The Sunday following his death was that upon which the Schismatic Priests said their first Masses in every parish of the city.
I have not space to reiterate in this volume the vast issue involved. I have sufficiently emphasised and shall further emphasise the profound truth that every Civil Revolution is theological at bottom, because, at bottom, it must be based upon a divergence of philosophy: a divergence between the philosophies of the old order and the new. A chance test of philosophy thrown at random into the Revolutionary movement had separated men suddenly and was rifting the State asunder; for a fortnight Paris raged upon the Nationalisation of the Church.
I will not detain the reader. There was here one of those double duties where the wisest get most bewildered and the most sincere go the furthest astray. Let the reader remember (difficult as it is to do so in the religious atmosphere of our time) that with the educated of that day Religion was dead—with the populace of Paris even more dead. The thing was a mere emblem. Its last little flickering light (which we have since seen to grow to so great a flame) was not comprehended, save as a political institution, by the great bulk of the Parliament, by the professions, by the workers; the very beggars in the street despised the Faith, and the shrines were empty. You were a priest or one of the very few Mass-goers? Then you were suspected of supporting the old forms of civil polity! After the Civil Constitution of the Clergy you deliberately refused to take a reasonable oath to the Constitution and the new-born Liberty of Men? Then you were a traitor, and a silly traitor at that. Let it be remembered that at this moment Religion had no warriors. All the vast rally of the nineteenth century was undreamt of. The bishops were place-hunters full of evil living;[[20]] the Creed an empty historic formula: a convention like the conventions of “party” in England to-day. The reader must see this, in spite of all the nineteenth century may have taught him to the contrary, or he will never see the Revolution.
[20]. We have seen Mgr. of Narbonne. His mistress was his own niece.
In such a crisis two factors, quite uncomprehended, stood like rocks—they were but small minorities: so are rocks small accidents in the general sea. The one was that little group of people who still practised the united Catholic Faith—and it just so happened that of these the King was one, his sister another, and—from the beginning in her light, easy way, latterly with increasing depth—his wife a third; the other factor was the mass of the humbler Clergy. They felt as by an instinct the note of unity; they refused to subscribe: to all, or nearly all, the bishops it was—for the most part—a matter of rank and policy to resist the Bill; to the two-thirds of the country Clergy to resist the Law was loyalty to our Lord.
What the King felt in that quarrel we all know. Marie Antoinette, in spite of her devotion, was never able to neglect the human, the purely temporal, the vulgarly political aspect of the quarrel. Her husband, sincerely sympathetic though he was with the French temper, thought mainly of the Divine interests in the matter; though he thought slowly and badly, that was his thought. The populace, the politicians—all the world—saw nothing whatsoever in the Catholic resistance but a dodge devised by privilege to put a spoke in the wheel of the Revolution. And Paris especially, having for so long abandoned religion, raged round the refusal of the priests.
It is pitiful to read how small a rally the Faith could make! One chapel in all Paris was hired for the true Mass to be said therein, and handfuls here and there put forward a timid claim to approach the only altar which Rome acknowledged. I say it for the third or for the fourth time, to-day we cannot understand these things, for the Resurrection of the Catholic Church stands between us and them; but to this Paris on that Lenten Sunday, the 3rd of April 1791, the presence of the Schismatic Clergy, each in his parish, was a plain challenge launched against the Crown, and it was nothing more: the attachment of the Court to the Roman Unity seemed to Paris a mere political intrigue, odious and unnational and stinking of treason. For a fortnight the Parisian anger raged, and the 17th of April was Palm Sunday.
It has become a rule for those who are in communion with the Catholic Church that they should receive the Sacraments at least once a year, and that at Easter or thereabouts; a rule defined, if I am not mistaken, during the struggle with the Lutheran—that latest of the great heresies. This rule the King had satisfied, and on that Palm Sunday had taken Communion in his Chapel from a priest who had not sworn the Civic Oath. All the customary talk of some religious necessity by which he was in conscience compelled to leave Paris is balderdash. The attempt he made the next day, the Monday, to leave the city in order to spend the Easter days in the suburban palace of St. Cloud was purely political. Religion had no part therein. It cannot be determined to-day—unless indeed further evidence should come before us—how much the mere desire to prove a liberty of action on the part of the Court, how much a sort of challenge sure to be defeated, how much a hope that escape would be easier from a suburban point, entered into this plan; but it is quite certain that the Body of the Lord and His Resurrection had nothing whatsoever to do with it. And when upon Monday of Holy Week, the 18th of April, a little before noon, the royal family got into their carriage to drive, as was their constitutional right, to the neighbouring palace those few miles away where the populace could not surround them, a crowd, organised as were these crowds of the Revolution, held them all around. The scene has been repeated too often to be repeated here; one character marks it—it is one of profound importance—for the first time armed and disciplined force was wholly upon the side of the Revolution.
The Militia which La Fayette had formed were with the people, and the common will of that great mob was present also in the men who bore arms. It had not been so in any of the movements antecedent to this, unless we admit the sharp national anger of the loose and almost civilian “French Guards” against the hired German Cavalry in July 1789. Hitherto there had been a distinction between the people at large and that portion of the people which was armed and disciplined, a distinction which now broke down because to the French temper on this Monday of Holy Week 1791 the issue was too grave for such distinctions. The national King must be kept in Paris; the people would not let him leave, much as a man will not let his money go out of his sight or out of his control.