Part 2

If the revolutionists had been content with secularising church property, they could not well have been convicted of attacking religion. But they interfered in the church's internal arrangements and discipline, and even altered its ritual; and its dignitaries naturally proclaimed that the foundations of religion were shaken. Therefore the ordinary priest hardly ever dared take the oath of allegiance to the constitution. The small yearly payment received from the state by those who did so was likened to Judas Iscariot's blood-money, although in times past it had been considered just that bishops should own palaces and pleasure-grounds, and have luxuries of every kind at their disposal, while the lower orders of the clergy were positively starving.

As a result of the new order of things many riotous and many comic scenes were witnessed in the provinces. In one of Camille Desmoulins' newspaper articles we find an amusing description of the compulsory parting between a village curé and his charge. Coming out at the church door one Sunday after mass, Monsieur le Curé is surprised by the sight of a coach loaded with all his belongings. On the top sits Javotte, his housekeeper, to whom the schoolmaster, with tears in his eyes, is saying farewell. The curé is handed into the carriage amidst cries of: "Good-bye, good-bye, your Reverence!" and off he has to go, though he rages and storms as long as his church steeple is in sight. In other places, however, the priest was forced to take the oath with the bayonet at his breast; and in one instance a recalcitrant was shot dead in his pulpit. But if dissident priests were occasionally maltreated, the treatment meted out by these priests to their opponents was infinitely worse. They taught the peasants that the new constitution, which did not in reality interfere with religion at all, was a work of the devil. They impressed upon their congregations that it was a mortal sin to take the sacrament from the hands of a priest who had sworn allegiance to the government, that the children of parents who had been married by such priests were illegitimate, nay, that the curse of God rested on them. One priest who had taken the oath was stoned in his church, another was hanged from the chancel lamp. The churches which had been closed by order of the National Assembly were broken open again. In certain departments murderous bands of devotees, led by priests, marched about armed with guns and spears. The situation was worst in Brittany. When the Breton peasant who had gone many miles to hear mass said by a true, _i.e._ non-juring priest, on his return met a dozen or so of his neighbours coming out of his own church, where they had been comfortably attending the ministrations of the new government curé, he was so infuriated that he felt justified in committing any of the outrages to which the church incited him.

By the time the Legislative Assembly met, there were no longer any Estates. The nobles had emigrated, and the exiled ecclesiastical dignitaries were imploring assistance at foreign courts. The lower ranks of the clergy, inspired by anti-revolutionary fanaticism, were inflaming the ignorant multitude. The debates now held in the Assembly were very different in tone from those of the old days. Now the standing grievance against religion was the naïvely formulated one that it did not harmonise with the constitution, and that against the clergy, that their one aim was to recover their property. The lies and violence of the priests had stirred up a feeling of great bitterness against them. A few conciliatory voices were heard, such as that of André Chénier, who maintained that the priests did not trouble the state when the state did not interfere with them, or Talleyrand, who insisted that, as no form of religion was prescribed by law, neither should any be prohibited by law; but Voltairean indignation was long the order of the day.

These were the halcyon days of the Girondists, and the Girondists were the practical expression of the ideas of Voltaire.

In a public declaration drawn up by their famous leader, Vergniaud, we read: "The rebellious priests are preparing a revolt against the constitution; these insolent myrmidons of absolutism are supplicating all the sovereigns of Europe for money and soldiers wherewith to reconquer the sceptre of France." Roland, as Minister of the Interior, said: "Mutinous and hypocritical priests, concealing their plans and their passions under the sacred veil of religion, do not hesitate to excite fanaticism and to arm their misguided fellow-citizens with the sword of intolerance." When the proposal to banish the priests was under discussion, Vergniaud spoke, half jestingly, half seriously, of the iniquity of bringing evil upon other countries by sending them such a gift. "Generally speaking," he maintained, "nothing can be more immoral than that one country should send into another the criminals of whom it desires to be rid." But he comforts himself with the idea that in Italy they will be received as saints, and that "in this gift of living saints which we are sending him, the Pope will recognise a humble attempt to express our gratitude for all the arms, legs, and other relics of dead saints with which he has favoured our pious credulity during the centuries gone by."

