VI.
Three causes of uneasiness agitated men's minds at the moment when the Assembly opened its sittings—the clergy, emigration, and impending war.
The Constituent Assembly had committed a gross error in stopping at a half measure in reforming the clergy in France. Mirabeau himself had been weak on this question. The Revolution was at the bottom only the legitimate rising of political liberty against despotism, and of religious liberty against the legal domination of Catholicism, because a political institution. The constitution had emancipated the citizens, and it was necessary to emancipate the faithful, and to claim consciences for the state, in order to restore them to themselves, to individual reason, and to God. This is what philosophy desired, which is only the rational expression of the mind's impulses.
The philosophers of the Constituent Assembly receded before the difficulties of this labour. Instead of an emancipation, they made a compact with the power of the clergy, the dreaded influences of the court of Rome, and the inveterate habits of the people. They contented themselves with relaxing the chain which bound the state to the church. Their duty was to have snapped it asunder. The throne was chained to the altar, they desired to chain the altar to the throne. It was only displacing tyranny,—oppressing conscience by law instead of oppressing the law by conscience.
The civil constitution of the clergy was the expression of this reciprocal false position. The clergy was deprived of these endowments in landed estates, which decimated property and population in France. They deprived it of its benefices, its abbeys, and its tithes—the altar's feudality. It received in lieu an endowment in salaries levied on the taxes. As the condition of this arrangement, which gave to the working clergy an existence, influence, and a powerful body of ministers of worship paid by the state, they required the clergy to take the oath of the constitution. This constitution comprised articles which affected the spiritual supremacy and administrative privileges of the court of Rome. Catholicism became alarmed and protested; consciences were disturbed. The Revolution, until then exclusively political, became schism in the eyes of a portion of the clergy and the faithful. Amongst the bishops and the priests, some took the civil oath, which was the guarantee of their existence; others refused, or, after having taken it, retracted. This gave rise to trouble in many minds, agitation in consciences, division in the temples. The great majority of parishes had two ministers,—the one a constitutional priest, salaried and protected by the government, the other refractory, refusing the oath, deprived of his income, driven from the church, and raising altar opposing altar in some clandestine chapel, or in the open field. These two ministers of the same worship excommunicated each other, the one in the name of the constitution, and the other in the name of the Pope and of the church. The population was also divided according to the greater or lesser degree of revolutionary spirit prevailing in the province. In cities and the more enlightened districts the constitutional worship was exercised almost without dispute. In the open country and the less civilised departments, the priest who had not taken the oath became a consecrated tribune, who at the foot of the altar, or in the elevation of the pulpit, agitated the people and inspired it, in all the horror of a constitutional and schismatic priesthood, with hatred of the government which protected it. This was not actually persecution or civil war, but the sure prelude to both.
The king had signed with repugnance and even constraint the civil constitution of the clergy: but he had done so only as king, and reserving to himself his liberty and the faith of his conscience. He was Christian and Catholic in all the simplicity of the Gospel, and in all the humility of obedience to the church. The reproaches he had received from Rome for having ratified by his weakness the schism in France, wounded his conscience and distracted his mind. He had never ceased to negotiate officially or secretly with the pope, in order to obtain from the head of the church either an indulgent concession to the necessities of religion in France, or prudent temporising. It was on these terms only that he could restore peace to his mind. Inexorable Rome had only granted him its pity. Fulminating bulls were in circulation by the hands of nonjuring priests, cast at the heads of the population, and only stopping at the foot of the throne. The king trembled, to see them burst one day on his own head.
On the other hand, he felt that the nation, of which he was the legitimate head, would never forgive him for sacrificing it to his religious scruples. Placed thus between the menaces of Heaven and the threats of his own people, he procrastinated with all his might the denunciations of Rome and the votes of the Assembly. The Constitutional Assembly understood this anxiety of the king's feelings and the dangers of persecution. It had given time to the king, and displayed forbearance to men's consciences: it had not intermeddled with the faith of the simple believer, but left each at liberty to pray with the priest of his choice. The king had been the first to avail himself of this liberty, and had not thrown open the chapel of the Tuileries to the constitutional worship. The choice of his confessor sufficiently indicated the choice of his conscience. The man in him protested against the political necessities which oppressed the monarch. The Girondists wished to compel him to declare himself. If he yielded to them, he infringed upon his dignity; if he resisted, he lost the remaining shreds of his popularity. To compel him to decide was a great point for the Girondists.
The public feeling served their designs. Religious troubles began to assume a political character. In ancient Brittany the conforming priests became objects of the people's horror, and they fled from contact with them. The nonjuring priests all retained their flocks. On Sundays large bodies of many thousand souls were seen to follow their ancient pastors, and go to chapels situated two or three leagues from any dwelling, or in concealed hermitages, sanctuaries which had never been stained by the ceremonies of a constitutional worship. At Caen blood had even flowed in the very cathedral, where the nonjuring priest disputed the altar with the conforming pastor. The same disorders threatened to spread over all parts of the kingdom: every where were to be seen two pastors and a divided flock. Resentment, which already displayed itself in insult, of necessity soon arrived at bloodshed. The one half of the people, disturbed in its faith, reverted to the aristocracy out of love for its worship. The Assembly must thus alienate the popular element, which it had so recently caused to triumph over royalty. It was highly necessary to provide against this unexpected peril.
There were only two means of extinguishing this flame at its source: either by freedom of conscience, stoutly maintained by the executive power, or persecution of the ministers of the ancient faith. The undecided Assembly wavered between these two parties. On a report of Gallois and Gensonné, sent as commissioners into the departments of the west, to investigate the causes of the agitation and the feelings of the people, the discussion commenced. Fauchet, a conforming priest and celebrated preacher, subsequently constitutional bishop of Calvados, opened the debate. He was one of those men who, beneath an ecclesiastical garb, conceal the heart of a philosopher. Reformers from feeling, priests by the state, sensible of the wide discrepancy between their opinions and their character, a national religion, a revolutionary Christianity, was the sole means remaining to them to reconcile their interest and their policy: their faith, wholly academic, was only a religious convenience. They desired to transform Catholicism insensibly into a moral code, of which the dogma was now but a symbol, which, in the people's eyes, comprised sacred truths; and which, gradually stripped of holy fictions, would allow the human understanding to glide insensibly into a symbolic deism, whose temple should be flesh, and whose Christ should be hardly more than Plato rendered a divinity. Fauchet had the daring mind of a sectarian and the intrepidity of a man of resolution.