However, his personal doubts about the truth of religion did not blind him to its power as an instrument of public policy. The revolts in the Vendée had proved the dangers of affronting people’s religious beliefs; and, as a natural disciplinarian, the mob frenzy of the Paris crowd had confirmed his view of what might happen when society’s rules broke down. While in Italy, he had been impressed by the influence of the clergy, and preferred to control rather than to fight them. He thus had a lively awareness of the utility of religion as a social cement: ‘You believe that man can be man without God … man without God, I have seen him at work since 1793. That man, one does not rule him, one shoots him: I have had enough of that type of man.’23
In practice, Napoleon was prepared to embrace any religion which suited his purpose. He was to boast that he had quelled the uprising in the Vendée by becoming a Catholic; that he had successfully won over the Egyptians by thinking of embracing Islam; and that he had secured the acceptance of popular opinion in Italy by becoming Ultramontane. He would have rebuilt the Temple of Solomon had he been the ruler of the Jews; in 1806 he did indeed restore the grand Sanhedrin of the Jews. Yet Catholicism he valued above all. Deism was dismissed for its want of moral certainty; Freemasonry he mocked for its bizarre rituals and its secrecy; Protestantism he distrusted because it lacked the organisational structure and hierarchy which was integral to Catholicism. On 5 June 1800 he informed the clergy at Milan, ‘The Catholic religion is the only religion that can make a stable community happy and establish the foundations of good government’, adding that, ‘the faith was like an anchor which alone could save France from the storm’.24
Ever the pragmatist, on coming to power in 1799 Napoleon had three objectives apropos his religious policy. The first was to secure an accommodation with the Church so as to siphon off the energies of the revolt in the Vendée. The second was to use Catholicism to legitimate his regime. As a soldier, with a strong sense of military discipline, he was always uneasy with the fact that he had illegally usurped power, and he constantly sought means to underpin his regime. This was to be done by an appeal to a popular mandate in the form of plebiscites and the retention of parliaments, together with the re-creation of a nobility.
Ecclesiastical approval would also be useful in this regard and would play well with the strongly Catholic areas of his burgeoning empire, notably Belgium and the Rhineland, and would undermine the claim of his European enemies, particularly Austria, that they were the upholders of the Catholic religion.
Finally, he looked for a definitive religious settlement which would delineate the role, social standing and influence of the Church so that it served as a bulwark of stability, and functioned more or less as a department of state. Napoleon moved swiftly to effect a rapprochement with the Church. In the Vendée, he allowed the open practice of Catholicism under the leadership of clerics who were obliged only to take an oath of fidelity to the constitution. He further ordered the body of Pius VI, which still lay unburied at Valence, to be interred with full funerary honours. This eased the way to the start of negotiations with the newly elected pope, Pius VII (1800–23), the former Benedictine monk, Barnabà Chiaramonte. ‘Tell the pope’, Napoleon declared, ‘I want to make him a gift of 30,000,000 Frenchmen.’25
For his part the novice pontiff, who as Bishop of Imola had preached the infamous ‘Jacobin’ sermon at Christmas 1797 urging an acceptance of the legitimacy of the revolutionary government, was eager to end ten years of schism and to begin his reign with a reconciliation between the Church and France, still viewed as the most prestigious Catholic country in Europe. Such a settlement could only redound to the prestige of the papacy itself, enabling it to reassert its primacy within the Church and affirm its independence of the secular powers. It was clear, however, which side was operating from a position of strength.
Napoleon’s decisive victory in 1800 over the Austrians at Marengo re-established French control over Italy, once again casting a doubt over the future autonomy of the Papal States in which Pius VII was tentatively introducing reform. In the ensuing negotiations, which lasted a long eight months, both sides proved exceedingly obdurate, although it was Napoleon who was the more bloody-minded.
