation, in this sense, was the first strike against the wealth of the nation, which never fully recovered.40 At a time when the state was gridlocked by debt, largely acquired through foreign war, the promise of a wealthy populace seemed too enticing.41 Returning Protestants were to receive lands under the decree concerning religionnaires fugitifs, but despite its successes at the national political level, the bureaucratic gears of the Revolution refused to turn.42 Numerous members of the newly created Legislative Assembly repeatedly demanded reports from the Minister of the Interior and the comité des domaines. By September 20, 1792, those who supported the religionnaires fugitifs pushed again for the return of Protestant lands. On his last day, Jean-Baptiste Lagrévol, elected deputy from Haute-Loire, expressed his discontent by condemning the Minister of the Interior for his apathetic response to this issue. He described the persecution of Protestants during the eighteenth century as a “political affront, with a religious disguise” and the lack of urgency on the Minister of Interior’s behalf reflected his “contempt” for the Protestant ex-patriot community and his desire to continue their “persecution.” He then proposed a decree of the utmost exigency that called for an immediate account of the land known to have belonged to the religionnaires fugitifs prior to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Then he prescribed a three-year period, beginning on September 20, 1792, for those who claimed such lands to return to France. The Assembly decreed Lagrévol’s bill and adopted it with “urgency.”43 Despite the persistent attention given to this issue, the success of such a bill remained clouded with uncertainty, especially during the height of the Terror. Most Protestants that emigrated back to France during the Revolution faced an insurmountable bureaucratic wall and failed to lay claim to their ancestral lands. In June 1792, the son of Louis Geneste of Lisburn wrote to his father in Ireland on the subject of their claims to French property. He complained, “All matters relative to the fugitive Protestant are enveloped in darkness and the clerks and persons attending at the different offices seem disinclined to draw aside the veil. It is their wish to suppress such information as would tend to throw light on the subject.”44 Those who successfully navigated the system used the issue to insist upon the patriotic status of Protestants. In 1796, Benjamin Constant chronicled his Protestant family’s plight and flight from France during the Wars of Religion in his pamphlet, titled

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Note sur les droits de cité appartenant à la famille Constant de Rebacque. Under the auspices of the law, enacted on December 22, 1790, his family returned to France, provided the necessary documentation, and was restored to their alienated land in the Franche-Comté. Constant received French citizenship, his family’s lost land, and soon after buried his father on their ancestral property. Having “reclaimed, obtained, inherited, and exercised the same rights” as his father, Benjamin Constant wrote, “I am therefore French, son of a Frenchmen, and a descendant of a Frenchmen.”45 At the time that he wrote this pamphlet, Constant recognized that most suffered the fate of Louis Geneste’s son. It is difficult to determine the numbers of actual Huguenots that returned to claim their ancestral land for a number of reasons. Most importantly was the burden of proof required of French Huguenots to reclaim their territory. Deeds, birth certificates, marriage licenses had either been unattainable at the time of their forced departure or they had been abandoned or destroyed during their relocation. Most failed to receive their ancestral lands in part because it was unclear exactly how long the revolutionaries should await the supposed torrent of returning Huguenots, the five-year window opened in 1790 had come and gone without much activity. On 15 messidor an IV, a circulaire concerning the sale of goods and lands belonging to religionnaires fugitifs was published, which encouraged local departmental officials to price and sell those goods “for the profit of the republic.”46 In the following year, the issue of back rents for ancestral lands added another layer of bureaucratic red tape, which made the return of lands that much more difficult.47 Late in 1797, the Minister of Finance called for detailed records concerning returned property in the provinces to be sent to Paris, yet the Paris Commune witnessed the destruction of many of these records.48 Despite the ineffectiveness of the French bureaucracy or the insurmountable burden of proof required for Huguenots to carry, the program to return lands to fugitive Protestants remained good politics. On 28 frimaire an V (December 11, 1796), Emmanuel Pastoret supported Constant’s petition for citizenship and restitution of lands on behalf of the international Huguenot community. The Directory reaffirmed the National Assembly’s efforts towards les religionnaires fugitifs on 4 nîvose an V (December 24, 1796).49 Despite all their talk, very few ever benefitted from the program and after 1797, all mention of the policy drops from the circulars concerning the national domains. After 1797 through Napoleon’s rise to power and his resulting Concordat, it was clear that

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the restitution of land to displaced Huguenots was a wasted program. Napoleon’s efforts to stop sectarian violence in France by reopening channels of communication with the Vatican easily outweighed marginal efforts to return lands to Huguenots.50 How many Huguenots actually returned to France because of this policy? No complete study of its effects exists, nor does this study pretend to be one. Anecdotal evidence hardly fills in for the absence of “hard numbers.”51 But we do know from personal accounts, that the policy attracted an important cadre of Huguenots including the politician and author Benjamin Constant, the sculptor James Pradier, the writer Paul-Jérémie Bitaubé, the diplomat Charles Guillaume Théremin, and many more into the nineteenth century. Estelle Aebersold has identified 226 people that took advantage of the 1790 declaration—most were individuals of some wealth, who returned at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in response to further measure of the state to call back Huguenots. Very few communities ever returned en masse—as the revolutionaries had hoped for.52 In the end, the greatest boon to the Huguenot population was the promise of citizenship and the state’s refusal to take part in sectarian conflict.

Conclusion What does this incident tell us about the politics of religion of the French Revolution? Revolutionary definitions of citizenship were crafted amidst an air of atonement—reparations were needed to absolve French sins committed under the Louisquatorzian monarchy. Politics, memory, and history blended in the process of defining revolutionary citizenship. While the revolutionaries opened up citizenship to Protestants, they recognized their history of religious persecution without forgetting the violence of the Wars of Religion and the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The balance needed to be struck then between individual rights and the protection of public society, between individual and corporate privileges. The case of the “rappel des religionnaires fugitifs” accentuates the complex issues dealt with by revolutionaries attempting to define citizenship (religious qualifications, whether property should stand as a requisite for citizenship). For Constant and others, citizenship was not a universalist category propped up on universal rights. To be a citizen was to own property. And to include Protestants as a part of the citizenry,

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one needed to make property available to them. So while the restitution of property can most immediately be interpreted as a response to past persecutions, as a symbolic action of social justice on behalf of a marginalized minority, it also indicated the rather narrow vision of citizenship held by many politicians at the time. To be a French citizen was to be a property owner, which meant being wealthy enough to own and maintain property. The restitution of lands to Huguenots abroad, at least on a rhetorical level, mirrored the seizure of Catholic lands in 1789. This balance was necessarily a part of the pursuit of equality for the revolutionaries, hence why the restitution issue appears repeatedly despite their inability to court back large swathes of the Huguenot community. This pro-Huguenot political preoccupation was not lost on French men and women during the Revolution. Many Catholics read any effort of reconciliation with the Reformed as a fundamental affront against the Catholic Church and the Bourbon legacy. Catholics like the polemicist Joseph de Maistre, François-Martin Thiébault, and Nicholas Sourdat imagined Reformed Protestants and revolutionaries conspiring in back rooms, furthering their common aim to tear down the Catholic Church and its corporate privilege in favor of the rights of the minorities guised in the name of universalism. For these Catholics, Huguenot refugees were rightfully expelled from the country by Louis XIV’s Revocation. In making this claim, they denigrated those arguments in favor of the revolution’s recall, continued to promote an Old Regime Catholic-state model, and stoked fears of a resurgent Wars of Religion. Lastly, this chapter reveals a previously missing angle of the politics of religion and the French Revolution’s relationship to the international world. The revolutionaries’ interest in the Huguenot community meant that they needed to promote a vision of French nationalism, which could include those not born on French soil. The construction of an imagined community ensued and Huguenots became decidedly “French” for some and for others, religious affiliation no longer shaped French identity. Citizenship defined membership in the French nation, but what that meant was entirely up for debate. Birth on French soil, assimilationist models, and memory were all categories used for inclusion. The promise of property further revealed the extent to which the revolutionaries wanted Huguenots to return, but such political calculus also shows the extent to which revolutionaries envisioned their revolution as a transnational phenomenon. Unfortunately for them, their ideological goal fell short in the face of an ineffective system.

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Notes







1. Robert Mandrou, Histoire des protestants en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1977). 2. Eckart Birnstiel and Chrystel Bernat, eds., La diaspora des Huguenots: Les réfugiés protestants de France et leur dispersion dans le monde (XVIeXVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Champion, 2001). 3. La constitution française, présentée au Roi par l’Assemblée nationale le 3 septembre 1791, 9. 4. David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 30. 5. Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne (1680–1715), 3 vols. (Paris: Boivin, 1935). 6.  Andrew Jainchill, “1685 and the French Revolution,” in The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 57–70. 7. See John Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 52 (1995): 77–102; Robin Gwynn, “The Huguenots in Britain, the ‘Protestant International’ and the defeat of Louis XIV,” in From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750, ed. Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), 412–24; David E. Lambert, The Protestant International and the Huguenot Migration to Virginia (New York: Peter Lang, 2010). 8. In this vein, I am drawing on Roger Chartier’s argument concerning the Enlightenment and the cultural origins of the French Revolution. In a similar sense too did the Revolution cast their movement against the backdrop of the Revocation, simultaneously reflecting on the socio-political situation it created as well as imbuing it with an added significance meant to elevate their own actions. See Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 87–89. 9. Edgar Quinet, La Révolution, trans. by Claude Lefort (Paris, 1987); Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, nouvelle édition revue et augmentée (Paris, Marpon, 1879). See also Bryan A. Banks, “The Protestant Origins of the French Revolution: Contextualizing Edgar Quinet in the Historiography of the Revolution, 1789–1865,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History (2014). 10. This title underscored the readily apparent allusion to the Jewish biblical exodus and recognized the geographical hardships that the population was willing to endure in order to profess their faith. Just as the Jews had embarked on a mass exodus into the desert, so had the Protestants

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entered into the Désert period of the eighteenth century. The Désert is often chronologically bound by the Revocation in 1685 and the Edict of Toleration in 1787, yet some historians prefer to further break this period into two distinct sections. The first period lasted until the 1760s, where the state actively supported the persecution of Calvinists. The second period spans from the 1760s to the Revolution, which witnessed the growth of a de facto pattern of benign toleration on the part of the State. See Yves Krumenacker, “Une perception protestante de l’espace au XVIIIe siècle?” in Évolution et représentation du paysage de 1750 à nos jours (Montbrison: Ville de Montbrison, 1997), 146–147; Robert Mandrou, Histoire des protestants en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1977); Geoffrey Adams, The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1991). 11.  Suzanne Desan, “Transatlantic Spaces of Revolution: The French Revolution, Sciotomanie, and American Lands,” in Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 472. 12. For example, see Geoffrey Adams, The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1991). 13.  Romilly, Jean-Edme. “Tolerance.” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Leslie Tuttle. (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2010). Web. [21 March 2016]. . Trans. of “Tolérance,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 16. Paris, 1765. 14. “Edit concernant ceux qui ne font pas profession de la religion catholique (Nov. 28, 1787),” in Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789, vol. 28 (Paris: Belin-le-Prieur, 1821), 474. 15.  Peter Sahlins, “Fictions of a Catholic France: The Naturalization of Foreigners, 1685–1787”. Representations 47 (1994): 85–110. 16. Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 173. 17.  Sébastien Le Pestre de Vauban, Mémoire pour le rappel des Huguenots (Carrières-sous-Poissy: La Cause, 1998), 14. 18. Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development, 1680–1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). For the most thorough critique of Scoville’s monograph, see R. Grassby’s review in Economic History Review XIV (1961–2): 360–2. See also Myriam Yardeni, “Naissance et essor d’un mythe: La révocation de l’Édit de Nantes et le déclin économique de la France,” in Repenser l’histoire: aspects de l’historiographie huguenote des guerres de religion à la Révolution française (Paris: Champion, 2000), 191–206. 19. Archives parlementaire, 8: 479 [hereafter cited as AP].

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20. Yves Krumenacker, “L’édit de Tolérance (1787) Lyon,” BSHPF, vol. 141, no. 1 (1995): 89–93. 21. Charles Delormeau, ed., “Un cantique pour célébrer l’édit de tolerance,” BSHPF, vol. 123, no. 3 (1977): 438. 22.  Louis Mazoyer, “L’application de l’Edit de 1787 dans le Midi de la France,” BSHPF, vol. 124 (1925): 151. This political praise should not be hastily interpreted; instead, it should be read against the social context of the post-Revocation period. 23. It should also be noted that the transition of the meaning of “Huguenot” in the French social imaginary did not happen solely at the behest of the Protestant population, but rather occurred simultaneously in Catholic, Protestant, and philosophical circles. The transition was not instantaneous, but resulted from a decisive intellectual shift away from the culture of the Wars of Religion during the Enlightenment. “Imagined community“ is Benedict Anderson’s phrase. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism  (New York: Verso, 2006). 24. Michael Fitzsimmons, The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789 and the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 61–64. The best narrative of the debate around religious freedom towards the end of August remains Raymond Birn, “Religious Toleration and Freedom of Express” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. by Dale Van Kley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 265–299. 25. David Bien, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 30. 26. “Edit concernant ceux qui ne font pas profession de la religion catholique (Nov. 28 1787),” in Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789, 474. 27. AP, 8: 480. 28. AP, 8: 479. 29. Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 30. AP, 8: 480. 31. Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); AP, 10: 756–757. 32. AP, 1: 697. 33. AP, vol. 10, 542. Also see, George Weis, “The Restitution of Huguenots’ Property at the French Revolution,” in The Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 17, no. 2 (1943): 110–121. Four months later, on July 10, Marsanne reminded the Assembly of his previous motion. See AP, 17: 35.

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34. Bertrand Barère, Le Moniteur universel (Paris, 1790), 1424–1425. This was printed on December 11, 1790. 35. AP, 756–757. 36.  “The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen,” in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Lynn Hunt (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996), 77–79. 37. Myriam Yardeni, “Naissance et essor d’un mythe: La révocation de l’Édit de Nantes et le déclin économique de la France,” in Repenser l’histoire: aspects de l’historiographie huguenote des guerres de religion à la Révolution française (Paris: H. Champion, 2000), 191–206. 38.  Sébastien Le Pestre de Vauban, Mémoire pour le rappel des Huguenots (Carrières-sous-Poissy: La Cause, 1998), 14. 39. Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Mémoire sur le mariage des protestans, en 1785 (n.p., 1785), 5–6, 13. 40. See the introduction to AP, 1: 21. 41.  For an examination of the economic losses associated with the Revocation, see Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development, 1680–1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 42.  See Weis, “Restitution of the Huguenots’ Property at the French Revolution,” 110–121; Eckart Birnstiel, “Le retour des Huguenots du Refuge en France de la Révocation à la Révolution” BSHPF, vol. 135 (1989): 782–790. 43.  AP, 50: 157–158. Louis-Joseph Charlier originally called for a report on May 11, 1792 (AP 43: 254). Eight days later, the Minister of the Interior, Roland, essentially avoided Charlier’s original proposal (AP 43: 573). Charlier returned this issue on June 23 (AP 45: 513) and July 7 (AP 46: 232). Another deputy brought the issue up on August 29 and the Assembly called for the comité des domaines to draft a quick report (AP 49: 104). 44.  Quoted in Grace Lawless Lee, The Huguenot Settlement in Ireland (Heritage Books, 2009), 26. 45. Benjamin Constant, Note sur les droits de cité appartenant à la famille Constant de Rebacque, n.d., 1–4. 46. “Vente ordonée des biens des religionnaires fugitifs dont le séquestre n’a pas été levé,” in Circulaires de la régie de l’enregistrement et du domaine national, vol. 3 (Paris, n.d.), 419–421. 47. “Régie des biens des religionnaires fugitifs: État de ceux restant à la disposition de la Nation et de ceux aliénés ou restitués,” in Circulaires de la régie de l’enrégistrement et du domaine national, vol. 4 (Paris, n.d.), 255–256.

24  B.A. Banks 48. “État des biens des religionnaires fugitifs,” in Circulaires de la régie de l’enrégistrement et du domaine national, vol. 4 (Paris, n.d.), 396. 49. Emmanuel Pastoret, Rapport fait par Emmanuel Pastoret: sur l’exercice du droit de cité pour les descendans des religionnaires fugitifs rentrant en France (Paris, 1797), 2–3; Étienne Mollevaut de la Meurthe, Opinion du citoyen Mollevault de la Meurthe sur la résolution relative aux religionnaires fugitifs: séance du 4 nivôse de l’an 5 (Paris, 1797), 2. 50. No mention of the restitution of lands appears in the correspondence between the Napoleonic and the Papal states, compiled in Alfred Boulay de la Meurthe, Documents sur la négociation du Concordat et sur les autres rapports de la France avec le Saint-Siège en 1800 et 1801, 5 vols. (Paris, 1892–1897). 51.  The methodology used in Philip Benedict’s work on the Huguenot population leading up to the Revocation is a good standard. See “The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 81, no. 5 (1991): 1–164. 52. See Estelle Aebersold, Les rémigrés du refuge huguenot. Le retour des ddescendants des religionnaires fugitifs en France depuis la loi du 9 décembre 1790 jusqu’au Code de la Nationalité du 19 octobre 1945 [mémoire de maîtrise ss. dir. Eckart Birnstiel] Toulouse, Université de Toulouse II—Le Mirail, 2005; Estelle Aebersold, “Résultats d’une enquête sur les rémigrés du Refuge huguenot,” in Diasporas. Histoire et Sociétés 8 (2006), 45–48.

Counter-Revolution and Cosmopolitan Spirituality: Anquetil Duperron’s Translation of the Upanishads Blake Smith

Long an obscure figure outside of French-language scholarship, the French Orientalist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron (1731–1805) has been rediscovered in recent years by Anglophone historians who see him as an exemplar of liberal, cosmopolitan, and anti-colonial trends in eighteenth-century thought.1 Jonathan Israel finds him to have been “the most learned of radically enlightened critics of the British Raj.”2 Siep Stuurman and Jennifer Pitts likewise present him as an opponent both of imperialism in South Asia and Eurocentrism more generally.3 Even Edward Said, while describing Anquetil’s projects for translating Zoroastrian and Hindu texts as bordering on “follies… crazy enthusiasms,” nevertheless exempted Anquetil from the critiques to which he subjected other major figures of the history of Orientalism.4 Anquetil is indeed a compelling figure, author of the first published translations of the Avesta (an ancient collection of Zoroastrian scriptures) and of the Upanishads (an ancient collection of Sanskrit philosophical and

B. Smith (*)  50 bis ave des piliers, 94210 La Varenne Saint Hilaire, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_2

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theological texts), as well as polemics against the notion of Oriental despotism outlined by Montesquieu (1689–1755). Anquetil was one of the few Europeans of his day to insist that states such as the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires were no less legitimate than Western European ones.5 Given such commitments, it would perhaps be unsurprising to see him in the last years of his life become, in Israel’s words, a “zealous supporter” of the French Revolution.6 Rather than supporting the Revolution, however, Anquetil opposed it with the peculiar weapons of his Orientalist arsenal. His path-breaking Latin translation of the Upanishads, published as Oupnek’hat (in two volumes 1801–1802) was offered to the public as a counter-revolutionary polemic, filled with notes, asides and appendices in which Anquetil allowed himself, at the slightest pretexts, to comment on political developments in France.7 Written over the course of at least a decade, the Oupnek’hat was crammed with many different sorts of remarks on the French Revolution, from analyses of the state of moral decay that supposedly had preceded it, to condemnations of the political implications of empiricist philosophy and advice for persecuted Catholics. Many of these passages were rather conventional pieces of counter-revolutionary rhetoric, and cited well-known works such as Augustin Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797). Anquetil’s career as a scholar of Asian religions with liberal, cosmopolitan sympathies, however, did inform his attitude toward the Revolution, giving it a unique cast. Scholars like Suzanne Desan, Timothy Tackett, and Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall show the diversity of religious responses to the Revolution, from the multi-faceted spirituality of lay people to the revolutionary Christianity of Abbé Henri Grégoire (1750–1831).8 Moreover, in an irony Anquetil would surely have resented, his efforts to wield a reimagined, syncretic vision of Catholic orthodoxy against the French Revolution were not so far removed from the spirit of religious experiment among many revolutionaries that inspired such innovations as the Cult of the Supreme Being. Inspired by a mystical interpretation of both the Upanishads and Christianity, Anquetil proposed that a synthesis between the two was Europe’s best hope for salvation from immorality, atheism, and political turmoil. In this sense, he sympathized with and went far beyond the ideas of better-known counter-revolutionary thinkers, like Joseph de Maistre (1754–1840), Louis de Bonald (1753–1821), or François-René

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de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), each of whom, in his own way, understood the Revolution as a consequence of French society’s deviation from Christianity and saw the return of legitimate political order as intrinsically linked to a revival of the Catholic Church. Anquetil agreed that good government depended on religion, yet, insisting that true Christians eschewed politics in any form, placed his hopes in an esoteric, cosmopolitan spirituality that had little to do with Catholic orthodoxy. In a pioneering article on counter-revolutionary thought in the immediate aftermath of 1789, Paul Beik suggests that the importance of thinkers like Maistre and Bonald lay not in their immediate political impact but in the fact that “unable to turn back the Revolution, opposed it as creatively as they could and in doing so explored possibilities which conservatives have used ever since.”9 If this is true, then, in spite of the silence with which contemporaries received Anquetil’s proposals for esoterism as the answer to Revolution, they must be seen as one of the most creative counter-revolutionary documents, foreshadowing trends in modern politics and spirituality. Unnoticed in its own time, the Oupnek’hat anticipated nineteenth and twentieth-century movements, such as Theosophy, “traditionalism,” and even post-Christian fascism. Before the Revolution, Anquetil did not seem to have had any particular hostility towards “enlightened” ideas, interest in esoterism, or opinions on domestic politics. He wrote nothing that might have signaled his affinity with “Counter-Enlightenment” “anti-philosophes” in France.10 From the beginning of his intellectual career, he seemed to have assumed that whatever he would discover about ancient religions would not contradict the truths of the Bible (he even took a copy of the Hebrew Old Testament with him on his voyage to India), but his approach, as Stéphane van Damme observes, was marked by a tension between belief and skepticism.11 He did not advance any claims about a universal esoteric wisdom in his pre-revolutionary publications.12 Focusing his attention on polemics against British imperialism in India, he likewise avoided involvement in debates over domestic French politics. Moderation and sympathy for the Revolution marked his foray into the latter in the early years of the Revolution. In early 1789, Anquetil published The Dignity of Commerce and of the Merchant’s Condition, a response to arguments over the Estates General then raging in the French public sphere, and a revival of mid-century debates over the “commercial nobility” (noblesse commerçante).13 Nobles were legally forbidden to carry out certain kinds of retail commerce,

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an interdiction which critics saw as prejudicial to the French economy and insulting to merchants, whose livelihood, the law implied, was in some way ignoble. As the title of his work suggests, Anquetil called for the abolition of this law, arguing for that commerce was in every way respectable. Nevertheless, he also insisted that the nobility as an order had a place in French society. Unlike radical writers like Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836), whose “What is the Third Estate?” appeared at the same time as Dignity of Commerce, Anquetil did not see the monarchy’s fiscal crisis as an opportunity to transform the social organization of the Old Regime, built around a tripartite division of Estates (clergy, nobility, and everyone else).14 He took the more moderate position that many members of the nobility had outmoded views concerning their own superiority; they needed to embrace commerce, and abandon their “feudal rights” and privileges.15 While he was not the most radical critic of the Old Regime, Anquetil was, as of 1789, clearly in the reform camp, and apparently, as the optimistic and moderate tone of Dignity of Commerce suggests, hopeful that reforms could be undertaken in a spirit of peace and consensus. It is unclear when his hopes soured. He did not publish another work until the 1798 India in Relationship to Europe, which contained fleeting, negative remarks about the Revolution. The earliest dated portions of the Oupnek’hat come came from 1794, by which time the optimism of 1789 had faded for many thinkers besides Anquetil. In the absence of journals and letters from this period, it seems impossible to reconstruct his shift in opinion with any precision. In the retrospective analyses made in the Oupnek’hat, however, Anquetil stressed his horror over the persecution of the Catholic Church, the appropriation of private property, the violence of civil war, the injustice of courts, and the installation of a republic. By this time, his language and tone resembled that of many other counter-revolutionary thinkers, with little trace of his earlier reformism. Indeed, there were few vestiges of his earlier identity as a member of the Republic of Letters who rubbed shoulders with leading philosophes. His 1771 translation of Zoroastrian scripture (until then known in Europe only by hearsay), the Zend-Avesta, earned him a public attention and generated considerable controversy, as scholars such as William Jones (1746–1794) questioned both the authenticity of Anquetil’s translation and the spiritual worth of the Zoroastrian religion.16 Anquetil’s subsequent work garnered less public attention, but throughout the following two decades he maintained correspondences with Orientalists

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and intellectuals across Europe, participating in debates over the nature of land tenure in Bengal (an important subject for the British colonial administration) and the relationship between Sanskrit and classical Latin and Greek. Although even in this period Anquetil often presented himself as a misunderstood hermit and ascetic, an Orientalist version of Rousseau, he was in the pre-revolutionary era, as Lucette Valensi observes, very much an insider, angling, at times successfully, for state sponsorship, and abreast of the latest intellectual controversies.17 Throughout this period, Anquetil rarely mentioned either his Catholic belief in published works or made any criticism of the dominant trends in Enlightenment thought. At some point in the early 1790s, Anquetil’s stance changed decisively. In the face of the Revolution’s displacement of the Catholic Church from its central political and social role in the Old Regime, he began to insist that belief in God and an organized church were critical to the maintenance of order, and that without them anarchy prevailed. Moreover, he now identified the main currents of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, from political theory to epistemology, as Trojan horses of atheism. Either unintentionally, by opening up intellectual space in which disbelief in God could be considered a respectable position, or deliberately, by organizing themselves into a diabolical network of anti-social conspirators, philosophers had caused the French Revolution. Besides condemning philosophy as a vehicle for atheism, Anquetil also railed against a range of social practices, from theater-going to gambling, that seemed to him to have distracted the French from spirituality. Yet, although he condemned atheism, empiricism, materialism, and what he saw as the decay of European morality, it would be difficult to label Anquetil a conservative thinker. The religion that Anquetil believed could save France from philosophy and Revolution was not quite Catholic orthodoxy. As he argued in many sections of the Oupnek’hat, the true meaning of Christianity, long obscured from most Christians, was that the material world and the immaterial human soul alike are emanations of the divine essence, a pure, uncreated being with whom one is reunited after death and whom one can know (to a limited extent) in this lifetime through ascetic practices and meditation. This hidden teaching, he claimed, was also the esoteric doctrine of Judaism, Platonism, and Hinduism.18 Hindus, therefore, could be “saved” just as much as pious Christians, although salvation here meant the acquisition of mystical knowledge: “the wise Indian who

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looks only to God will surely come to know Him: therefore, if God permits, he will never choose or consent to be separated in the depths of Hell from the original, self-created light, and will obey the will of the Creator.”19 Before analyzing the content of Anquetil’s interpretation of Christianity and Hinduism as expressions a common mystical teaching, and of his attempt to deploy that teaching as a political weapon, however, it will be necessary to survey the analyses of the Revolution that he developed throughout the Oupnek’hat, and particularly his identification of the Revolution with atheism.

Responses to the Revolution The writing of Anquetil’s text, nearly 2000 pages long, spanned at least a decade. The first volume was published in 1801, the second in 1802, and within each volume, various sections seem to date from as early as the mid-1790s, with each period apparently furnishing its own particular variety of recriminations against the Revolution and the French. A preface directed “To the Reader” at the beginning of the first volume is dated to September 1794, and the note of dread on which it concludes suggests that Anquetil was not sure the fall of Robespierre in July of that year had done anything to liberate France from “the mason’s trowel”, i.e., from the sinister influence of Freemasons.20 Many other passages condemn the persecution of the Church, the appropriation of ecclesiastical and private property, the perfunctory trials against supposed enemies of the Revolution, and the civil wars that characterized the Terror (1793–1794). As terrible, perhaps, as the injustice perpetrated in this period was the chaos that seemed to characterize the first five years of the Revolution, as one political group after another briefly exercised power only to be violently displaced by its enemies. The French people, “oppressed by a long and hard anarchy, were gripped with a fatal lethargy, and even whatever leader or tyrant was heated by audacity and madness soon dropped the reins [of government].”21 In this phase, Anquetil suggested, the Revolution was at once despotic and anarchic, reconciling contradictory elements to make the worst of all possible governments. If Anquetil abhorred the Terror, he nevertheless had no kind words for what followed, even as the Directory (1795–1799) achieved a precarious order, built upon by the Consulate (1799–1804) after it.

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The Concordat of 1801, by which the French State recognized Catholicism as the faith of the majority of its citizens and restored certain of the Church’s rights and freedoms, signaled the definitive end of dechristianization policies. But Anquetil characterized the rule of the Directory as a time of continued persecution against the Church, and particularly condemned the Napoleonic regime. He saw the latter as a break with the revolutionary order, but not an improvement on it. For him, this period was a time of “a soldier’s rough leadership, ruling with a rod over a mild people scarcely torn from the mason’s trowel” (a recurring metaphor).22 Napoleon Bonaparte’s military victories and turn toward the Vatican were mere side-shows “like monkeys dancing to drums, distractions that keep the eyes busy.” In fact the state was mismanaged and the “treasury was exhausted by poorly-conceived military expeditions,” especially the failed invasion of Egypt, which Anquetil saw as a missed opportunity to push on to South Asia and liberate the region from the British East India Company.23 The fact that the Consulate had brought a certain order to France only worsened one of the fundamental problems that had brought about the Revolution: the moral decay of the French people. By the early nineteenth century, the latter “had turned from religion, accustomed to a military life, scarcely aware of the crimes that they commit, as if they were intoxicated.” They no longer had the slightest notions of virtue, and prized their freedom to sin more than political liberty.24 Given that the French people enjoyed their new freedom to indulge in vice, and were duped by Napoleon Bonaparte’s displays of military force, there seemed little reason to think that earthly causes might bring about a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The most that could be expected from this quarter, Anquetil reasoned, was that in their very wickedness and capriciousness the French might grow tired of Napoleon as they had grown tired of the monarchy, and wish for a restoration as a kind of throwback to yesterday’s style. Nor was there anything to hope from the new regime’s foreign enemies. The coalition of Austrians, Prussians, and others arrayed against France was motivated by jealousy and avarice, and at the time of Anquetil’s writing seemed increasingly unlikely to succeed. It would take divine intervention to save France, although it was by no means certain that such intervention would come. Not quite giving up, Anquetil wrote “at least it is permissible to indulge the hope that legitimate order will be brought back to life” by supernatural means.25

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Causes of the Revolution Anquetil’s opposition to the Revolution was comprehensive enough to include critiques of despotism and anarchy, of dechristianization and the Concordat. His explanations for the origins of the Revolution were likewise multiple. He identified vectors of revolution as diverse as Masonic conspiracies, empiricist theories of cognition, and fireworks. Whether the various passages in which these explanations were developed were meant to provide a coherent, multi-faceted account of the intellectual and cultural roots of the Revolution is unclear. Taken individually, however, they reveal Anquetil’s sense that the Revolution had little to do with the problems he had taken up in Dignity of Commerce such as the position of the Third Estate. By 1794, at least, he was no longer interested in the economic and political conjunctures that had lead to the crisis of 1788–1789. Rather, he saw only the collapse of French society, attacked from within by decadence, impiety and the machinations of a network of radical philosophes. In at least some of his comments on the Revolution, Anquetil seems to have considered its emergence as a problem to be solved through the methods of scholarship, by amassing and sifting through sources. While he did not undertake original research himself, he hailed Augustin Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, of which the first volume was published in 1797, as a fine piece of history, thoroughly grounded in the relevant sources. Barruel (1741–1820), a priest who had fled to Britain, argued that the Revolution had been organized by an enormous secret organization, which included the Freemasons (whom Anquetil particularly blamed), Bavarian Illuminati, the Rosecrucians, as well as French thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau. Not all members of the organization were aware of its full scope or of its ultimate mission: destroying monarchy and Christianity.26 Anquetil found Barruel’s account entirely convincing, endorsing even the thesis that the history of this cabal reached back to the medieval Templars. For Anquetil, the question of the Revolution’s origins was now settled: “Barruel is greatly worthy of being praised by his country, by Europe, by the human race, for these timely and thoughtfully-developed commentaries on the origin of Jacobinism. This excellent work of vast erudition replaces ­discussion.”27 Alongside this endorsement of Barruel, however, Anquetil also developed his own account of the Revolution’s intellectual and cultural

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genesis, identifying specific philosophies that had corrupted French thought and vices that had perverted French society. It is uncertain at what point Anquetil read Barruel’s work, and likewise uncertain at what point he wrote the other passages in which he analyzed the Revolution in terms other than those of a conspiracy. Passages of the Oupnek’hat that treat the Revolution as the consequence of a generalized decay throughout French society and thought rather than as the work of a conspiracy might have been written first, representing a period in which Anquetil did not yet believe that the deliberate work of identifiable agents had brought about the fall of the Bourbon monarchy. Yet, the two theories were not necessarily mutually exclusive; a philosophical cabal might have been the ax that felled a tree already rotten from within. At any rate, whether or not they came before his discovery of Barruel, and whether or not the latter superseded them, they share with his endorsement of Barruel’s theory a vision of the Revolution as rooted in the decline of religion. For Anquetil, atheism was so sinister that even entertaining the subject in hypothetical terms presented a grave danger. It was thus that he blamed seventeenth-century thinkers, like Hugo Grotius (1584–1645) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), for attempting to understand the foundations of society without taking God into account as the cause and purpose of all that exists. Grotius and Bayle, he held, were the first to posit the “fantastical” possibility of a “society of atheists,” imagining a community of people whose ethical and political norms were founded only on the basis of reason and experience, rather than of divine revelation.28 By positing such an absurd possibility, Anquetil argued, they had done the Devil’s work, making atheism seem like a plausible, even attractive basis for social organization. Their eighteenth-century readers had taken this thought experiment all too seriously, using it as a blueprint for their attempts to transform France into such an atheistic society. Philosophical speculation had turned within a few generations into a program for ­revolution. A less obvious but no less blameworthy admission of atheism into Western thought was the empiricist philosophy of knowledge pioneered by John Locke and elaborated by his eighteenth-century French successors, such as Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) and the Marquis de Condorcet (Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, 1743–1794). By locating the cause of cognition, perception, and other mental phenomena in stimuli received from matter, these thinkers had undermined

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religion, Anquetil claimed. After all, if the operations of the mind could be understood as the product of interactions between the external, material world on the one hand, and the physical structures of our sensory organs and brain on the other, then what was the role of the immaterial soul? If the latter did not play a definite part in mental phenomena, it could just as well be said to not exist at all. For Anquetil thought was a spiritual faculty exercised by souls, which emerged from God and would return to Him. By explaining human psychology in terms that did not require belief in such a soul, he argued, empiricist philosophers had paved the way for atheism and Jacobinism. The work of a now rather obscure philosopher, Jean-Claude Delamétherie (1743–1817), at the time a rival of Condorcet, was singled out for particular condemnation. In his Principes de la philosophie naturelle (1787), published just before the Revolution, Delaméthrie had pushed “foundations and principles into a common ruin in order to destroy them… the ominous French Revolution arose from nothing other than the assertions of this author concerning the origin of cognition.”29 The stakes attached to philosophy were high indeed! Just as important as the influence of philosophy or the plots of Freemasons in Anquetil’s account of the origins of the French Revolution was the moral decay caused by or expressed in the extravagant living of eighteenth-century Europeans. Surrounded by material comforts and sensuous pleasures, Europeans were unable to comprehend, let alone practice, the acts of “meditation, study and penitence” that would allow them to set their minds on God. Anquetil offered a catalogue of vices by which Europeans distracted themselves from spirituality: “mixed company, banquets, dice, concerts, comedies, dances, fireworks, light-shows, these, repeated ad nauseam, these are the happiness of Western man… What an unhappy man!”30 In his earlier writings, Anquetil had vigorously promoted French trade with South Asia, and had celebrated the entrepreneurial qualities of the Third Estate. Commerce had seemed to him to be a positive force both domestically and internationally. In the aftermath of the Terror, however, eighteenthcentury society seemed far too materially comfortable, offering a wide range of distractions from spiritual life. Members of a poorer society might have more opportunities to focus on the things that were truly essential.

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Fighting the Revolution In his analysis of the Revolution’s causes and consequences, Anquetil painted a dark portrait of a society that had been corrupted culturally and intellectually even before 1789, and had become totally perverse after. With such a pessimistic reading of the situation, Anquetil called for opposition to the Revolution that would focus on the spiritual realm, either through retreat from the world or through the dissemination of new religious ideas. The former option was the theme of his address “To the Reader,” in which Anquetil portrayed this imagined subject as “an unfortunate one… learned in philosophy, mindful of your dignity,” a faithful Christian fearing persecution. Anquetil urged his readers to remember that death was of little importance in comparison to the glory of the pure immaterial soul: “hold fast to these two things, deeply driven into your spirit: first, that men are scarcely worth the trouble of being executed by their rulers; and that sustenance is hardly necessary because when the body has been subdued and the senses conquered, the mind, conscious of its own majesty, dares to take up its own governance.”31 Here a withdrawal into mysticism and a resignation unto death appear as the most appropriate responses to political turmoil. Indeed they are presented in terms of political metaphor. The wise person, who abandons the material world, including the body, becomes a kind of king, independent of the material world. This advice is in accord with Anquetil’s retrospective criticism of the political role of the Church during the Old Regime. While comments throughout the Oupnek’hat insist on the importance of religion to the maintenance of social and political order, Anquetil was equally clear that the role of Christians, and particularly of the clergy, was not a political one. He condemned the Jesuit order (abolished in France in 1763) for its involvement in worldly affairs. They were “a too-human family” akin to the Pharisees of ancient Israel, whose supposedly legalistic piety had been criticized by Jesus in the Gospels. Both groups had fought “against idolatry, sustaining outward things, even as inward things were already abolished.” The end of their order was in fact a good thing for Christianity in France, because it reminded believers that “the true, inward Christians, serving God in spirit and in silence, are small in number, hidden, with few great gestures, and with no knowledge about worldly things; they know absolutely nothing about the political art that can bring the leaders of the state back to an outward form of worship.”32

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By implication, the restoration of Christianity in revolutionary France was something Christians should pray for but not work for through conventional political means. Even if temporarily successful, Anquetil suggested, would only end in the same hypocritical, superficial devotion that had characterized France before the Revolution, or Israel before the coming of Jesus. While he offered such counsel to readers, Anquetil presented his own scholarly and spiritual activities during the Revolution not as a retreat from the world, but as a kind of combat. Writing about the year 1793, when things may have seemed bleakest to him, he reported that “I fought ignorance, the true cause of France’s ills, through the study of Greek and Eastern literature, a suitable and manly portion.”33 Ancient texts were weapons against the Revolution, and the Orientalist was a fighter on the front lines. His tactics for using knowledge of ‘Eastern’ religions were principally to compare the Revolution and non-European phenomena, in order to present the former as a time of barbarism and intolerance, and to offer Indian spiritual traditions as a path back to faith and social harmony. Both these approaches had continuities with Anquetil’s pre-revolutionary work, revealing that cosmopolitan and anti-Eurocentric sympathies such as those Anquetil displayed before and after 1789 did not necessarily correlate with zealous support for the Revolution.

Spiritual Warfare and Esoteric Syncretism Anquetil had a highly global vision of human affairs. Throughout his writings, he stressed the unity of the human race, and the common rights and aspirations that human beings shared across the diversity of their rich and varied cultures. His pre-revolutionary works have been understood as testimony to a liberal humanism, particularly insofar as they condemn British imperialism in South Asia. Such themes continued to inform his notes on the Upanishads, which are sprinkled with observations asserting the equality (or indeed superiority, at least in moral terms) of Europeans and South Asians, in phrases like: “Indians have no need to beg any European for lessons in ethics.”34 But Anquetil’s wide range of vision and familiarity with non-European societies could serve other ends as well. In the Oupnek’hat, Anquetil sought on a number of occasions to use his knowledge of foreign cultures as a means of attacking the

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Revolution, which could either be cited as a unique instance of depravity far worse than that societies Europeans might consider to be savage or backward, or else as a case of bloodthirsty fanaticism similar to some of the worst episodes in world history. The first strategy appears in Anquetil’s comments on a passage in the Upanishads that briefly discuss ritual preparations for burials. Anquetil noted that this text enjoined the “greatest reverence” for the dead in a true religious spirit. In revolutionary France, by contrast, he found that the dead were “interred outside the city walls… like animals… this was how the tireless zeal of the atheists cared for them.” But indeed, Anquetil went on, how could an atheist see any point to providing a decent burial for the deceased, since for those who did not believe in God dead bodies would never be resurrected, and had never been the residences of eternal souls? By attacking religion, the leaders of the Revolution, motivated by a “vast and idiotic presumption… uprooted the comfort and hope” that subjects of the Old Regime had felt in the prospect of eternal life, and replaced it with a “political dogma.”35 The Revolution was thus not only anti-religious, but a kind of pseudo-religion, a comfortless substitute for Christianity. Unflattering comparisons between the Revolution’s supposed impiety and immorality on the one hand, and the pure religion of the ancient Hindus on the other represented one of Anquetil’s techniques for using his scholarly knowledge in service of counter-revolution. Parallels between the Revolution and instances of religious violence in human history were another. A passing reference to human sacrifice in his source material gave Anquetil the opportunity for a digression into the anthropology of religion, the conclusion of which turned abruptly into a condemnation of the Revolution’s attempts to develop a civic religion of its own. He argued that human sacrifice was widespread and well-attested in those parts of the world untouched by the influence of Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), dwelling on the cruelty of these practices. Stories of human sacrifice might seem difficult for contemporary Europeans to believe, he observed, if it were not for the fact that the French Revolution had offered a recent lesson on how quickly savagery could return in the absence of religion. For Anquetil, there was little difference between the human sacrifice of the Aztecs and the persecution suffered by the Church at the hands of “the French people of the eighteenth century, who, raging in a bestial frenzy against the ministers of the Catholic faith, sacrificed them to the Goddess of Reason.”36

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Another case of religious violence, this time from early modern South Asia, must have been close to Anquetil’s consciousness while he preparing his translation. The Mughal prince Dara Shikoh (1615–1659), who had sponsored the Persian-language translation of the Upanishads on which Anquetil’s own Oupnek’hat was based, had been assassinated by his brother Aurengzeb (1618–1707) in the course of a struggle for succession to the imperial throne.37 Over the course of their political competition, the two princes styled themselves in opposing ways, with Dara visiting Hindu and Muslim holy men and promoting a esoteric dialogue between the two religious traditions, while Aurengzeb seemed to incarnate Islamic orthodoxy. For Anquetil, as for many later historians, the conflict between Dara and Aurengzeb was a conflict between religious tolerance and fanaticism.38 Only the latter, he felt, was a genuinely Islamic stance. Dara, Anquetil argued, had understood the basic statement of Islamic faith “there is no God but God” in an expansive, heterodox sense, as a proposition about the unity of faiths and indeed the unity of all individuals with God. His “doctrine of unification” with the divine “aroused Muslim zeal…. the rage of the impious and persecution” culminating in his murder. Such a reading of the struggle for the Mughal throne paints orthodox Islam in dark colors, and makes Dara out to be a martyr to tolerance. Within the context of the Oupnek’hat, however, Anquetil’s recounting of this episode was more about attacking the French Revolution than commenting on Islam in South Asia. It served as the conclusion to a section on the destruction of religious monuments in France during the 1790s, and argued that in both South Asia and France, “fanaticism of this sort holds nothing sacred… even when it comes to the final step: the ruler.”39 By implication, Dara’s death had prefigured that of Louis XVI. Parallels or contrasts between France and other parts of the world, particularly South Asia, were important elements of Anquetil’s critique of the Revolution. In them, he moved beyond a framework that saw the new regime as the consequence of moral decline, modern philosophy, or an atheist conspiracy, and considered the ways in which the Revolution was itself a kind of religion, full of persecuting zeal and hungry for human sacrifices. Thinking of the Revolution as a religion, rather than a consequence of the absence of religion, allowed Anquetil to retrace its origins in unexpected ways. At the end of another passage citing episodes of religious persecution in the Islamic world and comparing them to the Revolution’s persecution of Christianity, Anquetil turned to discuss

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the “German Illuminati” whom he believed to be at the “source of the revolution in France.” This secret society (in fact quite short-lived) had been founded by Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830), a Bavarian thinker who, Anquetil wrote, resembled nothing so much as a Jesuit. Indeed, he continued, Weishaupt had been a “zealous imitator” of Jesuit practices and aims, working in the shadows to acquire political power in order to impose his (lack of) religion on others. Having decried the methods of the Jesuits as forerunners of an imagined atheistic conspiracy, Anquetil also used references to South Asia to criticize another tendency in Old Regime spirituality. He attacked the Quietism of Madame Guyon (Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte, 1648–1717), whose doctrine of a “pure love of God” through which the soul could attain a state of passivity, calm, and sinlessness had fascinated the theologian Fénélon (François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénélon, 1651–1715). Anquetil did not single out any specific features of her teaching that might be problematic, but apparently agreed with the critique of Quietism offered by Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), bishop of Meaux and pillar of Catholic orthodoxy at the court of Louis XIV. Anquetil even argued that if Bossuet’s writings against Quietism were to “fall into the hands of the Indians” they would recognize his Catholic orthodoxy to be the same as their own faith, rejecting the teachings of Guyon.40 Across Anquetil’s comments on the Revolution and Old Regime, he pointed to the need for a form of religious life that would avoid the political methods of the Jesuits while at the same time maintaining orthodoxy. Such a faith, he suggested, would not only be truly Christian but also truly Hindu. Thus Anquetil’s knowledge of non-European religion could be not only a means of criticizing the Revolution, but also a kind of apology for Christianity, leading Europeans back to the faith and ending the political violence that had haunted France. Anquetil imagined that the Oupnek’hat would be a “comforting, mild cup” offered to the lips of the French “so that the thirst for blood will be eliminated.”41 It may seem paradoxical to use an ancient Sanskrit text as a tool of Christian apologetics, but for Anquetil there was no conflict between the essential teachings of Christianity and those contained in the Upanishads. He argued that both taught a doctrine of monism, by which the material world and the spiritual realm alike were instantiations of a common essence emanating from the pure, uncreated deity. Moreover, the scriptures of both faiths contained an esoteric wisdom by which individuals

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could learn to experience unity with God in their own lifetimes by overcoming the distractions of the body and senses. It was this mystical doctrine, Anquetil argued, that would save Europe from revolution. Demonstrating that his esoteric teaching was orthodox Christian theology, faithful to the meaning of the Upanishads and the spiritual answer to the French Revolution was a tall order. It is uncertain if any of Anquetil’s readers were convinced by his counter-revolutionary religious synthesis; his Latin text was read only by a few thinkers interested more in having access to the Upanishads than in hearing what Anquetil had to say about politics.42 Yet his arguments, concentrated in a lengthy “Dissertation, in which the summa of Eastern Theologyis investigated by means of the writings of the Jews, the Doctors of the Church, theologians both Catholic and non-Catholic” tucked into the first volume of the Oupnek’hat, were in many ways path-breaking, foreshadowing important developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. Even as he condemned Madame Guyon and championed Bossuet, Anquetil was himself hardly a conservative theologian. He offered a bold reinterpretation of Christianity as but one expression of “a tradition established throughout the entire world,” concealed in diverse religions and philosophies.43 His arguments rested on readings of a number of early Christian theologians, including Origen (c. 184–253) and Synesius of Cyrene (c. 373–414), who were associated with philosophical and religious movements like Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and whose status as orthodox thinkers is by no means uncontested even today. The idea that the world and human souls proceeded by emanation (apokatastatis) from God, which Anquetil inherited from Origen, has been generally considered by theologians to be heterodox, opposed to the story of creation outlined in Genesis.44 To further buttress the historically controversial idea of emanation, Anquetil drew on a still less obviously orthodox source: medieval Jewish interpretations of the Kabbalah. He further argued that Origen might have learned the doctrine of emanation from an Indian source, since such ideas were “the very tenets of the Brahmans.”45 By seeing Christian, Platonic, Jewish, and Hindu traditions as vehicles for a common esoteric doctrine, Anquetil was participating not so much in the orthodoxy of Bossuet as a tradition arising out of the Renaissance known as “perennial philosophy” (philosophia perennis). This school of thought originated in the efforts of Italian humanists to reconcile Catholic theology with the works of Plato and other historical

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or pseudo-historical texts. One of its earliest pioneers, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), argued that concealed within various ancient philosophical and theological texts were teachings concerning a pure religion by which the initiated could perceive the primordial unity of humanity and the material world with God. This teaching, Ficino claimed, could be traced through the works of Moses, Plato, Zoroaster, Orpheus, and the priests of ancient Egypt. The thought of Ficino and his successors formed an important current of early modern philosophy, influencing thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz (1646–1716), who likewise believed that the world’s faiths shared a common essence.46 Anquetil made two major contributions to the tradition of perennial philosophy. First, he incorporated Hindu philosophy (which he usually termed “Eastern”, “Brahmanic” or “Indian theology”) into it, arguing that the God of the Bible, the One of Platonic thought, and the Brahma of the Upanishads were expressions for the same divine being. Second, he gave this school an unprecedented political purpose, tying it to a rejection not only of the Revolution, but also of the eighteenthcentury intellectual and cultural milieu that had produced it. Earlier generations of perennialist thinkers searching for a common secret wisdom shared by diverse texts had no particular political agenda, or sense that perennial philosophy offered a way out of contemporary social problems. Anquetil, however, saw a kind of expanded perennialism as the solution to what might be called the problem of a post-religious Europe in which Christianity was no longer the self-evident center of culture and thought.

