Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (136 page)

Eighteenth-century Europe thus presented curious contrasts between government-sponsored change and vigorous survival from the past. While the Catholic Church was under attack even from Catholic monarchs, it was also full of life and energy. The monasteries of central Europe plunged into rebuilding schemes with the same panache as their French counterparts, the bishops still patiently worked away at the huge task of carrying out the reforms mapped out two centuries before at the Council of Trent. One symptom of what resources this Church might discover that it commanded was the fate of Joseph II of Austria's attempts to impose his own vision of reform on the Catholic Church in Habsburg lands. Briskly contemptuous of the contemplative life, the Holy Roman Emperor dissolved a large proportion of the monasteries in his territories, creating a Religious Fund under the monarch's control for other Church purposes, such as the endowment of parishes. He would have preferred a complete confiscation, which would decisively have placed the Church in the hands of the Crown - but even his modified plan provoked disaster for him. The people's reaction in the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) was to rise in revolt in 1789, forcing the dying emperor humiliatingly to abandon much of his scheme from the Netherlands to Hungary. It was a curious Catholic counterpoint to what was happening in France at the same time, and a harbinger of the Catholic resurgence of the nineteenth century (see pp. 817-27).
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What is striking about Christian Europe at this period, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, is the withering of autonomous Church government in the face of State onslaught: the decay of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, the shackling of the Russian Orthodox Church to the imperial government, the growing impotence of the pope witnessed in the destruction of the Jesuits, but also, in the Protestant world, the effective silencing of the Church of England's deliberative bodies. The Hanoverian monarchs did not allow Convocations of Canterbury and York to meet to transact business, and for nearly a century and a half after 1717, English bishops lacked any forum for concerted action. John Wesley's authoritarian answer, his tightly controlled organization of Methodism, also faced rapid disintegration after his death. At the end of the century, an unexpected convulsion of society appeared to accelerate this process, threatening complete dismemberment in the Catholic Church. In fact new power relationships and a new debate about authority in Western Christianity emerged, the consequences of which are still being worked out today. From 1789 events moved so quickly that, already in the 1790s, the French were talking about the '
ancien regime
', the former state of things, looking back to this society so confusingly tangled between medieval survival and Enlightenment, and seeing something remote and discredited.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1789-1815)

Few in 1789 could have predicted that France would be the seat of revolution. It was western Europe's greatest power, its language spoken by elites everywhere. After the crushing of the Huguenot uprisings in the first decade of the century, it was generally a less violent or excitable country than its otherwise not dissimilar rival Great Britain.
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Its weakness, however, in another contrast with Britain, was government finance. France had never established a proper national banking and credit system, and thanks to the centralizing impulse of its monarchy, failed to maintain a national representative body which could cooperate in raising revenue. This was disastrous even when France was victorious in war, as happened when the French supported Britain's former North American colonies in their War of Independence after 1776. Within four years of the Treaty of Paris recognizing the United States (1783), the French government faced bankruptcy, and it had no effective means of cutting through France's archaic revenue system. A run of terrible harvests and consequent famine inflamed the political temperature still further. An assembly of notables called in 1787 refused to help solve the financial crisis; so did an assembly of the clergy, who had jealously guarded their ancient right to tax themselves. However, the clergy raised the whole level of the argument by pointing out that their privileges survived from a time when all taxation had been levied with the consent of the feudal estates of the realm meeting as the States General. The clergy, or at least an idealized image of the good and conscientious
cure
(parish priest), became hugely popular nationwide - for the moment.
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The idea of reviving this representative institution therefore met with great enthusiasm, and if Louis XVI and his successive ministers had been more adroit in using it, they might have carried out substantial reform without disaster. Unfortunately the King was not a decisive man. Having assembled the States General in 1789 after more than a century and a half in abeyance, he could not make his mind up on vital procedural matters. In an atmosphere of expectation and with a torrent of suspicions and grievances already released by the summoning of the delegates, he lost the initiative. On 17 June 1789 the 'Third Estate', those delegates neither clergy nor noblemen, declared themselves a National Assembly; they were soon joined by dissident clergy and noblemen from the First and Second Estates. Further clumsy moves from the King increasingly destabilized the situation; rural France fell into turmoil. On 26 August 1789 the Assembly passed a Declaration of the Rights of Man, owing much to the American Declaration of Independence thirteen years before. It is worth noting what a break with the past this was, a high point of Enlightenment optimism: it was a declaration of rights, not accompanied by a declaration of duties. It took half a decade of mounting atrocity in war and revolution before duties were officially formulated.

It was still likely that France would develop a monarchy under a constitution, a tidier version of the British system, but the religious question pushed events a stage further. The National Assembly was as determined to reform the Church as everything else. Its plan was to create a national Church like that in England, but Catholic in doctrine and without the faults evident in the English Church. Gallican Catholics in France had long sought such arrangements, and indeed since the fifteenth century the monarchy had episodically done much to encourage such an outcome. Yet what was proposed took the most extreme form - it would be a national Church indeed, because bishops would be elected by the entire male population, including the newly emancipated Protestants and Jews.
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Church lands were confiscated, and the rural labouring classes watched in growing anger as wealthy merchants, office-holders and former officials flush with compensation for lost jobs all used their cash to build up new landholdings.

The 'Civil Constitution of the Clergy', passed by the Assembly in 1790, left the Pope with no power, merely a formal respect. The fact that its passage paid no attention to what the Pope might think horrified many clergy who had gone along with reform so far. Recklessly the Assembly forced all clergy to take an oath of obedience to the Civil Constitution in January 1791. About half refused - and in the countryside that was particularly serious, because parish priests refusing were liable to carry their congregations with them. So now large sections of the population were cast as opponents of the Assembly: a fatal moment for the Revolution and the Church. Resistance was much strengthened when the Pope officially condemned the Civil Constitution that spring.
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The King, a devout Catholic, was increasingly identified with this opposition, and when he failed in an attempt to flee the country later that year, he was deprived of all power.

