VII.
The Protestants took no active part, as Protestants, in the Revolution of 1830; but they generally hailed its occurrence with joy, because it brought them new pledges of security for the free exercise of their worship. We have witnessed how their vexations, annoyances, and exclusions were multiplied towards the end of the reign of Charles X.; and if their political rights, consecrated by the Charter, had fallen beneath the ordinances of July, to what perilous attacks might not religious liberty, which rested upon the same foundation, have been exposed? Many persons believed [that it would have been so exposed]; and without crediting the reports circulated at the time among the popular masses concerning projects of persecution against the Protestants, it is probable that their position would have been greatly aggravated.
This explains the satisfaction which they exhibited at the news of the three days’ victory. Yet this contentment was calm, reserved, and without the least thought of reprisals, and perfect harmony between the two Churches was nowhere disturbed, except at Nismes, where it seems as if the religious communions must always experience the consequences of political events.
The Protestants were not the aggressors. Far from this; for in the very first days of the month of August, an appeal to union was published, having the full adhesion of all the respectable portion of the community, without distinction of creed, and the pastors went from family to family, everywhere recommending forgetfulness of the crimes of 1815. Their voice was listened to. A multitude of Protestant workmen, accompanied by a great number of (Roman) Catholics, entered the public square, pronouncing words of reconciliation, and formed a procession that marched round the city, uttering cries of Vive l’union! Vive la paix! (Long live union! Long live peace!)
But some rioters of the lowest class of the people, led partly by fanaticism, and partly, perhaps, by the dread of the account that justice might require of them for their past excesses, returned to Nismes, on the 15th of August, with suspicious-looking strangers, after having sought a refuge at Beaucaire, and their presence was the occasion of unfortunate collisions. Happily several companies of courageous countrymen came down from Vaunage, and intimidated this seditious band. On the side of the (Roman) Catholics two were killed and six wounded, and on the side of the Protestants six were killed and twenty-eight wounded. The last had therefore furnished three or four times more victims than they had made; the French Reformation had been accustomed to suffer in this way for three hundred years past.
In revising the Charter, the Chamber of Deputies abrogated the 6th article, upon the religion of the state, and re-adopted the terms of the Concordat upon the religion of the majority of the French. In doing this, there was much less desire to give satisfaction to Protestantism than to the opinion excited against the usurpation of the clerical power. M. Dupin explained this very clearly in his report. “The expressions of the 6th article,” he said, “have awakened impudent pretensions to an exclusive domination, as much opposed to religion as to the freedom of conscience and the peace of the kingdom. A threefold interest demands the erasure of terms which, without adding anything to what religion will always possess of the holy and venerable in our eyes, had become the source of many errors, and, finally, caused the disgrace of the reigning family, and brought the state to the brink of ruin.”
Two months afterwards, M. Dupin, then procurator-general at the Court of Cassation, who has since maintained different opinions, demanded true conditions of religious liberty. The question was still the same; namely, whether it required the permission of the authorities or a simple preliminary declaration, before opening a new place of worship and forming regular assemblies of Protestants in communes, where none had ever before existed. It was the important question of a preventative or a repressive régime, of censorship or of liberty, of the arbitrary intervention of power in religious matters, or of the independence of believers.
M. Dupin also said, respecting the affair of the Protestants of Levergies (and his words are still worthy of quotation), “He who wills the end, wills the means. What avails a proclaimed liberty, if the means of its enjoyment be denied? What! The free exercise of worship is permitted, and at the same time there is a prohibition to exercise it in every place! The exercise is to be interdicted in the streets and public squares: that would shock other creeds. And when its exercise is asked for in any special edifice, it is forbidden! Such liberty is a mockery! What is the obligation thus imposed of obtaining permission to celebrate one’s worship, but tantamount to the preliminary censorship applied to the freedom of the press?... In the actual condition of our constitutional legislation, I can conceive that the administrative authority has a right to keep a watch upon the exercise of worship, as upon every other kind of assembly; a right to inquire into and punish offences arising out of this exercise, and by this very fact the utility of a preliminary declaration to prepare the authorities. But I can admit neither the peremptory right of refusal, nor the silence equivalent to this refusal, as a lawful means of preventing citizens from exercising their religious worship with full liberty. This liberty is not subject to preliminary authorization; it is not subordinated to optional permission any more for those, who are not Catholics, than for those who are so.” (October, 1830.)
The external condition of the French Reformation seemed therefore more favourable than it had ever been, and we may read in the Protestant journals of the day how full of hope they were. There were to be no longer any direct or indirect inequality between the two communions, or obstacles of any kind to the manifestation of the Reformed faith! There was thenceforth to be an end to the necessity of waiting about the antechamber of priest-led prefects to solicit their authorization in ecclesiastical matters, or about the office of a minister, governed by political calculations! The ill-will of a mayor or a royal procurator was not to be any longer sufficient to dissolve religious meetings, and the tribunals would not punish the prayers of a few peaceable men out-numbering the perilous figure of twenty persons, as if they were crimes! We shall soon see how completely their expectations were deceived.
