I.
This division of our history will be shorter than its predecessors. The period it embraces is not extensive; and it comprises no memorable events, or great successes and calamities; and it is more remarkable for ideas than for facts. But the recital of facts, not the discussion of ideas, is the object of our labours, and we will follow this plan to the end with the greater fidelity, in that we are nearer to the present generation. We have no desire to exchange the pen of the historian for that of the polemic.
This will explain the brevity of certain details, and even the absence of certain subjects, which perhaps excited, in their day, the most considerable interest. We omit them neither out of forgetfulness nor indifference, but from respect for our duty. It would be inconvenient in many ways, to eulogize or blame men still living, or to take part in questions yet under debate. This is a task that will be better accomplished hereafter.[134]
We step into a new world from the moment that we enter upon the history of the Revolution of 1789. Before that period, every petty reform had to be won by long negotiations, arrangements, and agreements of various kinds. The Edict of 1787, although it granted less than had been given by Henry IV. in the Edict of Nantes, cost twenty years of efforts. Now, on the contrary, we shall behold everything advancing with a firm and rapid step. The timorous scruples of the monarch, the subtle contrivances of his counsellors, the blind resistance of the privileged classes, no longer presided over the public affairs. A great assembly, the faithful interpreter of general intelligence and conscience, shook off the shackles of the past which had only sustained itself with artificial props, and enunciated principles that must resolve the most important problems of political and social order.
From the 21st of August, 1789, the Constituent Assembly overthrew the barriers, which had until then debarred the admission of Protestants to offices of state. Article 11 of the Declaration of Rights was thus conceived: “All citizens, being equal in the eye of the law, are equally admissible to every public dignity, place, and employment, according to their capacity, and without other distinctions than those of their virtues and their talents.”
With some slight differences of expression, this article was subsequently reproduced in each of the French constitutions. It may have been still disregarded in practice, as it has been, indeed, frequently, since 1814; but the principle was definitively won. It triumphed only after ages of persecution, iniquities, and combats. So tardy are human laws to inscribe the maxims of truth and justice!
The eighteenth article of the Declaration of Rights was destined to guarantee liberty of conscience and of worship. The committee of the National Assembly had drawn it up at first in these words: “No one shall be molested on account of his religious opinions, or disturbed in the exercise of his religion.” This was clear, precise, and unequivocal; but a curate proposed a restriction, which was adopted. The new article bore the appearance, in its embarrassed style, of the impress of the legislator’s hesitation: “No one shall be molested on account of his opinions, or even for his religious opinions, provided that he does not, in manifesting them, disturb the public order established by the law.”
This addition was superfluous in one sense, since it is evident that every religion must respect legal order in its acts. In another sense it was dangerous, since it seemed to confer upon the civil power more authority than it ought to have possessed in such matters. The priest, who was inspired with this unfortunate thought, ought to have foreseen that he placed a weapon in the hands of the politicians, which they would perhaps turn against [the members of] his own communion. Did the persecutors of 1793 invoke anything else than the duty of maintaining the order established by the law?
Rabaut Saint Etienne, who had been nominated a member of the Constituent Assembly by the seneschalry of Nismes, perceived the danger, and pointed it out in a speech, which obtained great applause throughout the country. It is one of the most admirable specimens of advocacy that has ever been pronounced in favour of religious liberty: such an oration has a place in history.
The speaker began by showing that those who have opposed toleration in every age, have never alleged any other pretext than that adduced by the imprudent curate. “The Inquisition always said, in its soft and guarded language, that assuredly no attack should ever be made upon thought; that every one is free as to his opinions, provided he does not manifest them; but that, as this manifestation might disturb public order, the law ought to watch it with scrupulous attention; and under the favour of this principle, the intolerant classes have arrogated to themselves that power of inspection which has subjected thought, and enchained it during so many centuries!...
“I discharge a holy mission,” continued the orator; “I obey the voice of my constituents. I represent a seneschalry of three hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants, of whom more than one hundred and twenty thousand are Protestants, who have intrusted their delegates to solicit from you the complement of the Edict of November, 1787. Another seneschalry of Languedoc, and other places of the kingdom, have expressed the same hope, and ask that you should give the non-Catholics the liberty of their worship....” (All! All! shouted a crowd of deputies.)