It was more or less inevitable as events swept on that the Assembly should declare war on the traditional great powers of Europe, beginning in 1792 with the bulwark of the old system, the King's brother-in-law the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope was one of those enemies: the lynching of a tactless Jacobin envoy in Rome, Nicolas Jean Hugon de Basseville, only cemented that impression in the minds of the government in Paris. War had a terrible effect on the Revolution. In 1792, spurred by provincial rebellions in the name of Catholic Christianity and the King, the State had begun large-scale executions of its aristocratic and clerical enemies in Paris. The numbers were at first small scale by modern standards of State terror, but they were horrifying at the time, particularly since they included nearly all available members of the French royal family, the King and Queen among them - the King died a week after de Basseville. At Nantes there were mass drownings of prisoners, beginning with priests, and the massacres in the Catholic Vendee set standards for later European atrocities in dehumanizing victims in order to make mass slaughter easy and virtuous. Europe's first single-party dictatorship in the name of the people had emerged. The awful tidy-mindedness of Enlightenment thought bred an insistence on everyone being liberated in ways defined by Revolutionaries - forcing them to be free, in a ghastly echo of Rousseau.

What was new about this regime - contrasting, for instance, with the austere enthusiasm of Savonarola's Republic of Florence or the nightmare popular kingdom of the Anabaptists besieged in Munster (see pp. 591-3 and 623-4) - was that the Jacobins, most extreme Revolutionaries of the French Republic, radicalized the snickering scepticism of French
philosophes
about the whole Christian message. They came to regard any form of Christian faith as a relic of the
ancien regime
which they were destroying, though they had to acknowledge that the people on whom they were imposing liberty, equality and fraternity craved for some sort of religion. The Revolution which had begun with a sincere effort to improve the Church now sought to replace it with a synthetic religion, constructed out of classical symbolism mixed up with the eighteenth century's celebration of human reason: the Christian calendar of years and months was abolished, religious houses closed, churches desecrated.

Much of the violence against the Church exploded out of popular feeling, striking out at anything which spoke of past authority, but much de-Christianization was imposed by government decree, and it was particularly hard to create new public ceremonies for a manufactured religion that did not seem ludicrous. An opera singer posed as the Goddess of Liberty (or Reason - her sponsors changed their minds) on a stage in Notre-Dame de Paris. She had novelty value but no staying power. When the coldly anti-Christian revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre tried to redesign and calm down the revolutionary liturgy, his efforts turned into a trigger for his own sudden march to the guillotine.
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Although the campaign of active de-Christianization petered out by the end of the 1790s, the Revolution had served long-term notice that the institutional Church and perhaps Christianity itself would be seen as an enemy of the new world. The Constitutional Church was wrecked; this ally of the Revolution was caught miserably between the de-Christianizers and those fighting the Revolution.

As wars with all France's neighbours dragged on, the French people became increasingly disillusioned with their masters: the Church had been shattered apparently to no purpose, and, since before the Revolution it had a virtual monopoly on caring for the poor and helpless, the weakest suffered most by the destruction of Church institutions. The most successful of the Revolution's generals, the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte, gained more and more popular support, in contrast to the revolutionary government's waning popularity. It would have taken a man with no ambition to resist this temptation, and Napoleon did not. He staged a coup d'etat in 1799, and successive plebiscites, only partially rigged, gave overwhelming majorities to his assumption first of the Republican title of First Consul and then of Emperor of the French. Right up to the final collapse of his extraordinary conquests in 1813-14, Napoleon continued to enjoy widespread support throughout France.

An astute politician as well as a brilliant general, Napoleon attached great importance to religion - not because he cared about it personally, but because he saw that other people cared about it a great deal. The Republic had made a gross error in attacking the Church. Now, if he was to unite France, he would have to come to an understanding with this institution which so controlled human emotions. He would benefit not only in France but throughout the large areas of Catholic Europe that came to be under French rule. If Napoleon was to clinch an agreement to cover all these territories, he would have to approach the Pope. Accordingly, in 1801, he and Pope Pius VII reached an agreement or Concordat, the model for many similar deals between the papacy and a variety of governments throughout the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Napoleon said that its negotiation was the most difficult task of his life.
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This Concordat was important not simply for its extensive reorganization of the French Church in partnership with the State, but for its effect on the pope's position. The marginalization of the pope begun by 'Enlightened Despots' had seemed to be complete when revolutionary French armies arrested Pius VI and watched him die in French exile in 1799. Now the new pope was negotiating terms for the whole French Church, once so proud of its independence. The new structure of appointments and hierarchy among the clergy gave the pope much more power, a move which many lower clergy welcomed since it was likely to curb the powers of their immediate superiors the bishops. The Pope's new position was most effectively symbolized when in 1804 he agreed to be present at the coronation ceremony for Napoleon as Emperor in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris: a curious reconciliation of the traditional Church with the new people's State, as Napoleon placed on his own head the crown which the people's armies had won for him. Nor was the Pope's usefulness over then: Napoleon prevailed on his new ally to discover a new saint of the Church, an ancient Roman martyr called with providential coincidence Napoleon, whose feast day on the Emperor's birthday, 15 August, usefully fell on that popular holy day of the Church, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady (see Plate 39). Even after the Emperor's fall, the Feast of St Napoleon remained a rallying point for Bonapartists throughout the nineteenth century, a sore annoyance to those French Catholics who detested the Emperor's memory and wanted to concentrate on celebrating God's Mother.
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