Esoterism and Anti-Modernism The arguments in favor of a cosmopolitan, esoteric vision of religion developed in the Oupnek’hat were almost totally ignored by Anquetil’s contemporaries. However, one aspect of his thought did attract the attention of readers in Germany, including a young Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). In a “Digression on Kant,” Anquetil expanded on his claims about the common essence of Christianity, Judaism, Platonic thought, and Hinduism to include the philosophy of Immanuel Kant as well. According to Anquetil (who was familiar with Kant’s work only through a French commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), Kant’s criticisms of empiricism, and particularly his insistence that our experience is organized by cognitive faculties whose operations precede sensation, shared much with the teachings of the

42  B. Smith

Upanishads, Plato and true Christianity. His arguments had an electrifying effect on Schopenhauer, whose first major work, The World as Will and as Representation (1818), purported to achieve a synthesis of Plato, Kant, and the Upanishads. From Schopenhauer, Anquetil’s comparison between Kant and the Upanishads would filter into the larger intellectual culture of nineteenthcentury Germany and Britain, rearticulated by the era’s major Orientalists, such as Paul Deussen (1845–1914) and Max Müller (1823–1900). As the notion spread, however, it became associated with the emerging ­consensus that ancient Indian philosophy was similar to that of Europe not so much because both were instances of a universal esoteric wisdom, but because both were products of what Müller called the “Aryan mind.” Indeed, for Müller the development of Aryan Man could be traced through the Upanishads to Kant, in whose works the race achieved “perfect manhood.”47 Where Anquetil had insisted on the spiritual, intellectual and moral equality of human cultures (with perhaps an exception being made of the perverted age of eighteenth-century France), now analogies between Kant and the Upanishads appeared as proof of Aryan superiority over other peoples. Much as Anquetil’s comparison of Kant and the Upanishads would became a touchstone for nineteenth-century thinking about the Aryan race, so too would the integration of Hinduism into perennial philosophy become a subject of interest for the far-right of the twentieth century. In this case, the Oupnek’hat did not exercise any direct influence. Rather, Anquetil’s attempt to bridge Catholic orthodoxy and Hinduism (however dubiously) in order to oppose what appeared to him as the decadence of eighteenth-century culture and philosophy would foreshadow the efforts of later thinkers, likely unaware of his own work, to interpret Hinduism through the lens of perennial philosophy. These efforts were spearheaded by the Theosophical Society, founded in the United States in 1875. The organization, represented by its charismatic front-woman Helena Blavatsky (Yelena Petrovna von Hahn, 1831–1891), preached Theosophy, a “combination of Perennialism with Hinduism,” specifically with the traditions emerging out of certain mystical readings of the Upanishads.48 The Theosophical Society soon fractured into a number of different movements, spreading theosophical ideas throughout Europe and India in the process. By the early twentieth century, some European thinkers came to see a version of perennial philosophy that included Hindu

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traditions not only as a means of accessing esoteric wisdom, but also as a solution to what they perceived as the “crisis of the modern world,” as the mystic Réné Guénon (1886–1951) phrased it in his 1927 Crise du monde moderne. To such thinkers indebted to Blavatsky’s integration of Hindu and Western esoteric traditions, the West seemed to have become alienated from authentic spirituality. It was thus prey to decadence and malaise. Salvation appeared to lie in the spiritual resources of Eastern traditions, which were, after all, only different forms of the same doctrine that had long been transmitted in Western thought before being abandoned in the Enlightenment. Like most thinkers inspired by Theosophy, Guénon himself was apolitical, but his anti-modernist ideas were quickly taken up in explicitly political ways, most notably by the far-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola (1898–1974).49 In works such as his 1934 Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola built on the notion of an esoteric tradition common to Europe and India, employing a variety of concepts drawn from Hindu theology to attack liberalism, democracy and other supposedly pernicious manifestations of modernity.50 Evola, broadly sympathetic to Italian fascism, embodied a strain of far-right esoteric perennialism that also manifested itself in the contemporaneous interest among Nazi circles in the supposed occult doctrines of the “Aryan” ancestors of the IndoEuropean peoples (an interest which was itself indebted to nineteenthcentury notions of the Aryan race developed by Orientalist scholars such as Müller).51 After the Second World War, neo-Nazi and far-right groups throughout Europe retained a fascination with political, anti-modernist iterations of perennialism, usually framed as “traditionalism” or “neotraditionalism.” One of the most prominent and influential thinkers seen to work within such a framework today is Alexander Dugin (b. 1962), who is closely linked to the current regime in Russia, championing war against what he sees as a spiritually dead American empire, and calling for a common front of “traditional” societies against neoliberal globalism.52 From Anquetil to Vladimir Putin or the “Aryan mind” is of course a long road. In many ways, Anquetil resembles not so much these figures, separated from him by several generations, as he does other counterrevolutionary French thinkers of his own era, or counter-­revolutionary thinkers outside of France, such as Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Like the latter, Anquetil combined a strong sense of the importance of rights with a conservative sensibility and what Uday Singh Mehta calls (in Burke’s case) a “cosmopolitanism of sentiments”: an appreciation

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of traditional cultures and societies within and without Europe as particular, concrete manifestations of humanity.53 Indeed, Burke and Anquetil opposed both British imperialism in India as well as the French Revolution precisely because both phenomena seemed to them to violate such a cosmopolitanism, imposing a harsh, arrogant, alien universalism in the place of authentic local traditions. But if Anquetil bears comparison to a familiar figure like Burke, he was nevertheless also a forerunner of movements much further afield from the standard narrative of counter-revolutionary thought or of religious responses to the French Revolution. Anquetil’s reorientation of perennialism philosophy towards Hinduism, and his appropriation of the Upanishads as a weapon of counter-revolutionary polemic, did not directly influence the far-right politics of later centuries. But, just as better-known counter-revolutionary authors like Bonald, de Maistre, and Chateaubriand explored the possibilities of nineteenth-century conservatism, so too did Anquetil prefigure some of the strategies by which radical religious and political thinkers would search for new directions in European intellectual life. By outlining the possibility of a comparison Western and Indian philosophy, Anquetil inspired a tradition in Germany of reading Kant alongside the Upanishads, a tradition that, for some thinkers, provided evidence for the existence of a distinct, “Aryan” race. By opposing the supposedly catastrophic materialism, atheism and republicanism of the eighteenth-century to a perennial “tradition” expressed in the esoteric doctrines of various world religions, he anticipated the anti-modernist views of the mystic Guénon, as well as of far-right political theorists such as Evola. Anquetil’s work reveals the scope and power of counter-revolutionary religious thought in late-eighteenth century France, which, far from being merely conservative, anticipated the future as it condemned the present and reinterpreted the past.

Notes

1. Raymond Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil Duperron (Paris: E. Leroux, 1934). JeanLuc Kieffer, Anquetil-Duperron: l’Inde en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1983). Lucette Valensi, “Eloge de l’orient, éloge de l’orientalisme. Le jeu d’échecs d’Anquetil-Duperron,” Revue de l’histoire des religions, vol. 212, no. 4 (1995), 419–452; “Anquetil-Duperron” in Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, ed. François Pouillon (Paris: Karthala, 2008), 21–23.

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2. Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: philosophy, revolution, and human rights, 1750–1790 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 603. 3.  Siep Stuurman, “Cosmpolitan Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment: Anquetil-Duperron on America and India,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 68, no. 2 (Apr, 2007), 255–278. Jennifer Pitts, “Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 1 (2012), 92–121. 4. Edward Said, “Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas,” 248–266 in The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 253. 5. Frederick Whelan, “Oriental Despotism: Anquetil Duperron’s Response to Montesquieu,” History of Political Thought, vol. 22, no. 4 (Apr. 2001), 619–647. 6. Israel, 603. 7.  Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, Oupnek’hat: (id est, Secretumtegendum): opus ipsa in India rarissimum, continensantiquam et arcanam, seutheologicam et philosophicam, doctrinam, è quatuorsacrisIndorumlibris, Rakbeid, Djedjrbeid, Sam beid, Athrbanbeid, excerptam ad verbum, è Persicoidiomate, Samskreticisvocabulisintermixto, in Latinumconversum; dissertationibus et annotationibus, difficilioraexplanantibus, illustratum: studio et opera Anquetil Duperron, 2 vols. (Strasbourg: Levrault, 1801–1802). 8. Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Timothy Tacket, “Religion and Revolution in France to 1794,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 536–554. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2005). 9.  Paul H. Beik, “The French Revolution Seen from the Right: Social Theories in Motion, 1789–1799,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 46, no. 1 (1996), 1–122, 4. For studies of Bonald, de Maistre, and Chateaubriand see: Jean-Yves Planchère, “Totalité sociale et hiérarchie: la sociologie théologique de Louis de Bonald,” European Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 49, no. 2 (2011), 145–167. Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Eric Gans, “Maistre and Chateaubriand: Counter-Revolution and Anthropology,” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 28, no. 4 (1989), 559–575. 10.  Darrin McMahon, “The Real Counter-Enlightenment: the Case of France,” 91–103 in Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment, ed. Joseph

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Mali and Robert Wokler, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 93, no. 5(2003), 96. See also Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 11. Stéphane van Damme, “Capitalizing Manuscripts, Confronting Empires: Anquetil-Duperron and the Economy of Oriental Knowledge in the Context of the Seven Year’s War,” 109–127 in Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View, eds. László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, Borbála ZsuzsannaTörök (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 111. 12. Although the same was not true of his personal manuscripts, which however present difficulties in dating. Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 363–448. 13. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Dignité du commerce et de l’état du commerçant (1789). On ‘commercial nobility’ debates see Jay Smith, Nobility Reimagined: the Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 14. On Sieyès see William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: the Abbé Sieyès and ‘What is the Third Estate’? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 15.  Dignité, 39. 16. Israel, 603. 17. Valensi, “Eloge de l’Orient.” 18. Whether Anquetil also considered that this message was also common to all other faiths throughout the world is unclear. For his perspective on Islam particularly, see my Un cosmopolitisme sans islam: Dara Shikoh, Kant, et les limites de la philosophie comparative dans l’Oupnekhat d’Anquetil-Duperron.” Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud: sources, itinétaires, langues (XVI–XVIIIe siècle)/ Cosmopolitanisms in South Asia: sources, itineraries and languages (XVI–XVIII c.), ed. Corrine Lefevre and Ines Zupanov, Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Collection Purushartha, vol. 33, 121–140. 19.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 622. 20.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, xx. 21.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 704. 22.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 704. 23.  Oupnek’hat, t. 2, 678. 24.  Oupnek’hat, t. 2, 678–679. 25.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 692. 26. Amos Hofman, “Opinion, Illusion and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (Autumn, 1993), 27–60. See also Amos Hofman, “The Origins of the Theory of the Philosophe Conspiracy,” French History, vol. 2, no. 2

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(June 1988), 152–172. J. M. Roberts, “The Origins of a Mythology: Freemasons, Protestants and The French Revolution,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xliv, no. 109 (1971), 80–93. 27. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 693. 28. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 469. 29. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 865. 30. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 670. 31. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, xxi. 32. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 707. 33. Oupnek’hat, t.1, 431. 34. Oupnek’hat, t.1, 704. 35. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 547. 36. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 450. 37. Anquetil did not directly translate the Sanskrit text of the Upanishads, but relied on the seventeenth-century Persian translation and commentary developed by Dara’s literary atelier. 38. This interpretation has been considerably modified in recent years. See Rajeev Kinra, “Infantilizing Baba Dara: the Cultural Memory of Dara Shekuh and the Mughal Public Sphere,” Journal of Persianate Studies, vol. 2, no. 2 (2009), 165–193. 39.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 430. 40.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, 622. 41.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, xv. 42. Anquetil’s Oupnek’hat seems to have been read only by a small number of readers in the early nineteenth-century. This was certainly Anquetil’s own estimation, and he resented the leading French journals for ignoring or criticizing his work. He particularly blamed a supposed conspiracy of empiricist philosophers for having placed negative reviews of his work in the Décade Philosophique, Moniteur Universel, and Magasin Encyclopédique. Oupnek’hat, t. 2, 876–880. None of these reviews discussed Anquetil’s counter-revolutionary thought. 43.  Oupnek’hat, t. 1, xxvii. 44. Frederick W. Norris, “Apokatastatis,” Westminster Handbook of Origen, ed. John McGuckin (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2004), 59–62. 45. Oupnek’hat, t. 1, lxx. 46. Charles Β. Schmitt, “Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steucho to Leibniz,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 27, no. 4, (Oct–Dec. 1966), 505–532. 47. Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 115–116, 420. 48. Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 41.

48  B. Smith 49. On the anti-modern and anti-political dimensions of Guénon’sthought, see Xavier Accart, Guénon, ou le renversement des clartés: l’influence d’un métaphysicien sur la vie intellectuelle et littéraire française, (1920–1970) (Paris: Edidit, 2005). 50.  Franco Ferraresi, “Julius Evola: Tradition, Reaction and the Radical Right,” European Journal of Sociology, vol. 28, no. 1 (1987), 107–151. 51. On Orientalism and the idea of ‘Aryans’, see Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). On the role of such ideas in Nazi esoterism see Nicholas GoodrickClarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoterism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 52. Whether or not Dugin qualifies as a perennialist thinker has been a subject of debate. See Anton Shekhovstov and Andreas Umland, “Is Aleksandr Dugin a Traditionalist? ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ and Perennial Philosophy,” vol. 68, no. 4 (Oct. 2009), 662–678. 53.  Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: a Study in NineteenthCentury British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 139. Jennifer Pitts observes the similarities of Anquetil and Burke’s opposition to British imperialism in “Empire and Legal Universalisms.”

Religion and the Atlantic World: The Case of Saint-Domingue and French Guiana Erica Johnson

In recent years, historians have placed the French Revolution in a global setting, which for many has meant emphasizing the importance of the Haitian Revolution as an interconnected revolutionary moment. In their focus on Haiti, they have reaffirmed national borders—specifically those of France and Haiti. In the process, they have relegated other French colonial spaces in the Atlantic World—namely French Guiana. This lack of connection is best explained by the different roles each colony played in the eighteenth-century Francophone world. Saint-Domingue remained the sugar capital of the French Caribbean, while Guiana, with its harsh landscapes became a penal colony, during the French Revolution.1 During the Haitian Revolution, the Capuchin order took the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, called for equal rights for free people of color, and sought to end slavery. On the other hand, the first deportees to and from Guiana were refractory priests. In both cases, religieux offer a point of connection across the Atlantic world. Very little work has been done on the role of Catholic clergy or nuns in the eighteenth-century French Atlantic World. Again, the focus of E. Johnson (*)  Francis Marion University, PO Box 100547, Florence, SC 29502, USA [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_3

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50  E. Johnson

historians on plantation economies, slavery, and so-called secular political discourse in Haiti has often marginalized religion, adding to the mythology of an ineffective religious cadre in the colonies. In 1950, Adolphe Cabon wrote a succinct article on the clergy in Cayenne during the French Revolution, asserting, “The great lines of religious history in the French colonies during the Revolution are hardly known to us.”2 Not much has changed in the last sixty years. Until only recently, the historiography has suggested that the Catholic Church disappeared in SaintDomingue after 1789 and religion was a tool to ensure docility and resignation among the slave population. Some scholars have suggested that after the c­olonial government expelled the Jesuits for being sympathetic to slaves in 1763, other members of the Catholic religieux did not advocate for people of African descent.3 However, Laënnec Hurbon and Father Antoine Adrien have begun to introduce evidence to suggest abolitionist and revolutionary sentiments among some Saint-Dominguan clergy. While these two brief analyses are in no way definitive, the two authors prove the need to consider the clergy as humanitarians and revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue before, during, and after the Haitian Revolution.4 On the other hand, Timothy Tackett, Nigel Aston, and Ralph Gibson have d ­ iscussed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in extensive detail, even noting the proposed deportations of refractory priests to French Guiana.5

Saint-Domingue The Catholic Church had a long history in France’s prized slave colony, Saint-Domingue, before the Revolutionary Era. The Catholic Church did not officially oppose enslavement of Africans during the eighteenth century, but some individual members of the Church recognized the people of African descent as potential converts and considered them to be equal in the eyes of God. Many Africans had been exposed to, and even converted to, Christianity in African before being sold into slavery in the Caribbean. The Christianity brought to Saint-Domingue by slaves traces back to the western coasts of Africa, where the Portuguese introduced Catholicism even before Columbus landed in the Americas.6 Of course, not all slaves accepted Catholicism as the French embraced it, but instead observed a form of religious syncretism, such as Voudou. The similarities between African cosmologies and Catholicism allowed for syncretism, combining African beliefs with Catholic representations.7

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The French Crown cemented the relationship between the Catholic Church and the colonies when it decreed the Code noir (Black Code) in 1685. Catholicism was central to the Code noir. Although intended to regulate relations between masters and slaves, Catholicism appeared throughout the Code noir. The edict explained the need for the authority and justice of the French Crown to maintain Catholicism before mentioning any regulations on slavery.8 By early 1790, the National Assembly had directly embroiled the colonies in the French Revolution, and initiated a period of unrest for the free population of Saint-Domingue, not least the religious. The ecclesiastic reforms of the French Revolution had profound ramifications across the French Atlantic. An ecclesiastic committee within the National Assembly began drafting reforms for the Church in August 1789.9 In July 1790, the National Constituent Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.10 In Saint-Domingue, the entanglements of the revolution and the religious became an obstacle for the Capuchin mission desperately seeking additional priests.11 On November 27, 1790, the Assembly passed a related law requiring the clergy to swear an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.12 Many refused to take the oath. Known as non-jurors, these refractory clergy were no longer allowed to exercise the practices of the Church, and were branded enemies of the French Revolution. Priests throughout the French empire were required to take the oath, even those who were in Saint-Domingue, and, as in the rest of France, the result was similar. As in the metropole, the Catholic religious had to choose sides, forcing them to decide upon the causes they supported. In Saint-Domingue that choice was entangled with issues of race, equality, and slavery. There were correlations between taking the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and advocating for free people of color and slaves. In Saint-Domingue, most of the Capuchins took the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but many Dominicans refused, representing perhaps half of the clergy.13 The division over taking the oath also meant a geographical divide over the Civil Constitution in SaintDomingue, because the Capuchins were the religious authority in the North, and the Dominicans had Catholic control over the West and South. Further, geography played into the racial composition each of the colony’s provinces. The North had a greater concentration of slaves, while the West and South had more substantial free colored populations. Therefore, Capuchins in the North who took the oath were also more

52  E. Johnson

likely to want to end slavery, while non-juring Dominicans were advocates for the rights of free people of color in the West and South. Of course, these correlations cannot be translated into rigid categories of action, but they indicate important connections between geography, the oath, and divisive revolutionary issues. The division down the middle over the revolution motivated some Capuchins to campaign in favor of the Oath and the French Revolution. Jean Claude Paul Dessirier, known by his religious name Father Julien, a Capuchin priest in Le Cap, claimed he was the first in his mission to take the oath, serving as an example to his fellow priests.14 In fact, he took the oath early, acting on information he received in correspondence with France about the decrees of the Constituent Assembly.15 Although the law requiring the oath passed in November, Dessirier presented himself before the Provincial Assembly of the North in Grand Rivière to take his civic oath in May. In addition to the ordinary oath, he requested to make an additional speech detailing how, during the eighteen years he had been employed in mission, “he always behaved in a manner worthy of the general esteem.”16 Only one month later, Dessirier sent a letter of good faith to the Pope, and he made a request to the colonial officials to go back to France due to his failing health. After returning to France, the revolutionary tribunal tried him for suspected counterrevolutionary activity, but he was eventually acquitted.17 Although most juring priests were immune from political suspicion, French officials questioned the sincerity of Dessirier’s oath because of the letter he sent to the Pope. Another Capuchin parish priest, Cibot, made a speech in support of the French Revolution before Philipppe-François Galbaud du Fort, the Governor General of the island, which was printed in the newspaper, Affiches Americaines, on 13 May, 1793. He began his speech explaining the ties of the colony to the French Republic, and the importance of the Governor General’s “civic virtues” and “military talents” in saving the colony and returning the blacks in revolt to their “duty.”18 At this point, the French Revolution upheld slavery, and Cibot’s comments suggest he also supported the institution. However, he, like many other priests, may have also been concerned about the possible consequences for dissension.19 In his closing, Cibot implied a joint effort by the Governor General and the clergy in saving the colony and reiterated that the Capuchins were never refractory priests. Similar to Dessirier and the anonymous monk above, Cibot encouraged the “ministers of the altar, and French citizens” to set an example of “submission to the laws.”20

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By including a call to his fellow priests in his speech, Cibot suggested the equal importance of the clergy alongside the French military and administration in the colony in saving the colony through support of the French Revolution. The second revolutionary intervention of the Saint-Dominguan religious was on the issue of rights for free people of color. Dominican priest François Pascalis Ouvière of Léogane was a white representative for the free people of color before the National Legislative Assembly in Paris. In 1792, Ouvière went to Paris with the three commissioners for the colored citizens of Saint-Marc, free men of color Etienne Viart, Dubourg, and Antoine Chanlatte. He made a speech before the Legislative Assembly in defense of the “hommes de couleur,” accusing the Colonial Assembly of “oppression.”21 An anonymous author explained how “the incendiary abbot” Ouvière stressed the “counterrevolutionary idea” that the French needed to suspend representative government in the colony and restore the military government of the Old Regime in Saint-Domingue to protect the “political rights of the men of color.”22 Quadroon spokesman for the assembly of people of color in Mirebalais Pierre Pinchinat denounced Ouvière as “most inflammatory and most counter-revolutionary” in a letter to Julien Raimond, a wealthy man of color from Saint-Domingue living in Paris.23 In this context, counter-revolutionary referred to his opposition to local government and being racially progressive. Although Pinchinat’s strong words came after Ouvière appeared in France, the priest’s overall philanthropic desire to achieve rights for free people of color by suspending representative government ultimately influenced perceptions of him as counter-revolutionary. In the West and South Provinces of Saint-Domingue, the religious were involved in the revolutionary struggles between free people of color and whites. The royalists and patriots were factions within the white population, but both the white royalists and free people of color abhorred the white patriots. The patriots were radical whites who were critical of the Governor General and sought rigorous implementation of laws that maintained the inequality of free people of color.24 In Saint-Marc, the royalists sought the support of people of color to defeat the patriots and reestablish the colonial Old Regime. The people of color who allied with the royalists became known as confederates. In this dispute, Pinchinat, Ouvière’s critic, supported the signing of a concordatwith the royalist whites, while having openly declared his loyalty to France on many occasions.25 Former gérant, or plantation manager, Grouvel claimed in

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his account of the Revolution that Ouvière initially supported the peace as well. Grouvel identified Ouvière as the “extraordinary” envoy sent by the military leader of color Beauvais to bring “words of peace” to “all the white and colored people of Léogane” that they “wanted to see and wanted to hear in this time of terror.”26 His involvement seems to confirm Ouvière’s counter-revolutionary sentiments, but his actions also suggest Pinchinat and Ouvière would have been in agreement. The connection between Ouvière and Romaine Rivière, or Romainela-prophétesse, during the struggles between the whites and the people of color was likely to have been the point of departure for many of Ouvière’s potential colored allies. Rivière represented a radical element that threatened the credibility of confederates in West, and they eventually broke ties with him. Further, Rivière and his followers disturbed the plantation system in the region by rousing slaves against their masters.27 The anonymous author of Précis de la revolution de SaintDomingue referred to Ouvière as “one of the instigators of the revolt of the West.”28 French General Pamphile de Lacroix claimed Ouvière, “suspected of hatred for the [French] revolution,” had “facilitated the enterprises of Romaine-la-Prophetesse” by his inaction, as well as maintaining a correspondence with Rivière.29 In a letter Rivière wrote from his camp at Trou Coffy to Ouvière in October 1791, Rivière referenced receiving a previous letter from Ouvière earlier that month, and expressed his anticipation of the priest’s celebration of mass the following day.30 While Rivière enjoyed considerable power through his alliances for a brief time, he lost to a coalition of whites and free people of color in March 1792.31 Ouvière supposedly appeared in Jamaica early the next year. In May 1793, the Affiches Americaines printed an extract from a letter from Jamaica about “an abbot called Auziere (but this is Ouviere) who committed that greatest crimes in Saint-Domingue,” who was suspected of attempting to “make an uprising” in Jamaica.32 Branded a counter-revolutionary, Ouvière’s advocacy for free people of color had been conflated with the more radical actions of Rivière. Similar to Ouvière, the marguillier in Port-au-Prince, Olivier, also supported the rights of free people of color. Charles-Damien Duguet had been the parish priest of Port-au-Prince and Dominican apostolic prefect of the West and South Provinces in the 1780s. When Duguet left Saint-Domingue in 1791, Olivier replaced him as churchwarden, assuming significant power. In his new position, Olivier used Catholic rituals to celebrate revolutionary legislation from France pertaining to people

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of color. The white colonists who opposed the decrees labeled Olivier a “fanatic aristocrat” after he sang a Te Deum, or Catholic hymn of praise, for the National Assembly’s decrees granting citizenship to free people of color.33 Olivier publicly supported right for free people of color, as well as the French Revolution, but his sentiments toward the slave uprising remain unknown. This, as we will see, was a totally different issue from the rights of free people of color. Priests acted as key intermediaries in negotiating between the slave rebels and French authorities. Father Sulpice intervened peacefully on behalf of the slave insurrectionists after the First Civil Commissioners arrived from France in late November 1791. The Legislative Assembly in Paris sent three civil commissioners to Saint-Domingue: Edmond de Saint-Léger, Frédéric Ignace de Mirbeck, and Philippe Roume de SaintLaurent. These civil commissioners delivered the king’s proclamation of September 28, 1791, granting amnesty for “acts of revolution.” The proclamation lacked clarity in the application of the amnesty to the slave revolutionaries, because it predated news of the slave uprisings, resulting in a disagreement between the slave leaders and the colonial assembly that had to be settled by the new commissioners.34 Despite disagreement with the other civil commissioners, Roume chose to offer the amnesty to insurrectionists. Jean-François and Georges Biassou, leaders of the slave revolution, embraced the amnesty as an opportunity to negotiate with the colonial authorities. General Pamphile de Lacroix wrote, “The leaders of the revolt…tired of the present scenes of carnage and horror…proved willing to make amends when Father Sulpice, parish priest of Trou, undertook to…explain the feelings of goodwill included in the amnesty of September 28.”35 While members of the colonial assembly and other whites refused to negotiate with the slaves, Sulpice willingly sought to facilitate communications between the insurrectionists and the commissioners. Jean-François and Biassou likely accepted the priest’s aid because he was literate, and the rebel leaders favored the king and the Church. In his Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue, J.-P. GarranCoulon explained how Sulpice used the slaves’ respect for priests to bring peace.36 Sulpice’s reaction to Dutty’s death could have only solidified Jean-François and Biassou’s trust and respect for him. The Capuchin parish priest of Dondon, Guillame Sylvestre de la Haye, also mediated in negotiations between the civil commissioners and the slave leaders. When the insurgents captured the parish of Dondon in September 1791, de la Haye later testified he “would have considered

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it dishonorable and a dereliction of his duty if he had thought of abandoning his parishioners.”37 While in Dondon, Jean-François sought de la Haye’s council, as well as that of a few other white captives, in drafting proposals to present to the authorities. During his time with the slave rebels, the priest maintained correspondence with Biassou, giving the insurrectionist advice and preparing a set of laws.38 According to naturalist Michel Etienne Descourtilz, Biassou asked de la Haye to sing a mass and to “draft a plan of conduct and a code of laws” for the slaves to live by in the “conquered country” until Biassou could receive Louis XVI, “their king and their only master.”39 The priest may have also served as chaplain to Biassou.40 De la Haye remained with the rebels until January 1792, when he escaped into the bordering Spanish territory, Santo Domingo.41 When the French Army of the North retook Dondon from the brigands in January 1793, they arrested De la Haye in St. Raphaël in Santo Domingo and imprisoned him in Le Cap.42 Despite his arrest, de la Haye had already provided the slaves with valuable political advice and introduced some equality into communications between white French officials and black slave insurrections, earning him the latter’s trust and respect. Abbé de la Porte, a priest in the area of Vallière in the North Province, also sought to communicate with the slave revolutionaries, but he condemned the rebellion. On May 25, 1792, the priest wrote an extensive letter explaining his face to face and written exchanges with and sentiments towards the rebels to Jean-Gabriel LarchevesqueThibault, deputy to the Estates General and member of the Colonial Assembly. Abbé de la Porte verbally expressed to the slaves the need to end their insurrection, because they had not achieved their goals and warned them of the threat of a combined European force that could exterminate them.43 He referred to the goals of three free days each week and liberty for the insurgent leaders expressed by Biassou and Jean-François in letters to the civil commissioners in December 1791.44 The priest also wrote letters to slave leaders asking their demands, and received a response from Biassou, who expressed his distrust, likely due to his previous exchanges with the civil commissioners. De la Porte noted that his words to the slaves “went in one ear and out the other.” In explaining his involvement with the slaves to LarchevesqueThibault, Abbé de la Porte wrote, “In doing so, I met the obligations imposed upon me of fairness, humanity, religion.”45 While the priest was obligated by fairness and humanity to acknowledge the cause of

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the slaves and hear their demands, he believed that his religious obligations required him to condemn a rebellion against the colonial order. He claimed the rebels would suffer “eternal loss of their souls,” because the revolution outraged “the sacred maxims” of religion.46 The priest used religion to oppose the rebellion, seemingly supporting slavery, but embraced the slaves in person and in writing with fairness and humanity. Priests also took part in attempts to form a new mixed-race government for the island. Priests became stalwarts of the civil commission. In September 1792, new civil commissioners sent from France, Etienne Polverel, Jean-Antoine Ailhaud, and Sonthonax, arrived in SaintDomingue to restore order. Only months after their arrival, the civil commissioners dissolved the Colonial Assembly and replaced it with a racially integrated Intermediary Commission composed of six whites and six free men of color.47 Father Boucher, parish priest of Terrier Rouge and former member of the provincial assembly, became president of the Intermediary Commission.48 Boucher was involved in the explosive events between the civil commissioners and the new colonial governor, François-Thomas Galbaud du Fort. Although Boucher publicly welcomed Galbaud upon his arrival, he later spoke out against the governor and in favor of the civil commissioners and men of color. Boucher claimed Galbaud refused to acknowledge the commissioners’ authority and discriminated against people of color.49 In June 1793, the city of Le Cap burned during fighting between the supporters of Galbaud and the civil commissioners promised slave insurgents freedom and citizenship for fighting for France.50 After the alliance of slaves and the civil commissioners defeated Galbaud, Sonthonax and Polverel formed an inner circle of loyal whites and free people of color, which included Father Boucher.51 A few months after the arrival of the second civil commission in September 1792, Sonthonax interrogated de la Haye who had been jailed since January 1792 for his actions amongst the rebels in late 1791. De la Haye was still in the custody of the civil commission “on suspicion of complicity with the black insurgents” when Le Cap burned in June 1793. The commissioners released de la Haye after defeating Galbaud, and he became a member of the commissioners’ council of loyalists.52 The civil commissioners proceeded toward general emancipation with the support of the two priests. In 1793, de la Haye began publishing a newspaper, Feuille de Jour.53 In his Soirées Bermudiennes, French proslavery author Felix Carteau described “the dreadful” de la Haye as

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“the ardent apostle of freedom for the blacks, composer of the Feuille de Jour, under Sonthonax.”54 Commenting on the relationship between de la Haye and Sonthonax, Michel Etienne Descourtilz wrote, “Abbot de la Haie [sic] found favor with Santhonax [sic]…since he was his adviser and the editor of a paper written in the principles he had professed, when the civil commissioner had lifted the mask.”55 Clearly, Descourtilz perceived both Sonthonax and Father de la Haye as abolitionists.

French Guiana In contrast to Saint-Domingue, French Guiana had an extensive history of colonial languish leading up to the French Revolution. A French expedition under Daniel de la Tousche La Ravardière claimed the island of Cayenne in 1604, but early colonization efforts failed. The small French population battled against the Dutch and English to maintain the settlement. Louis XIV granted the second Compagnie de la France équinoxiale (Company of Equatorial France) the authority over Guiana in 1645.56 In 1674, the Guianese colony officially came under French rule, and French settlers expanded into the coastal regions of the South American continent two years later. Due to a lack of labor and unsuccessful land cultivation, the colony stagnated from 1677–1763.57 For nearly a century, the French government neglected Guiana, but the Catholic Church maintained its interest in the colony’s diverse inhabitants. Even though a significant French population did not inhabit Guiana during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Catholic Church established institutions in the colony. In 1703, priests founded the Seminary of the Holy Spirit and a mission to minister to the South American Indian populations in Cayenne. Former governor of French Guiana from 1785 to 1788, Daniel Lescallier, wrote to Paris about the importance of mission to the colony. He declared, “I… certify that the missionaries who serve the parishes and the missions with the Indians in this colony, render services essential to the Religion and the moralities and are singularly useful for the temporal advance of this colony.” The missionaries ministered to the slave population as well. There were twenty priests at the seminary at the beginning of the French Revolution.58 The Jesuits also established a mission near Korou, which attended to the religious education of approximately 600 Indians by 1743.59 However, this mission dispersed with the French dissolution and expulsion of the Jesuits in 1764.60

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After the end of the Seven Year’s War in 1763 and the French loss of some of its overseas possessions, the metropole took a renewed interest in Guiana, in spite of its continued awful reputation. As part of a new colonization effort organized by Etienne-François, Chevalier de Turgot, thousands of French immigrants relocated to Korou, on the coast of Guiana, unprepared for the conditions and without immunities to local diseases.61 Due to an epidemic, many of the immigrants fled back to France in 1765. The failed expedition cost an estimated thirty million livres. The tragic expedition only worsened Atlantic perceptions of Guiana. No other French colony had “a more unfortunate history or a more miserable reputation.”62 It would remain almost impossible to convince people from continental France to migrate to French Guiana. Despite the continuous misfortunes of colonization efforts in Guiana, the remaining colonists worked to make the colony successful. With the help of Dutch engineer, Jean Samuel Guisan, and the model of Dutch Suriname, they drained and empoldered the land.63 Eventually, they were able to establish successful plantation agriculture, growing sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo, and cacao. Yet, Guiana had to complete agriculturally with the French possessions in the Caribbean, namely Saint-Domingue. By the time of the French Revolution, Guiana consisted of 1300 whites, 10,500 African slaves, and an unknown number of Indians.64 While Guiana was struggling to develop as a profitable colony, France was unknowingly progressing toward revolution, which would have an effect on all of its empire, including the religious. The National Assembly directly involved the colonies in the French Revolution with decrees in 1790. On March 8, the Assembly passed a decree giving each colony “the right to express its wishes regarding the constitution, laws, and administration appropriate to its prosperity and the good fortune of its inhabitants.”65 Each colony would submit plans to the National Assembly for approval. On March 28, the National Assembly issued instructions for elections to colonial assemblies and implementation of the March 8 decree. The two decrees arrived in French Guiana in July 1790. Eagerly, the inhabitants of Cayenne, without waiting for the rest of the colony, convened a Colonial Assembly on August 8, 1790. In response, the rest of the colonists protested, and the Guianese colony became tumultuous. As a result of the March decrees, the church also underwent political changes in the colony. The Colonial Assembly replaced the religious missions for the Indians with a civic mission, responsible for instructing the Indians—newly French citizens—of

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their civil rights and principles and the duties of society.66 The Colonial Assembly finally reported to France until July 1792. Yet, the decrees of March 1790 were not the only decisions made by the National Assembly to upset France’s Caribbean colonies. Revolutionary Church reforms also caused unrest within the French Atlantic. An ecclesiastical committee in Paris began drafting reforms for the Catholic Church in August 1789.67 In June 1790, the National Constituent Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The initial legislation divided the Catholic Church and separated the Church from the Revolution.68 On November 27, 1790, the Assembly passed a subsequent law requiring the clergy to swear an oath to the Civil Constitution. Consequently, it posed a threat to many French clergymen who were unwilling to take the clerical oath—those known as refractory or non-juring priests. The refractory clergy were no longer allowed to exercise the practices of the Church, and they were characterized as enemies of the Revolution. Although some non-jurors were able to flee France, many continued in their home country. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was not well received in French Guiana. Only six of the seventeen priests took the oath to the Civil Constitution.69 Mathieu Hérard, Spiritan priest in Iracoubo, became the voice of the refractory priests in Guiana. Early after the decree, it seemed that the Guianese non-juring priests would not experience any turmoil. In a letter in 1791, Hérard wrote, “I refused to take it [the oath]… and as there was no other priest to replace me, I was left peacefully in my post.”70 However, he only remained in his religious position for a short time. He could not be expected to instruct the Indians of their duties to French society if he refused to adhere to the revolutionary principles. In September 1792, civil commissioner Fréderic Guillot, new governor Charles Guillaume Vial d’Alais, and 750 soldiers arrived in French Guiana from France.71 By December 1792, the two civil leaders were already in opposition to one another, as Guillot accused d’Alais of yielding to the demands of the colonial leaders. As a result of the political dispute, the colonial authorities decided to no longer tolerate the refractory priests in Guiana. The Colonial Assembly declared that it would deport the priests to the United States, and they sent the decision to France for approval. In the meantime, in February 1793, the governor yet again gave the priests the option to take the oath or be deported.72 Hérard chose deportation from Guiana. Hérard went to Baltimore, Maryland. He arrived there with two other refractory priests, Charles Duhamel and

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John F. Moranvillé.73 Guianese refractory priests were not the only ecclesiastics in danger of deportation; their clerical counterparts in France suffered similar consequences. Although the Pope and French king rejected the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the consequences for refractory priests remaining in France increased rapidly over the course of a year from 1792 to 1793. In May 1792, the Legislative Assembly adopted legislation requiring the deportation of any priest to Guiana at the request of twenty citizens. Some priests took the oath to avoid the political consequences, and this act allowed the laity to enforce the Civil Constitution if they doubted the sincerity of a priest’s oath. The legislation appointed the gendarmerie to make arrests. An exception for deportation was possible for those ecclesiastics over the age of sixty or with disabilities. However, they were to report to the administrative center of their department, so they could be kept under surveillance.74 In August 1792, upon the proposal of Joseph Cambon, the legislation was revised to require the request of only six citizens, with a sentence of ten years imprisonment. The September Massacres took place in early September 1792, after the French learned that Verdun had fallen to the Prussians. The massacres were a preemptive reaction to fears of an invasion by counterrevolutionary powers. The revolutionaries executed approximately 1,200 previously imprisoned royalists, 240 of which were priests who had refused to take an oath to the constitution. By March 1793, all non-jurors were to be deported, without the need for any citizens’ requests. Despite the Assembly’s first uses of the punishment, the penalty of deportation was not specifically formulated for refractory priests in 1792. Deportation became an official form of punishment early in the French Revolution with the Penal Code of 1791. A constitutional committee drafted a new standard of punishments in September 1791. Foremost, the committee sought alternatives to capital punishment.75 Article I of the Penal Code stated, “The punishments that will be pronounced against defendants found guilty by the jury, are capital punishment, irons, imprisonment, embarrassment, detention, deportation, civic degradation, the iron collar.”76 Although the committee made deportation an official form of punishment, the members did not determine a location for deportees. In successive debates, representatives of various segments of society from French Guiana attempted to persuade the revolutionary governments to send deportees to the South American colony.

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Daniel Lescallier made an argument for the rehabilitation of the refractory priests in advocating for the colonization of French Guiana. Aware of the debates in France surrounding the new Penal Code, he cleverly prefaced his appeal. He wrote, “Several jurists are of the opinion to stop capital punishment, and to return to punishments of criminals useful for society; it is with this perspective that the party established the galleys.”77 Instead of imprisoning the criminals in France at the cost of French citizens, he believed deporting them to Guiana could actually produce a profit. He proposed a portion of French Guiana as the location to establish a controlled environment where the political convicts could raise animals and cultivate crops. He asserted the need to give the priests a “hope to return to society and the state of freedom,” but only after “several years of work.”78 His tenure as a governor of the colony from 1785 to 1788 no doubt gave his argument some considerable clout, but he was not the only former resident of Guiana to advocate for the colony. André Pomme, known as Pomme l’Américan, also devised a detailed plan to use the deported refractory priests to the benefit all of France’s empire. Similar to other former Guianese colonists, he believed that the deportees could be used to “contribute to the renewal of Guianese society” through raising animals for use in the Caribbean islands, as well as purify “continental France.” Perhaps, his plan may have been better received than others, because he was so specific. For example, he explained that December was the best time for deportation, because the rainy season was “the most favorable moment to acclimatize the Europeans.” He also accounted for the potential female prisoners, as not all clerics in France were male. He proposed the use of colored gendarmerie in guarding the detained priests, as well as an increase in the Guianese garrison.79 Pomme’s concepts for a penal colony were not unprecedented, as the French used similar methods in Louisiana and the English in Botany Bay Australia.80 Despite the precedents and the claims of the advocates on behalf of Guiana, the deputies of the Assembly debated the purpose of deportation for almost a year before the first deportations to Guiana. Perhaps, one of the biggest proponents of deportation was Michel Mathieu Lecointe-Puyraveau, who supported the penalty as early as 1791. In the debates preceding the decree in May 1792, he spoke in the Legislative Assembly. He stated, “To efficiently quell this type of disruption, of counter-revolutionaries that one calls unsworn priests; I maintain that

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we have only one option to take, only one resource remains for us, that is the deportation, and I say deportation of all indistinctly.”81 Similarly, Eustache Antoine Hua supported the deportation of priests. He asserted, “I begin by saying that in the political crisis which we are in, the nation has not had more dangerous enemies, more unrelenting than the priests…They have rekindled the torch of fanaticism, which a century of philosophy appeared to have extinguished forever.” Hua also believed that the priests were able to evade conventional punishments, so special measures had to be taken to punish them.82 However, not all of the members of the Assembly favored deportation. The strongest voice of opposition to deportation came from the constitutional clergy—those who had taken the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy—within the Assembly. Priest Chrétien Alexandre Demoy, Pierre Louis Ichon, and Bishop Pierre Pontard defended the refractory clergy in the debates in May 1792. Speaking against the severity of deportation, Demoy explained that distinctions needed to be made between those priests that disturbed “the order of society” and those that did not.83 When the Assembly erupted in disorder over his speech, Pontard demanded order amongst the deputies and Ichon defended Demoy’s right to present differing ideas.84 When another member of the Assembly requested that Demoy be heard, other members scoffed because it was a priest that asked.85 This episode demonstrated that the Constitutional clergy was not heard equally in the debates regarding deportation of refractory priests. Quite the contrary, it was treated as a secular issue to be made by secular officials. Interestingly, with all the debates in the assemblies, the financial realities of deportation were not taken before the appropriate committees until 1793. The finance and legislation committees of the Nation Convention reviewed the matter in March 1793. Transporting the priests cross the Atlantic to Guiana would cost millions of livres. The Convention decided to place at the disposal of the Minister of the Navy the required funds for deporting the priests.86 On April 23, 1793, the first group of refractory priests was finally deported to French Guiana. There are several possible explanations as to why the priests were not deported to the South American colony before April 1793. Foremost, if a penal colony was intended to rehabilitate the priests to return to society, Guiana needed to be stable. After the Revolution arrived in the colony, Guiana became as chaotic and disorderly at the metropole. It needed time to establish its own Colonial Assembly and report to France.87

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France was also at war with other European powers when the Assembly passed the decrees for deportation. It is possible that the wars were more central to their political and financial decisions. The debates over the purpose of deportation certainly contributed to the delay in carrying out the legislation. In addition, Louis XVI, who had opposed all the ecclesiastical legislations, was executed in January 1793, only months before the first deportations. There was also a shift in the political climate after his execution, and a new political party took control of the Convention. A combination of revolutionary factors contributed to impeding the deportation project. At this point in the Revolution, many priests had been deported to countries of their choosing or detained in coastal cities to await deportation to French Guiana. The main perspective missing from the Atlantic history of the deportations is those of the refractory priests deported. Priests deported to other areas left some historical documentation. Four coastal prisons—Lorient, Rochefort, Bordeaux, and Nantes— detained the refractory priests until France chose to deport them. Nantes deported imprisoned priests in September 1792. By the terms of the initial law of May 1792, each priest could be deported voluntarily by turning themselves over to the authorities within twenty-four hours and requesting a passport for a foreign country of their choice.88 The priests at Nantes chose Spain. Although they were given the choice of country for their deportation, the priests were not given many other liberties. For instance, they were prohibited from corresponding with their families. Some of their attempts to write letters home were intercepted. In December 1792, Jacques Soret wrote home complaining about his small allowance, despite the expensive area he lived in, and describing his lodgings with ten other priests.89 Leaving France voluntarily did not guarantee the priests any comforts, except for the promise of life. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the refractory priests who were involuntarily deported to Guiana as punishment were treated even worse than those who turned themselves into the Revolution.90

Conclusion While historians of the French Revolution have highlighted the importance of religion during the Revolution in France, they have failed to recognize the integral role of religious affiliation in France’s Caribbean colonies. The purpose of this chapter has been two-fold: to

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examine previously unknown elements of the Atlantic revolutionary ­experience and to highlight the role of religion in a supposedly secular revolutionary tradition. While Saint-Domingue underwent the French ­ and Haitian Revolutions, the Catholic religieux reacted to revolutionary ideas regarding their positions as well as the institution of slavery. The ­alliance between the religieux and the revolutionaries secured liberty and equality in Saint-Domingue, taking an active part in the political and social changes of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Following the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, the revolutionaries in France deported refractory priests to Guiana, hoping to rehabilitate the priests and further colonize the colonial space. At the same time, the Colonial Assembly in Guiana ordered the deportation of refractory priests from the colony to the United States and other French colonies. Comparing revolutionary events in French Guiana and Saint-Domingue offers unique perspectives into the French Revolutionary experience in an Atlantic context, the dialogue between metropole and colony, and the ability of the periphery to influence the core. France did not simply dictate to its colonies during the Revolution; there was a dialogue—delayed by months of transport across the Atlantic—which affected both. Therefore, it is imperative to study the religious history of French Revolution in an Atlantic context.

Notes



1. Two recent historians, Allyson Delnore and Miranda Spieler, address the deportations of the French Revolution in their works, but disregard the religious and revolutionary histories of French Guiana, nor have they adequately placed these histories in the context of the Haitian Revolution. Further, neither of these authors addresses the deportations from French Guiana during the French Revolution, which influenced the policies legislated in France. See Delnore, “Political Convictions: French Deportation Projects in the Age of Revolutions, 1789–1854” (Diss. University of Virginia, 2004); and Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 2. Adolphe Cabon, “Le Clergé de la Guyane sous la Révolution,” Revue d’histoire des colonies vol. 37 (1950), 173. 3.  George Amitheat Breathett, “Religious Missions in Colonial French Saint Domingue” (Ph.D. diss., State University of Iowa, 1954); J. M. Jan, Les Congrégations religieuses à Saint-Domingue, 1681–1793 (Portau-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1951); R. P. Joseph Janin, La Religion aux Colonies Française sous l’ancien régime (de 1626 à la Révolution)

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(Paris: D’Auteuil, 1942); and Sue Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions in the French Antilles, 1625-1800” French Historical Studies vol. 25, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 53–90. One exception is Laënnec Hurbon, “Church and Slavery in Saint-Domingue,” The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, Marcel Dorigny, ed. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003). 4.  Hurbon, “Church and Slavery in Saint-Domingue,” The Abolitions of Slavery. 5. Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (New York: Routledge, 1989). 6. John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History, vol. 25, no. 2 (1994): 147–167; Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” The Americas, vol. 44, no. 3 (1988): 261–278; and Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of the Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 7. Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’,” 66. 8. The Code noir, cited and translated in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents, Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 50. 9. “Séance du lundi 3 août 1789,” Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 recueil complet des débats, vol. 8 (Paris: Dupont, 1792–1894), 335. 10.  “Séance du lundi 12 juillet 1790,” Archives parlementaires, vol. 17, 50–51, 55–60. 11. Letters from P. Constantin, apostolic prefect of the Capuchin missions in Northern Saint-Domingue, 3 July 1790 and 7 October 1790, Ms. 1970 B, Bibliothèque Franciscaine des Capucins. 12. “Séance du samedi 27 novembre 1790, au soir,” Archives parlementaires, vol. 21, 74–81. 13. Janin, La religion aux antilles françaises sous l’Ancien régime, 225–226. In the years preceding the French Revolution, Capuchins and Dominicans had similar numbers of representatives in Saint-Domingue. In comparing a range of sources, Sue Peabody concludes that there were twentyfive Dominicans in 1773 and twenty-one Capuchins in 1785, as well as ten other clergy representing other orders or serving as secular priests.

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67

However, these calculations do not include the nuns in Cap Français, who were under Capuchin authority. Though it is possible the overall figures changed by 1790, with religious authority divided in the island between the two dominant orders, it is likely the Capuchins and Dominicans attempted to maintain balanced representation. In regards to the French Revolution, if Dominicans refused to take the Oath, considering Peabody’s calculations, nearly half of the clergy in Saint-Domingue were non-juring. Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’,” 73. 14.  Jean Claude Paul Dessirier de Rignosot, Dossiers du Tribunal Révolutionnaire, W138, Archives Nationales de France [hereafter cited as AN]. 15. Ibid. 16.  “Extrait des registres des délibérations de l’assemblée provinciale du Nord. Séance du 20 mai 1790 au soir,” cited in J. M. Jan, Les Congrégations religieuses à Saint-Domingue, 1681–1793 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1951), 174. 17. Dessirier, W138, AN. 18. “Du Cap-Français, Mercredi, 8 du courant, le clergé s’est présente chez le citoyen Gouverneur général, pour lui rendre ses hommages, le citoyen Cibot, curé, a prononcé les discours suivant,” Affiches Américaines, 13 May 1793, 76. 19. In addition to King Louis XVI’s execution for treason in January 1793 and the September Massacres of counterrevolutionaries in 1792, priests within the French empire had faced deportation for not taking the Oath since May 1792. See “Séance du dimanche 27 mai 1792” and “Séance du mercredi 30 mai 1792, au soir,” Archives parlementaires, vol. 44, 156–157, 348; “Séance du mercredi 1 août 1792, au matin,” Archives parlementaires, vol. 47, 367–368; Alfred Lallie, La Déportation des Prêtres Emprisonnes à Nantes, 8-15 Septembre 1792, Eugene Lafoyle, ed. Revue de l’Ouest (Vannes: [np], 1888), p. 3; and Adolphe Cabon, “Le Clergé de la Guyane sous la Révolution,” Revue d’histoire des colonies vol. 37 (1950), 181–182. 20. Ibid., 76. 21. M. François Ouvière, 2 June 1792, Archives parlementaires, vol. 44, 494. 22. Anonymous, Précis de la révolution de Saint-Domingue, depuis la fin de 1789, jusqu’au 18 juin 1794 (Philadelphia: Imprimerie de Parent, 1795), 153. 23. Pierre Pinchinat to Julien Raimond, 9 April 1792, in Correspondance de Julien Raimond, avec ses frères, de Saint-Domingue, et les pièces qui lui ont été adressées par eux (Paris: Imprimerie du Cercle Social, 1793), 65. 24. Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 21.

