History of the Protestants of France, from the commencement of the Reformation to the present time

by G. de Félice

Rabaut-Dupuy, who presided in the legislative body in 1802, made himself the organ of the feelings of gratitude and joy of his co-religionists at the closing of the session. “Legislators,” he said, “this law of justice has been received with thankfulness by all Christians; the Protestants have recognised all its value.... Restored to the freedom of civil, political, and religious rights, now that the law organizes all creeds in a parallel manner, they will be the firmest supporters of a protecting government.”

He also said, in 1807, in a letter addressed to the Reformed of the Empire: “You, who have lived like us under the yoke of intolerance, the relict of so many persecuted generations, see and compare.—It is no longer in deserts, and at the peril of your life, that you pay to the Creator the homage which is due to Him. Our places of worship are restored to us, and every day new ones spring up. Our pastors are recognised public functionaries; they are salaried by the government; the sword of a barbarous law is no longer suspended over their heads.... Alas! those whom we have outlived, ascended the mountain of Nebo, whence they beheld the land of promise; but we alone have gone in to possess it.”

At the same time, however unanimous the Protestants of that epoch may have been in their sentiments concerning the law of Germinal, it must be acknowledged that it has in many essential points changed the constitution of the French Reformation, and has made it pay dearly for the advantage of the political equality of the religions.

In bringing the new organic articles before the legislative body, the councillor of state, Portalis, afterwards minister of worship, announced that the law had been made upon verbal or written instructions taken from the Protestants. “If it appertains,” he said, “to the laws to admit or to reject different creeds, the different creeds have an existence by themselves, which they cannot hold of the law, whose origin is not thought to take its source in human wishes.” One would thereupon suppose that the government had confined itself to interrogating the Protestants upon their articles of faith and discipline, and that it had simply sanctioned them. But we have only to compare, in order to undeceive ourselves, the law of the 18th Germinal with the rules established by the national synods.

According to the ancient order, which is the system of Calvinistic presbyterianism, religious society exists in and by itself. It has its supreme authority, its secondary authorities, its doctrine, its discipline, its means of government, and its penalties. In the new order, religious society having no longer any confession of faith officially recognised; having no power to establish another without the permission of the civil magistrate; possessing no longer any general and fixed rules outside or independent of its relations with the state, and, controlled in the conduct of its internal affairs by the secular power, having no government, in the true sense of the word; it seems to lean for its very existence on a strength that does not emanate from its own foundation.

Formerly, it was the pastors and the elders who, assembled in conferences, in provincial synods, and in national synods, sovereignly decided upon all ecclesiastical questions. They appointed ministers, tried and adjudged disputes arising in the flocks, inflicted spiritual penalties, ordered changes that were thought to be useful; directed, in short, the churches in their quality of churches, in everything that concerned piety, morals, edification, and Christian life. Under the régime of 1802, there was nothing that did not seem to originate with the temporal authority, and everything centres in it one way or another—the confirmation and removal of pastors, dogmatic decisions, modifications in discipline, the projects of ministers of worship or of the consistories, and disputes among the flocks. Does not this seem to be an essentially civil organization substituted for an essentially ecclesiastical organization?

The chief differences, which exist in the general outline, are also reproduced in the details.

The primitive element, which corresponded to that of the commune in the political society, that is to say, the individual church, having its consistory and its pastor, is suppressed, at least in its proper and distinct authority, by the articles of 1802, and replaced by the creation of the consistorial church, which is composed of a certain number of agglomerated Protestants. The five or six particular churches of which it consists, are nothing more than sections or fragments of the body, and their consistories have no legal title. It is absolutely as if all the communes in the domain of the state were suppressed with their municipal councils, and absorbed in the purely conventional existence of the cantons.

The law of the year X. concentrates the consistorial capacity in the ranks of the persons paying the largest amount of direct taxes. Twenty-five of these tax-payers nominate the first consistory. Then the consistory itself designates the notables, who are, in concert with itself, to provide for the re-elections to the vacancies. The two conditions of piety and of fortune may doubtless be found in union; but when they are not so, it is wealth that will prevail, if the legal text be strictly complied with. The mass of the faithful, or the people, according to the expression of the ancient discipline, have no right of election, of veto, nor of consent.

In the place of the provincial synods, which reckoned from thirty to forty members, and occasionally more, since each particular church of the province deputed a pastor and an elder to them, the law of Germinal instituted district synods, formed of five consistorial churches. The assembly, therefore, can consist of ten members only, and may last only six days. It has no privilege of meeting but with the permission of the government, after having informed it of the matters for discussion, and in presence of a prefect or sub-prefect. Even farther, all the decisions which emanate from these synods, of whatever description they may be, must be submitted for the approbation of the civil power. And yet, for nearly half a century, there has been, in spite of these excessive precautions, only one district synod, that of Drôme, which was convoked in 1850.