[1573] Code Civil, Liv. I. Tit. v.
[1574] In an address to the Council of State, Dec. 20th, 1813, Napoleon said, “Le sacerdoce est une sorte de mariage; le prêtre étant uni à l’église comme l’époux à son épouse, il n’y aurait aucun inconvénient à appliquer au prêtre qui se marierait la peine de la bigamie: un tel ecclésiastique ne mérite aucun sorte de considération”—Bouhier de l’Écluse, de l’État des Prêtres en France, Paris, 1842, p. 17.—Chavard (Le Célibat des Prêtres, pp. 409-10) quotes Dean Stanley as asserting, on the authority of the elder Duc de Broglie, that Pius VIII. spontaneously offered to Napoleon to permit sacerdotal marriage, but that the Emperor declined the proposal. I cannot but think, however, that there must be some mistake in this statement.
[1575] For many of the above details I am indebted to the curious but ill-digested little work—“Histoire du Mariage des Prêtres en France,” published by Grégoire in 1826. Grégoire, though a priest of the ancien régime, was a sincere and consistent republican. A member of the States General, of the Convention, and of the Council of Five Hundred, elected Bishop of Blois by the voice of a people who knew and respected him, he preserved his ardent faith through all the excesses of the Revolution, and his democratic ideas in spite of the injuries inflicted on his class in the name of the people. The sincerity and boldness of his character may be estimated by a single example. When, on the 7th of November, 1793, Gobel, Bishop of Paris, appeared before the Convention with twelve of his vicars and publicly renounced his sacred functions on the ground that hereafter there should be no other worship than that of liberty and equality, almost all the ecclesiastics in the Convention followed his example. To hold back at such a moment was dangerous in the extreme, yet Grégoire had the hardihood to utter a defiant protest. “I am a Catholic by conviction and by feeling, a priest by choice, a bishop by the voice of the people, but not from the people nor from you do I derive my mission, and I will not be forced to an abjuration.” To him perhaps more than to any one else is attributable the skilful management which carried the church through the storms and persecutions of the Revolution, but the same inflexibility which maintained his Catholicism through the ordeal of 1793 and 1794 caused him to stand by his republicanism long after it had gone out of fashion. He was not to be bought or bullied; the Legitimist was less tolerant than the Terrorist, and under the Restoration he was reduced almost to absolute indigence. Together with the other constitutional bishops, he had been compelled to resign his bishopric by order of the pope after the Concordat of 1801, and he was too dangerous a man to be rewarded for his invaluable services to religion. He died in 1831.
[1576] Grégoire, op. cit. p. 102.
[1577] Bouhier de l’Écluse, op. cit. It was apparently this case which led to the publication, under date of Monaco, 1829, of the “Considerazioni imparziali sopra la legge del Celibato Ecclesiastico, proposte dal Professore C. A. P.”—a tolerably well written summary of the arguments against the rule.
[1578] Talmadge’s Letters from Florence, p. 166.
[1579] Chavard, Le Célibat des Prêtres, pp. 525-30.
[1580] J. M. Cayla, Les Curés mariés par le Concile, Paris, 1869.
[1581] Encyc. Mirari vos.
[1582] Encyc. Qui pluribus.