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25. Fick, The Making of Haiti, 121. While a concordat is usually an agreement reached with the Church, in this case, it was used to describe a union between races. 26. M. Grouvel, Faits historiques sur St.-Domingue, depuis 1786 jusqu’en 1805 (Paris: Renard et Delauny, 1814), 30. 27. Fick, The Making of Haiti, 128. 28. Anonymous, Précis de la révolution de Saint-Domingue, 153. 29. Lieutenant-Général Baron Pamphile de Lacroix, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue, (Paris: Pillet Ainé, 1820), 142; Pamphile de Lacroix, La révolution de Haïti, ed. Pierre Pluchon (Paris: Karthala, 1995), 498. 30. Romaine Rivière and Colonel General Elie to Abbé Ouvière, 24 October 1791, DXXV 110, AN. 31. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 263. 32.  Affiches Americaines, 10 May 1793, 69, ADXXA 6, AN. 33. Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, L’Ancienne Cathédrale de Port-au-Prince: Perspectives d’un Vestige de Carrefours (Port-au-Prince: Editions Henri Deschamps, 1991), 50. 34. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 125. 35. Pamphile de Lacroix, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution, 147. 36. J. Ph. Garran, Rapport sur les Troubles de Saint-Domingue, fait au nom de la Commission des Colonies, des Comités de Salut Public, de Législation et de Marine, réunis vol. II (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1796), 312. 37. “A Priest Who Stayed with the Insurgents: The Interrogation of the Abbé de la Haye, curé of Dondon,” “Interrogation of 1 December 1793,” DXXV 5, AN, translated and printed Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 160. 38. Yves Benot, Les lumières, l’esclavage, la colonisation (Paris: Edition la Découverte, 2005), 240. 39. Michel Etienne Descourtilz, Histoire des désastres de Saint-Domingue, précédée d’un tableau de régime et des progrès de cette colonies, depuis sa fondation, jusqu’a l’époque de la révolution française (Paris: Chez Garnery, 1795), 262–630. 40.  In his appended biographical index, Pierre Pluchon identifies Abbé Delahaye as aumônier to Biassou, La Révolution in Haïti, 484. 41. “A Priest Who Stayed with the Insurgents” in Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 163, 159. 42. “Armée du Nord,” Le Moniteur général de la partie française de SaintDomingue, 31 January 1793, vol. III, 76, 303. 43. Abbé de la Porte to Larchevesque-Thibault, 25 May 1792, printed in Jean-Charles Benzaken, “Lettre d’un curé dans une zone contrôlée par

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69

les esclaves révoltés,” Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe, no. 205 (JulyAugust 2007), 5261. 44. Jean-Francois and Biassou to the Commissioners, December 12 & 21, 1791, Folder 4, #6 & 14, DXXV 1, AN, translated and printed in Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 99–102. 45. Abbé de la Porte to Larchevesque-Thibault, Généalogie et Historie, 5261. 46. Ibid. 47. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 146. 48. Felix Carteau, Soirées Bermudiennes, ou Entretiens sur les événemens qui ont opéré la ruine de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Bordeaux: Chez Pellier-Lawalle, 1802), 82. 49. Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 165, 171; Elizabeth Colwill, “‘Fêtes de l’Hymen, Fêtes de la Liberté’: Marriage, Manhood, and Emancipation in Revolutionary SaintDomingue,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, David P. Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 128–129, 148 no. 21. 50. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 157. 51. Popkin, You Are All Free, 258–259. 52. Popkin, You Are All Free, 259. 53.  La Révolution in Haïti, 484. 54. Carteau, Soirées Bermudiennes, 82. 55. Descourtilz, Histoire des désastres de Saint-Domingue, 263. 56. Delnore, “Political Convictions,” 49. 57. Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 31. 58. Cabon, “Le Clergé de la Guyane sous la Révolution,” 174. 59. David Lowenthal, “Colonial Experiments in French Guiana, 1760–1800” Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 32, no. 1 (February, 1952), 24. 60.  Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 157; Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History: A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, John Michael Francis and Will Kaufman, eds. (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 607–610. 61. Redfield, Space in the Tropics, 32. 62.  Lowenthal, “Colonial Experiments in French Guiana, 1760–1800,” 32, 22. 63. Ibid., 37–38. 64. Ibid., 41.

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65. “Decree of the National Assembly,” in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents, Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, eds. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), 71. 66. Cabon, “Le Clergé de la Guyane sous la Révolution,” 175–176. 67. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 139. 68. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 353. 69. H. Koren, Les Spiritans: Trois Siècles d’histoire religieuse et missionnaire: histoire de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit (Paris: Beauchesne, 1982), 125, 128. 70.  Monsieur Herard, 2 June 1791, quoted in Cabon, “Le Clergé de la Guyane sous la Révolution,” 177. 71. Cabon, “Le Clergé de la Guyane sous la Révolution,” 179. 72. “Aux prêtres réfractaires de la Guyane. Ordre de quitter la Guyane, s’ils persistent dans leur refus de prêter serment et dans la poursuite de leur apostolat,” 28 février 1793, C/14/70 F˚76v, Archives nationales d’outre mer [hereafter cited as ANOM]; Cabon, “Le Clergé de la Guyane sous la Révolution,” 181–182. 73. St. Mary’s Seminary & University Archives in Baltimore holds papers for each of these Spiritan priests. 74. Alfred Lallié, La Déportation des Prêtres Emprisonnes à Nantes, 8-15 Septembre 1792, Eugene Lafoyle, ed. Revue de l’Ouest (Vannes: [np], 1888), 3. 75. Gordon Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty: Two Centuries of the Crime Problem in France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 30. 76. Assemblée nationale constituante, Titre II, Article I, Décret concernant le code pénal du 25 septembre 1791 (Paris: Imprimeur nationale, 1791). 77. Daniel Lescallier, Exposé des moyens de mettre en valeur et d’administrer la guiane, orné de deux cartes (Paris, Buisson, 1791), 194. 78. Lescallier, Exposé des moyens de mettre en valeur et d’administrer la guiane, 195. 79. Pomme L’Américain au ministre, “Ils renouvellent leurs demandes précédentes, rappellent les conditions frauduleuses de la vente de l’habitation des Épiceries à La Fayette. Lieu de déportation des prêtres réfractaires. Possibilité de fonder un centre de culture florissant en leur adjoignant d’autres déportés. Construction de logements pour ceux-ci, pour les nègres de l’habitation de Saint-Régis (La Fayette) et du Montjoli (comte d’Orsay et Colincourt),” C/14/69 F˚98, ANOM. 80. For more on these other penal colonies, see Lescallier, Exposé des moyens de mettreenvaleur et d’administrer la guiane, 194; Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999),

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xxi, 11–12; and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 5. 81.  Michel Mathieu Lecointe-Puyraveau, Archives Parlementaires, 16 May 1792, vol. XLIII (Paris: Dupont, 1893). 82. Eustache Antoine Hua, Opinion de M. Hua députée Seine et Oise, sur la déportation des prêtres dissidents (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1792), 1. 83. Chrétien Alexandre Demoy, Archives Parlementaires, 16 May 1792, vol. XLIII (Paris: Dupont, 1893). 84. Pierre Louis Ichon, Archives Parlementaires, 16 May 1792, vol. XLIII (Paris: Dupont, 1893). 85.  Archives Parlementaires, 16 May 1792, vol. XLIII (Paris: Dupont, 1893). 86.  Archives Parlementaires, 24 July 1793, vol. LXIX (Paris: Dupont, 1893). 87.  “A la commission intermédiaire. Motifs de son retard à sanctionner l’arrêté concernant la déportation des prêtres réfractaires (insuffisance du délai accordé, incertitude sur les limites fixées). Danger de la déportation en Guyane de prêtres insermentés venant de France. Demande d’envoi du décret de la Convention nationale relatif à ceux-ci,” 1 avril 1793, C/14/70 F˚79, ANOM. 88. Lallié, La Déportation des Prêtres Emprisonnes à Nantes, 13. 89. Jacques Soret, quoted in Lallié, La Déportation des Prêtres Emprisonnes à Nantes, 14. 90. For example, deportees to French Guiana were expected to engage in at least three years of labor on public works. See “Décret manuscrit de la Convention nationale réglant la situation des déportés à la Guyane (vers 1793),” C/14/89 no. 42.

Secularization by Stealth? Émigrés in Britain During the French Revolution Kirsty Carpenter

Around 30,000 French citizens left their country during the Revolution for reasons of fear, persecution and for protection against violence perpetrated by the State and sought refuge Britain.1 Emigration was not solely defined by its religious character, but it involved a physical movement away from the French Catholic Church with its established traditions, places and practices of worship that animated Ancien Regime society.2 This rupture was enacted more dramatically in emigration than in any other part of French society because émigrés left their known surroundings and became “refugees” as those who remained in France did not. Though some went to Spain and Portugal, émigrés did not exclusively choose to seek shelter in Catholic countries.3 Émigrés furthermore were activists‚ and their departure was a protest against the lack of moderation that saw them subject to confiscations and slapped with death penalties. For the clergy emigration was an apprenticeship in individualism, and for women who left France usually not expecting to be away for years, the Church proved its inability to live up to a role that was conferred upon it by society. The stark reality of emigration undermined the trust that was K. Carpenter (*)  Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_4

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placed in the Church by right—just as the escape to Varennes opened the door to a questioning of the King.4 Laicization or secularization crept in by stealth. Whether it was particular to emigration or whether it was just an affirmation of the trends in French society that culminated in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and later the Concordat is open to debate, but the religious situation in France in this era has largely been considered without the experience of the émigrés incorporated into that picture. It must be remembered that Catholic teachings had underpinned the education of the lay émigrés as well as the clergy, and it is necessary to consider the extent to which being staunchly Royalist and Catholic were undermined because by the end of the emigration being a constitutional royalist or a bonapartist could mean having a pragmatic attachment to the Catholic Church. Emigration particularly in Britain, even more than Revolution, created a sudden rupture in religious practices integrally associated with the French political elite. Distance, alienation from the Catholic polity with its authoritarian family traditions, and contact with British protestant religions, reset the norms in this micro-émigré society to nearly naught.5 The Revolution had begun a process that, whether by design or accident, had sparked a decline in the public sympathy for Catholicism. (This can be seen in the cahiers de doléances.)6 Conflict between the political strands of Catholicism, patriotism, and revolution added to a sense of complete dislocation and skepticism.7 This process arguably was in motion when the Revolution began, but the meeting of the vast majority of the émigré French with the Protestants of Britain made the Catholic French more aware of the ceremonial excesses inherent in their own religious practices.8 Emigration initiated a questioning of the relevance or even the functional necessity of religion that would foreshadow debates in the nineteenth century and emancipation for women.9 It threw up the question: “Did a Catholic French person need to practice the observances prescribed by the Church or even in a Church in order to be a good French Catholic or priest?” The answer was “no” if they had reasonable cause not to perform the rites of their faith. Documents concerning clerical conduct, like the one issued by the Bishop of Saint Pol de Leon, attempted to define the role of the Catholic French clergy in Britain, and address the lack of rules in the new place.10 In this way a provisionally-reformed variant of Catholicism was created reflecting not only the new laws and norms, but also the emotional fragility of that exile society.

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The emigration and the dispersal of the French around Europe and to the United States to escape life-threatening danger (or danger that they perceived to be life-threatening then became so after March 28, 1793) played a key role in this process of secularization.11 The émigrés were not persecuted for their religion per se, but for their absence from France and associated support for the Counter Revolution. Religion, that is part of the contemporary definition of a refugee, was not specified in the émigré legislation as a reason that the émigré was persecuted or condemned to death.12 And in the motivations for emigration, religion did not feature as prominently as might be expected—reasons to emigrate usually focused on the need to serve the King in the armies of the Counter Revolution, or on financial hardship as court pensions were discontinued and poverty set in among the elite. Only the clergy were persecuted directly for their religion, and that was due to their refusal to swear the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (that made the ecclesiastics paid servants of the State). The vast majority of those who arrived in Britain were not carrying weapons and many were women, children, elderly people, or clergy. This was the civilian society that had to wait out the storm hoping to return to their homes, and live their lives under conditions free from persecution by law or life-threatening danger with little recourse to justice. But the question should be asked is, “Why was religion not a more prominent part of the émigré lifestyle?”

Improvisation and Alienation From the outset, emigration meant leaving behind all that was regular and fixed with a hope that it would be re-established in the new place circumstances permitting. Invariably, the assumptions that the émigrés made were very far from the reality that transpired. The émigrés of the aristocracy left France hoping for an absence of months, but most of them stayed six to ten years. This meant that the premises under which they embarked on their voyages meant very little as time went on, and what did not change and adapt, became redundant almost irrelevant under the altered circumstances. Improvisation was crucial for a society unused to change, and creative solutions in the face of impending doom became imperative. An improvised, stubborn, and individual or family response to a government that émigrés did not wish to support, led them to try to escape what they feared the new regime would do to them or deprive them of in terms of property and rights.

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Protestant Britain, a country where the Catholic religion had been prescribed for generations, underscored the haphazard nature of the émigrés choice of asylum. The fact that Britain could be easily accessed from the Northern coast of France made the question of its official religion one of minor significance in the bid to escape persecution. This is typical of population displacements of today where it can plainly be seen that while religious or political opinion and morality might have been what led individuals to oppose a government, the subsequent events overtook the importance of belief or origins in the struggle that ensued.13 Once outside France, issues of survival both financial and physical became paramount. Many émigrés were not robust, and the women used to displaying a fashionably delicate health were unused even to breast-feeding their own children, let alone doing their own housework and laundry. We find in the novels and literature of emigration the frequent expression of loneliness—most famously by Madame de Staël: Travelling is no matter what one says, one of the saddest pleasures of life. When you find yourself happy in whatever foreign town, it is because you begin to make yourself a home there; but to pass through unknown countries, to hear a language that you scarcely understand, to see human faces that have no link to your past or your future, that is solitude and isolation without rest or dignity.14

Travel without desire or a happy destination to go to could be a depressingly sober business that inspired little joy and even much sorrow as distance swept the émigrés far from friends and relations. Alienation also had an urban aspect attached to it that is suggested in the above quote and commonly identified with eighteenth century London.15 Loneliness was at its most acute when arriving at a town because the French émigrés would previously have expected to be received or greeted by friends. In emigration another town meant another frustrating search for lodgings that might suit a straightened budget and a family unused to privation. That would invariably mean a lesser level of comfort to what they had been accustomed to in Paris prior to the Revolution. It meant eating ordinary food off rough crockery at Inns and subjecting themselves to the open scrutiny of strangers. This sadness is recorded by Madame de Souza in her novel Eugénie et Mathilde: Monsieur de Revel and his family arrived at the Inn with an impression of sadness that they had not ever experienced before. Not a single domestic

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servant, and Monsieur de Revel was obliged to attend to everything, to oversee himself the settling of each person.16

The words “tristesse,” “chagrin,” and “peine” pepper the travel accounts of the period, and are redirected from a spiritual usage to a temporal reality. There was little joy in this travel of a forced nature and much hardship compared to the luxurious way these émigrés were used to travelling. In this sense, alienation was alienation from country, local life and familiar society, friends and from the God of that civilized and privileged life. There are few accounts of émigrés stopping to worship on their travels or even to visit churches something that frequently happened during voyages prior to the Revolution. More than just the urban aspect of loneliness, alienation was ­furthered by legislation when the Aliens Act passed in Britain at the beginning of 1793 as much to control the feared Jacobin conspiracy as to restrict the émigrés.17 This led to a degree of separation of the French from the local community and within the French community—it meant separation according to British location and administration. This act required the émigrés to report their residential address to the municipality and seek a passport if they wanted to move around. This was particularly arduous for the clergy who often took church services in neighboring towns.18 The émigrés were not free, and they had to obey these laws that followed them from their arrival because ship captains had to provide lists of their passengers. They had to hand over any arms and munitions and could not leave the port without a passport from the mayor or a magistrate indicating the town to which he or she was going. Once there, an émigré had to report to local authorities where he or she received a new passport allowing them to reside in that area. Émigrés also had to stay in designated areas. These regions were not specified in the legislation, but they had to live within fifty miles of Cornhill and ten miles from ports or coasts. Their lodgings could be inspected for firearms. Charles James Fox and a minority group thought these measures excessive, but the majority of the parliamentary body and the British were swayed by the argument of necessity in time of war, and imposed them for the safety of the émigrés. All these measures tended to make the émigrés keep to their lodgings, and to their French enclaves in British society, like Soho or Marylebone, Somerstown, and Saint George’s Fields. There was an aspect of suspended animation in all places where the French settled. The

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emigration was expected to be temporary, and their residence in Britain, not to last as it did until the Peace of Amiens in 1802 or later until 1815. The stories of emigration impress the resilience and humor displayed by the émigrés. Whether drawn from the newspapers of London, or the Courrier de l’Europe, information was usually second hand. Chateaubriand’s19 accounts of starving as an émigré in London are famous.20 Talleyrand was less inconvenienced and continued to entertain his friends lavishly writing of having eighteen to twenty persons sit down to the table, including women, like the princesse d’Hénin, Mme de Poix, Mme de La Luzerne, and Adélaïde de Flahaut.21 Social barriers fell away too, particularly where talent was concerned. Whether it was an obscure aristocrat tossing the salad at parties for a fee, or Mlle Mérelle, who was admitted to the circle of the elite on the strength of her singing, promotion by merit was, by 1794, operating and changing the composition of the French elite in Britain. Individuals who would not have hoped to rub shoulders in Paris salons were doing so in this more cosmopolitan society. The invitation lists of the Marquis of Lansdowne feature an increasing diversity of French guests in this period, as do the invited guests at Juniper Hall.22 But the over-riding preoccupation was to fill the gap until such a time when they would be able to be free to return to France, and to live without the constraints of emigration.23 In that, all émigrés, male and female, rich and poor were psychologically in the same predicament. More than anything else, the experience of emigration was an experience of alienation through foreignness, boredom, and waiting to take up again the routines of their daily life as they so well remembered and imagined them. The drudgery of long days passed trying to retain a semblance of their old life became more and more difficult as time went by and resources became inadequate. Many of the coping mechanisms were developed with a two-fold objective—to make some much needed cash, and to help the time to pass. Émigrés hoped to return to France; they were not tourists, but refugees waiting for the war to be over. They longed to return freely to their own familiar places, and to take up the lives (and the religion that had fitted into, and been a context for that former life). In regard to many women’s memoires, what strikes the reader is the lack of comment about religious affairs or mention of worship. Most aristocratic female émigrés had had their world shaped by an education that was embedded in a religious framework “emphasising spiritual

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perfection via self-sacrifice and altruism” and designed to make them malleable as marriage partners and to accept their lesser rights.24 It inclined them to respect decisions made by fathers and husbands, but when circumstances in emigration were so bad, the wisdom of the decisions taken was questioned, and with that, the wisdom that gave such complete powers to both men and clergy. The decisions to emigrate on the basis that they had no other choice (or saw no possibility of a different political solution) aggravated the situation. In many cases women emigrated only to have their husbands and sons leave to serve with French regiments abandoning them to survive as best they could in places like Saint George’s Fields that were totally foreign to them. In Madame de Souza’s novel that presents itself as the non-fiction “Mémoires de la famille du Comte de Revel,” the heroine “Eugénie” had been locked up in a convent from a young age by her father. Liberated by the Revolutionary legislation in 1790, she emigrated with her family only to acknowledge that the decisions made by her father (whom she would not criticize) were responsible for her greatest obstacle to finding personal happiness i.e., her vows to the Church. Eugénie, the only family member capable of hard manual work in emigration, works herself into an early grave providing for the parents who had treated her so poorly as a family member in the first place. She saves them financially by marrying her sister Mathilde—the widow of a Vendéan war hero—to the wealthy Polish count who had fallen in love with her (Eugénie). This kind of irony is thrown up again and again. The price of faith in men and in the Church was misery or death for women, and the women became fed up with male mismanagement. For women, the hardships of emigration were enough to test the foundations of their religious convictions. Women like the clergy had to adapt, and this can be seen in the vast reduction of, not only levels of lifestyle, but also menial tasks that they had to perform for themselves that they had not necessarily been used to doing prior to their emigration. Madame de Falaiseau, for example, enjoyed 50,000 livres before the Revolution, managed on 6000 francs the year before her emigration and on eight francs per day by 1807 with no servants.25 Among the trials for women were dealing with ill health and pregnancy, and often these were exacerbated by living in areas of London like Saint George’s Fields that were cold and damp even in summer. Many women were faced with situations where they could neither heat their rooms, nor feed their

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families. Elderly women also struggled to look after husbands with war wounds, and help, if it came at all, often came late. The worst cases of female distress came at the time of the Quiberon disaster when an aristocratic woman died as a result of childbirth in Saint George’s Fields much to the horror of the British Ladies who immediately went into action. However, the telling aspect of this female distress was how very unable to do anything significant the French Catholic clergy were. They could not collect for them, or help these women whose existence they barely knew about. They were themselves dependent on British government aid that was constantly reduced by reviews of the relief lists after 1795. Never had an exiled society found itself with less access to support than the women émigrés in Britain after 1795. They coped with immeasurable hardship and grief many of them having lost their male family members sometimes husbands, brothers, and sons. Even those who had powerful English friends were reluctant to importune them, and to take on debts they could not hope to repay. The comtesse de Péysac wrote to William Windham in English: I have to subsist, I and three children nothing else than my husband’s pay of which you know the scantiness to the number of my family and comparatively to the dearness of everything in England. I do not request any pecuniary assistance tho’ being emigrated since four years my means of subsistance are become exceedingly short, I only request your goodness to see to enable me to employ usefully for my family the advantage which I have from a good education, sole wealth which I possess now. I am able to teach musick, viz both singing and piano forte, french tongue and embroyderie and other pretty works suitable for young ladies and I should be very deserving to find some scholars for one or other of these branches. I hope that you will excuse the present step which I take having no other title to claim your assistance and in the promoting of this business than what my misfortune gives me with any feeling mind.26

The failure of the Quiberon mission involved the loss of all émigré men taken prisoner (executed because they were subject to the émigré laws if caught on French soil).27 The scale of the human tragedy led the Comte de Botherel to write by 1802 of “exhausted men and dying women, unhealthy children; the lack of food and necessary clothing and the other necessities of life have destroyed our force and our health—we have lost in your armies our sons and brothers, our sailors—our sons who died for the cause of the King and for whom the work sustained us. We have

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absorbed the cost to our last resources and in their place remains only debts.”28 Yet even he cited first and foremost the desire to be faithful to the throne, and talks of faithfulness without limits. Madame de Staël later wrote in De la litérature that “The fanaticism of religion or politics were responsible for horrible excesses” and she (though protected by her Swiss and Swedish nationality) had been a first-hand witness to the distress of many of her French friends.29 Women had good reason to feel aggrieved. They had fought for their families and the men to whom they were attached by close family relations, but found little support as recompense for their assiduousness or sacrifices, and were often left without the men who went into emigration with them. Others like Madame de Flahaut/Souza emigrated alone while her husband tried to save family property and went to the guillotine. In this way many women also took the “chemin de l’honneur” believing in the protests being made by their (family) stance, and it is relevant that contemporary studies stress “migration as an act of heroism” on the part of women.30 Some émigrés did not want to remain in Paris once their financial circumstances were distressed. What is striking is the lack of mention of prayer, or worship in the women’s diaries of emigration where they detail day-to-day life. Is this because it did not need to be mentioned or because it was simply not happening anymore? It is a question that is hard to answer based on the evidence that remains. But it can be certain that those who went back to France and lived under the restored monarchy like Madame de Souza denied that they had ever questioned the place of moderate religious ideas and conformed to a social etiquette that accommodated Catholic observance. “A letter later recounts her mock-relief at how Madame de Genlis had written that she had not ever written anything against religion or against social mores, and comments ‘C’est beau cela! Comme si une femme qui se respecte ne pouvait faire autrement.”31 The bitterness is clearly there in her novels towards the extreme sentiments religious or political that had led to emigration—in La comtesse de Fargy Blanche wrote, “Oh how this word solitude brings back bitter memories for me.” (Ah que ce mot de solitude réveille en moi d’amers souvenirs!) And on motherhood: “Oh you cannot know how much a mother who loves intensely suffers pains that she does not dare to complain about.” (Ah! Vous ne savez pas ce qu’une mère qui aime avec attention, souffre de peines dont elle n’ose se plaindre.) In her last novel, motherhood is an exercise in suffering, anxiety and exile.32

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The clergy in particular were good at clubbing together to combat loneliness, and some enjoyed the enforced leisure to spend their days in prayer and study.33 They could adapt better than most to communal living, and find solace in the company of their peers. There were also those who welcomed labor of a physical kind, and French priests could be seen working at building the King Street chapel “digging the foundations, carrying the bricks, sawing the wood—a curious sight were their shovel hats and their black and white bands—all chatting gaily in their native tongue.”34 But, in general, they kept themselves to themselves and were not in contact with French lay community, and some were lodged in the King’s House at Winchester and other places outside London. In London, they founded the publishing bookshops of Dulau and Deboffe in Soho and published works of devotion like Abbé Caron’s Pensées Ecclésiastiques as well as more political doctrines and Abbé Barruel his Histoire du clergé pendant la Révolution française. This period of war saw the flourishing of opinion, and of publishing that only increased under the restored monarchy enriched by the writings of a much wider spectrum of authors from a much wider cross-section of society including women. This was also reflected in musical tastes and diverse pastimes that had previously been seen as corrupting influences, so that novels or work for priests, women and children, ceased to be unusual. So much so the Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon even had to warn the clergy against theatregoing and public amusements or prolonged stays at the inns and being out at night: qu’aucun prêtre Français puisse se permettre ni la fréquentation des théâtres ni celle d’aucun divertissement public, où leur présence deviendrait un sujet de scandale; mais ils doivent encore savoir que les mœurs Anglaises ne seraient d’accord ni avec des promenades prolongées tant soit peu avant dans la nuit, ni avec de longues séances dans le Auberges où il pourraient se trouver obligés de prendre leurs repas, et auxquelles il est bien à souhaiter qu’ils puissent se dispenser de recourir, ni enfin avec des courses dans les rues après la nuit tombante.35

All this helped to encourage the French clergy to stay away from places and people who might misinterpret their actions, and it is relevant that there were very few examples of misdemeanors that could be found by parties wishing to cast a slur on the conduct of the clergy—and for that the Bishop of Saint Pol was very much responsible.36

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Logistical Divisions By the time the French arrived, the logistics of Catholic worship in Britain were running against the Catholic French. The number of Catholic chapels in Britain made the continuation of worship problematic. Upon arrival in Britain the French used existing chapels in private homes put at their disposal and those in the Embassies. Abby Tardy’s manual for the French in London in 1800 listed seven Catholic Chapels, and none of these chapels had existed prior to the French arrival. Several of them (St Mary’s Chelsea, St Louis St George’s Fields, and the Chapel of the Annunciation in King Street, Portman Square) were built using the free labor of the clergy and other French refugees.37 The Abbé Baston wrote in his memoires that upon his arrival the number of Catholic chapels was so few and the number of the clergy so great, that they would have been reduced to not saying mass had it not been for permission to celebrate it in private chapels and improvised circumstances: Many Catholics had in their homes shrines obtained during the persecutions and for which the permissions had not been revoked. They were very happy to give us the use of them.38

While the English Catholics helped the French clergy, they too were reticent. The French clergy were in many cases were ordinary middle-aged men, and struggling to cope with the changes with which they had been faced, and understanding very little of the complex Catholic culture of the country that they had been thrown into by their rapid escape. In the light of the September Massacres, they were grateful to be alive, to have escaped persecution and were willing to work for their keep and help the Catholic Church in Britain. Yet, they were blithely unaware that their very presence threatened the English Catholics with the French Gallican ideas that the English vicars apostolic wanted to down play in order to allay the general unease in the English population about Catholicism. The French were unaware that Catholics in Britain until their arrival and the passage of the Catholic Relief Act of 1791 conducted their religion behind bolted doors or and in attics with admission only by password.39 And the last thing that the English Catholic priests would have done was to wear their clerical dress in public. The English Catholic clergy had lived a clandestine life for fear of discovery and prosecution, and despite

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the Act removing the penal crimes associated with practicing their faith, it was hard to go from that to seeing the French clergy wearing their habits in the street for lack of other cloths to put on, and no appreciation of why the English Catholics though it unusual.40 The same when they congregated to talk of affairs in France and friends, on the street outside the house of the Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon.41 This kind of public Catholicism was an anathema to the English Catholics and to the English non-Catholics it was a sort of peep-show into the religious world that had been hidden from them. Thus, the French found themselves somewhere between an embarrassment to the English Catholic Church, and a useful source of extra clergy outside the capital when there were marked shortages. There were, of course, great contrasts also between the comfort and ease of the English clergymen and the distress of the exiled French arrivals so “reasserting traditional religious and cultural values became an essential means of protecting the integrity of traditional social institutions.”42 As a result, two quite separate Catholic cultures emerged, “the one native and introverted, barely tolerated by the government, the other, foreign and French-centered, pensioned by the State.”43 The divisions of French society into clergy and laity were made so much more permanent in exile by the way the relief effort was organized and formalized when the relief payments were taken over by the British government in 1794. Separate charitable groups had come together to help the clergy, and initially there was reticence to mix the fate of the laity with that of the clergy for fear that the British public would be less sympathetic and less inclined to fund French émigrés who had belonged to the formerly privileged classes. This separation had its origin in the fact that two separate committees were formed to deal with relief to the clergy and the laity. Issues around the Civil Constitution of the Clergy became evident because French clergy who had sworn the oath had to apply for relief through the lay committee. So in the period from 1792 to 1800, when there were approximately 5000 clergy and a similar number of lay French receiving relief of a shilling-a-day in Britain, there were two separate channels of communication for that relief. There were still no organized social services for the émigrés until the arrival of the Abbé Caron from Jersey and his activities in Somerstown after 1797 where he created schools and homes for the elderly that did begin to bridge the divide between the clergy and the laity. The two major figures of the

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relief effort Jean-François de la March, the Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon, and the Abbé Caron themselves organized most of the relief in kind to the émigré French. From as early as late 1791 the Bishop of Saint Pol had accounts that he could dispose of at his discretion and clothes were deposited at his lodgings at No. 10 Queen Street.44 He was the architect of the charitable relief effort, and almost single-handedly took charge of the pastoral welfare of the ecclesiastics arriving in London. His skills and leadership were recognized by the British government who left him in charge with the help of a French Committee of the distribution of the relief after it had taken over the relief payments. But the Bishop had very fixed ideas about how the relief should operate, and what the role of the clergy should be in Britain as can be seen in the way he approached issues of finding teachers for the Penn School.45 He was controlling partly because he had to be, but his age and health were inclined to make him dogmatically conservative despite his legendary sympathy and preparedness to help. Many of the relief problems flowed from him asking the government for only the most modest of sums, and struggling to provide for all the needy who flowed into London. His battles are recorded in the records of the relief committee. These battles were fierce and militant‚ and they turned his role into one that was far more political and diplomatic than anything that he might have done as a Bishop in provincial France. When he was battling for £3750 for 2295 people at the limits of survival at the end of 1795 (an increase from 3000), he addressed a letter to William Pitt, saying, “I know how to sacrifice my time and the pleasures of life, my health even to my unfortunate compatriots, but I don’t know how to harden my heart against the spectacle always recurring of their awful misery, and when I can respond only with a sterile compassion judge how cruel is my fate.”46 He designed the methods and the system of distribution used by the Wilmot Committee, and he enjoyed the confidence of the French community and the British government. He was the humanitarian organizer at the centre of the relief effort coordinating all monies to refugees that flowed on into the two committees for distribution. And while he was not consciously moving away from his role as a Bishop, the business of distributing the relief left him little time to be preoccupied with religion other than in a private sphere. The Bishop of Saint Pol (known as the archangel of emigration by his fellow bishops) would not have seen a distinction in his role as Bishop and his role as a humanitarian leader, but in

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fact that there was one was significant and evident in the organized way he approached the job of making sure the French were the recipients of “secours.”47 It is relevant too that while he was already sixty at the time of his emigration by the he returned to France only to live out his life in retirement. What is important to note is that with the exception of those members of the clergy organized into committees, the larger body of the clergy became indistinguishable from powerless ordinary émigrés. They had lost the empire that they once had over the spiritual life of their parishioners. The clergy more importantly still had no answer or explanation to offer for the horrors of Revolution, the bloodthirsty executions of the Terror and Counter-Revolution or the death of Louis XVI much lamented in Britain. The Abbé Jean-Baptiste Cléry, former valet de chamber of the King, wrote his account—the journal of what happened in the Temple Prison—that was cried over by Frances Burney and many others.48 The clergy retired into themselves, worked and wrote as did the likes of Madame de Flahaut, the authoress. They were not able most of them to do other than wait out the exile, and the administrative isolation was very fundamental in creating an institutionalized helplessness among the clergy. The emotional toll of emigration was cumulative, and the one thing that unified all French exiles of the Revolution, their Catholic religion, became subject to severe utilitarian and secular constraints. The sheer economics of self-preservation put religious choices lower down the list of immediate priorities—quite apart from things like what to wear, how to get there, and importantly, the social impact of by whom one would be seen worshipping, all important aspects of French society prior to 1792. How much this was consciously done and consciously chosen can be open to interpretation, but the outcome was that religion lost much of its former social and sentimental empire. It can also be asked was there a collapsing of the structures between private contemplation and formal religion because structured religion was no longer a practical part of everyday living.49 Not only had Catholics (clergy and laity) drifted away from formalized religious practices‚ but they found themselves in a country where dissenting protestant religions were a tolerated part of the social fabric. The emigration in Britain more than anywhere else provided numerous examples of the way that the depths of distress were managed by reliance on secular government and social aid. The French Catholic Church showed itself powerless to help its followers to do other

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than survive alone with dignity when detached from the administrative and funding mechanisms of French State. Emigration involves a great deal of writing about the experience and reactions to it, but always on the part of individuals.50 Emigration was not natural, universal or pleasurable thus it was not something that the émigrés wanted to prolong or turn into a long-term relocation, and the only ones who did were those who married into British families or members of the clergy who found secure jobs teaching in schools and did not like the idea of returning to a dechristainized France.51 Emotionally it was traumatic and while it is relevant to ask how people could have survived through this extreme dislocation of their world, it is also appropriate to note that they did it by forming new friendships, and following the examples of people around them like the Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon and the Abbé Caron who were respected by émigrés lay and ecclesiastic alike. As leaders they were also aware that they were leading by example, and providing role models to Catholics and non-Catholics—to all strata of émigré society including former aristocrats and even members of the French royal family. The émigrés found the freedom to have faith in their own way, but not to worship publicly or to make a show of religious conviction. If we return to the novel of Madame de Souza, she advocated promoting fraternity over wild unbridled emotion. Wild emotion was associated with the Jacobins and with the Terror (the émigrés rarely saw their own actions as willful, or selfish even avoidable). Discipline, moderation, selfpreservation, and patriotism were the virtues of the émigrés, and they were virtues that the émigrés also admired in the British.52 Madame de Staël wrote to Madame d’Arblay (Frances Burney) of “The respect, the enthusiasm with which my soul is filled when thinking of the mix of virtues moral and political that make up England.”53 Ethical values and intellectual sources of individual strength began increasingly to find models of inspiration and behavior from outside the context of Catholicism. In a rather odd way, the Revolution encouraged a closer form of friendship between the two nations England and France who were rather fond of being rivals. The emigration that had facilitated a move away from Catholic Church influence in everyday life, had also helped to promote the sort of tolerance noted by Jean Philippe Genet, “Political society had thus become in England a society in which the religious choices and opinions of men searching in the depth of their own conscience for

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truth and faith were an essential component of political as well as cultural life.”54 Frances Burney expressed this at the end of her novel with the Admiral and the Bishop “Englishman, sitting cheek by jowl, beside a Frenchman; as lovingly as if they were both a couple of Christians, coming off the same shore.”55 “They had been brothers in a cause (the English and the French) and it had been a rare moment. The two communions could never quite forget that season of friendship.”56 The ­practical reality of everyday life for an increasingly large part of the elite in both Britain and France was increasingly a secular affair and a private one. Both the clergy and the lay émigrés returned to France (if they returned and most of them did) to pick up where the dechristianization and the Revolution left off. Their aging, emotional, and physical, during emigration made them much more likely to be like Balzac’s isolated characters in Le Lys dans la Vallée than active partisans of religious revival. Michel Vovelle was one of the historians who suggested that not only could maps and graphs tell us about the rise of positive factors, but also about “la montée de l’illégimitimité” or “le relâchement des disciplines religieuses.” If we seek the points of recalibration of the religious in the revolutionary world of emigration, it invariably points us towards a society where the individual had to turn inwards and seek solace of his or her own human dignity without any organized form of religious affiliation. Often music or writing bolstered confidence and personal fortitude, and provided an emotional bridge from the old to the new. It was a character building experience of a negative kind, and those who su rvived can be compared to survivors of prison camps.57 They had their dignity and their honor intact, but had lost family members and many of the beliefs that they held dear prior to the Revolution. Where were the networks that should have helped these persecuted French Catholics, and provocatively one can ask how different were they really to those in Paris struggling to survive as the Revolution continued becoming more gorily dramatic?58 Emigration showed religion in France to be a form of social control and propaganda more effectively than any political action on the part of the Jacobins.59 Botherel talks of royalism as a “religion de remplacement” and in doing so shows just how much patriotism and nationalism had subsumed, divided and suppressed Catholicism in the struggle between counter-revolutionaries and revolutionaries alike. Both had colluded in the conspiracy to attack the monopoly of the Church. The Catholic religion would never again hold in France the privileged administrative role or the exclusive spiritual monopoly over French

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subjects that it had enjoyed during the Ancien Régime. The emigration provides a microcosm that is important, because it involves a part of society that should have been disposed to promote and preserve religion, but was unable to do so. It did not die out any more than the monarchy and the royal government did, and great personal efforts were made to battle the levels of hardship that threatened the French Catholics in their exile. Jean-Clement Martin writes of the norms that were re-written by the revolutionary events in regard to women during the Revolution, and of the need to consider events globally and not only in the light of success or failure because those approaches obscure nuances.60 After 1815, the ceremonial aspect of religious adherence remained in France and at Court, but the substance of belief emerged from emigration very much recalibrated even if like Madame de Souza few ex-émigré women would openly admit to their changed views in public, and wrote about them using ambiguities that made the reader draw their own conclusions.

Notes







1. Kirsty Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution, Émigrés in London, 1789–1802, (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999) 43. This is out of a total of around 150,000 who left France and dispersed around Europe. See Donald Greer, The Incidence of Emigration during the French Revolution, (Harvard University Press, 1951). 2. The work of Dale Van Kley, John McManners, Timothy Tackett, Nigel Aston and French academic Michel Vovelle treat religion and its predicament to the fall of the monarchy. Bernard Plongeron writes for example‚ ‘Progressivement, sous l’influence des Lumières, l’homme du sacré s’est donc fait éducateur populaire; son ministère de la charité, parmi d’autres, s’en trouve modifié. La vie quotidienne du Clergé français au XVIII siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1974)‚ 211. 3. See David Higgs, Portugal and the Émigrés‚ in Carpenter and Mansel eds., The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789–1814 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999)‚ 83–100. There is no published work on the émigrés in Spain, but Roderick Barman’s work on Brazil, and transfer from Spain to Brazil of Catholic European culture treats the relationship between France and Spain. 4. See Munro Price The Road from Versailles, (New York: St Martin’s Press, New 2003) and Timothy Tackett, When the King took Flight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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5.  Suzanne Desan, ‘The French Revolution and the Family’, in Peter McPhee Ed., A Companion to the French Revolution, ( West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) reminds us ‘Revolutionary reforms drew in part on Enlightenment writings that advocated for more open and affectionate families and proposed numerous legal reforms. It reminds us to think about the link between family and clergy, and the fact that many men became priests as part of family politics and through no particular religious conviction. See also‚ Dominic Aidan Bellenger‚ Fearless Resting Place‚ (Downside Abbey Press‚ Bath‚ 2015). 6. Vovelle, La découverte de la politique, op cit, 164, finds a ‘pôle de mauvais gré religieux’ in the cahiers de doléances mapped. 7. Philip Mansel, Paris between Empires, 1814–1852, (London: John Murray, 2001), 114. 8. John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-century France, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981)‚ 440. 9.  L ynn Hunt in The family romance of the French Revolution (1992) and Inventing Human Rights (2007) and Carla Hesse The Other Enlightenment: How French Women became Modern (2001) treats the reasons behind excluding women and minority groups from political rights. 10.  Conduite à tenir par M. M. les Ecclésiastiques François Réfugiés en Angleterre, Imprimeur François Coghlan, Londres, 1794. 11. See Kirsty Carpenter ‘Emigration in Politics and Imaginations’ in David Andress Ed., The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)‚ 332–333. 12. A refugee is since 1951 defined by the UNHCR as: ‘a person who owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it’. United Nations Convention relating to the status of Refugees 1951, Article A2. 13. See Patricia Clavin, ‘The Austrian hunger crisis, and the genesis of the international organisation after the First World War’, in International Affairs, 90 (2014), 2. Also, her book: Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford, 2013). 14. Madame de Staël, Corinne, Chapitre II, (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1985) 32. Note that Madame de Staël was not an émigré because she was Swiss by birth and Swedish by marriage, but she travelled with her friends who were émigrés and lived with them at Juniper Hall in Surrey and in

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Switzerland. ‘Voyager est, quoi qu’on en puisse dire, un des plus tristes plaisirs de la vie. Lorsque vous vous trouvez bien dans quelque ville étrangère, c’est que vous commencez à vous y faire une patrie; mais traverser des pays inconnus, entendre parler un langage que vous comprenez à peine, voir des visages humains sans relation avec votre passé ni avec votre avenir, c’est de la solitude et de l’isolement sans repos et sans dignité.’ 15. London was the most dauntingly alienating of European urban environments. See: Roy Porter, ‘Enlightenment London and Urbanity’ in T D Hemming, E Freeman and D Meakin Eds., The Secular City, Studies in the Enlightenment (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994)‚ 29. 16. Carpenter, Eugénie et Mathilde, ou Mémoires de la famille du compte de Revel, MHRA Critical Texts vol. 26, (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014), 95. Monsieur de Revel et sa famille arrivèrent à l’auberge avec une impression de tristesse qu’ils n’avaient jamais ressentie. Pas un seul domestique; et monsieur de Revel obligé de donner ses soins à toute chose, de surveiller lui-même l’établissement de chacun d’eux. 17. Introduced into Parliament on 19 December 1792 it was passed on 4 January 1793. See 33 George III, c. IV. 18. Letters to the Home Office contain requests for special dispensations to allow priests to move between towns on certain days of the week. 19. See Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792– 1814, (Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, 2000). 20. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, (Paris: Édition du Centenaire, Flammarion, 1982), 444. 21. Emmuanuel de Waresquiel, Talleyrand, le prince immobile, (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 170. Adédaïde de Flahaut is later known by her name after her second marriage as Madame de Souza. 22. Constance Hill, Juniper Hall: A Rendez-vous of certain illustrious personages during the French Revolution including Alexandre d’Arblay and Fanny Burney, (London: Lane, 1905). 23.  Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Lessons from America, Liberal French Nobles in Exile 1793–1798, (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press, 2010), 57. 24.  Susan K Foley, Women in France since 1789, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)‚ 31. 25. Vicomte de Broc, Dix ans de la vie d’une femme pendant l’émigration, Adélaïde de Kerjean, Marquise de Falaiseau, 304. 26. Add Ms 37868 f. 66, dated 1801. 27. Maurice Hutt, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution, Puisaye, the Princes and the British Government in the 1790s, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)‚ 322.

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28. Add Mss 37,868 f 217 Mémoire du comte de Botherel au ministre britannique, 1802. 29. Angelica Goodden, Madame de Staël, The Dangerous Exile, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 36. 30. Rose Uchem, ‘Women as Migrants and Missionaries’, in Mission Studies, 2014, 319–339. 31. CHAN 565 AP, dossier 9, pièce 173. 32. See Carpenter, The Novels of Madame de Souza in Social and Political Perspective, (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007) Chap. 8, 201. 33.  A Martin, ‘Le Clergé Normand au temps de la Révolution’, Revue Catholique de Normandie, Juillet 1892, 63–64. 34. Johana. H Harting, Catholic London Missions from the Reformation to the Year 1850, (London: Sands & Co, 1903), 231. 35.  Conduite à tenir par Messieurs les Ecclésiastiques François Réfugié en Angleterre, (Westminster Diocesin Archives, pamphlet imprimé à l’imprimerie de J. P. Coghlan, 1794). 36. Abbé Gregoire, Mémoires, ancien évêque de Blois, (Paris: Dupont, 1837) II, 267–268. 37. Abbé Tardy, Manuel du Voyageur à Londres, ou recueuil de Toutes les instructions nécessaires aux étrangers qui arrivent dans cette capitale, Précédé du grand Plan de Londres, par l’Abbé Tardy, auteur du Dictionnaire de prononciation française à l’usage des Anglois. (Londres, 93 New Bond Street, 1800), 221. They were: Chapellle de la Croix, Dudley Court, Crown Street, Soho, Chapelle de St Agnès, London Street, Fitzroy Square, Chapelle de St Marie, Somerstown, Chapelle de l’Annonciation, King, Portman Square, Chapelle de St Louis, Prospect Place, St George’s Fields, Chapelle de Chelsea, Chapelle de Paddington Green. They are also mentioned in, l’Abbé Lubersac’s Journal historique et religieux de l’émigration et déportation du clergé de France en Angleterre. (Cox et Bylis, Londres, 1802) tome I, 32–69. 38. Baston, Mémoires de l’Abbé Baston, (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1897, Slatkine reprint 1977), tome I, 60. Beaucoup de catholiques avaient chez eux des oratoires, obtenus pendant les persécutions et dont la permission n’avait point été révoquée. Ils se firent un plaisir de nous en accorder l’usage. 39. Johana. H Harting, Catholic London Missions, op cit, 87. 40. William Amherst, The History of Catholic Emancipation, and the progress of the Catholic Church in the British Isles 1771–1820, (London: K. Paul Trench & Co., 1886), 83–85. 41. See image of ‘Emigrant clergy reading the late Decree, that all who return shall be put to Death.’ Isaac Cruikshank. in Kirsty Carpenter, ‘The Novelty of the French émigrés in London in the 1790s’, in Debra Kelly and

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Martyn Cornick eds, A History of the French in London, Liberty, Equality, Opportunity, (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2013), 77. 42.  David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English State in the 1790 s’ in Mark Philip Ed., The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 166. 43. Dominic Aiden Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789, (Bath: Downside Abbey Press, 1986), 62. 44. PRO T93–59. 45. Burke to Dr. Douglass, 5 June 1796 Westminster Archives main series vol. 46, f. 212. 46. BM Add Mss 18,592, 9 November 1795. 47. Bernard Plongeron, ‘Eglise et Révolution d’après les prêtres émigrés à Rome et à Londres (1792–1802)’ in Histoire, économie et société, 1989, no. 1, 96. 48. M. Clery, Journal de ce qui s’est passé à la tour du Temple pendant la captivité de Louis XVI, roi de France. (London: Baylis, 1798). 49.  William Reddy, ‘The Role of Emotion in the Era of the French Revolution’ in the Journal of Modern History, vol. 72, no. 1, 144. 50. See  Fernand Baldensperger Le mouvement des ídées dans l’émigration française (1789–1815), (Paris: Plon, 1924). 51. Dominic Aida Bellinger, The French Exiles Clergy, op cit, p. 1 starts his book describing Thomas Deterville a priest from Caen who lived out his life teaching at a grammar school in Norwich, and was remembered by a student. There were others. 52. The novels of Madame de Staël, Madame de Souza and Frances Burney reflect this respect for British that came from Emigration (Corinne, Charles et Marie and The Wanderer respectively). 53. Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, edited by her niece, (London: Colburn, 1842) vol. V, 434. ‘Le respect, l’enthousiasme, dont mon âme est remplie, en contemplant l’ensemble des vertus morales et politiques qui constituent l’Angleterre.’ 54.  Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘The Intellectuals: A pre-history’ in AngloFrench Attitudes: Comparisons and transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 37. 55. Frances Burney, The Wanderer, 864. 56. Not referring to Frances Burney. David Rice, ‘Combine against the Devil: The Anglican Church and the French Refugee Clergy in the French Revolution, in the ‘Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, vol. 50, no. 3 (1981), 281.

94  K. Carpenter 57. Issues of honor and national identity are treated by Anne Simonin in her introduction to Le déshonneur dans la République, Une histoire de l’indignité 1791–1958. (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2008), 22, 33. 58. Dramatic as opposed to melodramatic as suggested by David Andress in, ‘Jacobinism as Heroic Narrative Understanding the Terror as the experience of Melodrama’, in the Papers from the George Rudé Seminar, 2012, vol. 5. Also see Marissa Linton, Choosing Terror, Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 59. See chapters by Michael Sibalis, and Michael Broers on administration and policing in the Directory and Napoleonic period in Philip Dwyer ed., Napoleon and Europe, (London: Pearson Education, 2001). 60. Jean Clément Martin, La Révolte Brisée, Femmes dans la Révolution française et l’Empire, (Paris: Armand Colin, 2008), 245.