"Yes," cries Isnard, the future President of the Convention, "let us send these plague-stricken creatures to the hospitals of Italy." And he adds that when a priest is depraved, he is never partly, but always wholly depraved, that to forgive crimes is the same as to commit them, that an end must be put to the existing state of matters, and that the enemies of the Revolution are themselves compelling the Revolution to crush them. From his lips issue for the first time the terrible words which were to be echoed and re-echoed times without number in days to come: "There is no need of proofs." That is to say, all priests accused were at once to be banished.

And when the fear was expressed that such proceedings would result in civil war, the noted Girondist, Guadet, a disciple of Holbach, reassured the Assembly with a speech containing the following assertion: "Every one knows that a priest is as cowardly as he is covetous, that he wields no weapons but those of superstition, and that, having fought nowhere but in the theological prize-ring, he is a nonentity on the field of battle." It was soon seen how mistaken, in this matter at least, Guadet and his sympathisers were, and what bold, enthusiastic leaders the priests made in the sanguinary civil war which ensued.

Things reached such a pitch that speakers actually began to excuse themselves when they were obliged to address the Assembly on church matters. François de Nantes (as spokesman of a committee, be it noted) declares: "Our one consolation in being obliged to take up your time with the discussion of church matters is the hope that the measures you will take will prevent the necessity of your ever hearing of them again." His whole speech is a tissue of audacities.

These sentiments were shared by high and low. One of Louis XVI.'s ministers, the insolent, high-handed Cahier de Gerville, said one day, on leaving the council chamber, to his colleague Molleville, who noted down the expression in his Memoirs: "I wish I had these damned vermin, the clergy of all lands, between my fingers, that I might squeeze them all to death at once." But the spirit of the Revolution found temperate, dignified expression in a letter from the Republic to the Pope, which a woman had been commissioned to write. It is addressed to "The Prince-Bishop in Rome." In the name of the Republic Madame Roland writes: "High-priest of the Roman church, sovereign of a state which is slipping out of your hands, know that the only possible way in which you can preserve state and church is by making a disinterested confession and proclamation of those gospel principles which breathe a spirit of the purest democracy, the tenderest humanity, and the most perfect equality--principles with which Christ's representatives have adorned themselves only for the purpose of supporting and increasing a sovereign power which is now falling to pieces from decrepitude. The age of ignorance is past."

But such language as this is quite out of keeping with what was generally spoken and written. The period of calm conviction was at an end, that of unbridled passions had begun. The passions followed in the track of the convictions. Hatred of Catholicism reached its climax; it broke out in one great flame all over France. Those were the golden days of the Clubs.

