Pope Pius VI objected. The clerical stipulations of the new constitution were in direct violation of every solemn agreement that had been concluded between France and the Holy See since the year 1516. But the Assembly was in no mood to bother about such little trifles as precedents and treaties. The clergy must either swear allegiance to this decree or resign their positions and starve to death. A few bishops and a few priests accepted what seemed inevitable. They crossed their fingers and went through the formality of an oath. But by far the greater number, being honest men, refused to perjure themselves and taking a leaf out of the book of those Huguenots whom they had persecuted during so many years, they began to say mass in deserted stables and to give communion in pigsties, to preach their sermons behind country hedges and to pay clandestine visits to the homes of their former parishioners in the middle of the night.
Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the Protestants had done under similar circumstances, for France was too hopelessly disorganized to take more than very perfunctory measures against the enemies of her constitution. And as none of them seemed to run the risk of the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to ask that they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they were popularly called, be officially recognized as one of the “tolerated sects” and be accorded those privileges which during the previous three centuries they had so persistently refused to grant to their compatriots of the Calvinist faith.
The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the safe distance of the year 1925, was not without a certain grim humor. But no definite decision was taken, for the Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under the denomination of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court, combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies, caused a panic which in less than a week spread from the coast of Belgium to the shores of the Mediterranean and which was responsible for that series of wholesale assassinations which raged from the second to the seventh of September of the year 1792.
From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate into a reign of terror.
The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers came to naught when a starving populace began to suspect that their own leaders were engaged in a gigantic plot to sell the country to the enemy. The explosion which then followed is common history. That the conduct of affairs in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the hands of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which every honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But that the principal actor in the drama should have been a prig, a model-citizen, a hundred-percenting paragon of Virtue, that indeed was something which no one had been able to foresee.
When France began to understand the true nature of her new master, it was too late, as those who tried in vain to utter their belated words of warning from the top of a scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have testified.
Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point of view of politics and economics and social organization. But not until the historian shall turn psychologist or the psychologist shall turn historian shall we really be able to explain and understand those dark forces that shape the destinies of nations in their hour of agony and travail.
There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness and light. There are those who maintain that the human race respects only one thing, brute force. Some hundred years from now, I may be able to make a choice. This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest of all experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French revolution, was a noisy apotheosis of violence.
Those who had tried to prepare for a more humane world by way of reason were either dead or were put to death by the very people whom they had helped to glory. And with the Voltaires and Diderots and the Turgots and the Condorcets out of the way, the untutored apostles of the New Perfection were left the undisputed masters of their country’s fate. What a ghastly mess they made of their high mission!
During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the out-and-out enemies of religion, those who had some particular reason to detest the very symbols of Christianity; those who in some silent and hidden way had suffered so deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that the smell of incense made them turn pale with long forgotten rage. Together with a few others who believed that they could disprove the existence of a personal God with the help of mathematics and chemistry, they set about to destroy the Church and all her works. A hopeless and at best an ungrateful task but it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary psychology that the normal becomes abnormal and the impossible is turned into an every day occurrence. Hence a paper decree of the Convention abolishing the old Christian calendar; abolishing all saints’ days; abolishing Christmas and Easter; abolishing weeks and months and re-dividing the year into periods of ten days each with a new pagan Sabbath on every tenth. Hence another paper pronunciamento which abolished the worship of God and left the universe without a master.