PART II

Global Legacies of Religion and the French Revolution

Alexis de Tocqueville: Civil Religion, Race, and the Roots of French Universalism, 1830–1857 Whitney Abernathy Barnes

Christianity, which has made all men equal before God, will not flinch to see all citizens equal before the law. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835 Christianity, after having fought long against the egoistic passions that reestablished slavery in the sixteenth century, was tired and resigned. Our philanthropy took up its work, reawakened it, and brought it into battle as an auxiliary. We were the ones to give a determined and practical meaning to this Christian idea that all men are born equal. —Alexis de Tocqueville, The Emancipation of Slaves, 1843 Unfortunately Muslim society and Christian society do not have a single tie…they form two bodies that are juxtaposed but completely separate…this state of things seems to become more so every day, and nothing can be done against it. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Essay on Algeria, 1841

W.A. Barnes (*)  Boston College, Newton, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_5

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In the early summer of 1830, King Charles X of France sanctioned the invasion of Ottoman Algeria in a last, frantic bid for public and electoral support. While the assault on the North African territory was a military success, it exposed and fueled metropolitan discord revolving around religion’s role in the political sphere. The king and his ministers depicted the conquest of Algeria as a triumph of Christian kingship over Oriental despotism. The French liberal opposition replied that the martial success was a victory for popular sovereignty manifested in the nation, not the king. Jennifer Sessions upholds this division in her work By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria, writing “at the heart of the liberal interpretation of the expedition [in Algeria] lay a series of oppositions…between the liberal understanding of secular, popular sovereignty and the ultraroyalist vision of Christian kingship.” 1After the July Revolution that year, the successful revolutionaries not only deposed Charles X, but they also won the rhetorical battle over Algeria, explicitly defining the invasion of the North African territory as a secular victory and recasting the enterprise in language that tied the conquest to the sovereign nation and the people of France. While the new king, LouisPhilippe, also embraced the conquest in such terms, discord between the two groups remained. Historian Joseph F. Byrnes remarks on the fissure, “The opposition was deep-seated; the ideological sides self-consciously chosen.”2 However, while existing scholarship sustains this stark division between Christian monarchists and secular liberals in mid-nineteenthcentury France, the use of religious rhetoric to justify French colonialism and also underpin French ideological and political institutions prevailed amongst monarchists and liberals alike throughout this period. No historical character embodies this complicated union between secular liberalism and Christianity more completely than the celebrated French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville is perhaps best known for his secular liberalism, political and sociological insight, and in the more recent postcolonial historiography, his paradoxical promotion of French imperialism in Algeria. Specifically, while Tocqueville is renowned for his observations on democracy and his belief in human equality, modern scholars have been keen to expose his support of brutal French military action in Algeria in the 1840s. Historians including Jennifer Pitts, Roger Boesche, and Margaret Kohn utilize this “two Tocquevilles” metaphor as a lens to better understand the rising, contradictory forces of liberalism and empire in the mid-nineteenth century.3 Pitts, in particular, acutely explains the

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ways Tocqueville himself integrated nineteenth-century liberal and imperial ideologies in her translation of his Writings on Empire and Slavery, demonstrating that Tocqueville considered the imperialist venture in Algeria critical to the success of metropolitan republican politics and essential for the advancement of France’s international position.4 According to Tocqueville, empire was necessary for democracy to succeed. However, though Tocqueville’s stances on colonialism clearly locate him at the problematic intersection of liberalism and empire, few scholars have considered how Tocqueville’s observations related to the larger narratives of secularization and the changing role of religion within nineteenth-century France.5 Tocqueville’s employment of religious language within political and imperial contexts may enable us to better understand the multifaceted ways religion functioned and continue to function within postcolonial modernity. Although it is now increasingly common to claim that secularization—traditionally defined as the retreat of religion from mainstream culture and politics—was a complex and incomplete process in postrevolutionary France, questions over how religion evolved and even retained prominence remain to be examined. Even as existing works paint the rise of secularism as a more convoluted process than traditionally assumed, scholars continue to characterize secularization as the progressive decline of religion in the west.6 Tocqueville’s writings prove such a view as incomplete. As Tocqueville pronounced, religion may have “lost its sway over men’s souls” by the 1830s, but Christianity continued to fundamentally shape his conceptions of democracy, slavery, and French intervention in Algeria.7 When discussed in relation to Western democracy in Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Christian principles (devoid of their spiritual orientations) proved imperative to ensure moderation, equality, and liberty within society. In regards to the abolition question, which Tocqueville addressed in his 1843 essays The Emancipation of Slaves, France’s Christian heritage directly underpinned French universalist ideology and legitimized notions of human equality and brotherhood. Invoked in the colonial context in Tocqueville’s numerous writings on the French colonization of Algeria, France’s Christian identity was utilized to construct a religious binary between the French Christians and the Algerian Muslims. Analyzing the disparate and even contradictory ways religion operated within Tocqueville’s most publicized writings enable one to explore the influence Christianity had in fashioning French identity as

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well as the significant impact it had in the construction of French cultural and political institutions during the mid-nineteenth century. Although Christianity undoubtedly continued to fulfill an internal, spiritual function for many French people in the nineteenth century, Tocqueville (who was not a practicing Christian) invoked its principles and its connections to the French state in the broader public domain for political purposes. In other words, although Tocqueville did not ritually practice or believe in the salvific value of any religion, he firmly contended that Christianity had a significant role to play in the temporal sphere and thus utilized religious rhetoric to fulfill civic aims. Though religion had undoubtedly been utilized as a political force to dominate kings, nations, and peoples for centuries, the political and spiritual functions of Christianity had always been linked—at least rhetorically—in French society before the Revolution of 1789.8 For Tocqueville, the French Revolution was the first historical instance in which politics “developed into a species of religion” that aimed to regenerate the “whole human race.”9 However, the political sphere did not supersede the religious sphere or render it irrelevant. Rather, nineteenthcentury France witnessed a discernible separation between Christianity as a spiritual force laboring to bring souls closer to God and Christianity as a secular tool utilized to exercise political and rhetorical power.10 French governmental officials as well as intellectuals who otherwise did not publically espouse any religious affiliation, began to commonly invoke France’s Christian identity in both the metropole and in Algeria, thus giving rise to non-confessional secular forms of Christianity that manifested themselves in the French public sphere. Tocqueville’s reflections on liberalism, empire, and religion fit squarely into this trend. Considered within this context, Tocqueville’s references to religion with respect to France’s metropolitan and colonial circumstances specifically reveal the critical role this “civic Christianity” played in the construction of Western democracy, French universalism, and French colonial doctrine during this period. Tocqueville, a resolute supporter of the separation of church and state, paradoxically invoked France’s intimate ties to a creedless Christianity in order to bolster French democratic institutions and universalize France’s missionary appeal to the enslaved and “barbaric”—thereby laying the ideological groundwork for what would become the mission civilisatrice under the Third Republic— even as he simultaneously used Christianity as a tool to rationalize religious and cultural difference in French Algeria, a development that

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would later come to define France’s imperial project more generally. Ultimately, though Christianity filled many temporal positions in Tocqueville’s works, the religious language used in his writings demonstrates Christianity’s crucial place in the formation of an increasingly essential colonial identity during a period of extreme instability, political division, and social conflict in the French metropole.

Christianity: The Foundation of Democratic Institutions Though he was a secular liberal and firm proponent of the separation of church and state, Tocqueville believed that certain Christian principles were essential to the success of Western democracy. He had little interest in Christianity’s spiritual efficacy, but limited his discussions to religion’s impact on the temporal sphere. This is not to say that the “spiritual” and “temporal” were always mutually exclusive domains. Oftentimes, “spiritual” values had worldly effects. However, this chapter intends to distinguish between Christianity’s salvific and earthly functions to illustrate that Christianity was not the sole property of faithful Catholics in nineteenth-century France. Thus, a non-practitioner like Tocqueville was able to capitalize on Christianity’s capacity to underpin democratic objectives. Even as Christian values remained significant in Tocqueville’s texts, they took on secular significance separate from their spiritual connotations. By reading Tocqueville from this angle, one can see the fundamental role “civic Christianity” played in the construction of modern French ­institutions. Tocqueville shared a conviction with contemporary Protestant thinkers Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, and Edgar Quinet that Christianity was involved in the progressive realization of democratic freedom due to the fact that it promoted the fundamental equality of all human beings whatever their stations. However, a linguistic analysis of Tocqueville’s writings suggests that in the United States and France, religion’s primary role was to fulfill civic purposes as it promoted freedom, equality, and restraint amongst its adherents. It is important to note here that Tocqueville was a firm advocate of the separation of Church and state. It was only when Christianity was kept within this circumscribed, privatized sphere that it could effectively exercise all the temporal benefits it offered democratic society. Tocqueville’s 1835 work Democracy in America grappled with many facets of democracy, not least among them the position of religion

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within modern societies. Though Tocqueville understood Christian ethics (such as the promotion of equality) and democracy to be natural allies in the Western march towards greater liberty, the French case, which he constantly referenced throughout the work, challenged this alliance. In nineteenth-century France, “men of religion [fought] against freedom and the friends of freedom attack[ed] religion; some noble and generous spirits praise[d] slavery while some dishonorable and servile souls advocate[d] independence.” In other words, a person’s belief in Christian doctrine had no bearing on whether he or she upheld what Tocqueville claimed were the Christian tenets of human freedom and equality. Religious convictions within a given populace did not guarantee democratic success. Even as Tocqueville perceived Christianity in France to have been “temporarily involved with powers overturned by democracy,” he held that it had the fundamental potential to “support freedom’s struggles.” However, it was not faith in dogma but the Christian principles of liberty, equality, and self-restraint operating in the temporal sphere that sustained freedom in society. Consequently, Tocqueville observed that men who called upon the help of religion whilst keeping their sights “upon the earth rather than heaven” were in the best position to promote the equalizing benefits Christianity offered.11 Tocqueville’s conviction that civil Christianity contained the capacity to transcend class and political division and unite a given society would influence his later writings on the French presence in Algeria. Tocqueville believed that religion could only function productively in a democratic society when it was formally detached from a nation’s governing body and, thus, its factional struggles. However, while Tocqueville praised what he perceived as the United States’ healthy, delineated relationship to religion, his views of France’s historical affiliation with Christianity were more complex. For Tocqueville, it had been the lack of separation between the Catholic Church and the French monarchy, among other political and cultural factors, that led to the vehement and fanatic attack on religion during the French Revolution. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, published in 1856, Tocqueville attempted to account for the violent, radical reaction against the Church’s power: It is not a question of analyzing the shortcomings of the Church as a religious institution, but one of perceiving in what manner it obstructed the revolution that was getting under way … at this time the church was, if not

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the most oppressive, the chief of all the powers in the land, and though neither her vocation or her nature called for this, co-operated with the secular authority … bent on investing it with her aura and sanctity and making it as infallible and eternal as herself. Thus anyone attacking the church could count on popular support.12

By closely associating with the government and endowing it with its inviolability and sacredness, the Church ironically made itself vulnerable to the scathing critiques of the French revolutionaries in the last years of the eighteenth century. The state of religious and moral chaos in the years following the Revolution brought on by the intimate and unsuitable association between the Catholic Church and the French state was not conducive to a healthy democratic society. Although Tocqueville’s writings on religion’s role in society varied slightly in his chronologically disparate yet related discussions on the United States and France, he undoubtedly alleged that Christianity, democracy, and equality had the potential to mutually reinforce and underpin each other within the increasingly liberal, democratic West. While Tocqueville’s personal views on religion are undeterminable, it is clear that he understood religion could play a crucial role in the secular spheres of Western culture and politics. Even if secular Christianity simply enabled civil society to function, Democracy in America and The Old Regime demonstrate that it was present in the formation of nineteenthcentury Western democratic institutions.

Christianity’s Role in the Emancipation of Slaves and the Maintenance of Empire Tocqueville believed that secularized Christian principles enabled mainstream democratic society to function properly. However, his embrace of Christian ideas proved more complicated in his discussions on slavery and its role within France’s empire. For Tocqueville, Christian ideas underpinned French claims to moral superiority regarding the issue of slavery, which in turn functioned to enable the maintenance of France’s colonial holdings and ensure its powerful political position on the continent. In other words, Tocqueville’s employment of Christian ideals such as equality and universal brotherhood supported France’s project to free the enslaved so that France might maintain its coercive empire. Even though Tocqueville undoubtedly viewed the abolition of slavery as

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a moral issue, his interest in abolition was intimately tied to his fervent desire to preserve and fortify France’s overseas colonies. France needed to eradicate slavery—and indemnify former slave owners—if it wanted to maintain its Caribbean colonies, its powerful diplomatic position in Europe, and its reputation as the world’s advocate for human equality. Tocqueville believed that France “must not leave it to Britain to be the primary representative” of what he called “French principles (the principles of the Revolution) in the world.”13 Christian ideals, serving as an explicit foundation for the universalist claims in Tocqueville’s writings on emancipation, provided an ideological base for the developing mission civilisatrice that would come to characterize the French imperial project at its zenith under the Third Republic. As implied above, the Christian tenents of egalitarianism and liberty for all peoples offered Tocqueville a discourse with which to bolster France’s moral and civilizational preeminence whilst sustaining and rationalizing empire. While most of France’s chief competitors in the mid-nineteenth century—primarily Great Britain—also laid claim to a Christian heritage, Tocqueville invoked Christian principles in conjunction with France’s unique revolutionary tradition, thus producing a secularized, popular rhetoric which strengthened French claims to moral superiority over other European nations while achieving colonial and geopolitical goals. In this way, religion, integrated with France’s secular revolutionary heritage, contributed to and shaped Tocqueville’s mainstream writings on emancipation and paved the way for the ideological paradoxes inherent in the impending mission civilisatrice. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Tocqueville dedicated substantial energy both in and out of parliament to the issue of abolishing slavery in France’s colonies. In 1835, Tocqueville, along with other noteworthy liberals of the era, connected with the Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage, a moderate abolitionist society established in 1834 by the duc de Broglie. In 1843, Tocqueville presented his views on abolition to the public in a series of essays titled The Emancipation of Slaves. Although they were initially published anonymously, the authorship of the articles was widely known. As mentioned earlier, while slave trading had been abolished in France in 1818, Tocqueville argued that France should properly abolish all forms of slavery if it desired to keep its Caribbean possessions and maintain its reputation as the world’s protector of human equality. Though full emancipation did not occur in the French colonies until 1848 when unrest in Paris surrounding the February

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Revolution began to cause metropolitan fears of a colonial uprising, Tocqueville’s invocation of Christian and secular Revolutionary rhetoric in The Emancipation of Slaves highlighted the nation’s commitments to the enchained peoples across the globe so that France might preserve its imperial holdings and maintain its moral supremacy within Europe. In this work, Tocqueville considered Christianity and Frenchness as two separate, though converging, forces. In fact, France’s attempts to emancipate slaves were meant to succeed and surpass Christianity’s redemptive mission. He wrote of the emancipation movement, “we have seen something unprecedented in history: slavery abolished, not by the desperate effort of the slave, but by the enlightened will of the master; not gradually … over the course of those successive transformations that have led insensibly from bondage to the soil toward freedom.” The combination of Biblical language and references to the French Enlightenment in Tocqueville’s writing accentuated France’s celebrated and unique historical traditions. He continued, “In an instant almost a million men together went from extreme servitude to total freedom, or better put, from death to life. Just a few years were enough to accomplish something that Christianity itself could only do over a great number of centuries. Open the annals of all peoples, and I doubt you will find anything finer or more extraordinary.”14 In addition to highlighting France’s distinguished cultural heritage, Tocqueville used Christian rhetoric to assert that the French nation had greater potential than Christianity to confer liberty upon the enslaved. However, while this passage may appear to suggest that universal Frenchness was supplanting religion’s role in the emancipation movement, Christian principles proved fundamental to Tocqueville’s conceptions of France’s moral responsibilities to subjugated peoples across the globe. Although France and its populace were ostensibly more capable than Christianity in rising to meet historical “inevitabilities” such as the abolition of slavery, Tocqueville continued to underline France’s Christian heritage in his essay. In regards to the eradication of the slave trade, he stated, “This great event was produced by the general movement of the century … it is the product of the spirit of the times. The ideas, passions, the ways of all European societies have pressed in this direction for fifty years. When among free men, races mix and classes grow closer and merge throughout the Christian and civilized world, can slavery endure?”15 Tocqueville’s language revealed his conviction that France’s civilized, Christian heritage, merged with the growing surge

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of nineteenth-century equality and liberal democracy, rendered slavery reprehensible. Christianity played an integral role in the construction of Tocqueville’s universal notions of equality and liberty. While Christian ideas were ultimately assimilated into a more progressive French universalism, we can see through Tocqueville that religion continued to shape French perceptions of their own cultural institutions in the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that Tocqueville was a staunch advocate of the separation of Church and state, he understood that religious identity politics contained the potential to validate French institutions and ideologies. According to Tocqueville, the French possessed the aptitude to harness certain aspects of Christianity and turn them into a temporal, humanitarian crusade. He wrote: Christianity … was tired and resigned. Our philanthropy took up its work, reawakened it, and brought it into battle as an auxiliary. We were the ones to give a determined and practical meaning to this Christian idea that all men are born equal; we were the ones, finally, who, seeing new duties for social power, imposed upon it as the first of its obligations the need to come to the aid of the unfortunate, to defend the oppressed, to support the weak, and to guarantee to each man an equal right to liberty.16

Even though Christianity seemed to have been incapable of enacting any substantial social change, Tocqueville believed that the Christian ideal of egalitarianism, when combined with the French revolutionary idea of political liberty, took on a renewed and invigorated purpose. It was the French who had the potential to transform the idea of Christian egalitarianism into a material, worldly reality. As implied earlier, eager to bolster France’s international moral standing in regards to the slavery issue, Tocqueville privileged the unique capacity of French universalism to provide justice to the subjugated and oppressed. These essays on emancipation are critical for understanding Tocqueville’s complex colonial policy, for they bear witness to his belief in the vital significance of France’s colonies for the nation’s international status, regardless of their political or monetary cost, and they display what Tocqueville conceived of as France’s moral obligations in the world.17 Tocqueville’s proclamations of France’s unique duty to the enslaved and uncivilized across the globe contain an underlying claim to moral and sociopolitical power over other European nation states, particularly

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Great Britain. Tocqueville believed that, if there was way for France to keep its colonies, it would come only from the abolition of slavery.18 Importantly, France’s moral superiority in Europe was threatened by the continued existence of slavery in its colonies. Regardless of the fact that the British policy was proving itself more progressive than that of the French (the British abolished slavery in 1833), Tocqueville’s claim that the “French sentiments” of equality and liberty undoubtedly intended to undercut Britain’s ethical position within Europe by highlighting France’s distinctively revolutionary, Christian heritage within public discourse.19 In Tocqueville’s writings, the Christian principle of equality and France’s Christian tradition legitimate and universalize France’s natural obligations to the chained and “barbaric” in France’s colonies while simultaneously bolstering its moral and, indirectly, its economic claims over other European nations. This contradictory justification of empire undoubtedly offered an ideological foundation for the mission civilisatrice in subsequent French colonial policy. Contrary to prevalent secularization narratives, a close reading of Tocqueville reveals that Christianity’s influence remained widespread in French society, though it became increasingly amalgamated into more temporal cultural fixtures, such as the civilizing mission, within secular liberal discourse.

Race and Religion in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France If Christian principles operating within the temporal sphere undergirded democratic society and substantiated arguments for emancipation and geopolitical advancement, France’s rhetorical ties to Christianity were also an essential factor in the construction of cultural difference in the Algerian context. While Tocqueville eschewed all notions of biological racism, he nevertheless invoked France’s Christianity to emphasize a fundamental inequality between the French Christians and the Algerian Muslims. Before exploring Christianity’s position in the development of Tocqueville’s views on culture and race in the Algerian context, it is critical to examine the relationship between race, culture, and religion within the larger context of nineteenth-century Europe. The literature that focuses on citizenship and belonging in modern France contends that French racism places a greater emphasis on culture than on biology, distinguishing it from other, more ethnocentric or scientific visions of race.20 While there was undeniably a growing European

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concern with physical anthropology over the course of the nineteenth century, French racial theories as expressed in the military and colonial literature remained pluralistic and highly fluid. Even though emerging factors of scientific racism were important to the French medical community, French racial attitudes in general were based on a mixture of biological and cultural factors. It is the persistent and continuing role of culture that distinguished French racial attitudes from those in other national traditions.21 This French form of culturally motivated racism appears in Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria. However, the cultural discrimination present in his Algerian texts has deeper implications when considered in conjunction with his prolonged correspondence with Arthur de Gobineau—the nineteenth-century thinker most famous for his scientific theories of race. Through these letters, one can postulate that, while Tocqueville disdained the theories of biological racism, he nevertheless affirmed an essential disparity between the French and Algerian cultures that was rooted in religious difference. Tocqueville brought Gobineau into the French Foreign Ministry in 1849 while he was Foreign Minister under the Second Republic. Though the two men had already been in contact with each other previous to Gobineau’s appointment, it was during this period that they struck up a friendship that generated a prolonged correspondence that would last until Tocqueville’s death in 1859. While many (though certainly not all) of Tocqueville’s letters to Gobineau were written years after his most well-known writings on Algeria, they still contain, among other topics, important deliberations over the relationship between morality, religion, and race that significantly echo and bear weight on Tocqueville’s earlier viewpoints (to be discussed in the following section). Although race, religion, and morality are frequently discussed in tandem with each other in the letters between Tocqueville and Gobineau—suggesting that both men considered the three entities to be linked—the relationship between religion and race proved complex within their exchanges. On the one hand, their correspondence supports the conventional idea that Tocqueville did not embrace biological racism. For Tocqueville, arguments about the superiority of one race over another were an alternative form of predestination and denial of human freewill, which he scorned in the name of freedom. 22 Acting on this conviction, Tocqueville accused the biologically racist Gobineau— who was a practicing Christian—of hypocrisy and failing to uphold the Christian principle of equality. On the other hand, Tocqueville’s own

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ideas about difference were themselves deeply embedded in religious distinctions between people groups. Arthur de Gobineau converted to Christianity from Hegelian atheism in 1843. A decade later, he produced his infamous Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, one of the earliest examples of scientific, biologicallybased racism that divided the human species into three main groupings—white, yellow, and black—distinguishing the white Aryan race as the pinnacle of human development. Tocqueville believed Gobineau’s stance on race to be morally incorrect as well as hypocritical from a religious standpoint. In a letter from January 1957, Tocqueville wrote to Gobineau: I admit that it was impossible for me to believe you had not perceived the difficulties in reconciling your learned (racial) theories with the letter and spirit of Christianity. Regarding the letter: what is more clear in Genesis than the unity of humanity and the origin of all from the same man? And regarding the spirit of Christianity: its distinctive trait is … making a human species in which all the members are equally capable of perfecting and gathering themselves. How can this notion…conciliate with the historical doctrine that makes distinct, unequal races?23

Tocqueville’s belief in a religiously based equality applied to his position on biological racism. In fact, he extended the idea of equality to all men in this passage, not simply those who professed a shared Christian heritage. While Tocqueville recognized that Gobineau’s racist theories were prominent among Christians who benefited from the institution of slavery, specifically mentioning those in the southern United States, he believed that Christianity and racial equality were mutually reinforcing entities on a theoretical, idealized level.24 Christian principles functioning in the temporal sphere should ideally have led to greater equality and freedom for all peoples regardless of race. Opposed to the idea that men are organically unequal, Tocqueville labeled Christian adherents of Gobineau’s scientific doctrines hypocritical, even stating to Gobineau in 1957, “the reading of your book left me with doubts on the soundness of your faith … it is better to be a pagan with…clean hands than to be Christians in this manner.”25 However, Tocqueville used France’s Christian identity to indicate a fundamental difference between peoples. Thus, when romantic notions of Christian equality encountered the political and social challenges of empire in the

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Tocqueville’s writings, religion, in a similar manner to that of biological racism, functions to created insurmountable difference. In Tocqueville’s writings vis-à-vis Algeria, religion replaced race as the vital distinction between civilization and barbarism. Tocqueville stated, in an 1843 message to Gobineau: I studied the Koran a great deal, mainly because of our position vis-à-vis the Muslim population of Algeria … I must tell you that I came away from the study with the conviction that by and large, there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Mohammed. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though it is less absurd than the polytheism of ancient times, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion infinitely more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.26

Even though it was not the biological makeup of the Algerians that rendered them culturally inferior to the French, their religion usefully facilitated Tocqueville’s construction of difference. Even as Tocqueville condemned the biologically racist views of many practicing Christians (namely, those in the Southern United States), he readily invoked the fundamental disparities between civilization and barbarism rooted in France’s non-confessional Christian identity as a tool for empire. However, while cultural racism could be overcome and, therefore, proved itself more in line with Tocqueville’s liberal ideals, it nevertheless operated to create and underpin stark, incontrovertible ­difference.

Christianity and the Racialization of Religion in French Algeria Christian principles performed multiple functions in Tocqueville’s writings: grounding democratic institutions, furthering arguments for emancipation and enabling French expansion, and reinforcing fundamental disparities between the French and Algerians. In all of these scenarios, Christianity contained the potential to bolster French social, political, and colonial life in the temporal sphere. As such, Tocqueville’s writings on the French presence in Algeria in the 1840s, emphasizing religious difference rooted in France’s Christian identity, employed religion to

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dehumanize the Muslims of Algeria, to reinforce the binary between colonizers and colonized, and to justify violent excess in the North African colony. While there is an undeniable shift in the ways Tocqueville talked about Christianity between the 1830s and 1840s, Tocqueville’s discussion of religion and religious difference also changed over the course of his interactions with the Algerian population. From the beginning of his political life, he placed French colonialism at the center of his agenda. During his first attempt to obtain a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1837, Tocqueville published two “Letters on Algeria,” written after several years of studying the recently acquired North African colony. At this early stage in his exchanges with Algeria (having not yet been to the colony himself), Tocqueville held a firm conviction that the “amalgamation” of the two races—which he simplified to include only the Arabs and the French—was possible and desirable through both intermarriage and gradual interaction.27 Significantly, this eventual union would be achieved through initial religious toleration and legal pluralism. After winning the seat for Valognes in 1839, Tocqueville conducted a detailed study of government reports on Algeria, finally travelling there himself in 1841.28 As his encounters with the Muslims of Algeria became more frequent, France’s connections to Christianity became more important and entrenched in Tocqueville’s thinking. His shifting views were made manifest in his explicit invocation of a French Christian identity in his writings and signified an emerging racial component inherent in his conceptions of religious difference. Due to the fact that he did not actually step foot on North African soil until 1841, Tocqueville’s ideas about empire were purely theoretical in his 1837 Letter on Algeria. His language in this letter indicates that he believed a “single people” would eventually emerge out of the interactions between the French and the Algerians. As such, he initially presented religious difference as a relatively insignificant impediment to the ensuing integration of the two peoples. He stated that “the majority of the Arabs preserve a lively faith in the religion of Muhammad; however, it is easy to see that in this portion of Muslim territory, as in all the others, religious beliefs are continually losing their vigor and becoming more and more powerless to battle the interests of this world.”29 Here, Tocqueville made a distinction between religious beliefs and the so-called interests of this world, setting them up as if locked in an ideological battle with each other in Algerian society. It hints that decreased interest in

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the Islamic religion in Algeria would ultimately prove to be beneficial to France. He continued: Although religion has played a large role in the wars that have been waged against us in Africa until now … religion was nothing but the secondary cause to which these wars must be attributed. We were attacked more as strangers and as conquerors than as Christians, and it is the ambition of the leaders more than the faith of the people that has led them to take up arms against us.

Tocqueville’s language implies that Algerian religion was not only fading in importance; but it was also unquestionably being superseded by politics. However, the Algerians’ religion, their customs, and their ­politics did not “make them incapable of yielding to a communal life” with the French.30 Politics might have been the chief impediment to ­French-Algerian unification, but it was a conquerable obstacle. As such, Tocqueville believed that politics, economics, and other “worldly matters” proved more amenable than religion to the blending of the French and Algerian peoples. Even so, while religion seems at first glance to be the decisive barrier between the French and Arabs from the Arab’s perspective, Tocqueville viewed Islam as a fluid, surmountable obstacle that the French might overcome at this early stage of colonization. “We may thus believe that if we prove more and more that Islam is in no danger under our domination or in our vicinity,” he wrote, “religious passions will come to be extinguished and we shall have only political enemies in Africa … I have no doubt that they would adopt our style of life if we gave them a lasting interest in doing so.” As religious passions cooled amongst the Arabs, a union between the French and Algerians would become conceivable. Even as Tocqueville revealed his own distinctions between secular and religious politics in relation to Algeria, he divulged his belief that disparate cultures must focus on secular, worldly matters such as economics to achieve consolidation. Still remaining hopeful, Tocqueville concluded the letter by affirming, “There is, then, no reason to believe that time will not succeed in amalgamating the two races. God is not stopping it; only human deficiencies can stand in its way.”31 As Tocqueville became more involved in France’s Algerian endeavors, going there himself in 1841, he began to emphasize the importance of religious difference more openly. However, before he started

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discussing French and Algerian religious identities, he began to depict Algerian society in increasingly religious terms. In his Notes on the Voyage to Algeria, which he penned en route to the North African colony, Tocqueville stated that upon seeing Oran for the first time that “architecture depicts needs and mores: the architecture here does not merely result from the heat of the climate; it also … depicts the social and political state of the Muslim and oriental populations: polygamy, the sequestration of women. The absence of any public life, a tyrannical and suspicious government that forces one to conceal one’s life.”32 While he was clearly fascinated by this new landscape, his interpretation of the architecture in light of the Algerian’s Islamic faith suggests a privileging of religious factors in his early firsthand assessments of Algerian society. After experiencing Algerian culture in person, Tocqueville, who had hitherto referred to the Algerians exclusively as “Arabs,” starts referring to them as “Muslims,” often making references to the “entire Muslim population” within his assessments.33 A far cry from his Letters on Algeria that spoke of the consolidation of the French and Algerian peoples, Tocqueville’s 1841 Essay on Algeria draws explicit connections between French Christianity in direct opposition to Algerian Muslims. Due to the fact that Tocqueville never mentioned religious conversion, there is a non-confessional, civil value to Tocqueville’s notion of a French Christian identity. This civic Christianity discursively excluded Muslim Algerians from enlightened Christian civilization and justified the French presence in Algeria by infusing ideas about religious difference with rhetoric emphasizing race. In his Essay, Tocqueville underscored the necessity of France’s action in Algeria: “What we saw in Egypt has occurred in Algeria: it happens every time there is contact … between two races of which one is enlightened and the other ignorant, one progressing and the other declining … if we abandon Algiers, the country would probably pass directly under the rule of a Christian nation.” He went on, “but even if Algiers were to fall back into the hands of Muslims… it would enter into regular contact with the Christian nations and would be controlled by one of them. In a word, it is clear to me that … Africa has entered into the movement of the civilized world and will never leave it.”34 Tocqueville’s aim in this frequently quoted passage was first and foremost to persuade the French to revive and continue their conquest of Algeria or risk losing their geopolitical significance. However, by associating France (and Europe more generally) with Christianity, civilization, and enlightenment and Algeria

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with Islam, ignorance, and decline, Tocqueville reinforced the idea of a religious and civilizational binary between colonizers and colonized. Tocqueville’s former confidence in the eventual amalgamation of the two races had been supplanted by a nationalist fervor heightened by raciallytinged religious rhetoric. Religion functioned in Tocqueville’s works both to highlight the disparities between colonizers and colonized and to indicate the precariousness of France’s empire in regards to the other civilized Christian nations. Tocqueville invoked France’s Christianity to define an abstract Frenchness against a racially and religiously inferior Algerian population even as he underscored France’s vulnerable position in the growing colonial competition among other Christian nation states. Tocqueville asserted that “to leave any important spot in the hands of the Arabs is to give the first Christian power that comes into conflict with us a place of security and refuge.”35 Such allusions to religious identity in his writings emphasized stark differences and undesirable resemblances in order to defend French action in Algeria on all fronts. Moreover, Tocqueville’s 1837 assertions that religious fervor was declining amongst the Algerians had been overturned by 1841. He stated in his Essay, “The Arab tribe’s passions of religion and depredation always lead them to wage war on us … Christians … habitual war … is the natural taste of the populations that surround us. They grant power only to those who permit them to act on this taste.”36 Here, Tocqueville characterized the Algerians by their passions for fanatical religion, destruction, and war mongering against French Christians. As a result, the French had to respond with superior martial strength. Due to the fact that the Algerians were “condemned by humanity and the law of nations,” the French should have few scruples about the potentially vicious acts of military necessity in the North African colony. In the end of his Essay on Algeria, Tocqueville invoked religious difference to underline the fundamental incompatibility between the French and the Algerians. He stated, “The population of the colony being composed of … Muslims and Christians, we could not govern it in the same way that we can our homogenous societies … those who have been there (Algeria) know that unfortunately Muslim society and Christian society do not have a single tie … they form two bodies that are juxtaposed but completely separate.” He concluded by contending, “this state of things seems to become more so every day, and nothing can be done against it … the fusion of these two populations is a chimera that people dream

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of only when they have not been to these places … there can, therefore, and there must, be two distinctive legislative systems in Africa, because there are two very separate societies there.”37 These passages signify a dramatic shift in Tocqueville’s language and approach to both French religious identity and his own conceptions of colonial policy. Not only did Tocqueville contend that amalgamation between the French and Algerian “races” was impossible, but by the early 1840s, religious identity also became the chief way to characterize the differences between the French and the Algerians. In his First Report on Algeria, composed in 1847, Tocqueville unflinchingly asserted that “civilized and Christian society has been founded. Now our only task is to know under what laws it must live and what must be done to hasten its development.” Ultimately, distinctions made between the two potentially cohesive “races” were superseded by distinctions between two mutually opposed religions, indicating that religion itself had become a chief means by which to indicate difference. For Tocqueville, Christian France’s “domination over the indigenous peoples, its limits, its means, its principles” was of fundamental importance for the metropole.38 Tocqueville would eventually come to regret some of his harsher stances on the Algerian question, stating in 1847 that “Algeria will become, sooner or later, a closed field, a walled arena, where the two peoples will have to fight without mercy, and where one of the two must die. God save us gentlemen, from such a destiny! Let us not, in the middle of the nineteenth century, begin the history of the conquest of America all over again.”39 Nevertheless, his ideas which linked France with civil Christianity endured and came to characterize the later French imperial project more generally.

Conclusion Traditionally, France’s most historically celebrated cultural fixtures, such as universal republicanism and its colonial manifestation, the mission civilisatrice, have been characterized as predominantly secular entities with their ideological roots entrenched in the principles of the Revolution of 1789 and their concrete political and social origins embedded in the late nineteenth-century policies of the Third Republic.40 However, by examining the role of religion within Tocqueville’s writings, one can postulate that the genealogies of these celebrated institutions in French national mythology prove much

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more complicated than current scholarship suggests. Indisputably, late nineteenth-century conceptions of French universalism and the civilizing mission were influenced by secular, even antireligious, ideas promulgated during the French Revolution. Nevertheless, these perceptions were also significantly shaped by beliefs about religion held and espoused by public figures, particularly Tocqueville, during the French conquest and colonization of Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century. A resolute supporter of the separation of church and state, Tocqueville paradoxically invoked France’s intimate ties to Christianity in order to universalize France’s project to free and elevate the enslaved and uncivilized—thus providing the ideological foundation for the impending mission civilisatrice—even as he drew upon France’s Christian identity to contribute to the entrenchment of religious and cultural difference in French Algeria that would come to characterize France’s imperial project at its zenith under the Third Republic. Re-evaluating the ideological foundations of French universalism and republican imperialism changes the ways that we comprehend the function of religion in France as well as its role in the construction of a French colonial identity. As one of the leading commentators on France’s mid-nineteenthcentury imperial undertakings and a central figure of modern political thought, Tocqueville’s observations prove an effective lens by which to reevaluate religion’s role in the makings of modern French institutions. Tocqueville’s utilization of religion in his writings demonstrates that Christianity and its ideals proved a fundamental element in the making of modern Frenchness. Ultimately, religion’s disparate functions in Tocqueville’s works enable historians to observe how Christianity and its principles, operating in the temporal sphere, continued to shape French culture, politics, and identity in the nineteenth century. Whether it was undergirding democratic institutions, legitimizing Tocqueville’s arguments for emancipation and French geopolitical advancement, or justifying violent colonial excesses, Christianity, far from retreating from mainstream politics and culture, continued to structure secular French society. Despite the fact that Tocqueville was not interested in Christianity’s spiritual efficacy, at least in his political and mainstream writings, his invocation of France’s Christian identity illuminates the fact that religion endured as a means to exercise power through the politics of difference. While Christianity

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had undoubtedly been used as a force to wield political power for centuries before the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, these events sparked a separation between Christianity as a spiritual entity and Christianity as a nineteenth-century secular tool by which to exercise political, cultural and social power. That is, the nineteenth century saw French political figures and intellectuals such as Tocqueville who did not publically acknowledge any religious affiliation begin to invoke France’s Christian heritage and identity to accomplish political ends. By examining how religious discourse operated in Tocqueville’s works, we can start to see in new ways the secularization of religious discourse and witness religion’s changing functions within modern French ­society.

Notes





1. Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 57. 2. Joseph F. Byrnes, Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France (University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2005), xx. 3.  See Roger Boesche, “The Dark Side of Tocqueville: On War and Emoire,” The Review of Politics vol. 67, no. 4 (Autumn 2005); Margaret Kohn, “Empire’s Law: Alexis de Tocqueville on Colonialism and the State of Exception,” Canadian Journal of Political Science vol. 41, no. 2 (June 2008). 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xxxv. 5. See Alan S. Kahan “Tocqueville and Religion: Beyond the Frontier of Christendom,” in Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, ed. Ewa Atanassow et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6. Hugh McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe 1848–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 3. 7.  Additionally, while many scholars including François Furet, Nestor Capdevila, and Ran Halévi have studied how Tocqueville’s writings shed light on the relationship between democracy and revolution, they have failed to incorporate Tocqueville’s beliefs about religion into their analyses. 8. David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism 1680–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 35. 9. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Random House Inc., 1955), 13.

118  W.A. Barnes 10. Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin, Religion, Society, and Politics in France since 1789 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 5. 11. Tocqueville, Democracy, 21–22. 12. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 151. 13. Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, trans., Jennifer Pitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xxx. 14. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Emancipation of Slaves, trans., Jennifer Pitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 199. 15. Tocqueville, The Emancipation of Slaves, 201. 16. Tocqueville, The Emancipation of Slaves, 207. 17. Pitts, Writings on Empire, xxxi. 18. Tocqueville, The Emancipation of Slaves, 200. 19. Tocqueville, The Emancipation of Slaves, 207. 20. See Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1; Patrick Weil, How to Be French (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 12; 21.  Richard Fogarty and Michael A. Osborne “Race in French Military Medicine,” in The Color of Liberty Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 210. 22. Olivier Zunz and Alan S. Kahan, ed., The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Limited, 2002), 267. 23. Alexis de Tocqueville, Correspondance entre Alexis de Tocqueville et Arthur de Gobineau, 1843–1859 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1908), 306–307. 24. Tocqueville, Correspondance entre Alexis de Tocqueville et Arthur de Gobineau, 307. 25. Tocqueville, Correspondance entre Alexis de Tocqueville et Arthur de Gobineau, 307. 26. Alexis de Tocqueville, Letter to Arthur de Gobineau 14 March 1843, trans. Olivier Zunz and Alan S. Kahan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Limited, 2002), 229. 27. Tocqueville was instrumental in propagating The “Kabyle Myth” (See Patricia Lorcin’s Imperial Identities” Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria, published in 1995) which racially defined the Kabyles or Algerian Berbers as an ethnic group different from ‘Arabs’ and imputed to them qualities extolled by many French colonists in the nineteenth century (such as individualism, a sedentary lifestyle, and a commercial spirit) in contradistinction to the nomadic Arabs. However, Tocqueville’s use of France’s Christian identity was almost exclusively reserved for discussions regarding the Arabs due to the fact that their belligerency was seen essentially in terms of religion, while Kabyle hostility was considered to be primarily defensive and unconnected to Islam. 28. Pitts, Writings on Empire and Slavery, xx.

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29.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Second Letter on Algeria, ed. Jennifer Pitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 25. 30. Tocqueville, Second Letter on Algeria, 25. 31. Tocqueville, Second Letter on Algeria, 25–26. 32. Tocqueville, Notes on the Voyage to Algeria in 1841, ed. Jennifer Pitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 37. 33. Tocqueville, Notes on the Voyage to Algeria in 1841, 49. 34. Alexis de Tocqueville, Essay on Algeria, ed. Jennifer Pitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 60–61. 35. Tocqueville, Essay on Algeria, 64. 36. Tocqueville, Essay on Algeria, 63. 37. Tocqueville, Essay on Algeria, 111. 38.  Alexis de Tocqueville, First Report on Algeria, ed. Jennifer Pitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 130. 39. Pitts, Writings on Empire and Slavery, xxviii. 40. See Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003); Patricia Tilburg, Colette’s Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870–1914 (New York: Berghahn, 2009).

Out of the Cloister and into the World: Catholic Nuns in the Aftermath of the Revolution Sarah A. Curtis

By all measures, the French Revolution was a catastrophic event for Catholic nuns. As part of the dismantling of the Catholic Church, the National Assembly outlawed monastic vows in February 1790, prohibited religious habits in October 1790, and closed convents in August 1792. To radical revolutionaries, after the fall of the monarchy, the closing of the convents not only turned over religious houses and land to the nation, it liberated their inhabitants from what critics considered a forced vocation and unnatural lifestyle. Nuns, in their view, did little useful work, and women religious were forced into civilian life, with only a small state pension to tide them over. In some areas of France, nuns also faced spontaneous public violence against their property and their bodies. While some women religious resisted expulsion and others went into exile, overall the Revolution was successful in shutting down the consecrated female religious life in France. Only after the Concordat of 1801 did Napoleon begin, cautiously, to reauthorize women’s religious orders. S.A. Curtis (*)  San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_6

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Yet I argue that the destruction of women’s religious life during the Revolution laid the groundwork for a reconstitution of women’s religious orders that proved more powerful—and certainly more expansive—than previous structures. Throughout the nineteenth century, women’s religious orders in France grew rapidly, providing educational, health care, and welfare services throughout the nation. They also undertook missionary work abroad both inside and outside of the French empire. The contours of this explosion and its institutional forms are well known, thanks to the pioneering work of Claude Langlois, who published Le Catholicisme au féminin in 1984.1 He showed that during the nineteenth century, the cloistered, contemplative religious house was replaced by active orders dedicated to good works in the community; convents were no longer independent but directed by a single female superior general who had authority over multiple houses, whether on a regional, national, or international scale.2 In this way, post-Revolutionary female religious orders provided even more opportunities for service and leadership for women than had their Old Regime counterparts. Such an observation directly contradicts the reductionist secular narrative that normally ends with the dechristianization measures of the Revolution. Nowhere was this truer than in missionary work, which few women religious undertook before the French Revolution. Indeed, the very term missionnaire was masculine, and the activities undertaken by male missionaries required travel into unknown spaces and practice of the sacraments, especially baptism, both off limits to women religious. But the Revolution not only liberated French women religious from cloister, the nature of missionary work expanded to encompass the kinds of good works that they were undertaking at home. Revolutionary rhetoric emphasized the key role of women in the home raising Republican citizens; Catholics increasingly adopted similar rhetoric that emphasized the key role of Catholic women in raising faithful Catholics. Although Catholic sisters were by definition celibate, they still promoted and to a certain extent symbolized the maternal role that Lynn Hunt and others have attributed to revolutionary reimaginings of women’s role in the family.3 Women religious, inside and outside France, were now valued for their ability to evangelize via good works, especially education, and their welcome into the heart of the family. By the end of the nineteenth century, French Catholic sisters were active on all five continents.