The Cordelier Club held its meetings in the chapel of a monastery. All the paintings, tapestries, and carvings were torn down; nothing but the skeleton of the church remained. The president's seat was in the chancel, where the rain blew in through the broken panes of the east window. His table was composed of joiners' benches; on it lay a row of red caps, and whoever wished to speak had to put on one of these. Behind him was a statue of Liberty with broken instruments of torture in her hands. Planks, fragments of stalls, of church benches, or of shattered images provided seats for a dirty, wild audience in ragged _carmagnoles_ (as their jackets were called), shouldering spears, or sitting with their bare arms crossed. The orators spoke boldly and to the point; everything was called by its plainest name; an indecent word or audacious gesture roused applause. They were often interrupted by opponents, and at times by the screeching of small owls, which had been driven from their homes under the monastery roof, and now flew in and out through the broken windows seeking food. These were not to be silenced by the chairman's bell; they were sometimes shot, and fell fluttering and bleeding among the crowd. Among the speakers were Danton, Marat, and Camille Desmoulins--the amiable, witty Camille, whose moderation brought upon him the charge of hypocrisy, and who even before the tribunal of the Revolution spoke of the _sans-culotte_, Jesus. Camille had private reasons for his hatred of the priests. When, in December 1790, he wished to marry his beloved Lucile, without doubt one of the purest and most beautiful of the female characters of the Revolution, no priest would perform the ceremony because he had written in a newspaper article that the religion of Mahomet was as intelligible as the religion of Jesus. He was obliged to recant this assertion and to go to confession before he could be married. But now he made amends. In his newspaper, _Le vieux Cordelier_, he wrote: "The whole subject of priests and of religions is disposed of when it has been said that they resemble each other in all being equally absurd, and when it has been instanced that the Tatars eat the excrement of the Grand Lama as the greatest delicacy. There is no fool too foolish to be honoured as Jupiter's equal. The Mongolians worship a cow, which is the object of as many genuflexions as the god Apis.... We have not the right to be aggravated by such follies, we who in our simplicity have so long allowed ourselves to be persuaded that it is possible to swallow a god as one swallows an oyster." An influential paper which had a great circulation among the Cordeliers was Loustalot's _Les Révolutions de Paris_. One of its numbers, published during Lent 1792, contained the following tirade, apropos of the shows at the fair: "In the days when there was a ruling religion in France, the tonsured jugglers allowed no competition during Holy Week. They alone might give performances. Now there is free competition. When the ordinary conjurer shows himself upon his stage he is attired in a cloak and strange headgear, by which he is distinguished from the surrounding crowd; but as soon as the performance is over he takes off his costume. The priest wears his all day long, and performs his part off as well as on the stage.... When will they blush to play the rôle of the harlequins of humanity?" Henceforward the revolutionary nickname of the priests is "theophagi." In the month of April the same newspaper contains an article in which it is proposed to apply to priests the regulations instituted by Johanna of Naples for the control of women of ill-fame. "They ought to be shut up in a house where they can preach and pray as much as they choose for those who seek them there, but should be prohibited from going abroad, so that they may not infect the population." The wine of Voltaire has turned into vinegar, into poison.

A rival club of a very different type from the Cordeliers' was the Jacobins'. Its intellectual tendency was more serious and more pedantic. Its patron was Rousseau, as its rival's was Voltaire. The original programme of the Jacobins--love of equality, hatred of all established inequality--was derived purely from Rousseau; with it they managed to combine ambition, a cold, calculating, revolutionary spirit of persecution, and, underlying everything else, devotion to rule, that is to say, to the regulation of society according to Rousseau's principles.

To the student who observes historic phenomena from the literary point of view, nothing in the history of the Revolution is more striking than the distinct manner in which all its men of action and of words acknowledge the literature of the eighteenth century to be the mainspring of their actions and utterances. They seem to seek no other honour than that of transforming ready-made principles into action. At Mirabeau's grave it was told to his honour that he had said of the philosophers: "They have produced light; I will produce movement." And there is scarcely a paragraph in the _Contrat Social_ which did not, during the course of the Revolution, reappear either in a law, or a public declaration, or a newspaper article, or a speech in the National Assembly, or in the very constitution of the Republic itself.

The most important of its theories--that power emanates from the people, that law is the expression of their will--is to be found literally reproduced in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. As soon as the idea of association occurs to the Jacobins they instantaneously trace it back to Rousseau, and employ all his phraseology. Abbé Fauchet writes, in an article in _La Bouche de Fer_: "Great Rousseau, of the candid mind and feeling heart! thou art one of the first to have understood the eternal laws of equity. Yes; every man has a right to the earth, has a right of property in what he requires for his support." And he goes on to maintain that the social contract is a contract between the man and his country. Saint-Just expresses himself in almost the same words in his speech demanding the death of Louis XVI.: "The social contract is a contract which the citizens conclude with one another, and not a contract with the government. Men have no responsibility in the matter of a contract into which they have not entered." But it is Robespierre who, as leader of the Jacobins, gives typical expression to their devotion to the principles of Rousseau. He was the first enemy of the Girondist rationalism; hence we find him, at the time when this rationalism was most distinctly proving its destructive tendency, declaring in a charge to the Jacobins that the Revolution is under the direction of God, is in fact His work. He felt impelled to give his revolutionary sentimentality this affected expression, which implied its relationship with what was called "natural religion."