Rabaut Saint Etienne then appealed to the rights already sanctioned by the Assembly. “Your principles are that liberty is common property, and that every citizen has an equal right to it. Liberty, then, should belong to all Frenchmen alike, and in the same manner. Every one has a right to it, or no one has; he who would deprive others of it, is not worthy of it himself; he who distributes it unevenly, does not know what it is; he who assails the liberty of others, no matter in what [fashion it may be], assails his own, and deserves to lose it in his turn, as being unworthy of a gift, of which he cannot estimate the value.
“Your principles are that liberty of thought and opinion is an inalienable and indefeasible right. This liberty, gentlemen, is the most sacred of all; it is above the control of men; its refuge is in the depth of the conscience, whither it retreats as to an inviolable sanctuary, where no mortal has the light to penetrate; it is the only liberty that mankind has never submitted to the laws of universal society. To constrain it is unjust; to attack it is sacrilege.”
Approaching the special question of the Protestants, he established [the fact] that the Edict of 1787 permitted the continuance of a shameful inequality between the religious communions, and that the penal laws against the worship of the Reformed had never been formally abolished. He claimed their rights as Frenchmen for two millions of useful citizens. It was not toleration he asked for, it was liberty. “Toleration!” he exclaimed; “sufferance! pardon! clemency! ideas supremely unjust towards the dissenters, so long as it is true that difference of religion, that difference of opinion, is not a crime! Toleration! I demand that toleration should be proscribed in its turn, and it will be,—that iniquitous word, that deals with us as citizens worthy of pity, as criminals to whom pardon is granted!...
“I demand for all non-Catholics that which you ask for yourselves—equality of rights, liberty; the liberty of their religion, the liberty of their worship, the liberty of celebrating it in buildings consecrated to that object; the same certainty of not being disturbed in their religion as you have in yours; and the perfect assurance of being protected as you, as much as you are, and in the same manner that you are by our common laws.”
Some speakers had cited the intolerance of certain Protestant people in justification of their own. “A generous and free nation,” answered Rabaut Saint Etienne, “will not permit that the example of these intolerant countries, who proscribe its worship among themselves, should be cited before yourselves. Your high place is to set examples, not to receive them; and because there are unjust people, are you to be so too? Europe pants for freedom, waits upon your teaching, and you are worthy to lead it.”
The speaker conjured up before the bar of the Assembly the great body of proscribed whom he was defending. “They would present themselves to you,” said he, “dyed with the blood of their fathers, and would exhibit to you the mark of the fetters wherewith they have themselves been bound. But my country is free, and I would forget with her both the ills we have shared, and the yet greater evils, of which we have been the victims. What I ask is, that my native land should show herself worthy of liberty, by distributing it equally among all her citizens, without distinction of rank, of birth, or of religion.”
In concluding, Rabaut Saint Etienne enunciated that every religion demands a worship in common; that one set of Christians cannot refuse it to another without contradicting their own maxims; and that every restriction placed upon the public exercise of a religion, is an attack upon the basis of all creeds, since belief inevitably produces worship, which corresponds to it.
Notwithstanding the logic and eloquence of Rabaut Saint Etienne, the Right, succumbing to religious prejudices, the Centre, governed by political views and pre-occupations, and the priests of the Left, obeying their doctrinal antipathies, formed a majority, which accepted the proposed restriction. Each party had occasion to repent of their resolution.
Four months after this memorable debate, the National Assembly confirmed, on the 24th of December, 1789, by the following decree, the admissibility of Frenchmen to all offices and employments. “1. That the non-Catholics, who should otherwise have complied with all the conditions prescribed by the preceding decrees, with regard to electors, and [such as were] eligible, might be elected to every department of public administration. 2. That the non-Catholics were capable of receiving appointments to every civil and military office, without exception.”
The opportunity of applying this law in the most striking manner soon presented itself. On the 15th of March, 1790, Rabaut Saint Etienne, the son of the long-proscribed pastor, who had been glad to shelter his venerable head under a hut of piled stones, was nominated president of the Constituent Assembly; he filled the chair of the Abbé de Montesquieu. It was on this occasion that he wrote to his father these words, that mark so well the change of ideas and situations: “The president of the National Assembly kneels at your feet.”