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The Closing of the Convents The primary form of women’s religious life before the Revolution was the enclosed convent into which, upon taking solemn vows, a woman was legally subsumed, without an individual legal identity or the right to inherit. These convents might have followed a common rule (such as that of the Ursulines or the Visitation), but each house was separate, self-governing, and under the jurisdiction of the local bishop. The purpose of all religious convents was prayer, but some also provided schooling to girls who could afford their fees as boarders within the convent walls. John McManners cites forty-three such convents in Paris alone.4 The best known educational order specializing in the education of girls of more modest means was the Ursulines, whose houses spread all over France. Founded during the Catholic Reformation, the Ursulines originally eschewed cloister but were forced into it by an anxious Catholic hierarchy.5 The only religious orders to escape cloister were those whose members took simple vows; technically, they were not nuns at all. Most of these were very local tiers ordres of consecrated women who chose celibate lives of service. For example, the béates of the Haute-Loire ­provided rudimentary education and training in lace making to local girls. The Sœurs de St-Charles de Lyon‚ founded in 1680, were a small congregation of schoolteachers, counting only forty-one members in 1791. Somewhat larger were the Sœurs de Saint-Joseph du Puy, founded in 1674, whose 150 communities covered five contiguous dioceses in central France. The only national congregation of this type, and the model for many of the others, was the Filles de la Charité, founded by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac in 1633 as an uncloistered community of women providing various forms of poor relief. To avoid enclosure, the community rejected the formal status of nuns and required only annual vows. These sisters were recruited largely from the lower classes where the hard labor of nursing, hospital care, and poor relief became socially acceptable when done in religious dress. The Filles de la Charité expanded rapidly throughout France in the Old Regime, counting 426 houses in 1789.6 Nonetheless, on the eve of the Revolution, these active congregations were very much in the minority; five out of six women religious lived an enclosed monastic life and took solemn vows, which ensured both their salvation and their respectability.7

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Even cloistered orders, however, were not entirely isolated from Old Regime life. The teaching orders had contact with pupils and their families. Some took in paying (female) guests; male clerics entered to hear confessions and celebrate mass, and many nuns kept up relations by mail or in person (behind a grille) with their families of origin. Convents participated actively in the Old Regime economy through collection of dowries, sale of their wares, cultivation of land, and investment in financial markets. Indeed, Elizabeth Rapley argues that the new female religious communities of the seventeenth century, unable to fall back on the inherited wealth of older convents, “grew up as small business enterprises, each embedded in its own local ‘market’ of supporters and patrons.”8 A local convent, in fact, was often linked through its membership, its funding, and its clients to local elite circles, who took pride in their relationship with the nuns. The reality of convent life and its relationship to local communities, however, was overshadowed in the eighteenth century by a steady stream of publications vilifying convents and the women hidden within them. The hostile discourse about nuns, although not entirely new, grew out of the battle over Jansenist influence in the Gallican church as well as Enlightenment attitudes towards Catholicism.9 Exemplified by Diderot’s novel La Religieuse, convent literature cast nuns in authority as power hungry, sexually perverse, and financially corrupt. Compared to marriage and motherhood, enclosure and celibacy were viewed as unnatural states that trapped innocent girls into a life of misery with no legal recourse. Rank-and-file nuns in convents were portrayed as victims of their families who wished to get rid of them and church authorities (men and women) who wished to claim their dowries. Dedicated to prayer, convents also served little social purpose in these texts, merely wasting human and monetary resources. Although convent literature often reflected broader critiques about the Old Regime and its power structures, particularly absolute monarchy, it undoubtedly shaped the view that elite educated men developed about convents and nuns. As Elizabeth Rapley argues, this view also went largely unchallenged by convents, whose only literary output were hagiographic texts intended to prove the sanctity of an institution or an individual, often, in the latter case, in view of canonization. As one-sided as the critiques, these materials were produced largely for internal consumption.10 Therefore, it is not surprising that the men who sought to reform the Catholic Church and its place in a new regime were hostile to the very

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concept of monastic life, especially among women. The legislative decree of February 13, 1790, suppressed all monastic orders (male and female) whose members took solemn vows and in October religious clothing was prohibited. Early the following year, nuns were given a choice of staying in the convent or leaving with a small pension. Contrary to the anti-nun propaganda of the previous decades, most women religious remained in their convents. In part, this was because as single women with few resources, they had few places to go.11 Mita Choudhury argues that the framing of the nuns during the Enlightenment as passive victims meant that the legislation was initially more lenient for nuns than for monks. Revolutionary officials also worried about the repercussions of returning unmarried women, many middle-aged or elderly, into society without marital prospects.12 In the initial phase of the Revolution, from 1789 to 1791, nuns themselves also, for the first time, responded to criticism, sending letters to the National Assembly to correct misunderstandings about convent life and to frame their vocation as consistent with loyalty and utility to the nation.13 After 1791, however, and the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, women religious began protecting non-juring priests, especially by opening convent and hospital chapels for them to say mass, which resulted in episodes of public violence against them. In August 1792, the Legislative Assembly began closing convents and evicting nuns as well as suppressing communities that took only simple vows. Only hospital nuns were allowed to continue working, and those hospitals suspected of counterrevolutionary ideas were closed in 1793. Instead of being viewed as victims, nuns now came under suspicion as active counter-revolutionary agents. The Filles de la Charité, who comprised more than fifteen percent of nuns in 1790,14 were one of the last Old Regime orders to be formally suppressed during the Revolution, since their hospital and poor relief work could not be easily replaced. The National Assembly attempted to secularize their work by keeping the sisters on as lay personnel in hospitals and bureaux de charité. Without religious vows, habits, and financial and supervisory autonomy, they would become (inexpensive and dedicated) servants of the state rather than of God. When the Filles de la Charité refused to be disbanded in this way, they were forced from their Parisian mother house at bayonet point after a sustained campaign against them in the press, especially the radical newspaper Le Père Duchêsne.15 Two sisters in Angers, one in Dax, and four in Arras were guillotined as counter-revolutionaries during the Terror. In the hospitals,

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however, where their services were most needed, no single policy ­prevailed as some sisters managed to keep their jobs, either because they were willing to keep their heads down, or because local officials were willing to look the other way.16 What happened to nuns whose convents closed? Revolutionaries imagined that they would marry former male clergy, but the surplus of nuns meant that this was an incomplete solution, even if both parties desired marriage. Langlois finds that only one percent took advantage of the opportunity to marry, compared to six to seven percent of male clergy.17 Some had families who were willing to take them in, but many found that families were not interested in supporting an aging nun whose dowry had already been donated to the convent and whose government stipend was minimal. Others formed small living communities, which were under the constant suspicion (not unfounded) of reconstituting religious life outside of the law.18 Still others chose exile abroad.19 The Sœurs de la Retraite chrétienne for example, who had only been founded in November 1789 and authorized by the archbishop of Besançon in 1791, were expelled the following year and spent the revolutionary years in Switzerland, Germany, Croatia, and Austria before returning to France in 1803.20 A number of Visitation nuns, accused of counter-revolutionary acts, such as corresponding with emigrating sisters or manufacturing or spreading counter-revolutionary propaganda, such as images of the Sacred Heart, were imprisoned, sometimes in their own former convents, which had been seized by the state and transformed into prisons.21 In a few cases, nuns chose martyrdom over forsaking their vows, such as the (in)famous Carmelite nuns, sixteen of whom were executed on July 17, 1794, only ten days before Robespierre. In the Vendée, where the Filles de la Sagesse aided the counter-revolutionary soldiers, thirty-three were executed. Even if only a minority of nuns chose martyrdom, it is almost impossible to trace the many former nuns who may have continued an apostolate, alone or with others, in local communities all over France. Olwen Hufton calls them “the crucial elements in the organization of a fortress faith” that taught the catechism, prepared the dead for burial, read the Bible, recited the rosary, and organized clandestine masses with priests-in-hiding.22 During the Directory and Napoleonic periods, when religious life began to revive in France, however, only a minority of Old Regime nuns returned to a consecrated life. Langlois attributes this reluctance to lack of resources (few had the capital, even pooled, to purchase their former

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convent or a similar building) and the psychological break with convent life after a decade or more of isolation.23 Some, of course, had died; others had aged. The example of Philippine Duchesne is the exception that proves the rule. Born into a prosperous bourgeois family, in 1788 she became a novice in the convent of the Visitation in Grenoble where she had been educated. She remained at the convent until it was closed in 1792 when she returned to her family but also took up charitable work in the city. In 1801, she developed a plan to lease (with her own money) the now abandoned convent and invited her former Visitation sisters to join her. They did not match Duchesne in youth, enthusiasm, or daring (they had no official permission to reopen) and within the year the other women abandoned the experiment, although Duchesne established a girls’ school in the former convent. By 1804 she had joined Madeleine Sophie Barat, a woman ten years younger than herself who had come of age after the Terror, in a fledgling religious order that became the Religious of the Sacred Heart.24 In her own person, Duchesne exemplified the transition from the old model to the new one; Sophie Barat, like many other female founders of post-Revolutionary religious orders, did not have even a foot in the old system.25 Even more enthusiastically than Duchesne, Jeanne-Antide Thouret took advantage of the destruction of religious life during the Revolution to reimagine her place in the Church. Born in 1765, she joined the Filles de la Charité in Paris as a novice in 1787 and returned to her natal Besançon when the order was dissolved in 1793. On her return, she taught children reading and the catechism, visited the sick, and provided “remedies.” She also hid clandestine non-juring priests who provided the sacraments to faithful Catholics. In February 1799, with the support of the local bishop, she opened a school for poor girls. Joined by other pious women, in September 1799 she rented a house for them and added a soup kitchen and a pharmacy. Describing herself as a “true victim of the Revolution” who was “delivered up to the furor of the people” but who “remained constantly loyal to my ­vocation,” she argued that, having never taken formal vows with the Filles de la Charité, she was not obligated to return, especially as her good works preceded the reestablishment of the Filles de la Charité by two years.26 Instead she founded a new order, the Sœurs de la Charité, which expanded throughout the region, an area where the Filles de la Charité had never been very active. By 1806, she governed one hundred sisters in nineteen establishments, and in 1810, she responded to a request by

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Napoleon’s brother-in-law, king of the Two Sicilies to send six sisters to Naples. Indeed, reading between the lines in her own writings, one gets the impression that she welcomed “the orders of Providence” and the “unexpected events” that gave her the scope to reimagine her religious life as leader rather than a follower.27

Religious Life Renewed The Old Regime orders that were most likely to reconstitute themselves were those founded or substantially renewed during the Catholic Reformation, usually with a specific social purpose, such as education, even within the strictures of cloister.28 Indeed, the Visitation nuns in Grenoble did reestablish their order in 1806, without Duchesne, and even tried to wrest their former convent back from the Religious of the Sacred Heart after the Restoration in 1815. The Visitation and the Ursulines, both Old Regime orders rooted in the Catholic Reformation with strong pre-Revolutionary networks, were successful in reconstituting themselves after the Revolution but had to expand their educational work in order to receive authorization from the state. The argument of social utility had won on both ideological and political terms. Purely contemplative orders were slow to rebuild and even slower to be recognized by the state. Gemma Betros has found that in the correspondence of Catholic nuns supporting the suppression of convents during the Revolution, the most common complaint was that of enclosure.29 Under the Napoleonic regime, religious orders were prized for their contribution to an orderly society and the social services they could offer. It is not then surprising that the first female congregation to be reauthorized were the Filles de la Charité in 1800 who represented thirty percent of all Catholic sisters (congréganistes) in 1808.30 The regime also provided them with a new motherhouse and an annual sum of 12,000 francs to train hospital sisters, although they avoided calling them a religious community. In response to the regrouping of religious communities (the government found 460 nuns in 77 houses in Paris in 1801), Napoleon decreed in 1804 that religious communities had to be authorized by the state, which began a formal process of reconstitution, although Napoleon’s attempt to centralize all religious communities under single leadership ultimately failed. Despite the regime’s desire for control, unauthorized communities, both old and new, continued to spring up, most of which were tolerated, provided they did not entail the civil death

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of their members or the (supposed) forced vocations of the Old Regime.31 The demand, by both the state and the public, for religious communities that provided social services, however, favored active congregations. Indeed, Old Regime congregations on this model—centralized and service-oriented—were among the first to reemerge after the chaos of the Revolution. The Sœurs de Charité de Strasbourg, founded 1732, restarted with only three sisters in 1804 and was authorized by Napoleon in 1810.32 The hospital sisters (de Notre-Dame de la Charité) in Dijon were forced out of the hospital in 1791 but returned eleven years later in 1802.33 Purely local orders expanded regionally and nationally. Jeanne Fontbonne, a member of the Sœurs de St-Joseph du Puy before the Revolution, who resisted expulsion and escaped execution by a single day on 10 Thermidor, opened up a new, independent branch, the Sœurs de St-Joseph de Lyon, in 1808 under the protection of Napoleon’s uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch. They eventually became the fourth largest congregation in France.34 The Sœurs de la Doctrine Chrétienne de Nancy which originated as the Sœurs des Ecoles de Charité in 1717, counted 132 members at the beginning of the nineteenth century but had expanded to 1‚600 in 1861.35 Likewise, the Sœurs de St-Charles de Lyon (founded 1680) were a small congregation of schoolteachers until the Revolution, counting only forty-one members in 1791, of whom sixteen returned in 1802; by 1840, however, they had 970 members and held the public school contracts for girls in the city of Lyon.36 Perhaps the most spectacular reconstitution was that of the Filles de la Sagesse (founded 1703 in Poitiers), who had 360 members in 1789, of whom 260 returned by 1800, growing to 700 in 1810, and 1‚000 in 1840.37 These reconstituted congregations dating from the Reformation were joined by some 400 newly formed religious congregations with similar goals. By 1808 (when the first important census of religious houses since the Revolution was taken), 54 percent of the members of active, centralized congregations (both reconstituted and new) had been recruited since 1800. Eight out of ten of all nuns in France belonged to congregations of this type, and they were overwhelmingly young. By 1880, their numbers would increase ten-fold, to 130,000.38 In the aftermath of the Revolution, they were led, by and large, by women whose formative religious experience was not Old Regime convent life, but the dechristianization campaign of the Revolution. Born in 1779, Sophie Barat was a teenager during the Terror when her brother Louis Barat, a Catholic priest-in-training who had retracted his oath to

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the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, was imprisoned and nearly guillotined between 1793 and 1795. The family was kept under surveillance‚ and churches in their hometown of Joigny were either closed or transformed into temples of reason.39 In Burgundy, teenaged Anne-Marie Javouhey (also born in 1779) helped hide refractory priests and acted as lookout at clandestine masses; by 1796, she was giving catechism lessons to local children.40 For young faithful women like this, the motivation for founding new religious orders was not reconstituting the religious life of the Old Regime but rechristianizing France after the violence of the Revolution. Women in particular were active in the clandestine networks that hid non-juring priests and held illegal religious services; more visibly they protected churches from closure and ransacking.41 It was a short step from this activity to the desire to create a longer-lasting structure to re-evangelize France, as the example of Jeanne-Antide Thouret’s new congregation in Besançon showed. Anne-Marie Javouhey was a temporary member before leaving to found her own congregation, the Sœurs de St-Joseph de Cluny in 1808. Many new congregations in fact originated in some sort of local charity work among like-minded young women (the Sœurs de St-Joseph de Cluny was unusual in enrolling not only Anne-Marie Javouhey but three of her blood sisters as well), who then acquired a building—often a former convent, now on the market as a bien national—after which they sought out a priest to help draft a rule and administer vows. State authorization and recognition from the church followed these steps, often taking decades, while the de facto congregation pursued its good works.

The Missionary Impulse Missionary work was a natural outgrowth of this movement rather than a specific and different impulse. From the point of view of the women founding and joining these religious orders, France itself in the immediate post-Revolutionary period was mission territory. The formative religious experience of Emilie de Vialar, born in 1797, were the revival meetings held by Catholic missionaries in her hometown of Gaillac beginning when she was eight years old. These internal missions, numbering over 1‚500 between 1815 and 1830 and undertaken by male orders such as the Jesuits and the Missionnaires de France, traveled from town to town to preach, celebrate communion, and erect mission crosses.42 Like these missionaries Vialar wished to bring individuals back

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into the Catholic fold, but like other faithful women, she did so initially not by traveling from town to town but through good works in her own community. Vialar served soup to beggars who came to her door and nursed patients in their homes before she organized a religious order.43 The purpose of the new religious orders was to provide service to others but also to bring them back regular religious practice. Opening schools allowed them to teach the catechism; nursing and hospital work were opportunities to bring the ill and dying back to God; home visits to the poor provided occasions for intimate evangelization. The Revolution had shown that baptism and even sacramental practice were not impediments to dechristianization. Religious faith needed to be deeper, inculcated younger, and be anchored in the home and family. For this, the work of Catholic sisters, especially among children and women‚ was increasingly valued. In a France undergoing significant social and economic change in the nineteenth century, demand by local communities for sisters who could provide social services was high. Yet, traveling overseas to establish missions among non-Christian peoples was a departure for women’s religious orders, few of whom had ventured abroad in the Old Regime. The Ursulines had the most experience, individual convents having sent nuns to Quebec as early as 1639, followed by missions in Martinique in 1681, New Orleans in 1727, and Pondicherry in 1738. Although Heidi Keller-Lapp has argued that the colonial missions of the Ursulines allowed them more flexibility as to enclosure and a more common sense of purpose as a single religious order, both hallmarks of their nineteenth-century successors, the numbers of nuns involved in these missions were small: a mere sixty-three nuns traveled from France to one of these locations between 1639 and 1763.44 Although the Ursulines saw themselves as feminine counterparts to the Jesuits, they did not follow them to China or on the peripatetic missions across Canada, the Midwest, or the Mississippi River valley in North America. Enclosure only stretched so far. Nonetheless, the Ursulines provided an important model for both Old Regime and postRevolutionary nuns who wished to undertake missionary work, especially Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, missionary in Quebec, whose writings were widely circulated.45 The New Orleans Ursuline community was also instrumental in welcoming the Religious of the Sacred Heart to the United States in 1818.46 In 1733, the Filles de Notre Dame founded in 1606, opened a house in Cap Français (Haiti) to educate both daughters of French settlers and (separately) black girls and women. It remained

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open until 1792 when the sisters were forced out by the revolutionary events in St-Domingue.47 The only other pre-Revolutionary order active in missionary work were the Sœurs de St-Paul de Chartres. Founded in 1696, they opened an establishment in Cayenne, French Guiana in 1727 at the invitation of Louis XV and subsequently sent sisters to Ile Bourbon (Réunion) in 1770 and Ile de France (Ile Maurice) in 1775. Considered auxiliaries to the French military, in each location they staffed the French hospital and provided girls’ schooling to settlers; these were not conversion missions. But with twenty-six sisters in the colonies and only twenty in France in 1792,48 this was as close to a female colonial order that France had on the eve of the Revolution. Missionary work by women outside of France in the early modern period was hampered by the requirements of enclosure, the fragmentation of women’s religious houses, the rigors of travel, and the subordination of women religious to male authority. The growth of the centralized, uncloistered, and active women’s religious congregation made at least the first two impediments moot. Catholic sisters were now protected by their habits and codes of behavior alone; they no longer needed the protection of walled convents. When Philippine Duchesne left for the United States in 1818, she took Marie de l’Incarnation and the mixed vocation—cloister and education—of the Ursulines, as her role model and attempted to improvise some sort of enclosure in the convents she established in and around St. Louis.49 For the four Sœurs de St-Joseph de Cluny departing for Ile Bourbon (Réunion) in the same year‚ however‚ only the sea voyage caused anxiety; the sisters only left their small stuffy stateroom as a group.50 Once arrived, they moved around the island freely. The centralization of women’s c­ongregations under a single superior general also made missionary work easier by facilitating recruitment and placement. Whether a superior general responded to requests for missionaries or initiated missions herself, she had at her command hundreds, sometimes thousands of women, who could be moved around, under the vow of obedience, at will. Before the late 1830s, only a few French orders ventured into missionary work. Most reconstituted or new congregations inside of France were not yet in a position to spare members to send abroad. This was particularly true of the two orders that had been active overseas before the Revolution. The Ursuline missions in Quebec and New Orleans had flourished, but they were now under British (Quebec) and Spanish, then American (New Orleans) authority and no longer recruited from

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France. Their mission in Pondicherry had shut down in 1744. Only the Martinique house remained open during the Revolution, weathering shifting French politics and two British occupations. But the Ursulines were not a centralized order on the new model and individual houses had to reestablish themselves individually. The Sœurs de St-Paul de Chartres had also maintained their establishments overseas during the Revolution, while their French sisters were disbanded. In Ile Bourbon and Ile de France, they continued their ministry, in religious dress, even while priests’ belongings were confiscated. In Cayenne, the sisters ministered to political prisoners who had been exiled to French Guiana in their hospital, largely refractory priests, about a third of whom died.51 Without news from the motherhouse for over ten years, the seven remaining, and aging, sisters in Guiana left when Cayenne was occupied by Portugal in 1809. In France, the Ministry of Marine and Colonies requested more sisters be sent overseas beginning in 1802 to staff hospitals in the colonies, especially in war zones.52 The government asked the former superior general, Mère Marie Josseaume, to reconstitute the Sœurs de St-Paul de Chartres in 1802. Initially, prospects did not look good; she reported finding only two semi-willing former sisters, although at the time of her death in 1834, the congregation had grown to 363 sisters.53 Six sisters left France to reestablish the Cayenne mission in 1817.54 At the request of the French government, they added missions to Martinique in 1818 and Guadeloupe in 1820. But both the Ursulines and the Sœurs de St-Paul de Chartres found themselves edged out of French colonies by the dynamic post-Revolutionary order, the Sœurs de St-Joseph de Cluny. They fell into missionary work when their energetic founder‚ AnneMarie Javouhey, met a wealthy plantation owner from the Ile Bourbon (Réunion) in Paris who invited her to establish a mission there. Subsequently Javouhey skillfully negotiated with the colonial ministry to open houses in French colonial territory; after Réunion, she added in quick succession: Gorée and St-Louis (Senegal), Cayenne and Mana (French Guiana), Martinique, Guadeloupe, Pondicherry, and St-Pierre and Miquelon. She also established a seminary to train African priests in France and a colony to rehabilitate former slaves in Mana, Guiana, and positioned herself as one of the leading voices in favor of slave emancipation. According to Javouhey, when the apostolic prefect in Martinique sought additional Ursulines in 1825, the colonial ministry informed him that only the Sœurs de St-Joseph de Cluny were “approved for

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the colonies.”55 In Bourbon, when in 1825 five of the eight Sœurs de St-Paul de Chartres asked to return to France, the colonial ministry decided to replace them entirely with the Cluny sisters, who were perceived as younger and more dynamic. They were also less expensive.56 In Martinique, the two orders divided the work, hospitals for St-Paul de Chartres and schools for St-Joseph de Cluny. Far from helping them, the Old Regime origins of the Sœurs de St-Paul de Chartres initially acted as a brake on their influence: returning sisters were older and cautious and the congregation did not have a Paris house, their motherhouse in Chartres having served them well when proximity to the court at Versailles was more important.57 It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century, starting with an 1848 mission in Hong Kong and then expanding into French-held territory in Indochina, that the Sœurs de St-Paul de Chartres found their footing again as a missionary order. Although a post-Revolutionary order, the Religious of the Sacred Heart began their overseas expansion by following older models as well. The impetus to establish a mission in North America came from Philippine Duchesne, whose religious life began in a Visitation convent and who imagined a French return to missionary territory along the Mississippi River where she could proselytize among Native American tribes. Duchesne evoked the work of Mère Marie de l’Incarnation in Canada and Jesuit Catholic Reformation saints Francis Xavier and Francis Régis as inspiration for her own work. When contact with American Indians on the nineteenth-century frontier proved largely illusory, however, Duchesne and the Sacred Heart sisters who accompanied her refocused their mission on the education of girls, taking advantage of the new Catholic emphasis on women and the family as the key to sustained religious practice. Male missionaries in the early modern period were primarily concerned with the conversion of non-Christian peoples through baptism and their continued practice of the sacraments, especially Holy Communion. But when the Bishop of Louisiana, Louis William Dubourg, traveled back to his native France in 1815 in search of clerics to revitalize his diocese, he made a point of recruiting women religious, Duchesne and the Sacred Heart sisters, to open schools in St. Louis. Nineteenth-century clerics increasingly believed that the education of girls was crucial to the future of Catholicism, in France and around the world. Catholic girls‚ they hoped‚ would grow up to become Catholic mothers who would raise their children in the church. In this, Catholics mirrored the concept of “Republican motherhood” unleashed by the

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Revolution with the added confidence that women had been among the church’s most fervent supporters during the repression of Catholicism. Nowhere was this belief in the ability of women missionaries to evangelize among women and children stronger than in the newly opened mission territories of North Africa and the Middle East. The conquest of Algeria coupled with the slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire provided new opportunities for the Catholic Church to establish missions in Muslim territories. Two realities, however, hampered their efforts. One was the prohibition against overt proselytization and conversion of Muslims; this was even true in French-controlled territory in Algeria, where colonial officials were eager not to offend the sensibilities of “fanatical” Arabs. The second was the conviction that indigenous homes were “impenetrable” to outsiders, especially men. Active congregations of women could overcome both of these impediments. Women missionaries had access to women and children in their homes, spaces that male clerics could not enter. “A great number of women, Muslim or Jewish, seek us out to visit their ill,” wrote Emilie de Vialar only a year after the Sœurs de St-Joseph de l’Apparition had arrived in Algiers in the midst of a cholera epidemic. “Our sex allows us to gain admittance to Moorish women who most often receive no help during their illnesses.”58 This contact provided opportunities for a more subtle form of evangelization, based on building respect for Catholics and Catholic institutions. Catholic nuns in Muslim lands were also not reluctant to use their access during medical crises to secretly baptize Muslim or Jewish babies they envisaged in danger of death.59 Their convents acted as places of sanctuary for abandoned women and children; they were allowed to raise orphans as Catholics. Although most pupils in their schools were the daughters of Catholic settlers, with some Jewish girls, their educational mission allowed them to assure a more robust faith among European populations migrating in increasing numbers to North Africa. This less confrontational form of evangelization also suited French officials, who increasingly justified colonial expansion in terms of a “civilizing mission” which women religious, in their good works, appeared to embody. Although the Sœurs de St-Joseph de l’Apparition left Algeria in 1842 because of a dispute with the new bishop, Dupuch, they took refuge in nearby Tunisia where they were welcomed by Ahmed Bey, who embraced their charitable works.60 From Tunisia and Malta, where they opened schools and a novitiate, they expanded across the Mediterranean

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basin. In Algeria, they were succeeded by the Sœurs de la Doctrine Chrétienne de Nancy in 1840, the Trinitaires de Valence in 1841, the Filles de la Charité in 1842, and the Sœurs du Bon Pasteur d’Anger in 1843. Indeed, the 1840s saw a flurry of women’s missionary activity, as the post-Revolutionary apostolic congregations matured and took advantage of French expansion, both formal and informal, into the Ottoman Empire. No congregation represents this movement better than the Filles de la Charité, whose form of service was well suited to the new missionary conditions. Although their male companion order, the Congrégation de la Mission (more commonly known as the Pères Lazaristes), began expanding in the Middle East as early as 1643, the Filles de la Charité did not expand further than Poland (1652) and Italy (1788) before the outbreak of the French Revolution. In 1839, however, they established their first non-European mission in Constantinople, followed quickly by missions in Smyrna (1841), Algiers (1842), Alexandria (1844), Beirut (1847), and Damascus (1847). These initiatives were due to the conviction of Jean-Baptiste Etienne, who served as superior general for both the Filles de la Charité and the Pères Lazaristes, that the Ottoman Empire was ripe for Catholic expansion at the hands of women religious. “The Mohammedan,” he wrote, “sees something supernatural in a woman who has crossed the seas and sacrificed everything to come bandage his wounds and relieve his pains.”61 What was striking about the Filles de la Charité in the Middle East was how quickly and completely they replicated the charitable apparatus that had served them so well in France in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire. Schools, orphanages, hospitals, pharmacies, soup kitchens, all serving the widest possible public, multiplied quickly, staffed by increasing numbers of sisters coming from France. By the 1850s, it was not uncommon for the sisters to treat over 50,000 patients in their clinics and also visit thousands at home in a single year.62 Like the Sœurs de St-Joseph de l’Apparition they used these opportunities to save the souls, in their view, of young children in danger of death through clandestine baptism. But baptisms and conversions formed only a small minority of their work. The tally in Constantinople for 1848, for example, read as follows: outpatient clinics (68,827 individuals), poor relief (25,445 individuals), home visits (10,919), pupils received in classes (793), hospital patients (250), baptisms of dying children (225), conversions (188), aid to needy churches (21), abandoned and ransomed children (12), adult baptisms (10).

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The grand total was 106,286 good works, of which a mere 423 were ­baptisms or conversions.63 The late 1830s and 1840s saw a rapid expansion of French female missionary work around the world, with over a half a dozen new religious congregations joining the early pioneers in overseas evangelization, not only in French colonies, but also in the Ottoman Empire, North and South America, and Asia, especially places that France had growing political or commercial interests.64 Valparaiso, Chile, for example, was an important port for the Pacific ambitions of the French government where twelve Sœurs des Sacré-Cœur et de l’Adoration de Picpus opened a mission in 1838.65 The timing of this missionary “takeoff” is not surprising. By the 1840s, new and reconstituted congregations had matured with stable establishments in France and enough recruitment to consider expanding abroad. In 1822, Pauline Jaricot had founded the Association de la propagation de la foi, which raised funds and disseminated information about overseas missions, and in 1843, Mgr Charles de ForbinJanson founded the Oeuvre de la Sainte Enfance in order to raise money for orphans in Asian countries. The reestablishment of Propaganda Fide in 1817 and the interest of Pope Gregory XVI (1831–1846) in reorganizing mission territories also acted as a spur to clerics wishing to recruit female religious congregations overseas. Three French orders (Religieuses de Jésus et Marie de Lyon, Sœurs de Saint Joseph d’Annecy et de Chambéry, and Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de l’Apparition) for example sent sisters to British India and Burma between 1842 and 1847 at the request of local bishops.66 By and large, however, these congregations were not missionary orders per se, but French orders who answered calls by French colonial agents or Catholic clerics to establish houses overseas. Emilie de Vialar first ventured to Algeria because her brother was one of the early colonists, not because she originally sought to form a missionary congregation. Like the Filles de la Charité abroad, the Religious of the Sacred Heart performed much of the same work overseas as they did in France, only in their case, this consisted largely of educating daughters of the elite, which spread French Catholic culture throughout the world.67 Anne-Marie Javouhey monopolized the contracts for female religious communities in French colonies (excepting Algeria), but at any one time two-thirds of her sisters served in towns and villages in France. Only in the second half of the century did it become more common for women to answer a missionary call without having first established themselves in

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France, forming a congregation that was dedicated to missionary work alone.68 It is not until the 1880s that certain congregations, like the Filles de la Charité or the Society of the Sacred Heart, could count more establishments outside than inside of France.69 In the decades immediately following the Revolution, missionary work was an extension of the work that active congregations did in France, not a reconceptualization of their roles. Those roles were made possible by the destruction of a different kind of religious life during the French Revolution. The active, uncloistered model of religious life for women, centralized and dedicated to good works, had its origins in the Catholic Reformation, but it was neither dominant nor prestigious until revolutionaries created a tabula rasa that forced all religious communities to start over again in the aftermath of the Revolution. In sweeping away the old system, the revolutionaries paradoxically allowed for a new one to emerge, one that put more emphasis on both service and salvation. The contemplative and cloistered model proved less appealing to the young women who had spent their formative years protecting the church at the grassroots level. Instead they flocked to religious communities, some predating the Revolution but others brand new, that offered them the opportunity to lead active lives in France and in the world. By destroying an old system with limited energy and little potential for expansion and by creating an existential threat to the church itself, the Revolution inspired and empowered Catholic women to recreate religious life on their own terms to new, global, ends.

Notes



1. Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au féminin: Les congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1984). 2. Although in common English usage the terms are used interchangeably, a religious order is an enclosed institution whose members (nuns) take solemn vows and a religious congregation is an uncloistered community whose members (sisters) take only simple vows. 3. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 4. John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, vol. 1, The Clerical Establishment and Its Social Ramifications (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 535.

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5. On the enclosure of active orders of nuns during the Catholic Reformation, see Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in SeventeenthCentury France (Montreal and Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), esp. Chap. 3. 6. On the pre-revolutionary history of the Filles de la Charité, see Rapley, Dévotes, Chap. 4; Susan Dinan, Women and Poor Relief in SeventeenthCentury France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Burlington, Verm.: Ashgate, 2006), and Matthieu Bréjon de Lavergnée, Histoire des Filles de la Charité (XVIIe au XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 2011). 7. Elizabeth Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime (Montreal and Kingston, Ont.: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001), 117. 8. Rapley, Social History, 33. 9. The best source on this discourse is Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 10. Rapley, Social History, 4. 11.  Nuns were provided with minimal pensions at state expense: 200 francs per year for a nun aged between 40 and 60 in 1789. Langlois, Catholicisme, 83. 12. Choudhury, Convents and Nuns, 156. 13. Choudhury, Convents and Nuns, 167–168. See also Gemma Betros, “Liberty, Citizenship, and the Suppression of Female Religious Communities in France,” Women’s History Review 18, 2 (April 2009): 311–336. 14. Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 58 15. Hufton, Women, 59, 73. 16. Hufton, Women, 80–82. 17. Langlois, Catholicisme, 82. On nuns and marriage, see Kathryn Marsden, “Married Nuns in the French Revolution: The Sexual Revolution of the 1790s” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2014). 18. See, for example, Gabrielle Gauchat, Journal d’une Visitandine pendant la Terreur ou mémoires de la Sœur Gabrielle Gauchat (Paris: Mme Veuve Poussielgue Rusand, 1855). See also Betros, “Liberty,” 324. 19. See, for example, Péronne-Marie Thibert, ed., I Leave You My Heart: A Visitandine Chronicle of the French Revolution: Mère Marie-Jéronyme Vérot’s Letter of 15 May 1794 (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2000).

140  S.A. Curtis 20. Daniel-Odon Hurel, ed., Guide pour l’histoire des ordres et des congrégations religieuses: France, XVIe-XXe siècles (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 257–258. 21. Philippe Bourdin, “Visitation et Révolution,” in Visitation et Visitandines aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, eds. Bernard Dompnier and Dominique Julia (St-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2001), 249. 22. Hufton, Women, 76–77. 23. Langlois, Catholicisme, 82–83. 24. Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Religious and the Revival of French Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33–36. 25. On Sophie Barat and the origins of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, see Phil Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat, 1779–1865: A Life (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000). 26. Sainte Jeanne-Antide Thouret, Fondatrice des Sœurs de la Charité, 1765–1826: Lettres et Documents (Besançon: Imprimerie Jacques et Demontround, 1982), Letter to Monsieur Debry, Prefect, 14 (or 15) February 1805, 115–117. 27. Sainte Jeanne-Antide Thouret, “Mémoire,” 27 November to 2 December 1807, 128–130. 28. Langlois, Catholicisme, 84. 29. Betros, “Liberty,” 323. 30. Langlois, Catholicisme, 74. 31. These details on the Napoleonic regime are taken from Gemma Betros, “Napoleon and the Revival of Female Religious Communities in Paris, 1800–14,” in Revival and Resurgence in Christian History, eds. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (Ecclesiastical History Society, Boydell Press, 2008), 185–195. 32. Hurel, Guide, 234. 33. Hurel, Guide, 247. 34. Sarah A. Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 44. They ventured overseas for the first time in 1836, sending sisters to St. Louis, Missouri. This eventually became a separate congregation, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. See Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 35. Hurel, Guide, 243. 36. Hurel, Guide, 262. See also Curtis, Educating the Faithful. 37. Hurel, Guide, 260. 38. See Langlois, Catholicisme, 79–93, for these statistics. 39. Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat, 17–18.

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40. Geneviève Lecuir-Nemo, Anne-Marie Javouhey: Fondatrice de la congrégation des Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny (1779–1851) (Paris: Karthala, 2001), 23–24. 41. On women’s advocacy on behalf of the church during the Revolution, see Hufton, Women, Chap. 3 and Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 42. On internal missions during the Restoration, see Ernest Sevrin, Les missions religieuses en France sous la Restauration, 1815–1830, 2 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1948); Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), and Maria Riasanovsky, “Trumpets of Jericho: Domestic Missions and Religious Revival in France, 1814–1830” (PhD. diss., Princeton University, 2001). 43. Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 103. 44.  Heidi Keller-Lapp, “Floating Cloisters and femmes fortes: Ursuline Missionaries in Ancien Regime France and Its Colonies,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2005). See Appendix V for a list of Ursuline missionaries. 45. There is a large literature on Marie de l’Incarnation. Recent scholarly works include Françoise Deroy-Pineau, Marie de l’Incarnation: Marie Guyart; Femme d’affaires, mystique, Mère de la Nouvelle-France; Tours, 1599- Québec, 1672 (Paris: Robert Laffont‚ 1989); Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) Marie-Florine Bruneau, Women Mystics Confront the Modern World: Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672) and Madame Guyon (1648–1717) (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1998); and Françoise Deroy-Pineau, ed., Marie Guyard de l’Incarnation: Un Destin transocéanique (Tours, 1599—Québec, 1672) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), each of which has complete bibliographies of both primary and secondary works. 46. On the New Orleans Ursulines, see Emily J. Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 47. See Gabriel Debien, “Une maison d’éducation à Saint-Domingue: ‘les religieuses du Cap,’ 1731–1802,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 2, 4 (1949), 557–575 and R.P. Cabon, “Les Religieuses du Cap à Saint-Domingue (suite et fin),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 3, 3 (1949), 402–422. 48.  Jeanne Hélène Sineau, “La reconstitution d’une congrégation après la tourmente révolutionnaire: les Sœurs de Saint-Paul de Chartres,” 

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Archives de l’Eglise de France: Bulletin de l’Association des archivistes de l’Eglise de France 57 (Spring 2002): 2. 49. The preoccupation over enclosure in the Religious of the Sacred Heart also resulted from their statutes, which recognized them as a papal order in 1826. See Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 38–39. 50. Archives des Sœurs de St-Joseph de Cluny, 2 A d, Marie-Joseph Varin to Anne-Marie Javouhey, 21 November 1817; 29 April 1817. 51. Elisabeth Dufourcq, Les congregations religieuses féminines hors d’Europe de Richelieu à nos jours: Histoire naturelle d’une diaspora (Paris: Librairie de l’Inde, 1993), vol. 4, 192–193. 52. Dufourcq, Les congrégations religieuses‚ vol. 4‚ 194. Nonetheless, lack of personnel meant that no sisters departed for French colonies during the Napoleonic period. 53. Sineau, “La reconstitution,” 5–6. 54. Sœurs de Saint-Paul de Chartres, 250 Ans en Guyane (Rome, 1978), 20. 55. Anne-Marie Javouhey, Correspondance (Paris: Cerf, 1994), no. 110, to Mère Rosalie Javouhey in Bourbon, 13 September 1825. 56.  Archives Nationales, F19, 6211, Minister of Marine and Colonies to Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Instruction, 1 July 1825. 57. Dufourcq, Les congrégations religieuses‚ vol. 4, 216. 58. Archives des Sœurs de St-Joseph de l’Apparition, 1 A 4.4, Vialar to Mme d’ Aubilly, 21 April 1836. 59.  See Sarah A. Curtis, “‘Civiliser’ et convertir au XIXe siècle: Les baptêmes clandestins et les religieuses missionnaires,” in Femmes, Genre et Catholicisme: Nouvelles Recherches, Nouveaux Objets (France, XIXeXXe siècles), eds. Anne Cova and Bruno Dumons (Chrétiens et Sociétés, Documents et Mémoires, no. 17, 2012), 181–203, for a full discussion of this issue. Clandestine baptism of dying infants and children was also practiced by women missionaries in China. 60. See Curtis, Civilizing Habits, Chap. 5, and Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), Chap. 7. 61. Quoted in Vie de M. Etienne, XIVe supérieur général de la Congrégation de la Mission et de la Compagnie des Filles de la Charité par un prêtre de la Mission (Paris: Gaume et Cie, 1881), 120. 62. For example, with astonishing precision they recorded 55,517 outpatients and 4‚325 home visits to patients in Alexandria in 1851. Archives des Pères Lazaristes, C 217, Alexandrie, 7 January 1852. 63. Archives de Propagation de la Foi, Fonds Lyon, E 10a, Constantinople, Eugène Boré, Père Lazariste to M. le Secrétaire, 29 September 1848. For more on the Filles de la Charité in the Middle East, see Sarah A. Curtis, “Charity Begins Abroad: The Filles de la Charité in the Ottoman

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Empire,” in In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World, eds. Owen White and J.P. Daughton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 89–107. 64. See Elisabeth Dufourcq, Les Aventurières de Dieu: Trois siècles d’histoire missionnaire française (Paris: JC Lattès, 1993), 65, for a list of new missions and the female congregations that established them. A collection of missionary texts can be found in Chantal Paisant, ed., La mission au féminin: Témoignages de religieuses missionnaires au fil d’un siècle (XIXedébut XXe siècle) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009). 65. Dufourcq, Les congrégations religieuses‚ vol. 4, 231–233. 66. Dufourcq, Les congrégations religieuses‚ vol. 4, 260. 67. On the educational work of the Society of the Sacred Heart, see Phil Kilroy, The Society of the Sacred Heart in Nineteenth-Century France, 1800–1865 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), Chap. 2 and Rebecca Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), Chap. 8. 68. The first sisters to do so were the Sœurs missionnaires de la Société de Marie, whose founder, Marie-Françoise Perroton, left for the Pacific in 1846 after having read in the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi that the Pères Maristes were looking for “pious women” to help with women on the island of Wallis. They were not formally organized as a “third order” until 1881 and became a congregation in 1931. 69. Paisant, La mission au féminin‚ 23.

Lamennais’ Dilemma: Reconciling Religion and Revolution Thomas Kselman

The French Revolution was accompanied by a religious crisis in France, a familiar point to scholars who have explored the assaults on the Catholic Church and the struggle to create alternatives through the “constitutional” Church and a variety of civil religions.1 Over the past several years, historians have advanced our understanding of this crisis by exploring its impact on theorists concerned with imagining a new relationship between religion and society, broken by the Revolution, but necessary for re-establishing political and social harmony in Europe.2 For Benjamin Constant, whose Principles of Politics (1815) was a key source for nineteenth-century liberalism, “the only reasonable idea regarding religion” was the “freedom of cults without restriction, without privilege, without obliging individuals, as long as they obey the law, to declare their attachment to any particular cult.”3 Responding to the perennial Catholic fear that such freedom without limits would produce an everexpanding number of sects, Constant accepted the premise that such a situation would emerge, and embraced it as a positive development.

T. Kselman (*)  University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_7

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Competition between sects would create a virtuous circle, with each new addition pushing the others to moral improvement.4 Conservative theorists and papal pronouncements condemned unfettered religious liberty and consequent pluralism, convinced that such a policy would undermine the social order. Pope Pius VI’s papal brief of 1791, Quod aliquantum, rejected the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy for establishing “as a right of man in society this absolute liberty that not only insures the right to be left undisturbed in his religious opinions, but also grants full license to think, speak, write and even print freely whatever one wishes on religious matters—even the most disordered imaginings.” For Pius VI, such religious liberty was a “monstrous right,” a form of madness.5 This critique was echoed and elaborated by the anti-philosophes of the Counter-Enlightenment, including Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) and Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), for whom individual judgment must give way to the truths of tradition most perfectly captured in the teachings of the Catholic Church, infallibly taught by the Pope.6 Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854) took up these arguments from an older generation of theorists, and in a brilliant series of p ­ olemical works in the 1820s became the key figure in the defense of the Catholic Church as an essential antidote for the corrosive principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. What makes Lamennais a fascinating and important person for students of religion in the revolutionary era, however, is the journey that led him away from conservative orthodoxy to a radical posture that earned him two condemnations in papal encyclicals. A review of Lamennais’ career allows us to consider the complex and paradoxical ways in which the French Revolution reshaped the possibilities for thinking about the relationship of religion and society, and of the nature and value of religious liberty. Throughout his early career, Lamennais consistently defended the prerogatives of the Catholic Church, a position which led him to condemn what he saw as state interference in religious matters, and eventually to call for the separation of church and state. Religious liberty in this sense was a right that applied to the institutional church, but not to the individual conscience. In the 1830s, however, in the course of his battles with the Church hierarchy, Lamennais adopted, albeit in a hesitant and ambiguous manner, a more expansive sense of religious liberty that accepted the right of personal judgment. Lamennais’ career thus illustrates two enduring problems related to religious liberty that have confronted Catholicism from

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the Revolution through the present: the relationship of Church and State and the relationship between the individual conscience and official dogma.7

Lamennais and the Liberty of the Catholic Church Born in Saint Malo in 1782, Lamennais was the son of a prosperous merchant and ship-builder who was ennobled in 1788. We know very little of his early years, but like so many others of this generation, Lamennais’ education was affected by the disruptions of the Revolution. After his mother’s death in 1787, Félicité and his brother, Jean-Marie, were raised by their uncle Robert des Saudrais, who gave his nephews free rein to browse in his extensive library. With the Catholic clergy forced into hiding in 1792, Lamennais was deprived of the ordinary catechetical instruction which would have given him a foundation in Catholic dogma. Using the resources of his uncle’s library, he was largely self-educated, teaching himself Greek, and reading widely and indiscriminately.8 Jean-Marie decided early on a vocation, and was ordained a priest in 1804. Féli, as he was known, more brilliant and volatile than his brother, struggled over his future, and flirted for some time with the philosophical ideas of Rousseau.9 Finally, in 1804, at the age of twenty-two, he received his First Communion, and from that point, pursued his career as a writer preoccupied with the religious and political questions that divided France throughout his lifetime. For the next thirty years, the two brothers had a close relationship, damaged severely, but not completely broken by Féli’s departure from the Church in the 1830s. Lamennais’ early writings, based on a collaboration with his brother, were polemical interventions that established some of the principal ideas that he would develop throughout the next twenty years: the relationship between Church and State should mirror that between soul and body, with the first having primacy over the latter, the spiritual over the material; religious authority rather than individual reason is the basis for certainty in both religion and politics; the Catholic Church led by the Pope provides the only hope for the restoration of peace and s­tability in Europe; a Gallican Church that challenged Papal authority would prevent a universal Catholicism from fulfilling its regenerative role in post-revolutionary Europe.10 Although closely associated with a traditionalist defense of the Catholic Church, Lamennais was slow to accept ordination as a Catholic

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priest. It was only after a decade of painful soul-searching, and the exertion of considerable pressure by his brother and several friends, that Lamennais was ordained in 1816. A year later, he became a celebrity, when the publication of his Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion created an enormous and unexpected sensation with the reading public. The book sold 40,000 copies and overnight made Lamennais into one of the principal figures in the Catholic revival of the Bourbon Restoration. This was a book, according to Msgr. Fraysinnous, preacher to Louis XVIII, and subsequently the Grand Master of the University, that “would wake up a dead man.”11 The Essai sur l’indifférence appealed to readers because of its rhetorical flair and its unequivocal condemnation of freedom and equality, the principles of 1789 that led to the catastrophes of the revolutionary era and the contemporary crisis. Only a rejection of religious indifference, and of the soft-headed tolerance of individual judgment, could restore the social order. Lamennais describes with passion and power the social necessity for unquestioning submission to religious authority: [Religion] cannot leave man free to believe and act according to his will; it constrains him to submit his reason to his faith, his desires to his duties, his body to the practices that it imposes. In subjecting the whole man in this way, religion exhausts him, and drives his passions to despair. Never vanquished even when they obey, they work tirelessly to break the yoke that they bear, always murmuring against it.12

For Lamennais, life is defined by a constant battle to master our pride and reject our individual impulses in favor of religious authority manifested in the Catholic Church, and in particular in the Pope. This c­ onflict shows up as well in Lamennais’ popular translation of The Imitation of Christ, accompanied by an extensive commentary, which appeared in 1824.13 Chapter Nine of the Imitation calls for obedience and the renunciation of one’s own inclinations, a topic which led Lamennais to one of his most extended comments on any of the chapters, and concluded with an unqualified endorsement of external authority: “No order in the world, no life without obedience: it is the bond between men, and between men and God, the foundation of peace and the principle of universal harmony…. In obeying the Pope, the Prince, the father, anyone who is the minister of God for the good (Romans XIII, 1), it is God whom one obeys.” From Lamennais’ perspective, only in such

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apparent self-abnegation does one really become free, for “delivered from the slavery of error and passion, from the slavery of man, he enjoys the true liberty of the children of God (Romans VIII: 21).”14 Ten years after the publication of The Imitation of Christ, Montalembert would refer precisely to this passage in urging his friend and mentor to submit to the Church, surrender his personal judgment, and obey the Pope in acknowledging his errors. But as we shall see, Lamennais refused this appeal, for he had by then come to a very different understanding of religious liberty. Lamennais pushed very far in imagining how far the State, informed by Catholicism, could extend. At one point in the Essai sur l’indifférence he insists that “private actions, habits, must also be regulated by laws that, penetrating to the heart of man, establish order in his thoughts and feelings; because feelings and thoughts are the principle and motive of all human actions.”15 Although Lamennais never overtly attacked the freedom of conscience as such, this passage suggests how deeply he resisted individual religious liberty, a principle he had rejected in his own life only after a long and painful struggle, and which he saw as endangering the salvation of souls and the social order. Ten years after the publication of L’Essai sur l’indifférence, Lamennais had moved far from this early critique of religious liberty, a shift based on his increasing disillusionment with the Restoration state and its efforts to regulate the activity of the Catholic Church. As Sheryl Kroen has observed, the Bourbon regime that governed France between 1814 and 1830 maintained a “secular vision of monarchy.”16 State officials regarded the efforts of zealous Catholics to recreate the intimate relationship between throne and altar of the Old Regime as a threat to political and social stability, and took advantage of the Napoleonic Concordat governing relations between Church and State to control clerical behavior. Education was a particularly neuralgic point that focused attention on the Church-State tension. The assertion of State power over minor seminaries in June 1828 provoked a major political controversy, and marked a crucial moment in Lamennais’ evolution. These regulations brought minor seminaries under the control of the State university system, limited the number of students in order to exclude those who were not serious candidates for the priesthood, and forbade the Jesuits from teaching in them.17 For Lamennais these measures crushed any hope that the State would accept its proper role of “natural ­subordination” to the Church, a position he hammered home forcefully in Des Progrès de la Révolution et de la guerre contre l’Eglise (1829).18

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In an ideal relationship, the State would concede the responsibility for education to the Church, “limiting itself to protecting this right and facilitating its exercise.” Interfering with this division of labor and abandoning its supporting role would mean “breaking the ties that unite the Church to the State.”19 Convinced by the June “ordonannces” that the Bourbon regime had shattered this compact, Lamennais now called for “the freedom of conscience, the freedom of the press, the freedom of education.”20 Lamennais was careful, however, to distinguish his defense of liberty from the doctrine of liberalism, which was based on “the sovereignty and absolute independence of individual reason, a p ­ rinciple which, rejecting all external authority, excludes thereby every divine and obligatory law, and destroys the very notion of justice and duty.”21 Just prior to the Revolution of 1830, which brought to power LouisPhilippe, the Orléanist cousin of the Bourbons, Lamennais had a clear understanding of religious liberty as the right of the Catholic Church to operate free from the State in carrying out its obligation of religious and moral instruction, but rejected any sense that an individual might use this right to object to the infallible truths it taught.

Lamennais and the Liberty of Peoples The Revolution of 1830 was accompanied by anticlerical rioting that recalled the violence directed at the Church in the 1790s. The archiepiscopal palace in Paris was sacked by rioters during the “three glorious days” of July, the Archbishop of Paris Quélen was forced into hiding, and for months priests were afraid to wear their Roman collars in ­public. Religious rioting was renewed on February 14, 1831, when the palace was sacked again along with the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois following a ceremony commemorating the death of the duc de Berry, the Bourbon prince who had been murdered in 1820. The government reacted slowly to these assaults, leading to recriminations that it was unwilling to defend the persons and property of the Church.22 For Lamennais and his colleagues, the anticlerical violence that swept through Paris in 1830–1831 was the price being paid by the Church for its bargain with the Bourbon monarchy, a choice that put it on the wrong side of history and compromised Christ’s message of equality, charity, and justice. In order to win back the people, the Church would need to take up their call for liberty, and abandon its traditional alliance with kings. This fundamental agenda of “God and Liberty” was proudly

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declared on the masthead of L’Avenir, the paper guided by Lamennais in the aftermath of the July Revolution, and which attracted international attention because of the notoriety of its leader and the revolutionary nature of its appeal. From October 1830 to November 1831 L’Avenir served as a call to arms for reform-minded Catholics, and a frightening threat for conservatives desperate to maintain the social order. For Lamennais and his associates, the revolutionary movement that spread from Paris in the summer of 1830 revealed the inexorable movement of history, a providentially determined process that would overturn thrones in favor of democratic regimes. The Catholic Church had a special responsibility at this moment, to abandon its ties to decadent and oppressive power structures, and to associate itself with the cause of liberty. In one sense, the program of L’Avenir was a continuation of Lamennais’ attack on the “ordonnances” of 1828. In the first a­rticle that appeared in the paper, Lamennais insisted on the freedom of the church as an institution, which he linked to the issues of freedom of education and the press. Religious liberty meant the separation of church and state, which in turn implied that Catholics should be allowed to open schools unsupervised by the monopoly of the state university, and to publish freely.23 Along with separation, freedom of education and the press were the most important domestic issues for both the journal and the “Agence générale pour la défense de la liberté religieuse,” an organization formed under the same leadership as L’Avenir, and dedicated to defend religious liberty in the political sphere and the courts.24 All of these freedoms defended by Lamennais and his colleagues went well beyond what the July Monarchy was willing to accept, for while the revised Charter demoted the Catholic Church, it still exercised enormous control over the Church through its power of appointment and control of the purse strings; it continued to enforce its monopoly over secondary and higher education; and it monitored and at times suppressed public criticism of its policies. Despite L’Avenir’s support for episcopal prerogatives, and for freedom of Catholic education, Quélen and the vast majority of the episcopacy were deeply suspicious of Lamennais and his colleagues. As Lamennais made clear in his paper, the separation of the Church and State would, after all, mean the abolition of the ecclesiastical budget, the end of all state financial support for the Church.25 How would the clergy survive, how would churches be maintained in such a world? Would

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ordinary Catholics be able to provide the support needed? And weren’t clerical salaries a necessary and just compensation for the state seizure of church property during the Revolution? Beyond such institutional concerns, the bishops also feared the revolutionary rhetoric of Lamennais. While he foresaw a Catholic and democratic revival, the bishops feared a return of the violence and dechristianization of the 1790s. These hopes and fears were based not only on memories of the great revolution just one generation past, but on the new revolutionary wave that struck in 1830. France was not alone in facing revolutionary change in 1830. As the editors of L’Avenir looked around Europe and beyond they found ­several examples which proved to them that the marriage of Catholicism and liberty was already at work, generating religious fervor and mobilizing democratic movements. The signs of the time were clear: Europe had reached a providentially determined turning point which was troubled and even violent, but which would soon produce a revived religious and political order inspired by the Catholic principles advocated by the prophet Lamennais and developed in L’Avenir. Four years before Tocqueville analyzed the separation of church and state in Democracy in America Lacordaire praised the Catholic church in the United States as an “unprecedented marvel,” able to flourish precisely because it was independent of all state control.26 Ireland and Belgium were other examples trumpeted by L’Avenir as examples of the successful union of Catholicism and liberty. In the 1820s, the Catholic clergy and the layman Daniel O’Connell mobilized the Irish population and succeeded in forcing the British government to grant Irish Catholics political and civil rights in 1829. To the north of France, French-speaking Catholics resented the rule of William I, the Protestant King of the United Netherlands. Their rebellion that began in Brussels in August 1830 led eventually to an independent Belgium in which freedom of education was guaranteed.27 But the most dramatic and ultimately tragic example of the alliance between Catholicism and liberty was the Polish rebellion that began in November of 1830. From the perspective of L’Avenir, this uprising was a battle of Polish Roman Catholics against a Russian Orthodox tyrant, demonstrating the perfect congruence between the causes of political and religious liberty. Montalembert took the lead in praising the “holy revolution of the Polish” which succeeded at first in driving the Russian troops out of Warsaw. Freed from the “barbarous schismatic despot” Poland would

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soon become a “new Catholic republic,” and along with Ireland and Belgium was a sign that “Europe will recover its political and religious balance.”28 By early 1831, however, as Russian troops advanced on Warsaw, the fate of Catholic Poland was being redefined in the pages of L’Avenir. Lacordaire adopted an apocalyptic tone as he foresaw the defeat of the Catholic revolution, which he linked to the continuing threats directed against Belgium: Catholics! Your hour has come. You will show yourselves unshakeable in your love for the faith of your fathers and for the liberty of which Belgium and Poland have made you the first-born of the nineteenth century. When the swarms of barbarians throw into the grave the civilization which you created a thousand years ago, be not afraid, and trust in your immortality. Know that great suffering is required for great accomplishments. Perhaps Europe will be crushed anew, but this will be done so that it might be brought together in a new combination, as has been written by a man of genius….29

The genius Lacordaire referred to was Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet whose combination of Catholic zeal and nationalism brought him the admiration, not to say adulation, of Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert. I will come back to the Polish cause later, as it played a major role in the evolution of Lamennais’ understanding of religious liberty, when Pope Gregory XVI condemned the rebellion and called on Polish Catholics to accept the rule of Tsar Nicholas I. But in 1831, Lamennais and his circle were convinced that the Catholic Church was the natural ally of Polish nationalism. The July Revolution of 1830, along with the political mobilization of Catholics in Ireland, Belgium, and Poland led Lamennais to link the religious liberty of the Catholic Church to the political liberty of Catholic peoples, and to their democratic resistance to oppressive regimes. Lamennais explicitly made this connection in an essay on “religious liberty” published late in the summer of 1831, as he looked back on the momentous events in Europe over the past year. The movement of Catholics in Ireland, Belgium, and Poland showed Lamennais that “political liberty is inseparably tied to and can only be affirmed and developed through religious liberty.”30 The phrasing here is significant, for it suggests that religious liberty, while a principle concern, is nonetheless instrumental, aimed at achieving the ultimate goal of political liberty.