The document which was finally signed at 6 a.m. on 16 July 1801 was both brief and apparently reasonable. The preamble acknowledged Catholicism as ‘the religion of the great majority of the French people’,26 a wording which did not altogether please the Curia which had initially demanded that Catholicism should be the ‘dominant’ faith. Article 1 permitted the free and open practice of Catholicism, albeit in a way that did not disturb public order; Articles 2 and 3 foresaw the reorganisation of dioceses after consultation between Paris and Rome and the consequent resignation of bishops where necessary; Articles 4 and 5 placed the nomination of prelates in the hands of the First Consul, canonical institution being subsequently conferred by the Pope; Articles 6, 7 and 8 obliged bishops and priests to swear an oath of fidelity to the government and to recite prayers for the salvation of the consuls and republic; Articles 9 to 10 dealt with the internal organisation of the Church; Article 13 asserted the inviolability of the lands seized from the Church during the revolution; Article 14 made a vague promise of a ‘suitable salary’ to clerics to be paid by the state, while Article 15 allowed endowments to the Church; and the catch-all Article 16 conferred upon the First Consul the same rights as had been enjoyed by the ancien régime monarchy over the Church, without specifying what these entailed. A final article accepted that, in the event of a non-Catholic assuming the position of First Consul, the Concordat would be renegotiated. Whereas the terms of the above agreement appeared reasonable and balanced, the longer Napoleon pondered them the less he liked them, concerned that they did not sufficiently strengthen the state’s hand over the Church. He was also aware of the need to deflect criticism from anti-clericals who opposed any agreement with the Church – for this reason the Concordat was referred to as the Convention de Messidor – and he was wary of the growth of any kind of opposition at a time when his hold on power was still tenuous. The Constitution of Year X (1802), which effectively cemented his dictatorship by making him First Consul for life, still lay in the future. Napoleon therefore unilaterally added seventy-seven Organic Articles to the Concordat. Ostensibly these dealt with the policing arrangements referred to in Article 1, but in practice they went much further. Government approbation was required before papal pronunciations could be published, councils convoked, new parishes established and private chapels set up. A uniform catechism was introduced, church weddings could not precede the civil ceremony, cathedral chapters were reduced to merely ceremonial function and the powers of papal delegates were severely circumscribed. Any breach of the articles was treated as a criminal offence and was referred to the Council of State, the keystone of Napoleonic government. Additionally, clerical salaries were specified: a mere 15,000 francs per annum for an archbishop, of whom there were to be ten; 10,000 francs for each bishop, who numbered sixty in total; and 1,000 to 1,500 francs for the 3,000 or so parish priests. Although it was not specifically referred to in the Organic Articles, the creation of a Ministry of Cults in 1801 reinforced a drive towards government oversight of ecclesiastical matters.
It is commonly argued that the Concordat, together with the Organic Articles, was a victory for Napoleon and marked the end of ecclesiastical independence of the state. To be sure, clerical freedoms had been severely circumscribed, Catholicism was recognised only as one religion among others, and the Church had acknowledged something of the legitimacy of the revolution by accepting its successor, the Consulate.
Nevertheless, the Church also made significant gains. In the first place, the Napoleonic settlement was founded on the basis of an agreement between Church and state, and was not the result of a government diktat, thus implicitly recognising the authority of the Holy See and its ability to concede privileges to the state. In this way, Rome preserved something of its authority, just as it had done by the negotiation of concordats in the early modern period and as it would do again in the nineteenth century. Additionally, the papacy rescued from schism the most important national church in Europe while strengthening its claim to intervene in its affairs. This was to be perceived most clearly with respect to the position of the bishops who comprised two groups, the ancien régime prelates appointed by the King and the constitutional bishops who had survived the revolutionary onslaughts under the courageous leadership of Henri Grégoire. To reconcile the two groups was impossible and the only way forwards was to start afresh. Forty-eight prelates agreed to resign, but thirty-seven (mainly ancien régime bishops) refused, and continued to exist as the so-called petite église which ultimately came to naught, although in some regions this minor schism persisted until the Second Vatican Council. Their sees were declared vacant by Pius VII and the episcopacy was renewed under the terms of the Concordat. Such an exercise of Roman authority over the Gallican Church would have been impossible before 1789 and marked a new stage in the relationship between papacy and Church in France, and helped to lay the foundations for a developing Ultramontanism within the French clergy.