Many Protestants thought that the occasion was propitious for demanding the alteration of the law of the 18th Germinal. It appeared to them that a government sprung from the triumph of liberal ideas could not, without self-contradiction, maintain a law which had been inspired by an excessive reaction against all liberty. Complaints and petitions to this effect were presented to the ministers of Louis Philippe; but they were thrown aside. If the popular origin of the government were a means, it was also an obstacle. The new power, conscious of its weakness and want of solidity, would not increase the difficulties of its position by meddling with the ecclesiastical questions, and it adopted as a rule of conduct in these matters, to make no change unless under absolute necessity.
Perhaps it would have been The government, therefore, refused to make the least change in the law. Whereupon another question presented itself. Leaving the organic articles intact, was it not possible to have deduced more liberal applications from them, and to have given a less dependent position to Protestantism? The intervention of the legislative bodies was not necessary in this case; the discussion might be carried on with closed doors; the consistories and the minister of public worship might arrange everything, and a simple royal ordinance would suffice. Several consistories insisted upon this point; pastoral conferences drew up programmes for the administration of the Reformed churches; the government itself nominated a commission to prepare the draft of the ordinance, and there was finally a prospect of something favourable to the Reformed. Expectation was again deceived. The new regulation drawn up by this commission, instead of extending liberty, seemed to restrict it to still narrower limits than before; and the minister of public worship encountered the most energetic opposition from the consistories, when he consulted them upon it. The government ceased to do any more, and the régime of 1802 remained in its entirety. In other respects, according to the genius of the middle classes, who directed public affairs at this time, the material, or pecuniary side of the situation of the Reformed churches, not only suffered no attack, but was sensibly ameliorated. The majority of the pastors received augmented allowances, new places were created, and funds for building places of worship and opening schools were granted with liberality. All this is mentioned with gratitude. Nothing was refused that money can accomplish for the development of a religious communion. It must also be said in honour of Louis Philippe’s government, that it never sought to mix itself up with the internal questions of the churches, when its intervention was not sought by the churches themselves. If it decreed the removal of some pastors, and did other acts which ought not to depend upon the decision of the civil power, it was unwillingly, and after long delays [that it did so]. Protestantism might have been much more free under this reign, if it had seriously striven to become so. But beyond the official region, barriers and fetters of all kinds soon reappeared, as in the reign of Charles X.; sometimes, indeed, there seemed to be a stronger desire to offer obstruction, and scarcely was one cause of litigation on account of religion settled, before another sprung up. After the Revolution, the most zealous of the Protestants judged that the moment had arrived for multiplying their labours of proselytism. Considered from the point of view of liberty and the equality of creeds, this was their right; and considered from that of their personal convictions, it was their duty. When proselytism employs such means only as are peaceful and authorized by universal morality, no human power can legitimately interdict it. Circumstances appeared favourable. Public opinion was deeply hostile to the clerical party; it accused them of having deceived the conscience of an aged king to make him violate his oath, and overthrow the liberties of the nation. The external signs of (Roman) Catholicism fell in every direction before the popular cry; the churches were deserted, and the priests felt so well the discredit in which they stood, that for several years they kept themselves aloof, never showing themselves except when absolutely obliged, never raising a dispute, uttering a word, or asking anything but to be forgotten at the foot of their altars. This was not all. Philosophical systems and social theories were boldly propounded to the country under the sacred name of religion, and were preached with great applause. Saint Simonism, among others, had its journals, its public meetings, its worship, its hierarchy, its missionaries, its committees of propagandism: we mention the fact without contesting the right: the Saint Simonians were entitled to liberty, to as much liberty as the Reformed and the (Roman) Catholics, of gaining proselytes by the channel of persuasion. It may be easily imagined that the fervent members of the Protestant faith would not consent to be shut up in their places of worship, while antichristian and vicious doctrines, in their eyes, were openly propagated. Conscience imposed upon them the imperious and holy obligation of addressing themselves immediately both to the deserters from the (Roman) Catholic church—an immense multitude, wandering hither and thither without spiritual guides—and to the disciples of the schools, who had, as it appeared to them, but the empty appearance of a religion. It was not so much an idea of aggression against (Roman) Catholicism as a testimony of sympathy for the souls which had no longer religious belief of any kind. They had also another object in view, of secondary consequence to the religious conscience, but still important,—this was to strengthen order, threatened by the political revolutions. These Protestants believed that a vague spiritualism could not imbue a free people with those morals which must sustain the noble burthen of the laws, and that this required a strong and positive faith, the faith, which they themselves possessed. Hence the origin, for a part of French Protestantism, of a whole series of publications, associations, and Christian institutions, in the general sense of this word. A journal, rearing alone the standard of the Gospel, the Sower, appeared in the month of September, 1831. Chapels, unsalaried by the State, were opened about the same time at Paris and elsewhere. In 1833 an evangelical society was established, with the intention of announcing