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Lamennais and the Freedom of Conscience Lamennais never abandoned his passion for politics, and he remained convinced that religious liberty required the separation of the Church and the State. But between 1832 and 1836, he came to believe that this right was threatened not only when the State interfered with the Church, but also when the Church interfered with the individual conscience. This expanded view of religious liberty, however, came about precisely because of his battle with the Catholic Church over political questions. Lamennais continued to hammer on the need for political democracy and social justice, achieved through a religious and moral revolution that was first preached by Christ. But his personal and painful battle with the Church led him to insist on the right of individual judgment, the principle he began his career by denying. The story of Lamennais’ confrontation with the Catholic hierarchy has been told many times, in large part because of the personal drama involved in his prolonged effort to convince Pope Gregory XVI and his advisers to embrace the cause of liberty and popular sovereignty.31 Episcopal opposition to the doctrines of L’Avenir became increasingly intense in 1831, reinforced by rumors of hostility from the Vatican as well. In the face of such resistance Lamennais, along with his collaborators père Henri Lacordaire and Count Charles de Montalembert, decided to take their case directly to Rome, a quixotic mission that began in November of 1831, and resulted in the papal condemnation in the encyclical Mirari Vos in August of 1832. Although Pope Gregory XVI did not explicitly name Lamennais or L’Avenir, it was clear to everyone that they were targeted by the articles that condemned freedom of conscience (14), freedom of the press (15), resistance against government (17), and the separation of church and state (20).32 Lamennais’ immediate reaction was to submit, a decision that was published in several journals on September 10, 1832 after his return to Paris. The language employed in the public announcement seemed to be unequivocal in its acceptance of papal authority: The undersigned editors of L’Avenir… convinced according to the encyclical of August 15, 1832 of the Sovereign Pontiff Gregory XVI that they are unable to continue their work without placing themselves in opposition to the formal will of the one whom God has charged to govern his Church, believe it their duty as Catholics to declare that, respectfully submissive to

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the supreme authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, they abandon the field on which they have fought loyally for two years.33

Although the Vatican at first seemed willing to accept Lamennais’ submission, pressure from the French bishops led Gregory to acknowledge that it was insufficient. Throughout 1833 Lamennais engaged in a prolonged negotiation with Archbishop Quélen intended to produce a more positive endorsement of papal teaching. The battle between Lamennais and Rome over his submission to Mirari Vos in 1832 and 1833 took place in the wake of the defeat of the Polish revolution against the Russian Empire in October of 1831. Lamennais and his collaborators at L’Avenir were crushed by this blow to their inflated hopes for the alliance between Catholicism and freedom, God and liberty. Lamennais was particularly incensed by the papal letter to the Polish bishops of July 1832, in which Gregory XVI condemned the revolution and called on Catholics to submit to the will of their “magnanimous emperor.”34 In a letter to père Ventura in January 1833, Lamennais identified the Polish question as the starting point for his break from Rome: The first thing that made me reflect profoundly was the letter to the Polish bishops, gone over and corrected by the Cardinal Gagarin [the Russian ambassador to the Vatican], the delegate of His Holiness the Emperor Nicolas, who had just sent 25,000 Catholics to the Caucasus without a single priest, and suppressed 192 Polish convents, all of the seigneurial chapels, and all the seminaries, except one, in Wilna, whose rector is a known spy.

From this reflection, Lamennais went on to conclude that the Church was now governed by men who, “indifferent to all principles, have temporal interests as their only goal.”35 The political posture of the Vatican continued to trouble Lamennais throughout 1833, with Poland as the most dramatic example of Catholic complicity with tyranny. The arrival in Paris of hundreds of Polish refugees, and in particular of the poet Adam Mickiewicz, kept the Polish cause alive for Lamennais and his colleagues, horrified by stories of Nicholas’ repression following the Russian victory. It was sympathy for Catholic Poland that led Lamennais to break his silence and publish a “Hymn to Poland” at the conclusion of Montalembert’s translation of Mickiewicz’s Livre des pèlerins polonais, which appeared in May of 1833.

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Both Lamennais and Montalembert were moved by Mickiewicz’s biblical language, and his evocation of a Poland that would redeem the nations of the world through its sacrifice, just as Christ had redeemed individual men.36 The publication of the Livre des pèlerins polonais was a principal item in Gregory’s October letter to the Bishop of Rennes, in which he called on Lamennais to “to follow uniquely and absolutely the doctrine exposed in our encyclical letter… and to desist from writing or approving anything that does not conform to this doctrine.”37 Gregory’s attempt to discipline Lamennais marks an important point in which the political argument leads inexorably to one about the extent of papal authority over an individual conscience. This was familiar territory to Lamennais, who had devoted himself to the ultramontane cause throughout his career, but in the extended crisis of the early 1830s, he came, after much painful soul-searching, to see that papal authority could be abused. This recognition led in turn to an assertion of his freedom of conscience, the individual dimension of religious liberty that had previously remained in the background of his life and thought. Lamennais’ battle with Gregory XVI, and his own conscience, can be traced in the three letters he wrote to the Pope in 1833 and 1834. In the first of these, in August of 1833, Lamennais’ particular goal was to save the schools of the Brothers of Christian Instruction, a congregation founded by his brother Jean, which was threatened because of its association with a possible heretic. Lamennais concluded his letter with two declarations. First, he acknowledged that “because it belongs only to the Head of the Church to judge that which is good and useful to it, I have resolved to remain in the future, in my writing and my acts, totally apart from matters that touch it.” He then avowed that “no one, thanks to God, is more submissive than me, in the bottom of his heart and without any reservation, to all the decisions that emanate from the Holy Apostolic See on the doctrine of faith and morals, as well as the disciplinary powers held by its sovereign authority.” Lamennais came to this position only after he had “questioned his conscience,” which assured him accusations that he was acting in bad faith had no merit.38 Lamennais may have hoped that this statement would settle matters, but it was far from doing so. Instead, it was read by his enemies as an equivocation, an attempt to draw his own lines between politics and religion, and between papal authority and the individual conscience. A subsequent letter, written in November, only served to make the Vatican even more suspicious, as Lamennais combined his commitment neither

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to write nor approve anything that was contrary to the apostolic tradition as promulgated by the Church with an assertion that carved out significant space for disagreement. Tellingly, Lamennais claimed that “my conscience makes it a duty” to make a distinction, so that “if with regard to religion the Christian must only listen and obey, he remains, with regard to the spiritual power, entirely free in his opinions, his works, and his actions in the temporal order.”39 Between August and November “conscience” had taken on a new and more active role for Lamennais, for it was no longer being interrogated prior to an action, but was now compelling him to act. It is shocking to read the third and final letter that Lamennais wrote to Gregory XVI on December 11, given his increasingly robust sense of the duty to resist imposed by his conscience. Although he had been discussing a long explanatory note with Archbishop Quélen, in which his previous position was spelled out in more detail, he wrote instead (in Latin) a note of less than fifty words that he “accepted absolutely the doctrine of [Mirari Vos], and would neither write nor approve anything that contradicted it.” By this time, however, financial stress and the opposition of his local bishop in Rennes, who suspended him from priestly functions, had brought Lamennais to Paris. Living in a poorly furnished apartment on the rue de Vaugirard, Lamennais was in poor health, suffering from “violent spasms, fever every night, no sleep,” as he wrote to his friend the Marquis de Coriolis.40 When a hostile letter from Cardinal Pacca arrived in late November, in the midst of his conversations with Quélen, Lamennais was exhausted and in despair. Giving up, he abjured his position because, as he wrote to Montalembert three weeks later, he sought “peace at any price.” At that point, he admitted that he would have signed any statement at all, even “the declaration that the Pope is God, the great God of heaven and earth, and that he alone must be adored.” But this “deification” of the Pope “would have been invincibly loathsome to my conscience.” Reflecting on his situation, Lamennais was led to “very great doubts on several points of Catholicism, doubts which, far from weakening, have only grown stronger.”41 Throughout 1833, while Lamennais was struggling with Rome, he was also writing Paroles d’un Croyant (The Words of a Believer), the book that led to his definitive break with the Church. Influenced both by the prophets of the Old Testament and Mickiewicz’s Polish Pilgrims, Paroles is a series of short prose poems aimed at a popular audience, a passionate

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appeal for Christian solidarity as the basis for a new world of political liberty and social justice. Lamennais knew that this text would provoke a papal reaction, but “the abominable system of despotism that is developing everywhere disgusts me so much that at this moment silence on my part would be as infamous as direct approval.”42 Certainly Lamennais still had Poland in mind, but in France as well the early 1830s were years of danger in which popular movements inspired by the July Revolution pushed against an increasingly repressive regime.43 A republican-inspired uprising in Paris, later to be memorialized in Hugo’s Les Misérables, left more than one hundred dead in June 1832. Socialist ideas circulated in the press, and helped inspire a massive strike in the silk industry of Lyon in 1834, followed by an armed uprising suppressed by the army. In its efforts to gain control, the government passed legislation severely restricting freedom of association and the press in 1834, measures that were particularly odious to Lamennais.44 At the same time, in March 1834 the Catholic hierarchy, through the offices of Archbishop Quélen, once again renewed its efforts to push Lamennais to declare his “perfect obedience” and “inviolable devotion” to the Pope.45 Exasperated and angry at himself for his recent surrender, as well as at the Church for its unrelenting assault, Lamennais resolved “to save my conscience and my honor,” as he wrote to Montalembert, by publishing his incendiary book.46 Paroles d’un Croyant was an enormous success, surpassing even the triumph of the Essai sur l’indifférence. Within months tens of thousands of copies had been printed, with translations appearing in all the major European languages.47 One correspondent reported to Lammenais that people were renting copies in a reading room near the Odéon, and reading it by the hour.48 Franz Liszt could not contain himself in his letter to Lamennais, whom he had befriended earlier in the year. “Sublime, prophetic, divine!… From this moment on, it is evident… that the Christianity of the nineteenth century, that is to say the entire religious and political future of humanity, is in you.”49 Such over-the-top enthusiasm was matched, unsurprisingly, by the horrified response of the Catholic hierarchy. The abbé Garibaldi, chargé d’affaires of the Holy See at Paris, filed his first report to Rome on the very day that Paroles appeared, the first of several which pilloried the work as the result of a “profoundly malicious calculation,” condemned its democratic tendencies, and compared it unfavorably to the Koran.50 The papal nuncio at Venice, Mgr Orsini, wrote of Metternich’s consternation, and Cardinal

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Lambruschini, Gregory’s Secretary of State, provided a scathing report that informed Gregory’s condemnation of Paroles in his June encyclical, Singulari Vos. Gregory XVI’s encyclical was vitriolic, accusing the “wretched author” of betraying his oath and composing a book that though “small in size is enormous in wickedness.”51 For all its venom, the analysis in Singulari Nos is nonetheless accurate in identifying as principle themes of Paroles the condemnation of monarchy and the prediction of a popular revolution that would destroy it. In one startling scene Lamennais imagines seven kings participating in a black mass, where they drink blood from a skull at an altar, curse Christ, and conspire to subvert the clergy to preach submission to their will.52 Monarchs will eventually fall, but only after a terrible period of “great terrors and wailing, when men will be seized with a thirst for blood and adoration of death.”53 Lamennais might well have pled guilty as charged to the papal complaint that Paroles had as its goal “to dissolve the bonds of all public order and to weaken all authority.” The papal condemnation was correct as well in its judgment that Lamennais had consciously adopted the role of prophet, and used scriptures and references to Jesus and the Trinity in order to provide a religious sanction for revolution. Lamennais claimed that because he refrained from any specific reference to the Catholic Church that he was still complying with his oath not to deal with matters of faith and morals, but his political vision is nonetheless rooted in a messianic and even millenarian form of Christianity.54 Paroles d’un croyant is a political/religious tract that describes a decomposing monarchical system that will be replaced by a Christian community defined by mutual love, social solidarity, and justice. To judge by this text, Lamennais was only marginally concerned with freedom of conscience as an individual right as he worked through his religious ideas in the critical years of 1832–1836.55 But as Lamennais expected, this open challenge to papal authority meant that, for him and his friends, the issue of freedom of conscience in relationship to the Church could not be avoided. Could Lamennais still act as a priest, or even consider himself a Catholic, given his decision to flaunt papal authority with a book that would draw enormous attention, and raise obvious questions about his religious commitments? Charles de Montalembert was the most devoted of Lamennais’ followers, loyal to the master even when others, including Lacordaire, began abandoning him in the aftermath of Mirari Vos.56 Freedom

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of conscience emerges as the crucial issue faced by Montalembert and Lamennais, as traced in their correspondence between 1833 and 1836. During this period, when Montalembert was travelling in Germany and Italy, they stayed in close touch, exchanging dozens of letters full of news and gossip.57 But as the pressure on Lamennais to submit continued unabated, the two friends circled back more and more frequently, and with ever greater intensity, to the question of conscience. The publication of Paroles established the pivotal point which forced Lamennais and Montalembert to consult their consciences, their Catholicism, and each other in deciding how they understood the meaning of religious liberty. Montalembert had a clear premonition of the problems to come when he first read Paroles during a visit to La Chênaie, Lamennais’ home in Brittany, in the summer of 1833, and advised Lamennais not to publish it.58 As soon as he received his copy in May 1834, Montalembert knew that the decisive moment had arrived, for as he wrote to his master, after Paroles it would no longer be possible for Lamennais to try to protect himself by insisting that he was concerned only with temporal matters, leaving the spiritual dimension to the Church. “The question will be to obey or not to obey, to be or not to be Catholic. This is the infallible alternative to which you are reduced, and I tremble in thinking that the outcome of this alternative is doubtful.”59 In responding to Paroles Montalembert expressed some reservations about the evolution of Lamennais’ ideas. Perhaps his master had gone too far in his attacks on authority, both civil and ecclesiastical, and he was “very saddened to see direct attacks on property.”60 On this last point Lamennais himself moved quickly to distance himself from socialist ideas by writing a new chapter in defense of property within a month of the first edition.61 But Montalembert’s principle objections were practical rather than substantive; Lamennais might on the whole be right, but publishing Paroles, with the inevitable papal condemnation to follow, was inopportune: I see… that you accept with joy these tests in order to be faithful to the voice of your conscience, which orders you to defend justice and truth. I am all the more ready to feel the truth of this objection because your conscience, I can say it, is mine; there is not one of your complaints against current society, not one of your attacks against tyranny, not one of your hopes for the future which are not etched most profoundly on my heart, that I haven’t repeated a thousand times and would repeat a thousand

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times again. I accept your position all the more because I am myself dominated by the force of conscience: in order to obey it I have condemned myself to solitude and exile.62

Montalembert’s solution to his dilemma had been to live an isolated life, traveling in Germany and Italy, and keeping silent, a tactic which allowed him to preserve his conscience while avoiding a clear break with the Church. This was the same path that he had hoped Lamennais would follow; when he didn’t, and instead published Paroles, it created a new situation which led them to a final confrontation over conscience and Catholicism. Although the personal cost was high, in the end Montalembert surrendered his personal judgment and accepted that of the Church. Standing behind Montalembert’s growing uneasiness was the sense that in the end Lamennais was betraying his own principle of obedience to authority, which he had maintained even as he moved to embrace liberalism.63 When Lamennais was faced with papal pressure in 1833, Montalembert wrote to him that “Providence led me to open [The Imitation of Christ] to Chapter IX of Book I, entitled “Of obedience and renunciation of one’s own sense.” I read with profound emotion this beautiful chapter and especially your reflection on it; I immediately thought of you and wondered how it would be possible for the author of these lines ever to give a better example of the most humble and blind obedience.” A few months later it was Lamennais’ first polemical masterpiece, the Essai sur l’indifférence, that came to mind, when Montalembert wrote that he “was unable to imagine how one could logically distance oneself from the Church, without separating as well from Christianity, as you yourself so admirably demonstrated in the Essai.”64 Montalembert preached obedience and consistency to his master (and to himself), but these were not issues of merely human significance, signs of personal integrity, they were also essential for the salvation of souls. Montalembert continued to affirm his commitment to Lamennais’ principles even after the condemnation of Singulari Nos, but he pleaded with his master to abjure them nonetheless, because “I confess that the salvation of my soul, and of yours, are more dear to me [than these sentiments]; and I believe that this salvation can be compromised in preferring the uncertain to the certain, in obeying our reason and our own conscience rather than the inspirations of humility and submission.”65 In submitting to Rome, Lamennais would be sacrificing himself, accepting

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humiliation and defeat from the perspective of the world, but in doing so he would be following the model of Christ, and saving his soul. “You will respond, I know, that the conscience is invincible, and I would say that after having reflected well on this point I am persuaded that the Christian must not obey exclusively his conscience and that there are cases where he must above all obey!” This was the choice Montalembert made, a wrenching decision that he both embraced and regretted. Following his formal submission in a letter of December 8, 1834, he wrote to Lamennais that with this act he had done: great violence to my most deeply rooted convictions…. But I preferred this violence to the possibility of finding myself one day outside of this Church that alone offers me consolations for this intimate suffering that no political or intellectual activity would be able to relieve. I feel most profoundly the cruelty of putting myself in contradiction with myself, of destroying and denying in a sense everything that one has loved, defended, everything on which one has founded his life; but my life has already been so broken by causes outside my will that it matters little if I deliver one more blow from my own hand.66

In the end, Montalembert acknowledged that he was “Catholic above all.” He had been willing to follow his master “to the frontiers of Catholicism. But beyond these frontiers, no; because a law higher than all affection or all human conviction stopped me.”67 Lamennais was distraught by the growing separation between himself and Montalembert, but he was unconvinced by the appeal to authority, even when supported by his own past arguments. Instead, in responding to his young friend he articulated with ever greater clarity his commitment to freedom of conscience, a position that led him first to abandon the priesthood, and then to cease to be a Catholic. In the face of Montalembert’s call to humble him and submit after the condemnation of Singualri Vos Lamennais responded that he acknowledged the possibility of being wrong, but nonetheless was obliged to follow his conscience. “I well know that I may be mistaken, and it is why I listen to everyone and don’t condemn those who think otherwise than I do. But at the same time, my conviction, whether it be right or wrong, is so profound that the opinion of others, without reasons which strike me, cannot shake it in any way.”68 Lamennais’ enhanced sense of the freedom of conscience appeared in his public writings as well, in his essay on

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“De l’absolutisme et la liberté,” published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1834, in the preface to a collection of essays published in 1835, and with even greater force in Affaires de Rome (1836). In “De l’absolutisme et la liberté,” which appeared shortly after Paroles, Lamennais is no longer concerned with the freedom of the church, won by separation from the state, but with a larger battle between “two doctrines, two systems, which battle for control of the world.” In this Manichean vision, absolutism based solely on brute force is opposed by liberty, only apparently weaker because in the end its moral authority will triumph over the material resources of kings and tsars, who use brute force to crush liberty, “the spiritual rights of conscience and thought, which come only from God.”69 This sense of a providential historical process as the ultimate arbiter is applied to philosophical as well as political questions in the “Preface” to Troisièmes Mélanges. There Lamennais looks back on his own evolution, and sees his altered position not so much as a contradiction but as a sincere effort to grasp a truth that “grows, constantly expands because it is infinite.” Imagining this truth as a “divine river that flows from its eternal principal, and waters the entire universe,” Lamennais ridicules those who claim to be able to possess the truth as a changeless absolute certainty. “Tiny shell on the bank that would say: I have the ocean in me! There is nothing more unreasonable than to stay rooted in the same ideas…. Because this state implies either that one knows everything, has seen everything, conceived everything, or else that one has chosen not to see more, to imagine more.” Lamennais insists that his search for truth, which led him to different positions, was also based on a sincere examination of his own conscience, but that he was nonetheless often mistaken. Such failings arise when individuals insist on certainty based on their own reasoning, when instead they should look for the “common sense of the species.”70 This argument may not be philosophically coherent; Lamennais both affirms and disavows the rights of his individual conscience to judge the truth, for it is only individual conscience that can assess what the “common sense” of humanity reveals. But this unresolved dilemma is nonetheless revealing, for even as he abandoned Catholicism on the basis of individual conscience, Lamennais remained suspicious of the principle which he had condemned with such force in the Essai sur l’indifférence. In Affaires de Rome (1836), Lamennais did not engage in any questioning of the right of individual conscience, which he defended forcefully as part of an anti-Jesuit polemic. Working within a French tradition

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of anti-Jesuitism, Lamennais emphasized that above all else the Jesuits are dedicated to “the destruction of individuality in their corps, in order to increase its power and unity.” This act of self-surrender reaches so far that “conscience itself finds its satisfaction there,” and thus the individual is freed from “all moral responsibility.”71 The Jesuit denial of individual conscience here stands as a particular example of what Catholics in general are required to do, a trial that Lamennais had just experienced himself, and concluded by affirming his rights and claiming his moral integrity. In Affaires, Lamennais considers the conscience within a specific institutional framework, and defends individual freedom unequivocally, a reflection of Lamennais’ personal resentment of unrelenting and in his view unjustified ecclesiastical pressure. But in Mélanges, where he approaches individual conscience from a philosophical perspective, as an element involved in the search for truth, Lamennais adopts a more confused and ambivalent posture, one which recalls without fully recapitulating his rejection of this principle in the Essai sur l’indifférence. For the remainder of his life, Lamennais continued to work as a journalist and social reformer. His criticism of the July Monarchy earned him a year in prison in 1840, but did not silence him. Following the revolution of 1848 Lamennais was elected as a Parisian delegate to the Constitutional Convention that established the Second Republic. Lacordaire and Montalembert also served in this assembly, but they never reestablished a friendship, maintaining a barely civil relationship. By the early 1850s, the republican experiment had failed again, and Lamennais’ health led him to withdraw from politics. He continued to work, however, translating and writing a commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was published posthumously. As he grew weaker and sicker early in 1854 some of his friends and relatives sought to bring him back to the church, but he denied them access to his deathbed and died without the sacraments.72

Conclusion Lamennais’ disciples abandoned him in the 1830s, choosing to remain within the Catholic Church that he rejected. His life and thought were nonetheless influential, first of all in the short run, for the language of liberty that he made central to a defense of the Church continued to shape the arguments of Lacordaire, Montalembert, and others, as they battled for Catholic education against the state monopoly throughout

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the 1840s. This campaign would eventually contribute to a major victory with the Falloux law of 1851, though by this point Lamennais was no longer in favor of a clerical role in education.73 From a longer perspective, Lamennais’ insistence that Catholicism needed to embrace political democracy can be seen to anticipate the development of Christian democracy in the twentieth century and his commitment to social justice establishes him as one of the founding figures of social Catholicism.74 Ernest Renan, one of the most astute critics of Lamennais, called attention to his political legacy in a review of his life and work that appeared in 1857. Renan judged Lamennais a crucial innovator for establishing Catholicism as a force to be reckoned with in the world of democratic politics that was emerging in the nineteenth century: “Many others before him had put passion and intrigue at the service of their religious faith; the bold innovation of Lamennais was to make Catholicism a party.”75 Drawing on the ironic sense that was central to his own religious identity, Renan argued that Lamennais, despite his expulsion from the Church, had in fact triumphed, for even if the Church rejected his version of liberalism, it had embraced the need to play politics in regimes that were evolving towards mass democracy. According to Renan, it was Lamennais’ achievement “to have invented all the machinery of war that the catholic party has so usefully employed.”76 He was in the end a polemicist, “looking always for arguments to support his cause, rather than the truth, a powerful intellectual machine working over a void.”77 Renan’s critique reflects his deep suspicion of democratic politics, precisely the development in which Lamennais placed his hope for the future. For all its vitriolic character, Renan’s point is worth pondering, for Lamennais’ movement into and then away from Catholicism was inextricably bound up with his positions on the evolving political and social order, an entanglement that both reflected and contributed to the Church’s intense engagement with democratic politics in the modern age. Lamennais’ particular agenda was rejected, at least in the short run, but he stands as a key figure in adopting the language of liberty in defense of Catholicism, and in showing how the Church might become a powerful political force in modern liberal states. Judged on the basis of his political agenda Lamennais, in his lifetime and after, has been a controversial figure, a tragic failure for some in his stubborn refusal to accept the prudent guidance of the Church, a prophet for others in formulating the basis for a liberal Catholicism open to effective engagement with the modern world. If we put aside,

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however, a concern for judgments of success or failure, another legacy of Lamennais might emerge more clearly. Lamennais is a significant figure because of his battle to reconcile Catholicism and liberalism, but also because of his struggle to define a proper relationship between his conscience and the authority of the Church. How much weight should be accorded the Church in forming one’s conscience, and how should conflicts between the two be resolved? Where should the line be drawn that divides matters of faith and doctrine essential to a Catholic identity from political and social questions about which citizens are free to differ? Lamennais’ struggles with the Church and the conscience fascinated and troubled his contemporaries because they faced these same questions, which arose with particular force in the aftermath of the French Revolution and its sanction of religious liberty and political democracy.

Notes





1. Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000); Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Alyssa, Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 2. Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Helena Rosenblatt, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). Paul Bénichou, Le temps des prophètes: Doctrines de l’âge romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977) remains a valuable guide to the ideological currents of the post-revolutionary era. 3.  In Benjamin Constant, Ecrits politiques, Marcel Gauchet, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 461. 4. Constant, Ecrits politiques, 479; Bryan Garsten, “Constant on the Religious Spirit of Liberalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Constant, ed. Helena Rosenblatt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 286–312.

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5.  French text at http://laportelatine.org/bibliotheque/encycliques/ PieVI/Quod_Aliquantum.php (accessed 18 June 2015). Fr. Basile, O.S.B., Le Droit à la liberté religieuse dans la tradition de l’église (Le Barroux: Sainte-Madeleine, 2005), 195–199. 6.  Jean-Yves Pranchère, “The Social Bond According to the Catholic Counter-Revolution: Maistre and Bonald,” in Joseph de Maistre’s Life, Thought, and Influence, ed. Richard Lebrun (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001), 190–219; McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 48–49. 7. Scholarly interest in Lamennais has been especially intense during periods when the Catholic Church considered serious reforms. In the 1960s Lamennais was evaluated positively in light of the Second Vatican Council, most importantly in the work of Louis Le Guillou, L’Evolution de la pensée religieuse de Felicité Lamennais (Paris: Colin, 1966). Le Guillou also directed the definitve edtion of Lamennais’ correspondence: Félicité de Lamennais, Correspondance Générale, 9 vols., Textes réunis, classés et annotés par Louis Le Guillou (Paris: Colin, 1971–1981); I will refer to this collection as LCG. Other studies from this period include: Jean-René Derré, Lamennais et ses amis et le mouvement des idées à l’époque romantique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1962); Peter Stearns, Priest and Revolutionary: Lamennais and the Dilemma of French Catholicism (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). A prior wave of interest occurred in the early twentieth century, associated with the crises over theological modernism and the separation of church and state in 1905. Anatole Feugère, Lamennais avant l’Essai sur l’Indifférence (Paris: Bloud, 1906); Alfred Roussel, Lamennais à La Chênaie (Paris: Téqui, 1909); Paul Dudon, Lamennais et le SaintSiège (Paris: Perrin, 1911); Christian Marechal, La Jeunesse de La Mennais (Paris: Perrin 1913); Charles Boutard, Lamennais: Sa vie et ses doctrines, 3 vols. (Paris: Perrin, 1913). For concise summaries of Lamennais’ writings see Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 62–112; Louis Le Guillou, Lamennais (Paris: Desclée de Brouer, 1969). The most recent study, Frédéric Lambert, Théologie de la République: Lamennais, prophète et législateur (Paris: Harmattan, 2001), focuses on Lamennais as a political theorist. 8. Le Guillou, L’Evolution de la pensée religieuse, 8, notes that “[i]t is difficult to understand what Lamennais might have learned from his disparate readings that included: Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus, Cicero, Montaigne, Pascal, Malebranche, Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, Dryden, Arnauld, Nicole, Bossuet, Voltaire, and Rousseau.” Maréchal, La Jeunesse de Lamennais, 9–44, provides details on the evolving ideas of Robert de Saudrais in the 1790s as he moved from an attachment to the philosophes

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back to orthodox Christianity; see also Anatole Feugère, Lamennais avant L’Essai sur L’indifférence (Paris: Bloud, 1906), 115–143. 9. Lamennais’ familiarity with Rousseau is displayed in the first volume of his Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de la religion (Paris: Mérquignon, 1823; first published 1817), 126–171, a forceful attack on the philosophe’s understanding of “natural” religion. 10. For analyses of Lamennais’ Réflexions sur l’état de l’église en France pendant le XVIIIe siècle et sur sa situation actuelle (1808) and Tradition de l’église sur l’institution des évêques (1814) see Feugère, Lamennais avant L’Essai, 75–103, 149–175. 11. Michel Winock, Les Voix de la Liberté: les écrivains engagés au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 161. According to the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, compared to the rhetorical genius of Lamennais “Bonald was too much a metaphysician, Chateaubriand too abstract and profane, and de Maistre too hard to read and too unknown.” Charles-Auguste Sainte-Beuve, “L’abbé de La Mennais, 1832,”  in Portraits contemporains, ed. Michel Brix (Paris: PUPS, 2008), 199. This essay first appeared in the Revue des deux mondes, 1 février 1832, 359–380. 12.  Essai sur l’indifférence, 48. 13. The catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale lists no less than 496 different editions of Lamennais’ Imitation from its appearance in 1824 through the present. This number is based on an advanced search using Lamennais as author and Imitation de Jésus-Christ on 26 February 2016. 14.  L’Imitation de Jésus-Christ: Traduction nouvelle par M. l’abbé F. De Lamennais, 28th ed. (Paris: Sagnier et Bray, 1853), 34–35. 15. Essai sur l’indifférence, I: 333. 16. Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 116. 17. Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, The Bourbon Restoration (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), 410–413; Georges Weill, Histoire du catholicisme libéral en France (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1909), 11–17. 18. In Oeuvres complètes de F. de Lamennais, T. IX (Paris: Daubrée et Cailleux, 1838–1839). 19.  Progrès de la Révolution, 105. 20.  Progrès de la Révolution, ix. 21.  Progrès de la Révolution, 29. 22. Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, “Mgr de Quélen et les incidents de Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois en février 1831,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de France 32 (1946): 110–120; R. Limouzin-Lamothe, Monseigneur Quélen: Archevêque de Paris, Vol. II, La Monarchie de Juillet, 1830–1839 (Paris: Vrin, 1957), 12–19, 46–49; André Latreille and René Rémond,

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Histoire du Catholicisme en France: La période contemporaine (Paris: Spes, 1962), 277–279. 23.  L’Avenir, 16 October, 1831, 11. All references to L’Avenir are taken from the critical edition of its articles, L’Avenir: 1830–1831, ed. Guido Verucci (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1967). For a comprehensive review of the topic see Jacqueline Lalouette, La Séparation des églises et de l’état: Genèse et développement d’une idée, 1789–1905 (Paris: Seuil, 2005). 24. L’Avenir, 186–190. 25.  Lamennais, “De la séparation de l’église et de l’état,” L’Avenir, 18 October 1830, 28. 26.  Lacordaire, “Mouvement d’ascension du Catholicisme,” L’Avenir, 7 January 1831, 239. 27.  The Catholic rebellion was praised in Lacordaire, “Mouvement d’ascension du catholicisme,” L’Avenir, 7 January 1831, 240. Subsequent articles continued to praise the rebellion, but were critical of the diplomatic negotiations that led to the election of the Protestant Leopold of Saxe-Coburg as a constitutional monarch. Charles de Coux, “De la Belgique,” L’Avenir, 25 May 1831, 505–509; Lacordaire, “Entrée du prince Léopold en Belgique,” L’Avenir, 20 July 1831, 606–611. Lamennais was in direct contact with Belgian clergy in the summer of 1831; Vincent Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX (1831–1859) (Bruxelles: Institut historique belge de Rome, 2001). 28. Monalembert, “Révolution en Pologne,” L’Avenir, 12 December 1830, 175–177. 29. Lacordaire, “La Pologne,” L’Avenir, 10 March 1831, 374–378. Even as the Polish rebellion collapsed, Lamennais continued to hope that God would somehow intervene on its side. In July 1831 he wrote to Madame la Baronne Cottu: “I tremble for my dear, heroic Poland, and nevertheless I cannot believe that Providence would abandon this miraculous people.” LCG, 1831, 18. 30. Lamennais, “La liberté religieuse,” L’Avenir, 30 August 1831, 644. 31. Lamennais recounted his version of the events in Affaires de Rome, T. XII, Oeuvres complètes de F. de Lamennais (Paris: Cailleux, 1836–1837), first published in 1836. For scholarly treatment see the references in note 7. For a collection of documents on the controversy see Louis Le Guillou, M. J. Le Guillou, eds., Condamnation de Lamennais: dossier présenté (Paris: Beauchesne, 1982). 32.  Mirari Vos—On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism, Encyclical of Pope Gregory XVI, August 15, 1832, http://www.papalencyclicals. net/Greg16/g16mirar.htm (accessed 26 February 2016). A letter to Lamennais from Cardinal Pacca, the Secretary to the Congregation of the

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Holy Inquisition, that accompanied the encyclical also made it clear that L’Avenir was a principle target; Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 128–133. 33.  Condamnation de Lamennais, 261–262. 34. Affaires, 103–104, 108. The papal letter to the Polish bishops was first of the ‘pièces justificatives’ appended to Affaires, 309–313. 35. LCG, T. V, 292–293. For the importance of the Polish cause see Le Guillou, Lamennais, 35–41. 36. Adam Mickiewicz, Livre des pèlerins polonais (Brussels: Tircher, 1834). For Mickiewicz’ time in Paris and his relations with the Lamennais circle see Roman Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 160–161, 196–201. 37.  Affaires, 371. 38. LCG, T. V, 447. 39. LCG, T. V, 509–510. 40.  LCG, T. V, 549. A police report to the Minister of the Interior of December 20 describes “a small two-room apartment that [Lamennais and Gerbet] share. These two rooms are hardly furnished, and the appearance of the these two individuals, especially of the abbé Gerbet, is even more miserable than their furnishings.” Archives Nationales, F19 5601, dossier 1. 41. LCG, T. VI, 14–18. 42.  Letter of Lamennais to Benoit d’Azy, March 29, 1834, LCG, T. VI, 53–54. 43. The phrase is borrowed from Munro Price, The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions (London: Macmillan, 2007), 224. 44. Price, The Perilous Crown, 232–240; Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 58–59. 45.  These phrases come from a letter drafted by Archbishop Quélen that he sent to Lamennais on March 28, 1834, for his signature. For their exchange, see LCG, T. VI, 55–56, 574–575. 46. LCG, T. VI, 50. 47. Yves Le Hir, Les Paroles d’un croyant de Lamennais (Paris: Colin, 1949), 16–20. 48. LCG, VI, 96. 49. LCG, VI, 603. 50.  Condamnation de Lamennais, 458–471. 51. “Singulari Nos—On the Errors of Lamennais,” available at http://www. papalencyclicals.net/Greg16/g16singu.htm (accessed December 15, 2012). 52.  Paroles d’un croyant, Chap. 13; for the satanic nature of monarchy see also Chap. 35.

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53. Paroles d’un croyant, Chap. 24. Lamennais’ correspondence from this period is also full of dire predictions of popular rebellions that will bring about a new political order; see the citations in Le Hir, Paroles, 55–63. 54. Le Hir, Paroles, 63–69. 55. In Chap. 20, Lamennais defines religious liberty as “a living power that we feel within and around us, the protective genius of the hearth, the guarantee of social rights, and the first of those rights.” But in developing this idea he concentrates on the right to self-government, and to the freedom of education and association. Individual religious liberty comes into sharper focus in Chap. 28, where he recalls the ancient Christians, persecuted for their faith, who claimed the right “to obey only God, to serve him and worship him according to [their] conscience.” 56. Anne Philbert, Lacordaire et Lamennais (1822–1832): La route de la Chênaie (Paris: Cerf, 2009). 57. These letters can be read in LCG, T. V–VII. 58. LCG, T. VI, 580–581. 59. LCG, T. VI, 633. 60. LCG, T. VI, 633. 61. Chapter Ten, defending the right of property, appeared in the fourth and subsequent editions. See LCG, Montalembert to Renduel, June 3, 1834; Le Hir, Paroles, 124–125. 62. LCG, T. VI, 634–635. 63. Lacordaire pushed Montalembert consistently in this direction throughout 1833 and 1834, arguing that resistance was a sign of stubborn pride out of keeping with the duty of a Catholic who must “submit himself to the direction of the Holy See, and not desire to direct it himself.” LCG, T. V, 474. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Lacordaire and Montalembert as they considered their break with Lamennais see Carol Harrison, Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 102–148. 64. LCG, T. VI, 578. 65. LCG, T. VI, 706. 66. LCG, T. VI, 808. 67. LCG, T. VI, 833. 68. LCG, T. VI, 309. 69. F. de la Mennais, “De l’absolutisme et de la liberté,” Revue des Deux Mondes (Aôut 1834), 298–322. 70.  Félicité de Lamennais, “Préface,” Troisième mélanges, 2nd ed., (Paris: Daubrée et Cailleux, 1835), iii–ix. 71. Affaires, 16–20.

172  T. Kselman 72. “Les derniers moments de Lamennais vus par A. Barbet,” LCG, T. VIII, 852–879. 73. LCG, T. VIII, 671. 74. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Les débuts du catholicisme social en France, 1822–1870 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951). 75. Ernest Renan, “M. de Lamennais,” in Ernest Renan: Histoire et parole, Laudyce Rétat, ed. (Paris: Laffont, 1984; first published in Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 aout 1857), 313–337, quote from 319. 76. Ibid., 321. 77. Ibid., 318.

Religion and Secularization in Bavaria in the Age of Revolution, 1777–1817 Morten Nordhagen Ottosen

Comprising some 2.5 million inhabitants and being one of eight electorates in the Holy Roman Empire, Bavaria was one of the most notable German powers on the eve of the French Revolution. Yet, like many of the major polities within the Empire, Bavaria was a patchwork of overlapping sovereignties and territories across south and southwestern Germany. Its territorial core was “Old Bavaria” (Altbaiern), corresponding to the historical Duchy of Bavaria on the upper Danube, which the Electorate of the Palatinate and duchies of Jülich and Berg in the Rhineland joined in 1777 through the ascension to the Bavarian throne of a different branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Further territorial aggrandizement during the Napoleonic Wars saw Bavaria more than double its size to establish a more coherent territory, as well as the elevation of the country to a kingdom and transformation into a modern state. This firmly established Bavaria as the “third” power in Germany, second only to Austria and Prussia.1 The Napoleonic Era also saw Bavaria turn into one of the most progressive German states as its territorial expansion was compounded by M.N. Ottosen (*)  Norwegian Military Academy, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_8

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sweeping modernizing reforms under the auspices of Prince Elector (later King) Max Joseph and his chief minister, Count Maximilian von Montgelas. In many respects, Bavaria followed the lead offered by the French example but several aspects of the Bavarian reform project predated Napoleon and the Revolution. Their roots lay as such less in the French Revolutionary experience than in the German Enlightenment, perhaps especially with regard to religious reform and secularization. It was thus to some extent a matter of finishing the unfinished Enlightenment business of subordinating the Catholic Church to the state and breaking its cultural grip on society. These efforts were influenced by Jansenism, a theological current within the Catholic Church that emphasized personal devotion and moral purity, in contrast to outward displays of Baroque piety and obedience to Rome. Yet, by the time of the French Revolution, the reform endeavors in German Central Europe, including Bavaria, had largely come to a halt. Although the French Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 basically resurrected Jansenism, it was Napoleon’s hegemony that brought this resurrection beyond France’s borders.2 Still the most crucial effect of France’s influence on Bavaria under Napoleon was less that France served as a model to be meticulously copied than that the FrancoBavarian connection created a set of circumstances that facilitated domestic Bavarian reforms without direct Napoleonic interference. This allowed reformers in Bavaria and other southern German states in Napoleon’s orbit to go even further than Napoleon let those under his direct rule go under the terms of his Concordat of 1801. With French support, these governments exploited the demise of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803–1806 to ruthlessly reform and secularize some of the most pious parts of Central Europe, sweeping away entire states in the process. This ruthlessness was in some ways the irony of South German secularization, against the background of what David Sorkin argues was a more moderate “religious enlightenment” in the German states as compared to France.3 This chapter outlines religious policy, reform, and secularization in Bavaria in the period from Prince Elector Charles Theodore’s ascension to the throne in 1777 to the Bavarian Concordat of 1817. During these three decades, public religious life in Bavaria was anchored in the secular, rational world of the Enlightenment; the Church was subordinated to the state and most of the regular orders abolished; Bavaria’s Lutheran and Calvinist minorities were brought on an equal footing with the

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Catholic majority; and a relatively high level of toleration was granted to Jews, although it stopped well short of full emancipation. Despite the onslaught by the forces of modernity on the Catholic Church, as it were, sufficient vestiges of Catholicism were left to give rise to something of a Catholic revival after the Napoleonic Wars.

The German Rome If the Rhineland between Cologne and Mainz was “die Pfaffengasse” (“the clerics’ alley”)—as the region was known in some circles because of its notorious reputation for religious conservatism and intolerance— Munich, the Bavarian capital, was the “German Rome,” as one former Jesuit put it in the early 1780s.4 Munich was not the only city in the German-speaking world to be given this label at one point or another,5 nor were the Bavarians alone in being reputed as the most zealous Catholics in Europe, but the Church imposed uniformity with much vigor in late eighteenth-century Bavaria.6 Bavaria was the only major German state, alongside Austria and Saxony, to be ruled by a Catholic dynasty, which to some extent may account for the prominent role of the Church and clergy in Bavarian society in the late eighteenth century. For example, Bavaria had somewhere between seven and eight thousand clergy, compared to 814 paid schoolmasters as per 1796.7 Like in several other Catholic lands, Jansenism had made some advances in Bavaria around the mid-eighteenth century, influencing religious policy particularly under Prince Elector Max III Joseph, but traditionalist elements within the Catholic Church generally regarded the Enlightenment with mistrust or hostility.8 Attempts by successive electoral governments from the mid-1700s to limit the Church’s accumulation of wealth and to assert control over the clergy in Bavarian territory triggered resistance from several clerical quarters. This helped the Catholic Church in Bavaria retain most of its independence and as such jurisdictional power much coveted by the electoral government. Prince Elector Charles Theodore’s legacy was mixed. He was perceived by many as a backward ruler, out of touch with the currents of his time, unwilling to reform and pursuing instead a repressive and traditionalist policy of Catholic exclusiveness. However, Charles Theodore had a Janus-faced relationship with the Catholic Church and the Enlightenment. On the one hand, he had clear traditionalist inclinations, owing in part to influences in his court and government, in the shape of

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a number of shadowy figures such as his confessor and court preacher, Ignaz Frank, a former Jesuit, as well as the historian and Geheimrath, Johann Caspar von Lippert. Under their influence, a college of book censorship was established to stem the flow of Enlightenment works, while the supervision of education was left to the Catholic Church, after an educational fund, set up with capital from confiscated Jesuit property after the suppression of the order in 1773, was deprived of this endowment in 1781 in order to fund a Bavarian branch of the Order of St. John.9 Perhaps most famously as far as his skepticism toward elements of Enlightenment thought went, Charles Theodore banished the Order of the Illuminati in 1785 and persecuted its members, real and alleged.10 Such repressive aspects of the government’s policies alienated many of the Bavarian intelligentsia, several of whom left the country. Among their ranks were many reformist clergymen, ruthlessly persecuted by what amounted to a Bavarian Inquisition led by Lippert, thereby impeding the Catholic Enlightenment in Bavaria.11 The electoral government under Charles Theodore generally pursued a policy of Catholic exclusiveness, though within the bounds of the minute confessional regulations of the Holy Roman Empire, laid down in the Peace of Westphalia. In “Old Bavaria,” freedoms of public worship and pursuit of occupation were reserved for Catholics, whereas the small Protestant and, especially, Jewish minorities were subjected to several discriminations. Protestants were, in any event, mostly found in the Rhenish territories united with Bavaria in 1777, as well as a number of small principalities in the Upper Palatinate, some of which had been acquired by Bavaria as late as in the 1740s. Legal residence, fraught with restrictions, for Bavaria’s 3000 Jews was contingent on the purchase of a patent of tolerance and additional levies, including a protection tax, the Leibzoll.12 Still, Charles Theodore’s rather restrictive religious policies were not for lack of trying to reform religious life and clerical institutions. Like many enlightened rulers of his time, he embraced certain aspects of Jansenism. Repeated efforts were made to regulate popular religious practices, such as scaling back the number of holidays, festivals, pilgrimages and processions, as well as practices considered as wasteful, superstitious or even dangerous, such as shooting of firearms and excessive ringing of church bells during thunderstorms. However, most efforts to reform popular religious practices came to very little. By the early 1790s, Charles Theodore had largely resigned to their failure, although

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this owed less to any obscurantist inclinations on his part than resistance from the populace and traditionalist elements among the clergy, as well as the much-publicized failure of Joseph II’s ambitious reform program in the Habsburg Lands.13 The most determined reform efforts on the part of Charles Theodore, reflecting his state-building ambitions, were those made to assert control over the clergy. He had ascended to the throne with a vigorous statement to this effect, but this, too, proved a very difficult venture. A particular thorn in Charles Theodore’s side, inherited from his predecessors, was that none of the dioceses to which the Bavarian parishes belonged lay wholly within Bavaria’s borders. Most bishops with spiritual authority in the parishes in the Prince Elector’s dominions were also independent princes of the Holy Roman Empire. As such, they were not only technically the Elector’s equals, but could also call upon the protection of Imperial law and courts in conflicts with the secular rulers over their sovereignty and rights. This was a forceful display of the limits to the Prince Elector’s sovereignty within his own dominions and cause for a tug-of-war between him and the Prince-Bishops. To make diocesan and temporal boundaries coincide, Charles Theodore wanted to create purely Bavarian dioceses, whose incumbents were to be nominated by the Prince Elector. In this venture, Charles Theodore sought help from Pope Pius VI, with whom he maintained a close personal friendship and whose relations to the German Prince-Bishops were also strained. This led to the establishment of a special Nunciature in Munich in 1785, which undercut the powers of the Prince-Bishops, but the Pope never went further than this in supporting Charles Theodore’s struggle with the Prince-Bishops. However, he agreed to certain financial concessions, such as the secularization of a number of indebted abbeys and the so-called “Dezimation” in 1787, which enabled the government to levy a ten percent tax on church assets.14 Yet, by the time of the French Revolution, this was about as far Charles Theodore had come in terms of reform.