To sign the Concordat was one thing, but to reconstruct the Church in France was quite another. The task was made easier by the generally high quality of the new bishops. Well educated and conciliatory, they approached their jobs with commendable fairness and assiduity, overcoming the administrative difficulties of having to govern new dioceses which had been put together with reference to both the pre- and post-1789 situations. Even though a majority of the newly appointed bishops were refractories, they lacked that collegiate sense which had characterised the old regime episcopacy, not least because the Napoleonic Church no longer had a body equivalent to the prerevolutionary General Assembly of the Clergy which had provided a corporate sense of identity, but merely a series of ranks and offices through which orders were barked. More troubling were the shortage and quality of the parish clergy. Well over 3,000 of those who had resigned their office, apostatised or married during the 1790s now sought reconciliation with the Church and presented themselves for scrutiny before the legation led by Cardinal Caprara, who had been appointed to handle this sensitive task. Former refractories also presented themselves for service, and they dominated the ranks of the Napoleonic Church, often making life difficult for the constitutional clerics. But even when such recruits were taken into account, there were insufficient clerics of regulars, émigrés, ex-canons and prebendaries. By 1808, almost 12,500 parishes, over 20 per cent of the total, remained vacant. Some areas of France, particularly the Vendée where counter-revolution and repression had been most intense, were especially short of clergy: barely half the ancien régime clergy were eligible for office in 1801 and nearly one-third of these would die within the decade. The department of the Var was obliged to depend upon Italian priests until the 1820s. Poor career prospects and low salaries did little to entice new ordinands.
In the period 1801 to 1815, there were only 6,000 recruits, the same number as had come forward in the year 1789 alone. Small wonder that the average age of priests was high and rising: over one-third were in their sixties in 1809. The seminary system, which had been one of the highlights of the French Church in the eighteenth century, was unable to furnish the replacements needed, even though seminarians were excused military service until 1809. There was also a shortage of teachers, buildings and income, for no provision was made to fund the seminaries. Clerical recruitment was increasingly from the ranks of the peasantry, and herein lay the roots of the anti-urban and anti-liberal attitudes which characterised the nineteenth-century lower clergy. Additionally, the Concordat had enormously strengthened the authority of bishops within their dioceses. The majority of priests had no security of tenure, but served at the bishop’s pleasure. So it was that the Richerist dream of the eighteenth-century lower clergy of a synodal and democratic Church, which had initially led some ecclesiastics to favour the revolution, had been stymied. Priests discovered themselves looking increasingly to Rome as a counter-balance to episcopal despotism; paradoxically, the bishops themselves looked to the Eternal City as a counter-weight to the despotism of the state. One of the unlooked-for products of the Napoleonic religious settlement was thus the emergence of a strong Ultramontane sentiment among all levels of the French clergy. If Napoleon had anticipated that the Concordatory Church would be a faithful servant of his regime, he was to be disappointed. To be sure, the
Church preached compliance with the conscription laws. It also accepted the Imperial Catechism of 1806, significantly drawn up by the Ministry of Cults, albeit with serious reservations with respect to Article 7. This threatened with damnation all those who refused adherence to ‘Napoleon I, our emperor, love, respect, obedience, loyalty, military service … because God … has made him the agent of His power and His image upon earth’.27
The Feast of the Assumption of 15 August was followed by the feast of St Napoleon, an early Christian martyr whose pedigree always remained distinctly dubious. Yet the Church could not be stopped from going its own way, at least in some spheres. Prefects in the dioceses of Aix, Bayeux, Bordeaux, Nancy and Rennes turned a blind eye when constitutional clergy were illegally forced to swear humiliating recantations. Prefects further ignored the reconsecration ceremonies for those churches which had been supposedly sullied by constitutional uses as well as the collective rebaptism and remarriage ceremonies undertaken by those who had had recourse to the services of the constitutional clergy. More seriously, some bishops presided over open-air festivals even though these contravened police regulations over public assembly. After 1809, when Napoleon treated Pius VII in much the same way as the Directory had handled Pius VI, the prelates became ever more outspoken in their criticisms of his government, and privately longed for the restoration of the Bourbons. The Concordat made no mention of the regular orders, and the revolutionary legislation suppressing them was not rescinded.
While Napoleon had some admiration for the military organisation of the Jesuits, he was deeply mistrustful of all male orders, believing them to be useless ‘unprofitable creatures’, subversive and inherently disloyal because of their outside allegiance. Moreover, the male regulars fell beyond the control of the bishop whose authority in respect of the secular clergy the Concordat had done much to strengthen. In practice, some limited restoration of the male congregations took place. Those allowed to function were concerned primarily with the provision of elementary education and public welfare, more or less free of charge, thereby not imposing financial burdens on the state. Such orders included the Brothers of the Christian Schools and the Ignorantins. Tolerance was also extended to those orders, such as the Lazarists and the Fathers of the Holy Spirit, which were instrumental in propagating French culture and esprit abroad. Conveniently out of the way, those orders based in the mountainous terrain linking France with Italy and Spain were allowed to survive, providing convenient stop-overs for travellers, thanks in part to the generosity the canons of St Bernard had displayed to Napoleon himself on his way to the battle of Marengo.