Rabaut Saint Etienne was born at Nismes in 1743. He completed his theological studies in the seminary of Lausanne. On his return to France, he was ordained to the ministry of the Gospel, and fulfilled his functions most courageously in the emergency when the Parliament of Toulouse condemned the pastor François Rochette, the three gentlemen glass-makers, and Calas to death. In the front of these execrable scaffolds, he unceasingly preached resignation, obedience to the law, and the duties of fraternal love.
In 1779, he pronounced, as we have elsewhere said, the funeral oration of M. Becdelièvre, bishop of Nismes. This discourse having been printed and communicated to Laharpe, by M. Boissy d’Anglas, that illustrious critic replied: “You have sent me an admirable composition, replete with true eloquence, that of the soul and of feeling. It is clear that everything which flows from the pen of the author, is inspired by the virtues which he celebrates.”
Rabaut Saint Etienne published other discourses, and a book entitled: Amboise Borély, or the Old Cévenole. In this last work he painted, under a dramatic form, the sufferings of the French Protestants at the period of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and during the eighteenth century.
Chosen by the seneschalry of Nismes first among the eight deputies of the Third Estate, his noble character, his oratorical talents, and his devotion to the public good, immediately obtained for him great influence in the Constituent Assembly, over which he was elected to preside on several occasions.
Having been sent to the National Convention by the department of Aude, Rabaut Saint Etienne brought to his place in the Assembly a wise moderation, as well as a generous love of liberty. He sided with the party of the Girondists, and boldly confronted the popular passions, by refusing to vote for the death of Louis XVI. “The nation,” he said, “has sent you to delegate its powers, not to exercise them all at once; for it is impossible that it should have desired only to change its masters. As for myself, I avow it, I am weary of my part in despotism; I am fatigued and harassed with it, and loathe the tyranny which I share in exercising; I sigh for the moment when you shall have created a national tribunal that will divest me of the features and the aspect of a tyrant.”
At the sitting of the 3rd of May, he presented the report of the Commission of Twelve who represented the party of the Gironde, and maintained an obstinate struggle against the violence of the Mountain. Its doom awaited so firm a courage. His arrest was decreed, and his retreat having been discovered, he was dragged before the Revolutionary tribunal, who ordered, upon his simple identification, that he should be executed within twenty-four hours. Rabaut Saint Etienne perished on the scaffold on the 3rd of December, 1793.
Let us return to the Constituent Assembly. A member of the Left, the Carthusian Don Gerle, a man of singular, but unsettled ideas, who had begun to experience some disquietude about the course he was following with his new associates, suddenly proposed, on the 12th of April, 1790, that (Roman) Catholicism should be declared the religion of the State, and that no other religious worship than the Romish should be authorized. The Right and a few Jansenists hailed this unexpected motion with transport. The bishop of Clermont even asked that it should be voted by acclamation, as a homage paid to the (Roman) Catholic religion.
The majority seemed for a moment to be undecided, and the sitting was adjourned until the following day. In the interval, the defenders of religious liberty had time to combine. Charles Lameth had already appealed to the maxims of the Gospel in favour of the dissenting communions. Public opinion, in the meanwhile, became agitated; tumultuous crowds gathered round the building occupied by the legislative body; Mirabeau recalled to mind the horrible recollections of the Saint Bartholomew massacre; and Don Gerle, by this time aware of the dangers of his proposition, withdrew it.
The Constituent Assembly hastened to give the Protestants new proof of its good-will. It ordered the restitution of property confiscated on account of religion, which was still in the possession of the State, to the heirs of the lawful proprietors. By another decree, it restored all the rights of French citizens to the descendants of the refugees, on the sole condition that they should return to France and take the civic oath. Finally, the constitution of 1791 sanctioned the liberty of religious creeds in these terms: “The Constitution guarantees to every man the exercise of the religious worship to which he is attached.”
The legislature had fulfilled its task by proclaiming true principles; the people had next to fulfil their duty. But if, in former periods, the manners of the nation were in advance of the laws, the laws were at this epoch in advance of popular manners, at least in the southern districts, where there existed greater ignorance and stronger religious passions in combination.
The province of Vendée did not rise until 1793, because it contained scarcely any Protestants within its territory. In the south, on the contrary, where they were very numerous, the old antipathies between the two communions began to explode from the year 1790. These facts were accompanied by results of grave importance, which require illustration.