The Impact of the French Revolution The French Revolution received a mixed response in the German lands.15 This was also true of responses to the Revolution’s impact on religious life and the Church, which ranged from initial sympathy in

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several intellectual circles to sheer horror at French displays of anti-clericalism and widespread condemnation of Jacobin excesses. These excesses were brought to bear on parts of Germany as French troops overran the Rhineland after the outbreak of war in 1792. By 1794, they had taken possession of the left bank of the Rhine, including Bavaria’s Rhenish possessions, which were subjected to occupation and exploitation for the duration of the 1790s before eventually being annexed to the France. Initially, the anti-clericalism of the French armies triggered something of a religious revival in the Rhineland and even elsewhere in the German lands.16 Old confessional strides between Protestant and Catholic communities were revived as conservative elements among them blamed each other for the excesses unleashed by the Revolution; perhaps not an entirely surprising development in the wake of renewed German confessional tensions in the 1780s, against the background of which the much publicized and rather damning verdicts of Catholicism in Bavaria by contemporary observers like Friedrich Nicolai and Johan Caspar Riesbeck must be seen.17 Moreover, among the populations most affected by the hardships of war, religious reaction was intensified as common people turned to religion to make sense of the new situation in which they, often to great horror, now found themselves. News and rumors of French anti-clerical excesses and military advances spread beyond the Rhine. When French troops approached “Old Bavaria” in the mid-1790s popular piety was revived there as well, undoing many of the efforts of the government to regulate religious practices. Several popular practices were revived, usually aiming to invoke divine protection against the godless French or the armies of other belligerent powers, or to offer gratitude for escape from disaster. The populace venerated wonder working Virgins, statues, shrines and other relics, while processions, pilgrimages and passion plays—many of which had been banned or restricted by the electoral government—were restored.18 Bavaria took part in the first coalition against France, but was hardly an eager coalition partner. When General Moreau’s advances in the summer of 1796 brought French troops deep into Old Bavaria, the Bavarian government found it most opportune to seek an understanding with Directorial France. At this point, the First Coalition was already falling apart. In the late summer of 1796 Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg all made agreements with France which furthered the link, first established by the Franco-Prussian Peace of Basel the year before, between French

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annexation of the left bank of the Rhine and territorial compensations for the German princes among the ecclesiastical states elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, the latter having been long-standing targets of enlightened reformists in the German lands. The Bavarian government saw this as a chance to undermine the sovereign powers exercised by the independent Prince-Bishops in the Wittelsbach domains by secularizing their ecclesiastical states and as such also as a chance for territorial aggrandizement. This aim appeared to be within immediate reach after the Franco-Austrian Peace of Campo Formio in November 1797. In anticipation of the Congress of Rastatt to compensate the secular princes who had lost Rhenish territories to France, the Bavarian government drew up a detailed plan for secularization, which mapped out Bavaria’s desired territorial expansion and sought to strike at the Prince-Bishops with jurisdiction in Wittelsbach dominions by depriving them of their sovereign powers.19 Meanwhile, in the face of what seemed like an imminent wave of secularization in the Holy Roman Empire, and fleeing from French troops in Italy, Pope Pius VI had been pressured into extending his financial concessions to Charles Theodore by consenting to a special tax of fifteen million Gulden to be levied on the Church, as well as to the dissolution of certain houses of the regular orders. Outraged prelates lamented that this was but a cloak for secularization on a much greater scale, while the deeply conservative Landschaftsverordnung—the standing committee of the Bavarian Landtag (last convened in 1669)—argued that it was unconstitutional and far beyond the financial ability of the Church. In the wake of such resistance, the levy in question was reduced to a third, whereas the outbreak of the War of the Second Coalition and subsequent end to the Congress of Rastatt in early 1799 put a momentary halt to the process of secularization on a grand scale.20 Yet, it was not abandoned. Charles Theodore’s death on February 16, 1799, signaled new times ahead, as Max Joseph, the Duke of Zweibrücken—who was deeply committed to Enlightenment rationalism and an outspoken admirer of revolutionary France—stood first in the Bavarian line of succession. Speaking to the French envoy to Munich, the French-born Max Joseph asked him to communicate to the Directory that “that they have no more loyal friend than I. The joy I have felt on the occasion of every advance of the French arms has proven to me that I am a Frenchman.”21

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The Dawn of a New Era Having advanced through the ranks in Charles Theodore’s administration before leaving Bavaria in 1787, when his position became untenable because of his affiliation with the Illuminati, Count Maximilian von Montgelas had eventually found employment in 1796 as private secretary for Duke Max Joseph and followed him as such to Munich three years later, where Montgelas was installed as foreign minister. Montgelas’ views virtually embodied enlightened rationalism, in almost all aspects of society. Above all, he adhered to the principle of state absolutism, regarding the state as the only proper source of authority, with sovereignty vested in the monarch and executed by his central government. In this view, there was no room for the small sovereign fiefs of the kind so characteristic of the Holy Roman Empire, least of all sovereign ecclesiastical bodies.22 Changes under the new government were commenced immediately upon Max Joseph’s arrival to Munich on the evening of February 20, 1799. Within a week, the shadowy figures in the deceased elector’s court were dismissed, while the college of book censorship was abolished, to pave the way for the eventual introduction of full freedom of print in 1803.23 Furthermore, a series of royal decrees introduced ever-greater levels of tolerance for Protestants, thereby ending the official policy of Catholic exclusiveness. These measures coincided with an assault on the Bavarian branch of the Order of St. John, lambasted by Montgelas as a useless institution that had infiltrated the court and government under Charles Theodore. Yet attempts to abolish the Bavarian branch of the order and seize its property was abandoned when it incurred the wrath of Tsar Paul of Russia, the order’s acting grand master, whose armies were too close to Bavaria’s borders for comfort.24 In need of domestic stability after the dynastic transition and consent from the estates as to be able to levy taxes under the strains of the ongoing war, the new government under Max Joseph issued a guarantee for the integrity and property of the clerical institutions represented in the provincial estates. Despite this, the government proceeded to plot their abolishment. A special committee was set up in March 1799 to map out the secularization of the regular orders, taking its cue from ideas previously spelled out by Montgelas. In a memorandum penned in 1789, Montgelas had advocated the subordination of the Church to the state and future secularization of the regular orders and confiscation of their

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property, but generally within constitutional bounds. Seven years later his ideas and aims were spelled out in further detail in his “Ansbach Memoire,” an outline for complete reform of the Wittelsbach domains, which, as a general program for centralization of power, the introduction of legal equality and abolition of serfdom, advocated the complete suppression of the Roman Catholic religion in the political sphere. To this end, Montgelas suggested the creation of a ministry of religion to supervise and administer ecclesiastical matters and affirm “the rights of the monarch over the Catholic and Protestant clergymen.”25 Montgelas’ ultimate target was the Prälatenstand, the first estate under Bavaria’s corporate constitution. By greatly reducing the number of clerical institutions represented in the provincial estates—known at the time as landsässige Klöster or Mediatklöster—on which the Prälatenstand largely hinged, Montgelas aimed to undermine the Prälatenstand as a whole, and thus one of the very foundations of the corporate constitution itself, which was also on his list of institutions to be eliminated. Yet, his endeavors were complicated by the fact that the clerical institutions under the corporate constitution were also under the protection of Imperial Law, and some abbeys even directly under the Empire. Thus, were these so-called ständische or Reichsunmittelbare monasteries, convents and abbeys to be secularized, the process would somehow have to comply with the legal ramifications of the Holy Roman Empire and take place in an international political context favorable to Bavaria. This was the background to Bavarian foreign policy in the wake of the Peace of Lunéville in February 1801, after Bavaria had fought against France in 1800–1801 and yet again witnessed French troops penetrate deep into Bavarian territory, this time even briefly occupying Munich. On August 24, 1801, Bavaria aligned with France by treaty, looking to use French support to reap the benefits of the pending reorganization of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been outlined at Rastatt and was to be recommenced in the wake of Lunéville.26

Secularization The special committee set up to map out secularization in Bavaria presented its plan in September 1801, neatly coinciding with Bavaria’s recent treaty with France as well as Napoleon’s Concordat.27 For legal reasons, the committee advocated first and foremost the secularization of clerical institutions not part of the Prälatenstand or under the protection

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of Imperial Law (nichtständischen Klöster), which for the most part comprised the houses of the mendicant orders. The plan became the essence of an electoral decree issued on January 25, 1802, which abolished all houses of the mendicant orders, as well as the houses of the possessing orders that were not part of the Prälatenstand, and ordered the confiscation of their property. Friars and nuns native to Bavaria were carted off to newly-created central institutions or directed to other spiritual and charitable activities, whereas foreign-born regular clergy were, as a rule, expelled. This first stage of secularization, as it would turn out, was swift and ruthless, and carried out under vehement protests from the Landschaftsverordnung.28 The legality of the measure was indeed debatable at best, even if the ständische institutions were not yet touched. Yet, the impending reorganization of the Holy Roman Empire ensured that this was only a matter of time, while Napoleon’s Concordat suggested that even the Pope had caved into the forces of secularization. In November 1802, as if to give the ständische clerical institutions a stark reminder that their days were numbered, and in blatant disregard for Imperial Law, meticulous inventories and registers were taken of both their property and members, and further ordinances of novices prohibited. Meanwhile negotiations for the reorganization of the Holy Roman Empire, under French and Russian mediation, had been commenced in a special Imperial deputation sat at Regensburg, composed of representatives from the major territorial states. Max Joseph was among the rulers to be compensated for loss of territory on the left bank of the Rhine, but was already looking beyond the mere acquisition of new territory. Of equal importance to the Bavarian government was the question of the ständische clerical institutions within Bavaria’s existing borders. This was a matter of contention at Regensburg that, in Bavarian eyes, acquired urgency in December 1802 when the Grand Duke Ferdinand, recently ejected from Tuscany, was given possession of the secularized Prince-Bishopric of Eichstädt, initially marked for Bavaria. Through shrewd diplomacy and liberal bribes, Montgelas obtained French support for secularization of the ständische clerical institutions in “Old Bavaria” as a means of compensation for Eichstädt. Consequently, at Bavaria’s instigation, the final report of the Imperial deputation—the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss or, in a less awkward

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term, the Imperial Recess—in February 1803 placed the lands and property of the monasteries, abbeys and convents of the regular orders “in the old as well as the new possessions” of the secular rulers in whose territories they lay at these rulers’ free disposal. Although by this time only a mere formality as far as the Bavarian government was concerned this provided it with the legal backing it needed to complete the secularization of the remaining sixty-seven ständische Klöster in “Old Bavaria,” bringing the total number of secularized institutions up to over 160.29 This also dealt a fatal blow to the Prälatenstand and paved the way for the abolishment of the estates through the introduction of a new constitution in 1808.30 In the wider context of the Imperial Recess, the secularization of monasteries and abbeys was almost only a sideshow to the most comprehensive aspect of German secularization. Indeed, whereas the Napoleonic Concordat set certain limits to how far Napoleon was prepared to allow the most eager reformers under his direct rule to go, no such checks were applied to Bavaria and other German states, where the wave of secularization continued to roll over entire states.31 The Imperial Recess did away with almost all of the Holy Roman Empire’s ecclesiastical states, in addition to forty-five of fifty-one imperial cities and all the Imperial Knights. The lands of these states, cities and knights were confiscated by the states to which they were annexed.32 Bavaria was among the major beneficiaries, ceding to France and its satellite states 730,000 inhabitants in the Rhineland in return for 880,000 inhabitants in the ecclesiastical states, imperial cities and other principalities annexed to Bavaria, including all or parts of the lands of the prince-bishoprics of Augsburg, Würzburg, Freising, Bamberg, and Passau. These were later joined by Eichstädt (1805), Salzburg (1809) and Regensburg (1810), ultimately doubling the size of Bavaria’s territory and fulfilling the longstanding ambition of acquiring full sovereignty over the Bavarian parishes belonging to these dioceses. Almost as an afterthought, the final stage of secularization was carried out in 1807–1808 through the suppression of the pious foundations, after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 had eliminated the last legal constraints and placed the fiefs of these foundations under the sovereignty of secular rulers. Consequently, the Teutonic Knights in Bavaria had their property confiscated in 1807, before the Order of St. John was eventually suppressed in 1808 and its property placed under government administration.

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“The War Against God” The Bavarian government found itself in a precarious financial position upon Max Joseph’s ascension to the throne, which was further aggravated by the costs of Bavaria’s reluctant participation in the War of the Second Coalition, which brought with it the costly presence of French and Austrian troops on Bavarian soil. In other words, there was a major economic incentive behind secularization insofar as the lands, revenues and cultural treasures of the clerical institutions—generally perceived as bloated and wealthy—would befall the Bavarian government. Indeed, upon his attempt to banish the Order of St. John in 1799, Max Joseph argued that the order’s property, estimated at eight million Gulden’s worth, was essential to balancing the highly strained Bavarian budget.33 Montgelas and the committee set up to plan secularization also argued in terms of secularization being a financial imperative for the Bavarian state. Yet, financial concerns were not all there was to it. In 1802, Max Joseph justified the confiscation of the property of the monasteries he was about to abolish on grounds that it was the only means by which the government could fund the schools necessary to remedy the moral ills caused by the regular orders. Perhaps even more precisely to the point, Montgelas castigated the monasteries for having “encouraged the perpetuation of superstition and of the most baneful errors; they have built up obstacles against the spread of enlightened principles, and they have sown suspicion against every institution working for true moral education.”34 The confiscated Church lands and assets yielded relatively little immediate revenue, as Montgelas admitted. Most of the income from confiscated Church property and assets was offset by expenses incurred by pensioning off friars, monks and nuns, paying out various compensations, and handling the debts of several of the secularized institutions. Moreover, too much Church land was put on the market at the same time, thereby decreasing prices which, in any event, were driven further down by lack of available capital among potential buyers. Only in the much longer term would the economic benefits of secularization become apparent, partly through its social consequences and consequent benefit to industrial development and perhaps above all through the confiscated forest lands which were not immediately sold off. The limited immediate revenue did not trouble Montgelas and his collaborators too much, their concerns over Bavaria’s dire finances

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notwithstanding.35 What really mattered to them was that the Church was dispossessed of its property and cultural treasures, which was reflected as much by the incalculable loss or destruction of many priceless artefacts as it was by the very symbolic act of leaving those books and manuscripts that escaped destruction to the Royal Library in Munich as well as several state-run secondary schools.36 As far as Montgelas was concerned, every object of art, book and other incunabula seized from the dissolved monasteries and abbeys was an artefact recovered for the benefit of society and to the detriment of the Church.37 This was also true of the Church’s landed property, with comprised more than half of Bavaria’s dependent peasantry, who could now be emancipated.38 As the librarian, Johann Christoph von Aretin, tasked with the administration of confiscated books and manuscripts, put it: The philosophical historians will begin a new chronology, starting with the dissolving of the cloisters, like they did after the lifting of the law by brute force, and one will approach the ruins of the abbeys with roughly the same mixed feelings with which we observe the old castle of robber barons. Do not believe, dear friend, that I get carried away with enthusiasm here. When you will come to know better the former influence of our cloisters that possessed a third of the land I am convinced that you will appreciate with me the importance of the changes, which can never or rarely appear in their true light to contemporaries.39

Thus deprived of its wealth, the task of breaking the Church’s intellectual grip on society could begin. This was the very essence of what historian Michael Broers has aptly termed “the war against God” in the “inner empire,” the states within Napoleon’s orbit.40 It was very much a war, for the sweeping reforms implemented by Montgelas and his compatriots, all brought up on Diderot and Voltaire and less inclined to compromise than even many of their French counterparts, were unpopular with many of the clerics and the laity. First and foremost, the reforms aimed at the absolute institutional subordination of the Church to the state, the long-standing aim of so many Enlightenment reformers, but one that hardly any of them had achieved. After the abolition of virtually all other clerical institutions, religious life was to be centered on the dioceses and parishes, the ecclesiastical equivalent to the Bavarian Kreise and Kommune, while stringent government controls were imposed on communications between the Bavarian clergy and the Papal Curia. When

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in 1808 the myriad of decrees and ordinances hitherto issued by Max Joseph were gathered under a single legal document in the shape of a new constitution, little was symbolically more significant than the elimination of the ministry of religion—itself a reformist creation—and subordination of all religious matters to the ministry of the interior.41 This was going even further than the co-existence of church and state accepted by enlightened absolutists, or even the French Directory’s policy of separation of church and state. As such, it was hardly surprising that negotiations with the Holy See over a Bavarian Concordat came to nothing.42 Secondly, “the war against God” was also waged by means of reforming the secular clergy and the religious practices of the general population. The clergymen were to be officials of both the state and church; not only in capacity of being on the state payroll as parts of Bavaria’s tenured corps of civil servants, but they were also to be loyal proponents of the ideology of the central government, rooted in the culture of reason and enlightened progress. The clergy in their dioceses and parishes were to promote this ideology not only by performing mass and service at the altar and otherwise observing outward rites, but also by tending to the spiritual and moral needs of their parishioners, as a local branch of the secular government. This was not only a matter of redefining the role of the clergymen—it was also very much a matter of redefining the way the mass of the population should live and think. By making vast changes, the religious practices of ordinary people, the state and its representatives were to combat what Montgelas and like-minded reformers saw as ignorance and public disorder associated with traditional practices such as processions and festivals. This was of course nothing new, considering the concerns and efforts of the electoral government even before the French Revolution; what was new under the rule of Max Joseph was rather the sheer scale and intensity of efforts such as to abolish holy days and otherwise regulate religious practices. Although an electoral decree issued on May 7, 1804, stated that the government was not to interfere in matters of conscience and religious doctrine, it granted the government the right of supervision of spiritual matters, which was interpreted quite liberally by Montgelas. This right of religious supervision was extended further through an organic edict issued on March 24, 1809, as a supplement to the constitution, which explicitly brought religious education, liturgy and, significantly, policing of the Church under the jurisdiction of the government. Through yet another measure rich in symbolism

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but of even greater practical value, a special cult police was created to enforce religious bans and regulations.43 These measures were not intended to dechristianize Bavaria, so to say, but were, very much in line with Jansenism, intended to make religion more spiritual, austere and personal; to promote a “purer form of the cult of Religion” as the decree of May 7, 1804 put it.44 This was “Jansenism under the secular eye of Enlightenment scepticism,” as Broers remarks of Italy, an official Catholicism with which even Montgelas could be comfortable as long as it was equal to the other Christian confessions and more or less completely subordinated to the state.45

Religious Tolerance The process of religious reform and secularization in Bavaria was paralleled by the introduction of unprecedented levels of religious tolerance, owing both to economic and ideological considerations. In 1799, Montgelas, aware of the disastrous effect of the virtual exodus of the Bavarian intellectual elite in the wake of the purge of the Illuminati, made a case for the desirability of greater religious toleration as a means to promote industry and science by attracting skilled and industrious immigrants regardless of confession, as well as a means to promote statebuilding and patriotism through the principle of civil equality. A pamphlet issued by the government in 1801, in response to protests from Catholic burghers in Munich against greater tolerance for Protestants, stated that the underlying purpose of the new legislation was “to procure through the settlement of foreign communicants, industrious cultivators for the many lands still waste, skillful manufacturers of products, active enterprisers in commerce, and to increase in such a manner the physical and moral strength of Our Hereditary States.”46 The Imperial Recess brought several Protestant areas of Franconia and Swabia under Bavarian rule, altering Bavaria’s confessional balance by bringing the number of the Protestant minority up to over 700,000, almost a third of the total population. This made toleration toward Protestants a necessity if the newly acquired territories were to be integrated into the Bavarian state and the new citizens turned into loyal Bavarians irrespective of confessional differences. A decree issued in January 1803, following up on a tolerance edict issued in 1800 and in anticipation of the Imperial Recess, confirmed religious freedom and civil rights for all Lutherans and Calvinists in the entire Bavarian state,

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including rights of settlement, property, free worship and eligibility to public office. In addition, several practices now considered discriminatory, such as the obligation of all military personnel to kneel at the passing of Corpus Christi processions, were abolished. This amounted to full equality between the Christian confessions, although the last few administrative privileges of the Catholic Church were only brought to an unequivocal end in 1809. The policy of tolerance toward Protestants was far from uncontroversial in a country with such a staunchly Catholic background as Bavaria, but it was still much less controversial than the question of Jewish emancipation. The about 30,000 Jews in the newly acquired Bavarian territories were subject to a bewildering mass of existing legislation, giving the Bavarian government every reason to press for at least legal standardization. However, coupled with the economic potential of emancipation and the ideology of civil equality, the question of Jewish emancipation was soon on the government agenda. In 1802, Johan Christoph von Aretin made a case for this in a memorandum that came to resemble something of a manual for the subsequent introduction of a number of different decrees and edicts granting various concessions and rights to Jews, most notably their admission to higher education in 1804, the abolition of the Leibzoll and all other special levies in 1808, and official recognition in 1809 of their church as a private religious society. Yet, several restrictions on Jews were retained, such as on marriage and acquisition of property, whereas the practical enforcement of the new legislation was uneven and, in any event, often encountered popular hostility. This left a myriad of different legislation and practices that were confusing and often contradictory. The Bavarian government sought to remedy this through the introduction in June 1813 of an organic edict encompassing the previous piecemeal legislation and as such introducing a uniform set of laws as regards Jews. Consequently, Jews legally residing in Bavaria were granted what amounted to full civil rights, but these rights were still qualified by a number of restrictions. The gist of the edict was on the one hand the integration of the Jews into society within certain parameters that generally reflected the social and economic prejudices of the general population and, on the other hand, to limit their number by banning immigration and placing certain restrictions on marriage and settlement. Still, the edict marked a significant stride toward Jewish emancipation in Bavaria, although it did not end

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popular prejudice and hostility, as evidenced by the fierce debates over Jewish emancipation in the Bavarian parliament (Landtag) in 1819 and the outbreak in August that year of the “Hep-Hep” riots in Würzburg.47

Responses, Resistance, and Revolt The Jansenist affinities of reformers in the Napoleonic era were an integral part of an elitist, aggressive and ruthless perception of rationality and progress. This contrasted sharply with popular piety, which conservative elements among the Catholic clergy sometimes drew upon to mobilize the masses behind their resistance to the reformist agenda. Mass resistance was rarely driven by religious concerns alone, but religion played an integral part in some of the most violent revolts against Napoleonic rule and reforms in Europe. Bavaria, too, experienced a bout of violent popular resistance aimed, in part, at the religious policies of the Bavarian government, but open rebellion only erupted in the Tyrol in 1809, which had been seized from the Habsburg Empire some four years previously. Up until this point, religious reforms and secularization in Bavaria had not evoked much in the way of violent resistance, even if there was no shortage of popular resentment and protest. The toleration edicts were generally resented while the abolishment of the regular orders and the closing of their institutions sometimes unleashed streams of petitions from local communities or individuals to the government asking for particular monasteries or convents to be reestablished. Yet this was about as far as resistance went. Most of the secularized institutions were small communities, composed of relatively few clergy with little inclination to put up a fight against officials sent to take possession of the monasteries and their assets. Moreover, they were rarely able to drum up much active support beyond the local community, even if local resistance was still something with which the government had to contend, as some government-appointed clergymen found out when they took up their new vocations to a hostile reception.48 In the final analysis, Montgelas was probably right to assert, albeit not devoid of self-justification, that the scope of resistance to the religious reforms was limited, although this does not mean that they were willingly accepted or popular.49 The Tyrol was a rather special case. Following the introduction of the new Bavarian constitution in 1808, Montgelas’ reform program, including its religious and clerical provisions, was extended to the Tyrol, despite initial guarantees from the Bavarian government to the contrary. A number

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of monasteries and convents were closed, their property confiscated and several restrictions and bans placed on popular religious practices. In a province as zealously Catholic as the Tyrol—where, in the face of French invasion in 1796, the provincial estates had convened to declare a holy alliance between the Tyrol and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which became an integral part of Tyrolean identity and patriotism—this seemed bound to be a cause for resentment. The situation was exasperated further when the recalcitrant bishops of Chur-Meran and Trento were removed by the Bavarian government, as were many of the clergy who had supported them. The latter were often replaced by Bavarian clergy, who, alongside the cult police, were tasked with the enforcement of the reforms, including bans or severe restrictions on field processions and midnight vespers at Christmas, weather prayers and ringing of even bells. Coupled with other unwelcome aspects of Bavarian rule—such as adherence to the Continental Blockade, the end to provincial autonomy, increases of customs duties and taxes, and above all conscription—this caused disruption and fermented discontent, eventually leading to a full-scale revolt in conjunction with the outbreak of Franco-Austrian war in April 1809.50 Traditional historiography has tended to depict the religious policies of the Bavarian government as a main cause behind the revolt, owing not at least to the fact that the rebels often clothed their resistance in religious discourse and had several clergy among their ranks.51 Yet recent research has downplayed the role and significance of religion and clerical participation as the main factors in the revolt. As the historian, Martin Schennach suggests, traditional historiography appears to have been colored by contemporary propaganda and preconceptions, thereby creating a narrative that has obscured the more complex causes underlying the revolt. The rebels often made deliberate use of religious discourse as a means to legitimize the revolt, or even as a mere pretext for it, whereas for Bavarian and French troops sent to combat the rebels such discourse reinforced their existing prejudices against the Tyrol as something of a superstitious backwater. The French general, Franḉois-Joseph Lefebvre, may serve as a case in point. On the one hand, he initially dismissed the Tyroleans as backward and superstitious and the revolt as mainly the work of disgruntled clerics, but his first-hand experiences in the region eventually made him assert that, “religion is only a pretext for the rebellion,” dismissing reports of the rebels as led on by monks wailing crucifixes as little more than hearsay.52 Indeed, the Tyrolean clergy was much more divided in their stance than traditional historiography

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suggests. Several clergy—including the bishops of Brixen and Trento— advocated a peaceful course through accommodation to the new rulers and even questioned the legitimacy of the revolt. The religious policies of the Bavarian government were most ferociously resisted in the diocese of Chur-Meran, and even then, resistance needed not be driven by purely religious concerns. The ban on Christmas midnight vespers, for example, appears to have been resented by younger people less for reasons of religion than that it deprived them of an important social occasion.53 Moreover, in many districts the reforms were enforced without major opposition while in other places their enforcement was rather lax, with local officials turning a blind eye to the continued practice of banned festivals and processions. Thus the actual impact of the reforms was rather varied, which in turn makes it difficult to point them out as a major cause for the Tyrolean revolt. Never really grasping what, exactly, had triggered the revolt in the Tyrol, but all the more fearful of similar occurrences elsewhere in the lands recently acquired by Bavaria, Montgelas nevertheless opted to dictate tact, realizing that, regardless of the actual extent and significance of religious grievances, the Tyrol was unlikely to be pacified as long as the Bavarian government was at odds with the Tyrolean bishops and clergy. Although none of the religious legislation was revoked as a result of the revolt, its enforcement in the Tyrol was relaxed by in favor of a more pragmatic approach that allowed certain pilgrimages, processions and passion plays, as well as local communities and towns to buy back a number of closed churches and monasteries and maintain them at their own expense. Still, Montgelas was careful not to apply too much leniency in the Tyrol, as he feared that any overt signs of Bavarian accommodation could inspire revolts elsewhere among the territories recently acquired Bavaria, such as in Swabia, where there had also been popular unrest in 1809. There were to be no more serious revolts, however, and order was eventually restored in the Tyrol, although this probably owed as much to the fact that the rebels were outfought and defeated in 1809 as the subsequent Bavarian policy of tacit accommodation.54

The Concordat of 1817 and the Catholic Revival The reform program carried out under Montgelas created many tensions that first served to slow down the pace of the reforms from about 1810, before bringing about Montgelas’ fall from power in February 1817. Yet

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Montgelas’ downfall was less the result of clashes with forces of reaction in the construction of Bavaria’s post-war order than Montgelas increasingly being perceived as a block against further progress. The immediate background to his dismissal was constitutional conflicts, which saw Montgelas pitted against those who advocated constitutional reforms to introduce political representation after Montgelas had failed to replace the abolished estates and Landschaftsverordnung with the parliament provisioned by the 1808 constitution.55 Another point of contention was negotiations with the Papal Curia over a Bavarian Concordat, which had been resumed in 1815 after having been abandoned in 1809 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, were concluded shortly after Montgelas’ downfall. The Concordat was a crucial issue as far as all parties were concerned. It was also highly controversial, as evidenced by the fact that the Bavarian government kept the final Concordat a secret for several months after its initial completion in early June 1817 and eventual ratification by King Max Joseph in October. Even then the Concordat was only ratified after a number of modifications had been made to the initial document signed by the Bavarian negotiator in June, which itself had followed on the back of several rejected drafts. Unsurprisingly, Rome had wanted the Bavarian government to relinquish crucial parts of the religious legislation introduced under Max Joseph’s rule and to reacquire the right to nominate bishops. Considering the efforts of successive Bavarian rulers and Max Joseph’s eventual success in bringing the clergy under state control this was absolutely out of the question, but in return the archbishops and bishops were—at least theoretically—left with a more or less free hand to run their dioceses. However, this concession was qualified by a number of regulations granting the monarch extensive influence on the appointment of clergy, while the boundaries of the dioceses remained for the most part identical to those of the Kreise. The Concordat was, in any event, subordinated to the Religionsedikt, a supplement to the new Bavarian constitution introduced in May 1818, which confirmed the principles of religious tolerance and the secularization of Church property as well as the rights and powers of the state in religious and clerical matters. In return, the Concordat restored the free communication between the Church and the Holy See as well as the special Nunciature in Munich, while the Church was also granted the supervision of the reestablished episcopal seminaries, the right of acquisition of property within certain limits, and certain limitations to freedom of

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print in religious matters, to be defined and enforced by the government. These concession, however small, were enough to cause sensation among displeased moderates and liberals, as well as triumph in traditionalist and ultramontane circles. The British envoy to Munich, Lionel Hervey noted that, “it is indeed remarkable that a Government which since the secularization of the Clergy in 1803 has accorded less influence & fewer privileges to the Church than any other in Europe, should have ratified a Treaty so favorable to the supremacy of His Holiness.”56 Yet few other governments of predominantly Catholic states in Europe had as much say in Church affairs and appointments as that of Bavaria, while the monarchy, in the words of George S. Williamson, “promoted the Church only to the extent that it served as a buttress to royal authority.”57 Indeed, rather than ending the conflicts over religion and the Church in Bavaria, the Concordat contributed to unleashing new conflicts that would color Bavarian politics for much of the nineteenth century. The Bavarian Concordat coincided with a broad Catholic revival in the German lands after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.58 This revival was not only a reflection of increased popular demands for public piety— although the extent of these demands and the Catholic revival as such, as Werner Blessing notes, should not be overestimated—but also an intellectual movement that had emerged during the Napoleonic Wars. The University of Landshut was one of the institutions that hosted intellectual circles influenced by romanticism, which posed a challenge to Enlightenment rationalism and advocated the recovery of certain aspects of traditional Catholicism. Leading among the Bavarian branch of this circle was the Landshut Professor Johann Michael Sailer, sometime teacher for the Crown Prince Ludwig. Ludwig opposed Montgelas over constitutional issues and was instrumental in his downfall, and clashed with Montgelas over religious matters owing in no small part to Sailer’s influence. Sailer sought to escape the confinements of enlightened rationalism without rejecting reason itself, and his influence on Ludwig helped pave the way for something of a Catholic Restoration after Ludwig’s ascendance to the throne in 1825, which was followed by a reversal of some of the religious reforms introduced by his father and Montgelas, including the reestablishment of certain houses of the regular orders.59 Ludwig stopped well short of committing to anything that challenged royal authority, and did not fundamentally alter the State-Church relations established under his father. For this reason, he had a somewhat

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uneasy relationship with the ultramontane movement that emerged in the 1830s and came to play a prominent role in Bavarian politics the decade after.60 One of the leading political figures in this movement was Karl August von Abel, who found himself in deep conflict with Bavaria’s protestant minority and liberal opposition, especially over the reintroduction of the so-called “kneeling order” in 1845, obliging Bavarian soldiers regardless of confession to kneel before the passing of Corpus Christi processions. Such conflicts served to revive religious passions and confessional divisions, but it was ultimately the controversy surrounding King Ludwig’s affair with his Irish mistress, the actress Lola Montez, that eventually brought about Abel’s dismissal in 1847 as well as the King’s own abdication in 1848.61

Conclusion Religious life and the Catholic Church in Bavaria underwent a massive transformation during the Napoleonic Era, which firmly subordinated the Church to the State, dispossessed it of much of its property, abolished the regular orders and brought Bavaria’s Lutheran and Calvinist minorities on an equal footing with the Catholic majority, while rather extensive rights were also granted to Jews. In many respects the reforms and secularization in Bavaria went further than in France, where the Church had hardly enjoyed a similar degree of sovereignty prior to the Revolution, while Napoleon dictated tact in matters of the Church and religion. The process of secularization doubled Bavaria’s territory and contributed greatly to the centralization of power and creation of the modern Bavarian state. Even though the French influence on the Bavarian reforms was obvious, the reform program carried out after 1799 were equally much the completion of unrealized ambitions that predated the Revolution, the sovereignty of the state and its central government chief among them. Perhaps above all, the religious reforms and secularization carried out under Montgelas’ auspices were driven by ideological concerns rooted in the secular, rational world of the Enlightenment, which, to mixed responses, were imposed on the general population. Despite this onslaught on traditional Catholicism and its institutions, Catholicism witnessed a revival in Bavaria after the Napoleonic Wars. Although it might be tempting to attribute this revival in no small part to popular resistance against religious reforms and secularization during

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the Napoleonic Era, and as such popular demands for piety, the extent of this resistance, as well as the popular reach of the post-war Catholic revival, should not be overestimated; nor should its institutional consequences. The Concordat of 1817, for all its concessions to the Catholic Church, largely confirmed the reforms introduced during the preceding 18 years, the subordination of the Church to the State chief among them. Neither King Max Joseph nor Ludwig deviated from this path, leaving it a lasting legacy of the revolutionary-Napoleonic era in Bavaria, albeit one that would remain embattled throughout the nineteenth century. Still religion did not succumb to “modernization,” not even so ruthlessly imposed and strongly felt as in Bavaria.

Notes





1. Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in NineteenthCentury Germany, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10. 2. Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon 1799–1815, 2nd Ed., (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 83. 3. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 10–11. Roy Porter argues that France was an exceptional case in Europe, in how the hostility of the philosophes toward the Church and the absence of enlightened reform from above contrasted with the idea of the reforming state and reforms of religious institutions evident in German Enlightenment thought: Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 55, 32–41. 4. Friedrich Nicolai, Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781, vol. VI, (Berlin and Stettin, 1785), 714. 5. This characterization was also attributed to Cologne, Münster, Bamberg and Salzburg, cf. Ewald Hibel, “German, Austrian or ‘Salzburger’? National Identities in Salzburg, c. 1830–70”, in Laurence Cole (ed.), Different Paths to the Nation. Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830–70, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 109. 6. Georg von Laubmann & Michael Doeberl (eds.), Denkwürdigkeiten des Grafen Maximilian Joseph v. Montgelas über die innere Staatswervaltung Bayerns, (Munich: Beck, 1908), 120. 7. Chester Penn Higby, The Religious Policy of the Bavarian Government during the Napoleonic Period, (PhD diss, Columbia University, New York, 1918), 27.

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8.  Marc R. Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 104–198. 9.  Alfons Maria Scheglmann, Geschichte der Säkularisation im rechstrheinischen Bayern, vol. 1: Vorgeschichte der Säkularisation, (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1903), 51–55. For a more recent treatment, see Jutta Seitz, Die landständische Verordnung in Bayern in Übergang von der altständischen Repräsentation zum modernen Staat, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht Verlag, 1999), 78–92. 10.  Norbert Schindler, “Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten: Aufklärung, Geheimnis und Politik,” in Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Freimauer und Geheimbünde im 18. Jahrhundert in Mitteleuropa, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 284–318; Eberhard Weis, “Der Illuminatenorden 1776– 1786. Unter besondere Berücksichtigung der Frage seiner sozialen Zusammensetzung, seiner politischen Ziele und seiner Fortexistenz nach 1786“, in Eberhard Weis (ed.), Deutschland und Frankreich um 1800. Aufklärung—Revolution—Reform, (München: Beck, 1990). 11. Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015 [1966]), 100–104. For the broader perspective, see Michael Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 12. Harold C. Vedeler, “The Genesis of the Toleration Reforms in Bavaria under Montgelas,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. X, no. 4 (1938): 475–478. 13. Chester Penn Higby, The Religious Policy of the Bavarian Government during the Napoleonic Period, (PhD diss, Columbia University, New York 1918), 84–99. 14. Alfred Wieczorek, Hansjörg Probst and Wieland Koenig, Lebenslust und Frömmigkeit, Kurfürst Carl Theodor (1724–1799) zwischen Barock und Aufklärung. Handbuch und Ausstellungskatalog, 2 vols, (Regensburg: Pustet, 1999); Cornelia Jahn, Klosteraufhebungen und Klosterpolitik in Bayern under Kurfürst Karl Theodor 1778–1784, (Munich: Beck, 1994); Karl Habenschaden, “ Die Kirchenpolitik Bayerns unter Kurfürst Karl Theodor. Ein Beitrag zur kirchenrechtlichen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts”, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung, vol. 28, no. 1 (1939); Michael Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 14–15. 15.  Jonathan Sperber, “The Atlantic Revolutions in the German Lands, 1776–1849,” in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 148–154; James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 207–235.

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16.  George S. Williamson, “Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, 1760–1871: Enlightenment, Emancipation, New Forms of Piety,” in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 218–219; Horst Carl, “Religion and the Experience of War: A Comparative Approach to Belgium, the Netherlands and the Rhineland,” in Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Jane Rendall (eds.), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians. Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 226–234; T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany. Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland 1792–1802, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 207–247. 17. Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus, (Mainz: M. Grunewald, 1992), 77–91; Friedrich Nicolai, Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781, vol. VI, (Berlin and Stettin, 1785) 714; J.K. Riesbeck, Travels Through Germany, vol. 1 [Translated by Rev. Maty], (London: T. Cadell, 1787), 79, 93–96; Leighton S. James, Witnessing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in German Central Europe, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 19. 18. Ute Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg. Frankreichs Kriege und der deutsche Süden: Alltag—Wahrnehmung—Deutung 1792–1841, (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 336–382. 19.  Ludwig Hammermayer, “Das Ende des Alten Bayern. Die Zeit des Kurfürsten Max III. Joseph und des Kurfürsten Karl Theodor”, in Max Spindler (ed.), Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte, vol. II: Das alte Bayern, (Munich: Beck, 1969), 1101–1102 and 1275–1283. 20.  Reinhard Stauber, Auf dem Weg zur Säkularisation. Entscheidungsprozesse in der bayerische Regierung 1798–1802, in Rainer Braun (ed.), Bayern ohne Klöster? (Munich: Generaldirektion der Staatlichen Archive Bayerns, 2003), 251–264; Jutta Seitz, Die landständische Verordnung in Bayern in Übergang von der altständischen Repräsentation zum modernen Staat, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht Verlag, 1999), 192–209; Eberhard Weis, Montgelas, vol. 1: Zwischen Revolution und Reform. 1759–1799, 2nd Ed., (Munich: Beck, 1988), 419–431; Oskar Köhler, “The Established Church and the Enlightenment,” in Hubert Jedin and John Dolan (eds.), History of the Church, vol. VI: The Church in the Age of Enlightenment and Absolutism, (New York: Continuum, 1992 [1981]), 500–502; Heinz Lieberich, Die bayerischen Landstände 1313/40-1807, (Munich: Komm. für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 1990).

198  M.N. Ottosen 21.  Winfried Schulze, “Bayern und die Französische Revolution: Machtweiterung und innere Reform,” in Alois Schmid & Katharina Weigand (eds.), Bayern mitten in Europa: Vom Frühmittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, (Munich: Beck, 2005), 253. 22. Eberhard Weis, Montgelas, vol. 1: Zwischen Revolution und Reform. 1759–1799, 2nd Ed., (Munich: Beck, 1988), 140. See also Walter Demel, Der Bayerische Staatsabsolutismus 1806/08-1817: Staats- und gesellshaftspolitische Motivationen und Hintergründe der Reformära in der ersten Phase des Königreichs Bayern, (Munich: Beck, 1983). 23. Karl Möckl, Der moderne bayerische Staat: Eine Verfassungsgeschichte vom aufgeklärten Absolutismus bis zum Ende der Reformepoche, (Munich: Beck, 1979), 181–183. 24.  Thomas Freller, “Between Malta and St. Petersburg. The Balì and Turcopilier Johann Baptist Anton von Flachslanden and Tsar Paul I,” Melita Historica: Journal of the Malta Historical Society, vol. 14, no. 2 (2005): 215–222. 25. Eberhard Weis, Montgelas, vol. 1: Zwischen Revolution und Reform. 1759–1799, 2nd Ed., (Munich: Beck, 1988), 21–31, 117–123; Idem, “Montgelas’ innenpolitisches Reformprogramm. Das Ansbacher Mémoire für den Herzog vom 30.9.1796,” Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, vol. 33 (1970): 219–256. See also Michael Henker, Margot Hamm and Evamaria Brockhoff (eds.), Bayern entsteht. Montgelas und sein Ansbacher Memoire von 1796, (Regensburg: Pustet 1996). 26. Karl Härter, Reichstag und Revolution 1789-1806. Die Auseinandersetzung des immerwährenden Reichstags zu Regensburg mit den Auswirkungen der französischen Revolution auf das alte Reich, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht Verlag, 1992), 570–641. 27.  Montgelas later identified Georg Friedrich von Zentner as the driving force in the committee, cf. Eberhard Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2: Der Architekt des modernen bayerischen Staates 1799–1838, (Munich: Beck, 2005), 161, 229. 28. Jutta Seitz, Die landständische Verordnung in Bayern in Übergang von der altständischen Repräsentation zum modernen Staat, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht Verlag, 1999), 285–297. 29. The most concise overview remains Eberhard Weis, “Die Säkularisation der bayerischen Klöster 1802/03. Neue Forschungen zu Vorgeschichte und Ergebnissen,” Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften München. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse.Sitzungsberichte, Jg. 1983, vol. 6, 1983. For a more extensive treatment, see Alois Schmid (ed), Die Säkularisation in Bayern 1803. Kulturbruch oder Modernisierung?, (München: Beck, 2003).



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30. Jutta Seitz, Die landständische Verordnung in Bayern in Übergang von der altständischen Repräsentation zum modernen Staat, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht Verlag, 1999), 285–297; Eberhard Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2: Der Architekt des modernen bayerischen Staates 1799– 1838, (Munich: Beck, 2005), 87–108. 31.  Cf. Michael Broers, Europe under Napoleon 1799–1815, 2nd Ed., (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 81–83. 32.  Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte zeit 1789, vol. 1: Reform und Restauration bis 1830, (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967), 51–55. 33. R. Du Moulin-Eckart, Bayern unter dem Ministerium Montgelas 1799– 1817, vol. 1 (1799 bis 1800), (Munich: Beck, 1895), 103–111. 34. Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015 [1966]), 607. 35.  Reinhard Stauber, “Zwischen Finanznot, Ideologie und neuer Staatsordnung. Die politischen Entscheidungen der Administration Montgelas auf dem Weg zur Säkularisation 1798 bis 1803,” in Alois Schmid (ed), Die Säkularisation in Bayern 1803. Kulturbruch oder Modernisierung?, (München: Beck, 2003), 111–151. 36. Anton Schneider, Der Gewinn des bayerischen Staates von säkularisierten landständischen Klöstern in Altbayern, (Munich: Stadtarchiv, 1970), 212; Eberhard Weis, Die Begründung des modernen bayerischen Staates unter König Max I. (1799–1825), in Alois Schmid (ed.), Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte. Begründet von Max Spindler, vol. 4: Das neue Bayern. Von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart, Part 1. Staat und Politik, (Munich: Beck, 2003), 52–53; Walter Demel, Der Bayerische Staatsabsolutismus 1806/081817: Staats- und gesellshaftspolitische Motivationen und Hintergründe der Reformära in der ersten Phase des Königreichs Bayern, (Munich: Beck, 1983), 179–185 and 202–207. 37. Georg von Laubmann & Michael Doeberl (eds.), Denkwürdigkeiten des Grafen Maximilian Joseph v. Montgelas über die innere Staatswervaltung Bayerns, (Munich: Beck, 1908), 128–131, cf. Eberhard Weis, Die Säkularisation der bayerischen Klöster 1802/03. Neue Forschungen zu Vorgeschichte und Ergebnissen, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften München. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse.Sitzungsberichte, Jg. 1983, vol. 6 (1983), 43 and 51–54. 38.  Hans A. Schmitt, “Germany without Prussia: A Closer Look at the Confederation of the Rhine,” German Studies Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (1983), 23. 39. John Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy, (Boston: Brill, 1998), 38–40.

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40. Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy. The War against God 1801–1814, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 41. Allen T. Cronenberg, Montgelas and the Reorganisation of Napoleonic Bavaria, Donald D. Horward and John C. Morgan (eds), The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850. Proceedings, 1989 to Commemorate the Bicentennial of the French Revolution, (Tallahassee, FL, 1990), 715. 42. Eberhard Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2: Der Architekt des modernen bayerischen Staates 1799–1838, (Munich: Beck, 2005), 229–242. 43. Allen T. Cronenberg, Montgelas and the Reorganisation of Napoleonic Bavaria, Donald D. Horward and John C. Morgan (eds), The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850. Proceedings, 1989 to Commemorate the Bicentennial of the French Revolution, (Tallahassee, FL, 1990), 716. 44.  Churpfalzbaierisches Regierungs-Blatt, MDCCCIV, 23 May 1804: 509–514 (quote p. 509). 45. Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy. The War against God 1801–1814, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 3. 46. Harold C. Vedeler, The Genesis of the Toleration Reforms in Bavaria under Montgelas, The Journal of Modern History, vol. X, no. 4 (1938): 479–488 (quote p. 484). 47. Stefan Schwarz, Die Juden in Bayern im Wandel der Zeiten, (Munich: Olzog – Aktuell GmbH, 1987 [1963]), 19–77 and 107–124; Reinhard Rürup, “Judenemanzipation und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland,” in Ernst Schülin (ed.), Gedenkschrift Martin Göhring. Studien zur europäischen Geschichte, (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1968): 174–199; Eberhard Weis, Montgelas, vol. 2: Der Architekt des modernen bayerischen Staates 1799–1838, (Munich: Beck, 2005), 598–608; Ursula Gehring-Münzel, Vom Schutzjuden zum Staatsbürger. Die gesellschaftliche Integration der Würzburger Juden 1803–1871, (Würzburg: Schöningh, 1992), 121–177. 48. Chester Penn Higby, The Religious Policy of the Bavarian Government during the Napoleonic Period, (PhD diss, Columbia University, New York, 1918), 145–146, 238–240. 49. Georg von Laubmann & Michael Doeberl (eds.), Denkwürdigkeiten des Grafen Maximilian Joseph v. Montgelas über die innere Staatswervaltung Bayerns, (Munich: Beck, 1908), 124. 50. Margot Hamm, Die bayerische Integrationspolitik in Tirol 1806–1814, (Munich Beck, 1996), 277–302. For an overview in English, see F. Gunther Eyck, Loyal Rebels. Andreas Hofer and the Tyrolean Uprising of 1809, (Lanham: University Press of America, 1986), 29–37. On the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, see Laurence Cole, Patriotic Celebrations in Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Tirol, in Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield (eds.), Staging the Past. The Politics of

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Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to Present, (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2001). 51.  Franz Huter, “Der Anteil der Geistlichkeit an der Erhebung von 1809,”, in Tiroler Heimat, vol. 23 (1959): 101–113 and Hans Kramer, Beteiligung der Tiroler Geistlichkeit 1809, in Zeitschrift für bayerische Landegeschichte, vol. 12 (1939): 244–259. 52. Martin P. Schennach, Revolte in der Region. Zur Tiroler Erhebung von 1809, (Innsbruck: Wagner, 2009), 285–305. 53. Martin P. Schennach, Revolte in der Region. Zur Tiroler Erhebung von 1809, (Innsbruck: Wagner, 2009), 231–232. 54. Margot Hamm, Die bayerische Integrationspolitik in Tirol 1806–1814, (Munich: Beck, 1996), 298–302, 325; Eberhard Weis, Montgelas und Tirol (1806–1814), Veröffentlichungen des Tiroler Landesmuseums Ferdinandeum, vol. 78 (1998): 224–225; Martin P. Schennach, Revolte in der Region. Zur Tiroler Erhebung von 1809, (Innsbruck, 2009), 288–289. See also Montgelas’ own reflections in Ludwig von Montgelas (ed.), Denkwürdigkeiten des bayerische Staatsministers Maximilian Grafen von Montgelas (1799–1817), (Stuttgart, 1887), 187. 55. On this conflict, see Markus J. Prutsch, Making Sense of Constitutional Monarchism in Post-Napoleonic France and Germany, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 82–93. 56. Quoted from Lionel Harvey to Viscount Castlereagh 17 January 1818, in Sabine Freitag, Peter Wende and Markus Mösslang (eds), British Envoys to Germany 1816–1866, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 261. 57.  George S. Williamson, “Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, 1760–1871: Enlightenment, Emancipation, New Forms of Piety,” in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 223. 58. Christopher Clark, Religion, in Jonathan Sperber (ed.), Germany 1800– 1870, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 168–174. 59.  On Sailer, see Georg Schwaiger, Johann Michael Sailer. Der bayerische Kirchenvater, (Munich and Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1982); on Ludwig, see Heinz Gollwitzer, Ludwig I. von Bayern. Königtum im Vormärz. Eine politische Biographie, (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1986). 60. Werner Blessing, Staat und Kirche in der Gesellschaft: Institutionelle Autorität und mentaler Wandel in Bayern während des 19. Jahrhunderts, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht Verlag, 1982), 84–98. 61. Heinz Gollwitzer, Ein Staatsman des Vormärz: Karl von Abel 1788–1859. Beamtenaristokratie—monarchisches Prinzip—politischer Katholizismus, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht Verlag, 1993) especially, 179–328.