Much greater indulgence was displayed towards the female religious who were regarded as less of a political threat and who, above all, were engaged in utilitarian social functions. In some instances, they were even given official encouragement and blessing. Once again, it was those congréganistes concerned with education, care of the sick and poor relief that benefited most. These included the Daughters of Charity, who were permitted to return in 1800, and the Sisters of Mercy who, in 1801, were put under the protection of Napoleon’s mother. A number of new congregations, stimulated by official toleration, also sprang up. These were mainly local in influence, and were devoted to philanthropic activities, notably the education of girls, a reflection of Napoleon’s own misogynistic attitudes which viewed women as deeply inferior to men and incapable of rational thought. So it was that the Sacred Heart Society was founded in Paris in 1800, the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary at Ghent in 1806, the Sisters of Notre Dame at Amiens in 1804 and the Daughters of the Holy Cross at Poitiers in 1807. Concerned at the proliferation of local initiatives, Napoleon attempted to enforce some overarching authority upon the congregations in 1807 but, in the event, he had to be content with setting out common guidelines for their operation. Without this window of opportunity, it is inconceivable that the startling growth of the women’s orders in the nineteenth century could have got under way. Something of the nature of nineteenth-century popular religious practice in France was also to be shaped by the revolutionary and Napoleonic experience. In the first instance, there was a growing laicisation of religion. Under the Directory, the Church had been restored at the initiative of the laity, who reopened religious buildings, refurbished wayside shrines and even held services, including masses, with a lay person officiating. Freed from the tutelage of the clergy, lay people became accustomed to taking the lead in religious practices, a trend which could not be easily reversed. In the aftermath of the schism of the French Church, priests no longer commanded the same respect and had been shown wanting in several regards, not always able to offer guidance and leadership. Suggestions after 1814 that tithes might be reestablished were met with absolute hostility and there was reluctance to provide financial support for the returning curés. The parish priest of Rognon in eastern France complained that, ‘certain people say that they do very well without their curés’.28
In a related development, one may point to the resurgence of popular religious practices which the eighteenth-century clergy had sought to control or stamp out altogether, but which were now reinstituted by a laity liberated from clerical supervision. The cult of the saints, the establishment of wayside crosses and shrines, night-time pilgrimages and processions, the use of benedictions, all made a come back.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly in the long term, there was a noticeable feminisation of religion which built upon the leading role of women in the defence of the faith during the high point of dechristianisation in particular, and reinforced an eighteenth century trend towards a gender dichotomy in religious matters.
In part, this reflected women’s search for areas of empowerment, since they were effectively excluded from so many spheres of public life under the revolution, as they had been in the pre-1789 period. It also emerged out of a ‘dearth, disease, devotion’ syndrome. Bearing the brunt of the economic privations which were intense, especially for the poorest elements of society in the 1790s when the harvests were seriously disrupted, women sought consolation in religion. In ways unlooked for, the Church in France regrouped and laid the parameters for religious life in the nineteenth century. No less significant were the effects of the Napoleonic regime on religious life in the rest of Europe.
Notes:
22. Taken from D. G. Wright, Napoleon and Europe (London, 1979), p. 102.
23. Quoted in M. Vaughan and M. S. Archer, Educational Change and Social Conflict in England and France, 1789–1848 (Cambridge, 1971), p. 184.
24. Quoted in O. Chadwick, The Popes and the European Revolution (Oxford, 1981), p.484
25. Quoted in Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 206.
26. See F. J. Coppa (ed.), Controversial Concordats. The Vatican’s Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini and Hitler (Washington, 1999).
27. Quoted in Hales, Revolution and the Papacy, p. 117.
28. Quoted in M. Rey, Le Diocèse de Besançon et de Sainte-Cloud (Paris, 1977), p. 155.
By Nicholas Atkin & Frank Tallet in: "Priests, Prelates & People- A History of European Catholicism since 1750"-I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., London/New York, 2003, pages 71-77, Edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comments...