to all indifferently, what they held to be the essential truths of Christianity. We might mention some other institutions conceived in the same spirit. These labours were not trammelled in the beginning. But the (Roman) Catholic clergy having gradually recovered their strength, the government thought it expedient to make approaches to them, and endeavoured to conciliate them by favours of a nature alien to the establishment of 1830. It is not our duty to examine whether the government of Louis Philippe did not lose more than it gained by this policy. What it is important for us to say is, that it impeded the work of proselytism according to the measure of its relations with the sacerdotal body. Considering certain acts and prosecutions, it might even have been supposed, that there was something passing analogous to what had been seen in former times. All the historians have remarked that Henry IV., on his advent to the throne, and Louis XIV., when he had disputed with the Holy See, redoubled their severity against the Protestants, because they felt it incumbent upon them to wipe away the suspicion of heresy. The same cause, in its due proportion, and allowing for the great difference of the periods, produced similar effects under the reign of Louis Philippe. This prince had to dissipate the distrust of the priests, to win their sympathies; and in one sense, he dreaded more than ever Charles X. had done, giving Protestants a free field, because the clergy would have been more prompt in accusing him of connivance with them. The marriage of the heir to the crown with a Protestant prince (a descendant, it is said, of Admiral Coligny), instead of improving matters, made them worse. Things were now carried farther than instituting suits against those, who opened new places of worship, than invoking the restrictive articles of the penal code against them, as under the Restoration, and applying the dispositions of the law of 1834 respecting associations, although the minister of justice and public worship had solemnly promised the Chambers not to turn them against religious societies; but even the right of controversy, that was exercised under the régime of the Edict of Nantes, was called in question, and a certain prefectorial order actually assumed to fix—as in the time of Charles IX. and Catherine de Medicis—the number of persons authorized to participate in the Protestant religion. Even more, legally constituted Protestantism had to maintain contests to preserve the right of visiting its own members in the hospitals, prisons, and other public establishments; and the authorities proceeded sometimes so far as to impose arbitrary bounds to preaching among the scattered Protestants. These iniquitous proceedings, which it would be just to attribute more particularly to subordinate and ignorant functionaries, provoked energetic remonstrances. A society was formed, under the name of the general interests of French Protestantism, to protect the freedom and equality of creeds. All the pastors of Paris, without exception, complained of the conduct of the civil power. The national tribunal resounded with these grievances. Some eminent men of the Protestant communion, MM. Pelet de la Lozère, François Delessert, and Agénor de Gasparin, were the medium of communication; the Opposition supported them, and the minister promised that the Reformed should be more justly treated. He kept his word in some respects. Legal Protestantism might accomplish its mission among its people, without as well as within; but evangelical proselytism met with never-ceasing obstacles until the end of the royalty of 1830. It is sad to say, that not a single government in France, whatever may have been its origin, has yet known how to sanction the practical exercise of religious liberty in its full extent. We may be unbelievers, but we are not yet free to proclaim our faith, or to celebrate our worship according to our consciences. Notwithstanding the resistance of the government, the Reformed doctrine gained ground in many places. A certain number of (Roman) Catholics, and even some priests, embraced Protestantism. New churches were added to the old ones, some attaching themselves to the established organization, others preserving an independent position. Yet the importance of these successes must not be exaggerated. In our times the vital forces of the people seem to be absorbed by political pre-occupations and material interests, and it must be confessed that the great majority of Frenchmen have too little faith to change their religion. The attempt at proselytism on either side would, as a natural consequence, increase the ardour of controversy. This argumentative warfare was in effect carried on without cessation; and we might cite a long list of writings upon matters disputed between the two communions, from 1830 to 1848. Some of these publications are dressed in a popular form that has gained them numerous readers. The same epoch affords examples, from time to time, of an odious intolerance; but they were only private and isolated acts. These were the abduction of young girls, refusal of burial in the communal cemetery, profanation of tombs, sequestration of the sick, accusations against several agents of the evangelical societies. The hand of the priests and the nuns was often suspected, and in certain cases was detected with incontrovertible evidence. The responsibility of these acts must fall only upon some fanatical and ignorant individuals. The respectable people of the (Roman) Catholic communion were indignant at them, and the judiciary or administrative authority protected the rights of the minority, although it deserves the reproach of pursuing and punishing the true criminals too leniently. The last years of the reign of Louis Philippe were disturbed by an affair which deeply moved the Protestants of France, although it was connected in a very indirect manner with their relations to the State. The armed invasion of the island of Tahiti revealed to the world the extreme complaisance of the government for the clerical party, and at the same time the danger of subordinating the temporal power to the maxims of the Romish church. This attack upon the rights of nations narrowly escaped rupturing the alliance with England, compromised the name of France before all civilized nations, sensibly augmented the strength of the opposition, and threw the ministry into difficulties of embarrassment, from which it was never able to recover itself A lesson so severe and so grave ought not to be lost!