Comparative Republican Religion: Eighteenth-Century France and Twentieth-Century Turkey Hakan Gungor

In recent years, scholars of Turkish history have focused on s­ecularism since the Turkish Independence War in 1919 and the influence of European secularisms.1 Specifically, the secular legacy of the French Revolution impacted the Turkish Revolution and there were remarkable similarities between the two movements. Turkey is a Muslim state practicing secularism; yet, it constantly blurs together religion and politics, gives rise to continual conflict, and leaves many questions as to whether or not the French Revolutionary concept of secularism is applicable to Turkey or other Muslim states. Therefore, scholars must question Turkey’s understanding of secularism, and a comparative study of the French and the Turkish Revolutions makes this possible. Both revolutions altered the relationship between religion and politics. Similar to Old-Regime France, Islamic clergy were also royal subjects under the Ottoman Empire and had more or less extensive authority over the middle class and peasants. In eighteenth-century France, revolutionaries

H. Gungor (*)  Ordu University, Ordu, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9_9

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challenged religious authority. Later, in the twentieth century, Turkey experienced seemingly similar changes; Republicans suppressed, exiled, and sometimes even executed Turkish clergymen. In this chapter, I analyze the influence of the French Revolution on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s revolution in Turkey in a religious context. This chapter consists of two parts. While the first part deals and compares the influence of the French Revolution on the Ottoman Empire until the First World War, the second part compares the practice and implementation of Turkish secularism in reference to the earlier French experience, particularly in religious terms. By comparing the two revolutions, I flesh out the historical efficacy of Turkish secularism in its transnational perspective. Inspired by liberal and radical ideas, the French Revolution brought social and political changes, which damaged the dominance of theocratic and monarchical dominant ideologies. The effects of these new ideas on France’s colonies were expected, even inevitable, following established trade routes, facilitated by the common langue.2 However, such effects in the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire were unforeseen, and, therefore nationalistic and liberal ideas caught the Ottoman Empire, a multi-national state, off guard. While French monarchs ruled by divine right, the Ottoman Sultans held ultimate power because they were believed to be representatives of God. The Bâb-i Hümâyûn (the gate leading into the first courtyard at Topkapı Palace) describes Mehmed the Conqueror as “the son of Sultan Murad, son of Sultan Mehmed Khan, the sultan of the lands and the emperor of the seas, the shadow of God extending over men and djinn, the deputy of God in the East and the West.”3 Unlike the Ottoman regime, the Republic of Turkey embraced the ideas, values, and model that the French Revolution generated. Thus, in the first two articles of the constitution, Atatürk and his cabinet described the formation of the Turkish regime as republic system laid on the bedrock of secularism.4 French influence in Ottoman Turkey had been building for quite some time. The Islahat Fermani of 1856 (Edict of 1856) opened the way for an increased influence of French literature and history on the Ottoman elites. Seeds of liberal ideas penetrated to the Porte mainly through such reforms. While books might not have caused the 1917 Turkish Revolution, their ideas inspired some to think about what secular reform would look like in a predominantly Muslim country. Two main groups enabled liberal, nationalistic, and constitutional ideas from France to penetrate the Ottoman Empire. First, Ottoman subjects read European books and

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observed European visitors. Second, students, exiles, and travelers brought European ideas back to the Ottoman Empire. Many of the Ottoman subjects in the first group were military and naval officers who were trained along strictly western lines since the reign of Mahmud II (1808–1839). These officers were members of CUP, and they first led the Constitutional Revolution of 1876 and then the Constitutional Revolution of 1908. Ottoman elites deeply engaged with French literature. The novels of Pierre Loti5 and the works of Halide Edib6 vividly depict the influence of French literature and French politics on the empire. Further, French culture and ideas, including those from the French Revolution, had a paramount impact on Turkish students who went to Europe for education. Shinasi Efendi published a Turkish translation of French poets after a period of study in France and founded the unofficial newspaper called, Interpreter of Circumstances. The educated class spoke French as the second language. Thus, many newspapers published in French, including Akcham, Le Milliett, and La republique in Istanbul. The number of French schools in Istanbul dramatically increased in the nineteenth century. Among them the Lycee of Istanbul and the Galata Serai were the two influential schools that played leading roles in Turkey’s intellectual Westernization.7 This French-inspired secularism, modernity, democracy, and political violence influenced Turkey in various ways. Modern, secular France dates back to the events of the 1789 Revolution and thereafter. Although the French Revolution is associated with the effort of separating church and state, it actually took longer after the Revolution for France to establish a republic.8 A glance at the formation of France will enable us to see the parallel development of the Turkish Revolution. The first French Republic came in 1792, after the execution of King Louis XVI. The first republic lasted until Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799 and became the first emperor of France in 1804. In 1814– 1815, counterrevolutionaries restored the French monarchy. However, the parliamentary monarchy of the Legitimists ended by the 1830 Charter and was replaced by Orleans’ monarchy. In 1848, revolution reintroduced republicanism, but it was soon replaced by the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon, nephew of Bonaparte. This Second Empire led to the tragic events of the 1871 Commune and afterwards gave its place to the Third Republic of France. This Third Republic of France lasted until the Vichy Regime of the Second World War. After the war, the Fourth Republic was established in 1945 but only to be changed by the Fifth Republic in 1958, the republic currently in place.9

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The political transition of the Turks to a secular republican government experiences a similar trajectory as the French experience. The Ottoman Constitution of 1876 developed after a series reforms introduced in 1839 during the Tanzimant era. Penetration of liberal and nationalistic ideas into the Ottoman Empire produced İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (The Committee of Union and Progress or CUP). This Young Turks Movement, a group of progressive Turks, pursued a constitutional government beginning in the mid-nineteenth century under the Ottoman Empire. As a reformer, Ahmed Şefik Midhat Pasha, former Grand Vizier, initiated Birinci Meşrutiyet Era (the First Ottoman Constitutional Era) in 1876, which only lasted two years. Led by Midhat Pasha, the Young Turks removed Abdülaziz and his successor Murad V to bring Abdulhamid II to the throne with promises of a constitutional and a liberal regime. However, the Young Turks’ hopes for a liberal state did not last long; Abdulhamid II suspended the Constitution and sent many Young Turks into exile, including Midhat Pasha. After partially removing the liberal-inclined Turks, the Sultan commenced a pro-Islamic movement and emphasized his position as caliph of Islam, a position that gave him authority over all Muslims in the world. Although many reformers were in exile and monitored, some of the military leaders and officers formed secret committees to overthrow Abdulhamid II and restore the constitution. The most important cells of these secret committees were in Salonika, in northeastern Greece on an inlet of the Aegean Sea, and they were in touch with the exiles in Paris. In 1908, the Young Turks forced Abdulhamid II to restore the constitution he had suspended in 1878. Following the revolution of 1908, CUP members overthrew Abdulhamid in favor of Mehmed V and this period was named as IkinciMeşrutiyet Era (The Second Constitutional Era).10 The Second Constitution was declared in the summer of 1908 when the Young Turks overthrew Abdulhamid II. However, the Young Turks soon faced a global problem, the First World War. When the Ottoman Empire was defeated in the First World War, Atatürk formed a new government and declared it as a republic on October 29, 1923.11 As in France, the processes of secularization in Turkey took a long time. Religion as a test of citizenship was gradually severed from the constitution in the Ottoman Empire. The Porte, the central government of the Ottoman Empire, started to replace the practices of previous centuries, based upon a union of religion and politics, with the adaptation of patterns developed in France based upon the separation of religion and

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politics. The Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane/Tanzimât Fermânı (Imperial Edict of the Rose House/Imperial Edict) of 1839 marked an extraordinary social and religious transformation in the Porte. This proclamation by Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I brought numerous social and administrative reforms. Adoption of the fez as the national headdress to replace the turban, which had symbolized Islam, and declaration of new rights and equal treatment for the non-Muslim subjects were the first visible elements of the oncoming secular regime in the Ottoman Empire. The secularization of Turkey started after the First World War when Atatürk founded the new republic in 1923. He initiated several reforms that enabled him to remove religion from the public sphere. The process of secularization led to the persecution, exile, and oppression of many Muslims. However, religion has refused to disappear from the state even today. In 2009, Altan Tan, a leading prominent intellectual and journalist, asserts, “If Atatürk had not done what he did, against the will of the people, we would neither have had a Kurdish problem nor a problem about religion in this country.”12 Tan touched on the never-ending discussion of secularism in Turkey. Similarly, Atilla Yayla suggests that “Kemalism corresponds to what is reactionary rather than to what is progressive.”13 These quotations from two leading prominent liberal intellectuals from Turkey are not the only products of the long discussion and confrontation between conservative Turkish Muslims and secular Turks, Kemalists, but also represent liberal attacks on the Kemalists.14 Although such statements seem to refer to Turkey’s problems today, the root of these problems rest deep in early Turkish history. The influence of the French Revolution presented two opposing sides in Turkey. On one side is the Islahat Fermani of 1856, the symbol of freedom, equality, human rights, and fraternity. On the other, is the terror and violence that was exercised in the name of revolutionary values in the 1920s.15 French revolutionary secularist principles in early Republican Turkey took hold in successive stages in the 1920s. Two constitutions, both drafted along Western lines of modernization and combining parliamentary democracy with populist sovereignty, were promulgated during this period—the first in 1921 and the second in 1924. While the 1924 Turkish Constitution inherited some of its articles from the Constitutional Laws of 1875 from France’s Third Republic, more importantly, it also borrowed articles from Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was the fundamental document of the French Revolution in 1789.16 Article 68 of the 1924 Turkish Constitution read:

208  H. Gungor All citizens of Turkey are endowed at birth with liberty and full right to the enjoyment thereof. Liberty consists in the right to live and enjoy life without offense or injury to others. The only limitations on liberty - which is one of the natural rights of all - are those imposed in the interest of the rights and liberties of others. Such limitations on personal liberty shall be defined only in strict accordance with the law.17

This language closely resembles that of Article 4 of the Declaration passed by France’s National Constituent Assembly in 1789, which promised the imprescriptible rights of man. Many measures marked the beginnings of secularization in Turkey. First, Atatürk, Turkey’s founder dissolved the Ottoman Sultanate on November 1, 1922. After dissolution of the Sultanate, the last Sultan Mehmed VI went into exile. Next, the Turkish Parliament elected Mehmed’s cousin Abdülmecid as caliph. However, under the Atatürk’s administration, the Turkish Parliament later abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924. Despite being elected by the government, Abdülmecid was expelled from his Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul. In the following years, Republican Turkey revamped the educational system with the aim of being “cleansed” of its explicitly religious features. For example, the Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu (Unification of Education Law) consolidated the state’s hold over all matters pertaining to education.18 The MahkemeTeskilati Kanunu (Regulation on the Organization of Law Courts) abolished the already undermined Seriat (Turkish Sharia courts) on April 8, 1924, forcing their judges into retirement. Many of these people never returned to their positions. Under Atatürk, the government’s cadres applied radical secular policies with the use of force. They tried to make sure that these policies were felt in every aspect of social life. The new policies touched people’s lives from the way they dressed to the alphabet with which they wrote and introduced the Turkish people to western culture and symbols. “These reforms are considered to have created an overall ‘state of amnesia’ within the population by estranging them from most of their defining cultural practices and values.”19 Thus, Turkish history of secularization typically focuses on this time and up until Atatürk’s death in 1938.20 In order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the secularist reforms, I examine several representative laws that Atatürk’s government introduced to the Turks. The foundation of Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (Presidency of Religious Affairs), the Kilik Kiyafet Kanunu (Dress Code), and confiscating vakıfs (Islamic

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endowments) religious places such as mosques and madrasas were only several of them. Furthermore, I compare these changes with the French experience during its eighteenth-century revolution. The introduction of a new form of government, with new laws and institutions, represent strong similarities between the Turkish and French Revolutions. On October 29, 1923, Article 2 Number 364 of the 1921 Constitution stated that Islam was Turkey’s religion and Turkish was the nation’s formal language.21 At the same year on October 29, 1923, Atatürk proclaimed Turkey as a republican state, and named Turkey the Republic of Turkey. On March 3, 1924, when the Turkish Parliament abolished caliphate, it also abolished many other religious institutions, including the Şeriye ve Evkaf Vekaleti (Ministry of Religious Affairs). The State took the full control of religion. Although the State’s intention was to unify the community with such measures, instead it further divided and polarized the society. Following the abolishment of the Caliphate, the Kurds sought to establish an independent Kurdish State in the east and southeast of Turkey. They claimed that religion was the only thing that bound the Turks and the Kurds. If religion was to be removed from society in order to secularize the State, the main cause for the Turks and the Kurds living together would disappear. It was with these both religious and nationalistic sentiments that Şeyh Said, a Kurdish religious leader, uprising started in 1924.22 Leaders in twentieth-century Turkey implemented religious policies comparable to those put into place in revolutionary France. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was a law passed on July 12, 1790 during the French Revolution in order for Catholic Church to submit to the French government. It subordinated and reorganized the Catholic Church in a way that gave the French government authority over religion.23 Similarly, Atatürk’s government founded the Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (Presidency of Religious Affairs) to take religion under its control and direct it. The law defined the duties of the Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı as follows: “to execute work regarding the beliefs, practice, and ethics of Islam, enlighten public on religious matters and administer mosques and religious places.”24 The number of Imams (prayer leaders) was dramatically reduced, and those that agreed to serve under Diyanet were given a salary by the State.25 In fact, this was not too much different from the French experience. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy proposed to reduce the number of bishops from 135 to 83, and to have the state pay clergy’s wages.26 During the French Revolution, more

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than 53,000 clergy faced the obligation to take the oath if they wished to stay in ecclesiastical office. Those who did not take the oath were either oppressed or exiled. After the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was declared in 1790, the revolutionaries in France deported refractory priests to countries of their choosing or its Latin American colony, Guiana.27 Drawing almost the same lines in Turkey, Kemalists exiled or executed those who did not agree with laic and secular ideas. The abolition of the caliphate and Şeriye ve Evkaf Vekaleti agitated many orthodox Muslims. Soon, this agitation led to many uprisings, which Atatürk’s government suppressed in bloody ways. For individual Muslims and clergy, this was just the beginning of an era of unbearable religious restrictions. Marginalization, oppression, and execution became tools in the hands of the government. Secularist and religious Turks have debated the Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı since its foundation in 1924. While secularists resist the Diyanet for being an obstacle for Turkey to be a completely secular republican state, the religious circle endorses the Diyanet because it offers jobs, builds new mosques, and prints copies of the Quran and other religious materials. However, many imams were under state surveillance and abuse them in the early years of the republic. Thus, the Director of the Diyanet at the time, Ahmed Hamdi Akseki observed that “it became impossible to find imams to lead the prayers.” As a solution to this problem, the state opened Imam-Hatip Okullari (Imams and Preachers Schools) in 1951. Furthermore, in order to provide higher education for the graduates of the Imam and Preacher Schools, the state also founded the Yuksek Islam Enstitutusu (Higher Islamic Institute) in the same year.28 However, clergy members and imams who did not act with the State were either fired or exiled. Revolutionaries in France and Turkey even targeted religious dress. While French revolutionaries banned clergy members and nuns from wearing their traditional religious dress, such as the habit, the Turkish state banned wearing tarboosh (fezzes) and made it mandatory to wear western-style hats in 1925 through the şapka kanunu (hat law).29 In Turkey, Muslims did not want to give up wearing the fez because it is Sunnah (actions of the Prophet Muhammad). In 1924, before the law was passed, the Imam of the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul, Atif Hoca, published a book titled Frenk Mukallitligi ve Sapka (Western Imitation and Hat). In his book, Hoca wrote that fezzes were one of the five things that made Muslims look different from the infidels. If Muslims were to

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give up on their fundamental symbols—including the fezzes—and try to look like infidels, they would become one of them. Adopting the infidel’s customs would be a first step to becoming an Islamic heretic.30 However, elite Turks, influenced by France, imposed these religious reforms. Thus, there was a strong resistance from the poor and middle classes as well as the clergy to adopting secular laws and institutions in Turkey paralleling the popular counterrevolutionary insurgency carried out in the Vendée in France.31 Similar to how the Committee of Public Safety used Revolutionary Tribunals during the Reign of Terror,32 the Turkish government soon lunched a deadly attack on Hoca and anyone opposed to its secularist reforms. In 1926, Independence Tribunals executed Hoca and many others. First founded in 1920, Atatürk granted full authority to these Tribunals to prosecute the state’s enemies. Often referred to as Olum Mahkemeleri (“death courts”), these Independence Tribunals operated until their termination in 1927. Murat Aksoy, a Turkish historian and journalist, claimed that there were many executions due to violations of the şapka kanunu in 1925. He narrates the story of thirteen men from Erzurum in eastern Turkey. Known as a conservative city, Erzurum’s citizens protested this new law on the day it was declared. Police arrested hundreds, including these thirteen men. Although some of these hundreds were lucky to get out, many of them were hanged. What is most interesting according to Aksoy is that the thirteen men from Erzurum were executed on the same day that they were arrested. In fact, Erzurum was not the only place that challenged the state over the law; there were protests in Istanbul, Marash, Rize, Kayseri, Sivas, and many other cities in Turkey. On November 24–25, 1925, five people in Kayseri, two in Sivas, and eight in Rize were hanged by Independence Tribunals.33 These Tribunals did not exclusively make their decisions based on evidence; they judged people by their ideology. French and Turkish secular reforms also targeted the financial holdings of religious institutions. In their reforming effort, the French reformists created a new administrative and financial framework for the French Church. The French National Assembly abolished the collection of tithes and confiscated church lands.34 Confiscation and regulation of sacred places in Turkey were, to some extent, the same with the French implementations. On January 8, 1928, the Turkish government passed a law regarding regulations on Islamic institutions and places of worship. With this new law, numbered 6061, the government seized the right, if

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it saw necessary, to close and sell mosques, masjids, and vakifs (religious endowments). Immediately after the law, it closed hundreds mosques; some were turned into warehouses and the party office, while others were destroyed. A. Kıvanç Esen, a Turkish historian, argues that this law enabled the government to make any decision they wanted about the mosques and vakifs.35 During the single party era in Turkey (1923–1950), 3900 vakif buildings were sold, and 2815 of these were mosques.36 Esen concludes that this was not a coincidence but a well-planned and deliberately imposed policy. Following the law, the Diyanet Isleri Baskanligi announced that the unnecessary or unused mosques will be sold. However, the question was soon raised as to whom and/or what would decide if a mosque was necessary or not. Although the government of the time came up with many reasons, the Diyanet determined that distance would be the decisive factor. Accordingly, there had to be at least 500 meters between two mosques. Soon after this rule was issued, the Turkish government started to sell the vakifs, including the mosques.37 Historical documents provide several examples of the reasons—or lack thereof—for closing mosques. The Vakiflar Genel Mudurlugu (Directorate of Vakifs) sent a request to the President of Turkey on April 13, 1936, asking to close some mosques that were attached to the cover letter. However, this report did not include any specific reason to close the mosques. Although the letter did not present why the director of vakifs wanted to shut down or sell these mosques, Atatürk approved the request anyway. As it is seen in this case, the government did not really need a reason to close the mosques, but it had to convince the people that they did not need that many mosques. In many cases, the state failed to propose a legitimate reason.38 Unlike this first document, other d ­ ocuments provided reasons for shutting down or selling mosques. One example came from the Yedikule neighborhood of Istanbul. Dated July 12, 1934, a report to Atatürk suggested there was no need to have so many mosques in the Yedikule quarter. The report concludes, “In Yedikule (Istanbul), because it was noticed that there are other mosques around Kutbettin Ilyas Celebi Mosque to pray and the neighborhood is heavily populated by non-Muslims (Gayri-Muslim), the mentioned mosque might be sold immediately.”39 Atatürk and his government immediately issued permission to sell Kutbettin Ilyas Celebi Mosque. The document utilized a vague language, and no research was conducted to determine the need for the mosque in the neighborhood. Although the document made mention of the non-Muslim in the neighborhood, it

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failed to provide a specific number of Muslim and non-Muslim population in the area. Furthermore, the document did not refer to the rule that was decided by the Diyanet, which required at least 500 meters distance between two mosques, which should have determined if the mosque was to be closed or not. The state focused on selling mosques, and the reasons for such closures did not carry that much importance for the government. Mosques were sold everywhere in Anatolia, including eastern Turkey, where people are still known as being particularly pious. In 1935, upon receiving a petition from the local administration of Elazig in eastern Turkey, Atatürk allowed the administration to sell its mosques and ­masjids. The document concluded, “It has been documented that Ahmet Bey and Kale Meydani mosques and Hasanoglu Mescidi are in ramshackle situations and have no historical values. Thus, as Directorate of vakifs, we suggest that the mentioned properties should be sold in an auction.”40 The document did not have any indication about background of these buildings, such as how much old they were and if they had any historical values. Again, the government approved the petition. The other distinctive characteristic of revolutionary centralism in France and Turkey was in education. The French Revolutionary system of education intended to create liberal citizens. In conjunction with other religious reforms, French Revolutionary policies sought to nationalize education, providing access to free secular public secondary schools, to reduce the influence of Catholic Church-sponsored ­ instruction.41 Likewise, Republican Turkey revamped the Ottoman educational system in order to create a secular, liberal, and egalitarian Turkish community. The Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu (Unification of Education Law) enabled the state to centralize and establish the state’s monopoly over education.42 The government tried to create a single type of individuals devoted to the state with the Kanunu. While it accelerated the secularization process, the Kanunu also became an important apparatus for the modernization of Turkey. Since the founding of the republican regime in the 1920s, state policies regarding to religion have been often criticized in Turkey. Raised from the ashes of monarchial Ottoman system, where Sharia and Customary Laws dominated for centuries, Turkey and the Atatürk’s administration faced a resilient resistance when they tried to implement secular policies. During the secularization process, Turkish society was deeply polarized. The conservative and liberal Muslims formed their

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party in opposition to secular and republic Atatürk’s party. However, Atatürk effectively used secularism as a tool to modernize and centralize the state. The discussion has shown the historical roots of Turkish Kemalist secularism. Kemalists inherited the Young Turks’ motives to secularize the state. The new republican regime “incorporated Islam in its secularist discourse and promoted a national, vernacular Islam.” The government articulated this discourse in the “secular project of controlling and steering religious practice, thus fostering “good Muslims” praying in Turkish and understanding the “rational” essence of Islam.” Thus, the state implemented Turkification project of hutbe (the Friday sermon) and Ezan (Prayer Call).43 Many historians of the Middle East, such as Niyazi Berkes, Kemal H. Karpat, M. Şükrü Hanioglu, and Bernard Lewis, have associated the secularization of Turkey with the French Revolution. Lewis concluded, “With the French Revolution, for the first time, we find a great movement of ideas penetrating the barrier that separated the House of War from the House of Islam, finding a ready welcome among Muslim leaders and thinkers, and affecting to a greater or lesser degree every layer of Muslim society.”44 This chapter presents a comparison between the Turkish and French secularizations’ processes. Parallels in the revolutions were apparent through the Civil Constitution of Clergy and Diyanet Isleri Baskanligi, confiscation of the church land and vakifs, and practices of oppression, exile, and execution. Both France and Turkey sought to subordinate religious institutions to the revolutionary government. During the French Revolution, leaders placed the Catholic Church in France under the government through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.45 The French Revolution of 1789 ended some privileges of the Church, as it associated the clergy with the Old Regime. During the process of secularization in Turkey in the early 1920s, the Turkish government followed the French pattern of centralizing religion. In order to establish a state monopoly over religion, the Turkish Grand National Assembly founded the Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı. Similar to France, the clerical question was one of the main sources of political conflict in Turkey. Atatürk’s government portrayed the Ottoman clergy as a problem for the secularization of the state. Thus, the nascent Turkish republic endeavored to break the clergy’s hegemony over the public. The Diyanet, like the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, was an effective apparatus for the government to dismantle the old institutions of the Ottoman clergy.

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Turkey’s secularism is exceptional because it stands out among Muslim states, most of which have officially declared Islam as the national religion or support Islam through state policies. Both Turkey and France are assertive secular states. In this context, assertive secularism means to “exclude religion from the public sphere and confine it to the private domain.”46 As among reformists in France, Turkish elites, starting from the Tanzimat era, developed anti-clergy feelings. This elite class believed that the clergy held the Ottoman Empire back, as an obstacle for modernization.47 Thus, assertive secularism resulted in anticlericalism among Turkish republican elites. When these elites came to power, they applied anti-religious policies.

Notes







1. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964); Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2. The French abolished slavery in 1794 granting equal rights to people of all colors. Thus, citizenship was opened up to all subjects within the empire. Although the metropole tried to reassert control over ex-slaves in the early 1800s, it could not take away the idea of citizenship and equality from colonial citizens who had already formed alliances with metropolitan republicans. For a detailed account, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); David Patrick Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014). 3.  Niki Gamm, “Ottoman Rulers - Sultan, Khan, Padişah and Caliph,” Hurriyet Daily News, November 30, 2013. 4. T.B.M.M., Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Anayasası. https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/ anayasa/anayasa_2011.pdf (Accessed June 24, 2016). 5. A French naval officer and novelist, Pierre Loti visited Turkey many times during his lifetime because he was drawn to the Ottoman life style, which he reflected in his novels. See for example, Pierre Loti, Aziyadé (1879); Le Mariage de Loti (1880); Le Roman d’un Spahi (1881). 6. Turkish novelist, nationalist, and feminist, Halide Edib published many novels. Some of her best known works are Yeni Turan (New Turan 1913); Ateşten Gömlek (Shirt of Fire 1923); Kalp Ağrısı (Heartache

216  H. Gungor











1924); Vurun Kahpeye (Hit the Whore 1926); and SinekliBakkal (The Fly Filled Grocery 1936). 7. Henry Elisha Allen, The Turkish Transformation: A Study in Social and Religious Development, (University of Chicago Press, 1935), 10–15. 8. Van Kley, Dale K. The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 9.  For a detailed account of the French Revolution and Republics, The French Republic: History, Values, Debates, eds. Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson (NY: Cornell U.P., 2011); E. Gündoğan, “Turkey and France: A Comparative Study of Administration and Politics,” GAU Journal of Social and Applied Sciences, vol. 4, no. 8 (2009), 2. 10.  Henry Elisha Allen, The Turkish Transformation: A study in Social and Religious Development (University of Chicago Press, 1935), 1–7; KazimKarabekir, İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Turkey: YapiKrediYayinlari, 2014); Jacob M. Landau, Exploring Ottoman and Turkish History, (London: Hurst & Co., 2004). 11. Bernard Lewis, “Why Turkey Is the only Muslim Democracy,” Middle East Quarterly, vol. 1, no.1 (March 1994), 41–49. 12. Ahmet Altan, “Günlükler,” [Diaries] Taraf, (March 18, 2009). Quoted in Halil M. Karaveli, “An Unfulfilled Promise of Enlightenment: Kemalism and its Liberal Critics,” Turkish Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, (March 2010), 85. 13. Atilla Yayla, Kemalizm—Liberal birbakıs [ SCEDI L] [Kemalism, a Liberal View] (Ankara: Liberteyayınları,2008), 10. Quoted in Karaveli, “An Unfulfilled Promise of Enlightenment: Kemalism and its Liberal Critics,” 85. 14.  Kemalism and Kemalists are related to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey. While Kemalism means is ideology, Kemalists are the one who devoted his ideology and his reforms. 15. These two different sides resemble the French Revolution. The French Revolution had one side in 1789, which represented equality, fraternity, democracy, and human rights. The other side was the ruthlessness of 1793, of violence and terror exercised in the name of revolutionary values. These two opposite yet inseparable aspects of the French Revolution existed in Turkey as well. For detailed account, see Editorial, “Influence of the French Revolution,” International Social Science Journal, vol.41, issue 1, (February 1989), 1–4. 16. Ahmet Mumcu, “1924 Anayasası,” Atatürk AraştırmalarıMerkeziDergisi, vol. 2, no.5 (March 1986), 4, 8. http://www.atam.gov.tr/atam-dergisi/ sayi-05, (Accessed on July 17, 2016).

COMPARATIVE REPUBLICAN RELIGION: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE … 

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17.  Article 68, Section V, Constitution of 1924 translated and printed in Edward Mead Earle, “The New Constitution of Turkey,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1 (1925), 96. 18. The objection of the Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu (Unification of Education Law) was to unify education and create a single type of individuals devoted to the state. However, Turkish minorities, such as the Kurds, objected the law from the beginning. The Kurds saw the law as the state’s control over their language and culture; thus, they believe that Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu has become an assimilation tool in the hands of the state against the minorities. Altan Tan, Deputy of Peace and Democracy Party (Kurdish Party), presented a motion to the Turkish Parliament in 2013 offering to abolish the law. For a detailed account of the motion, From Altan Tan to the President of the Turkish Parliament, “Tevhid-I Tedrisat Kanunu.” no. 5225, (February 7, 2013). http://www2.tbmm. gov.tr/d24/2/2-1234.pdf, (Accessed July 13, 2016). 19. Seda Kalem, “Contested Meanings-Imagined Practices: Law at the Intersection of Mediation and Legal Profession,” (PhD diss., The New School, 2010), 15. 20. Kalem, “Contested Meanings-Imagined Practices,” 1–15. 21. T.B.M.M., Kavanin Mecmuasi, vol. 2, 125. http://www.diyanetdergisi. com/diyanet-dergisi-27/konu-456.html (Accessed January 24, 2015). 22. For a detailed account of the uprising, see Robert Olson. The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and The Sheikh Said Rebellion: 1880–1925 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1991); Altan Tan, KürtSorunu (Kurdish Question), (Istanbul: Timas Yayinlari, 2009). 23. Although the Pope and French king rejected the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the Legislative Assembly adopted legislation requiring the deportation of any priest that did not take an oath to the Constitution. For a detailed account, Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (New York: Routledge, 1989; and Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 24.  Dirvan Nizamoglu, “Anayasamizda Din ve laiklik, Diyanet Isleri BaskanligininKuruluse ve Laiklikleilgesi” Diyanet Dergisi, no. 123. http://www.diyanetdergisi.com/diyanet-dergisi-27/konu-456.html (Accessed January 24, 2015). 25. For more information, please visit Presidency of Religious Affairs’ web page at: http://www.diyanet.gov.tr/tr/icerik/kurumsal/1 (Accessed January 29, 2015).



218  H. Gungor 26. Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in EighteenthCentury France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 27. Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 179I (Princeton, 1986). 28. Ufuk Ulutas, “Religion and Secularism in Turkey: The Dilemma of the Directorate of Religious Affairs,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, (May 2010), 389–399. 29. See Phil Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat, 1779‑1865: A Life (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000). 30. Iskilipli Mehmet Atif, Frenk Mukallitligi ve Sapka (Istanbul, 1340/1924), 22–23. Quoted in Selami Kılıç, “Şapka Meselesi ve Kılık Kıyafet İnkılabı,” Ankara Üniversitesi Atatürk Yolu Dergisi, vol. 4, no. 16 (1995): 530–534. 31. Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (University of California Press, 2000), 103–104. 32. Patrick J. Conge, From Revolution to War: State Relations in a World of Change (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 48–49. 33. Murat Aksoy, Başörtüsü, Türban: Batılılaşma, LaikleşmeiLaiklik ve Örtünme, (KitapYayınevi, İstanbul, 2005). 34. William Doyle, The Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 46. 35.  A. Kıvanç Esen, “TekPartiDönemiCamiKapatma/SatmaUygulamaları,” Tarih ve Toplum, no. 13, (Fall, 2011). 36.  Haber7, “TekPartiDonemindeSatilanCamiler,” 23 February 2012. http://www.haber7.com/ic-politika/haber/848359-tek-parti-doneminde-satilan-camiler [Accessed April 16, 2014]. 37. Ibid. 38.  Basbakanlik Cumhuriyet Arsivi, T.C BasvakaletKarar Mudurlugu, “Kararnama,” uürk, (May 13, 1936). 39.  Basbakanlik Cumhuriyet Arsivi, T.C Basvakalet Karar Mudurlugu, “Kararnama,” no. 2/1012 signed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, (July 12, 1934). 40.  Basbakanlik Cumhuriyet Arsivi, T.C BasvakaletKarar Mudurlugu, “Kararnama,” no. 2/3041 signed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, (July 27, 1935), 332. 41. R. R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 42. From Altan Tan to the President of the Turkish Parliament, “Tevhid-I Tedrisat Kanunu.” no.5225, (July 2, 2013). http://www2.tbmm.gov.tr/ d24/2/2-1234.pdf (Accessed July 13, 2016). 43. Umut Azak, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Kemalism, Religion and the Nation State, (I.B. Tauris, 2010), 45–58.

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219

44. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 53. 45. See, Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in EighteenthCentury France (Princeton University Press, 1986); Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (Routledge, 1989). 46. Ahmet T. Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 11. 47. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, 431.

Epilogue Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson

“The Revolution is over.” François Furet began his Interpreting the French Revolution with this postulate that challenged the character and chronology of the French Revolution. For Furet, both the origin and the endpoint of the French Revolution placed too heavy a burden on cause and effect, lessening the attention given to the Revolution as a “new type of historical action and consciousness.”1 Looking for origins or effects of the French Revolution meant defining the Revolution in essential terms. And so defining the Revolution in democratic terms often means plotting an end date in 1794 or in 1799 when democratic ideas and practices ceased and were driven back. Such an exercise, if conducted in terms of religion, might conclude at various points as well. The Revolution’s hostile nature towards certain religious communities may have ended with the conclusion of dechristianization in 1794 or the Concordat in 1801. If the Revolution is defined in terms of its religious creativity, or its ability to craft new republican faiths like Theophilanthropy, then perhaps the Revolution would end again in 1801 when Napoleon rejected the sect vis-à-vis the Concordat. Or if the Revolution is defined in terms of its relationship with the Jewish population of France, perhaps the Revolution would end in 1806–7 when Napoleon convened the Grand Sanhedrin. But what about the secular legacies of the Revolution? If one reduced the French Revolution’s legacy to its separation of Church and State, then the French Revolution might not end until much later in the © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, French revolutionaries debated the role of primary schools, stripped Church leaders from their positions as teachers, and drafted blueprints for a secular, universal primary school system. Such demands fell short and were not implemented until the Ferry Laws in 1881 and 1882. The Revolution’s goal of officially separating Church from State was not achieved until 1905 and under the Third Republic.2 If we take in the concomitant processes of nineteenth and twentieth-century empire building and destruction, decolonization, and global migration, then the secular legacy of the French Revolution might then lead us to trace the efforts to insure Jewish rights in France through the anti-Semitic episode that embroiled the falsely accused, purported German spy Alfred Dreyfus in controversy in 1894 to the election of Jewish French Prime Minister Léon Blum in 1936.3 Should the legacy of dechristianization be linked to l’affaire du foulard (1989) and the 2004 law that banned overt religious symbols from being warn in primary and secondary schools?4 Should the shootings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 be seen as the continuing struggle between freedom of religious-free conscience and the religious-minded? If the Revolution is defined in traditional secular and global terms, has the Revolution ended at all? The thought of penning an epilogue for a volume like this—one equally devoted to understanding the chaotic, transnational history of religion during the French Revolution and its supposed legacy—with a finite date, a plot point that marks the end of the Revolution and its legacy, which would simultaneously mark the point of a post-religio-revolutionary future (most often done in imagined secular terms) is daunting and teleological. The essays in this collection challenge the traditional secular narrative—in both spatial and temporal terms—of the French Revolution’s impact on quotidian religious lives. By recalibrating the “secular” to emphasize the ways in which the sacred and profane balanced and rebalanced themselves, it is possible to examine how individuals assessed their own religious sentiment over the course of their lives, how the Revolution affected such changes, and how global movement became a factor in the transformation of their faith. While the chapters in this volume have emphasized the global connections and legacies of the French Revolution and religion, we most certainly have not sought to be comprehensive. There are many other transnational elements for future scholars to pursue in and concerning North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and the wider Pacific World.

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Perceptions of foreign faiths like those discussed Banks’ and Smith’s respective chapters should encourage scholars to explore the ways that other world religions were represented for political purposes. How were other branches of the Christian tree perceived during this period? How were Muslims, animistic faiths, the Occult, Confucianism and other religions—both thriving and dead in the eighteenth century—understood during the French Revolution? Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt’s The Book that Changed Europe showed that a near-sociological understanding of religion was popular in the pre-Revolutionary era.5 A comparative study of religious representation would assist scholars of the French Revolution understand the geo-political and cultural self-definition of Frenchmen and women at the precipice of the nineteenth century and the outset of the age of high imperialism. Chapters in this collection hone in on the anti-Catholic measures of the French Revolution as a prime catalyst of globalization. French Catholics, fleeing or forced from France during the Revolution into the wider Atlantic World—as prisoners, émigrés, refugees, and missionaries—also figured importantly in the Revolution and its legacy. This space transformed their religious communities and ultimately their faith. French émigrés escaped to London where Catholic spaces were rare. In order to satiate their need for religious community, many converted to other Christian faiths. The missionary model provided by Ursuline nuns in New Orleans, Louisiana as well as the deportations of refractory priests from French Guiana to Baltimore, Maryland, the eighteenth-century seat of Catholicism in the United States show how religious orders expanded larger French networks. Still others adopted secular beliefs as was the case with Tocqueville himself. And still others entrenched themselves in the Catholic catechism, propelling themselves into the mission civilisatrice. Religion then is a useful category of historical analysis in global perspective precisely because it can act as a nodal point for many historical trajectories. Missionaries and Catholic counter-revolutionary émigrés-turned-colonists spread the revolution’s message and counter-message to North and South America, Africa, Asia, and the wider Pacific World. This volume encourages scholars to think about the links between revolutionary and imperial histories. Many of these essays also challenge the legacies of the French Revolution’s impact on religion and political policy. The legacies of the French Revolution and religion functioned differently in France and abroad in places like Algeria. Whereas, Catholic heritage could be used

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to promote moderation at home, in many cases, it was used to advance the excesses of imperialism abroad. In other places in Europe, like Bavaria and the Tyrol, the French Revolution may have halted advancements towards religious toleration and public policy. Through such lenses, the French Revolution loses its place as the breach of secular modernity altogether. And still in other places like Turkey, the connection between the French Revolution and political reform may simply be imagined more than directly connected, yet when placed in a comparative perspective, the political struggles concerning religion in different nation-states may help us to better understand the varieties of secularism.6 Similarly the secular “legacy,” comparative models used in this volume could equally be used not only for territories under the French Empire but also other countries with economic, diplomatic, and cultural ties to France.7 By critically reflecting on the narratives of the French Revolution as inaugurating secular modernity, this volume opens up and identifies a multifaceted religious experience and religious legacy of the French Revolution. Consequently, if we revisit Tocqueville’s assertion—that the French Revolution adopted the guise of a religious revolution—we should take his claims more seriously. Scholars can better understand the French Revolution’s impact through a religious lens and in global perspective. We can also recognize the fundamental modernity of religion. As religion retracts from public debate, it surges in other places through intolerant specters and persecutory acts. Freedom of religion conflicts with other freedom discourses—the rights to self-determination on the individual, local, or national level. The wax and wane of religious belief and expression are essential to the self-definition of modernity and this vision of modernity knows no boundaries. This holds as much truth for the French Revolution as it does today.

Notes 1. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 23. 2. For a history of religious establishments in the nineteenth century, see C.T. McIntyre, “Changing Religious Establishments and Religious Liberty in France, Part 1: 1787–1879 & Part 2: 1879–1908,” in Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Richard J. Helmstadter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997): 233–301; Furet and

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Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 3.  See Pierre Birnbaum. Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Léon Blum to the Present (Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1992). 4.  Joan Wollach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, 2007); Teresa Hefferman, Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 119–144. 5. L ynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt. The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010). 6.  See Michael Warner, Jonathan Van Antwerpen, and Craig J. Calhoun, eds. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010). 7. Such a comparative approach would gain invaluable insight from a close reading of Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

Index

A Abolitionism, 28, 99, 103, 105, 151, 181, 185, 188 Affiches Americaines, 52, 54 Akcham, Le Milliett, 205 Algeria, 98–100, 102, 108, 110–113, 116, 118, 135, 137 Anglican, 93 Aretin, Johan Christoph von, 185 Atatürk, 204, 206–208, 210, 212– 214, 216 Atheism, 26, 29, 30, 33, 34, 44, 109 Augsburg, 183 B Bamberg, 183, 195 Baptism, 122, 131, 134, 136, 142 Barat, Madeleine Sophie, 127, 129 Barère, Bertrand, 6, 14 Barruel, Augustin, 26, 32, 33, 46, 82 Baston, Abbé, 83 Bavaria, 173–176, 178–184, 187–189, 191, 193–196, 199, 200 Bayle, Pierre, 33

Belgium, 140, 152, 153, 169, 197 Biassou, Georges, 55, 56, 68 Bitaubé, Paul-Jérémie, 18 Blum, Léon, 222 Bonal, François de, 11 Bonald, Louis de, 26, 27, 44, 146 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 39, 40, 167 Bourbon Restoration, 148 British East India Company, 31 British Empire, 107 British Raj, 25 Burke, Edmund, xx, 43 C Cahiers de doléances, 74, 90 Calvinists, 3–7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 187. See also Huguenots Cap Français, 67, 131 Capuchins, 51, 52 Caribbean Sea, 49, 50, 59, 60, 62, 104 Castellane, Boniface-Louis-Andre de, 6, 11 Celibacy, 124

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 B.A. Banks and E. Johnson (eds.), The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9

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228  Index Charles X, 98 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 26, 44, 78 Citizenship, 4–6, 12, 14, 17, 19, 57, 107, 206 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 217 Code noir, 51, 66 Concordat, 17, 24, 31, 32, 53, 68, 74, 121, 149, 174, 181–183, 186, 191–193, 195 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 33 Condorcet, Marquis de, 33, 34 Congress of Rastatt, 179 Constant, Benjamin, 16–18, 23, 101, 145, 166 Crise du monde moderne, 43 Cult of the Supreme Being, 26 D Dechristianization, 31, 32, 88, 122, 129, 131, 152 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 5, 13, 146 De la litérature, 81 Delamétherie, Jean-Claude, 34 Democracy in America, 99, 101, 103, 152 Demoy, Chrétien Alexandre, 63, 71 Des Progrès de la Révolution et de la guerre contre l’Eglise, 149 Dessirier, Jean Claude Paul, 52, 67 Deussen, Paul, 42 Diderot, Denis, 21, 124, 185 Dowries, 124 Dreyfus Affair, 222 Dubourg, Louis William, 134 Duchesne, Philippine, 127, 132, 134 Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil, xxiii, 25, 45

E Edict of Toleration (1787), 6, 8 Egypt, 31, 41, 113 Encyclopédie, 7, 21 England, 3, 16, 80, 87 Enlightenment, 4, 6, 27, 29, 43, 105, 113, 117, 124, 125, 174–176, 179, 185, 187, 193, 194 Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion, 148 Eugénie et Mathilde, 76, 91 Evola, Julius, 43, 44, 48 F Falaiseau, Madame de, 79 Fénélon, François de Salignac de la Mothe-, 39 Ferry Laws, 222 Filles de la Charité, 123, 125, 127, 128, 136–139, 142 First Report on Algeria, 115 Flahaut, Adélaïde de, 78 Foulard Affair, 222 Fox, Charles James, 77 Franconia, 187 Freedom of Religion, 11, 13 Freemasons Plots, 34 Freising, 183 French Guiana, 49, 50, 58–61, 63–65, 132, 133 French Revolutionary Wars, xxiv, 65, 106, 174, 203, 207, 213 French Second Republic, 5 French Third Republic, 100, 104, 115, 116, 205 Furet, François, 221 G Gallican Articles, 3, 5 Gallican Church, 124, 147

Index

Geneste, Louis, 16, 17 Genlis, Madame de, 81 Germany, 16, 41, 42, 44, 126, 160, 161, 173, 178 Gobineau, Arthur de, 108, 109 Grand Sanhedrin, 221 Grégoire, Henri, 26 Grotius, Hugo, 33 Guénon, Réné, 43 Guillot, Fréderic, 60 Guizot, François, 101 H Hegel, G.W. F., xviii, xxii Henri IV, 3 Hinduism, xxiii, 29, 41, 42, 44 Histoire du clergé pendant la Révolution française, 82 Holy Roman Empire, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179–183 Hua, Eustache Antoine, 63 Huguenots, xxiii, 4, 6–10, 15, 17, 19. See also Calvinists Human Rights, 12, 207 Hunt, Lynn, 12, 122 I Ichon, Pierre Louis, 63 Indochina, 134 Ireland, 10, 16, 152, 153 Islahat Fermani of 1856, 204, 207 Islam, xxvii, 37, 38, 112, 114, 206, 207, 209, 210, 214, 215 Israel, Jonathan, 25 J Jansenists, xvii, xxi Javouhey, Anne-Marie, 130, 133, 137 Jesuits, 39, 50, 58, 130, 131, 149, 164

  229

Jews, xxvii, 13, 40, 175, 176, 188, 194 K Kabbalah, 40 Kant, Immanuel, 41 Kemalism, 207 Kurds, 209 L L’Avenir, 151–155 Lacroix, General Pamphile de, 54, 55 Lamennais, Felicité, xxvi, 146 Landschaftsverordnung, 179, 182 Langlois, Claude, 122 La république, 94, 167 Le Catholicisme au féminin, 122 Lecointe-Puyraveau, Michel Mathieu, 62 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhem, 41 Le Lys dans la Vallée, 88 Le Père Duchêsne, 125 Lescallier, Daniel, 58, 62 L’Essai sur l’indifférence, 149 Lippert, Johann Caspar von, 176 Locke, John, 33 Louisiana, 62, 134 Louis-Philippe I, 98, 150 Louis XIV, 3–5, 7, 39, 58 Louis XVI, 8–10, 15, 38, 56, 64, 86, 205 Lutherans, 187 Luzerne, Madame de la, 78 M Mahmud II, 205 Maistre, Joseph de, 19, 26, 146 Malesherbes, Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de, 15

230  Index Marriage aristocratic, 78, 80 Jews, 13, 175, 188 Protestant, 5, 7–10, 13–16, 74, 76, 101, 176, 178, 181, 187, 194 Racial, interracial, 51, 108, 109, 111 Marsanne, Jean-Louis-CharlesFrançois, 6, 14 Martin, Jean-Clement, 89 Martinique, 131, 133, 134 Marx, Karl, xxi Max Joseph, 174, 179, 180, 182, 184, 186, 192, 195 McManners, John, 123 Mehmed VI, 208 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, 26, 32 Michelet, Jules, 5 Mickiewicz, Adam, 153, 155 Mirari Vos, 154, 155, 157, 159 Mirbeck, Frédéric Ignace de, 55 Missionaries, 58, 122, 130, 132, 134, 135 Mission civilisatrice, 100, 104, 107, 115, 116 Monastic Orders. See Religious Orders, 125 Monism, 39 Montalembert, Charles de, 154, 159 Montesquieu, 26 Montgelas, Maximilian von, 174, 180 Motherhood, 81, 124, 134 Mughal Empire, 26 Müller, Max, 42 Munich, 175, 177, 179–181, 185, 187, 192 Muslims. See Islam N Napoleon Bonaparte Concordat, 17, 149, 174, 181, 182

Grand Sanhedrin, 221 Napoleon, Louis, 205 Napoleonic Wars, 173, 175, 193, 194 National Assembly, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 51, 55, 59, 60, 121, 125, 211, 214 Neoplatonism, 40 Netherlands, 15, 152 Nicolai, Friedrich, 178 North America, 4, 131, 134 Nuns. See Religious Orders O Orientalism, 25 Ottoman Constitution of 1876, 206 Ottoman Empire, 135–137, 203, 204, 206, 207, 215 Ozouf, Mona, 166 P Paris, 17, 53, 55, 58, 60, 76, 78, 81, 88, 104, 123, 127, 128, 133, 134, 136, 150, 151, 154, 155, 157, 158, 206 Paroles d’un Croyant, 157–159 Passau, 183 Pensées Ecclésiastiques, 82 Physical Anthropology, 108 Pitt, William, 85 Plato, 40, 42 Poix, Madame de, 78 Poland, 136, 152, 153, 155, 158 Pomme, André or Pomme l’Américan, 62 Pondicherry, 131, 133 Pontard, Pierre, 63 Pope Gregory XVI, 137, 153, 154 Pope Pius VI, 146, 177, 179 Port-au-Prince, 54 Pradier, James, 18 Principes de la philosophie naturelle, 34

Index

Q Quietism, 39 Quinet, Edgar, 5, 101 Quod aliquantum, 146 R Race, 32, 36, 42–44, 51, 57, 100, 107–110, 113 Reformation, 5, 123, 128, 129, 134, 138 Refugees, 3, 4, 7, 73, 78, 83, 85, 155 Religious Orders Anti-religious order propaganda, 215 Orders; Filles de la Sagesse, 126, 129; Filles de Notre Dame, 131; Religieuses de Jésus et Marie de Lyon, 137; Sœurs de la Doctrine Chrétienne de Nancy, 129, 136; Sœurs de la Retraite chrétienne, 126; Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de l’Apparition, 137; Sœurs de Saint Joseph d’Annecy et de Chambéry, 137; Sœurs de St-Charles de Lyon, 123, 129; Sœurs de St-Joseph de Cluny, 130, 132, 133; Sœurs de St-Joseph de l’Apparition, 135, 163; Sœurs de St-Joseph du Puy, 129; Sœurs de St-Paul de Chartres, 133–134; Sœurs du Bon Pasteur d’Anger, 136 Religious toleration, 6, 7, 12, 13, 111, 187 Renaissance, 40 Renan, Ernst, 165 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), 6 Revolt Against the Modern World, 43 Rhineland, 173, 175, 178, 183

  231

Riesbeck, Johan Caspar, 178 Romaine-la-prophétesse, 54 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 29, 32, 147 Royalists, 53, 61 Russia, 4, 43, 180 S Safavid empire, 26 Said, Edward, 25 Said, Şeyh, 209 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (August 24, 1572), 18 Saint-Domingue, 50, 51, 53–55, 58, 59, 65 Saint-Étienne, Rabaut, 6, 8, 12 Saint-Laurent, Philippe Roume de, 55 Saint-Léger, Edmond de, 55 Scandinavia, 4 Scientific racism, 108 Seven Year’s War, 59 Sharia, 208, 213 Slavery, 49–52, 57, 65, 99, 102–107, 149 Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage, 104 Sonthonax, 57, 58 Sorkin, David, 174 Sourdat, Nicholas, 19 South Africa, 4, 10 South America, 137 Souza, Madame de, 76, 79, 81, 87, 89 Staël, Madame de, 76, 81, 87 Surinam, 4 Swabia, 187, 191 Switzerland, 126 Sylvestre de la Haye, Guillame, 55 T Tanzimant, 206 Tanzimat, 215

232  Index Taylor, Charles, xx The Dignity of Commerce and of the Merchant’s Condition, 27 The Imitation of Christ, 148, 149, 161 Theodore, Prince Elector Charles, 174, 175 Theophilanthropy, 221 The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 99, 102 Theosophy, 27, 42, 43 Théremin, Charles Guillaume, 18 Thiébault, François-Martin, 19 Thouret, Jeanne-Antide, 127, 130 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xix–xv, 98, 99 Tunisia, 135 Turkey, 203–205, 207, 208, 210, 214, 215 Turkish Independence Tribunals, 203 Turks, 206–211, 214 Tyrol, 189–191 U Ultramontanism, xxvi Universalism, 19, 44, 100, 106, 116 Upanishads, xxiii, 26, 36–42, 44

Ursuline Order, 128 Ursulines, 123, 128, 131–133 V Vatican, 18, 31, 154–156 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 7 Vendée, xxviii, 126, 211 Vialar, Emilie de, 130, 135, 137 W War of the Second Coalition, 179, 184 Warsaw, 152 Wars of Religion, 3, 4, 11, 13, 16, 18 Weber, Max, xx Würzburg, 183, 189 Y Young Turks, 206, 214 Z Zoroastrianism, 25, 28