It was not this feeling, but the spirit of contemptuous indignation awakened by Voltaire, which, towards the middle of the year 1792, became the dominant feeling in the Legislative Assembly and in France. In August the edict was passed which condemned all refractory priests to banishment to one of the colonies. Arrests of such priests took place every day. Then came the September slaughter. The imprisoned priests were the first to fall. Abbé Baruel writes: "These executioners did not all belong to the dregs of the people. A man shouted to the priests who were being murdered: 'Scoundrels, murderers, monsters, contemptible hypocrites! the day of vengeance has come at last. No longer shall you delude the people with your masses, your scrap of bread upon the altar!'" The fortitude displayed by most of the priests is worthy of all admiration. In the prison of the Carmelite Convent, 172 of them unhesitatingly elected to be shot rather than take the oath of allegiance to the constitution. It is touching to read the description of the composure of those who were locked into the church: "From time to time we sent some of our comrades up to the window in the tower, to look in what posture the unfortunate men who were being sacrificed in the courtyard were meeting their fate, so that we might know how to conduct ourselves when our turn came. They told us that those who stretched out their arms suffered longest, because the sword-blows slackened before they reached the head" (Jourgniac de Saint-Méard.) In all, 1480 human beings were butchered. The number is unquestionably an appalling one; but it is to be noted, as not without interest, that, according to Michelet's calculation, the number of men (and women) executed between the beginning and the end of the Revolution does not amount to a fortieth part of the number killed in the battle of the Moskwa alone.

The hatred which had found such ferocious expression in the Days of September had not cooled down when the Convention assembled. Let us see what the member of Convention writes, reads, and says on the subject of priests and religion. One of them, Lequinio by name, presents his colleagues with a book which he has written and dedicated to the Pope. Its title is _Les Préjugés Détruits_. In it we read: "Religion is a political chain invented for the purpose of fettering men; its only use has been to ensure the pleasures of a few individuals by holding all the others in check." The tirades against the priests in this book surpass in violence and indecency any yet published. Amongst its mildest affirmations concerning them is one perpetually made at this time, with all manner of variations: "When they are honest, they are stupid or mad; as a rule they are audacious impostors, veritable assassins of the human race." We must go to Kierkegaard's _Öieblikket_ (The Moment) to find outbursts corresponding to this. Such is the literature of the day. And Lequinio is not to be regarded as an exception, though he carried his war with prejudice to the extent of inviting the public executioner to dine with him and his family for the purpose of overcoming the prejudice against that official. In _Les Révolutions de Paris_, the newspaper which the member of Convention perused before he went forth to take his part in the debates of the day, he read one morning in December 1792, apropos of the celebration of the midnight mass in Paris: "There is no particular harm in holding exhibitions of dancing marionettes or conjurers' tricks in the public streets in the light of day; it is quite permissible that children and nurses should be amused. But to meet in dark assembly halls at night for the purpose of singing hymns, lighting tapers, and burning incense in honour of an illegitimate child and an unfaithful wife is a scandal, an offence against public morality, which demands the attention of the police and strict repressive measures."[1] Previously quoted utterances have been aglow with exasperation, hatred, and scorn; but as yet they have not been ribald. They were the revengeful cries of that human reason which had been so long fettered and tortured. This language is scurrilous. And there is another change. Those who have hitherto been oppressed are betraying a marked inclination in their turn to play the part of oppressors.

Action followed swiftly upon resolve. "They proceeded," writes Mercier in _Le nouveau Paris_, "to the destruction of everything connected with the old worship, not with the frenzy of zealotry, but with an ironical contempt and uncontrolled mirth which could not but astound the onlooker." The churches were positively ravaged. One troop of its emissaries communicated to the Convention that they had "permitted 'brown Mary' (a certain miracle-working image) to retire, after all the hard work she had had in fooling the world for 1800 years." The altars were plundered for the benefit of the treasury of the Republic. Here is a fragment of a report: "There are no longer any priests in the Department of Nièvre. The altars have been despoiled of the piles of gold which ministered to priestly vanity. Thirty millions worth of valuable articles will be sent to Paris. Two carts laden with crucifixes, gold croziers, and two millions in gold coin, have already arrived at the Mint. Three times as much will immediately follow."

Sometimes the carts stopped at the door of the assembly hall of the Convention, and sacks full of gold and silver were piled up in the hall itself.

Another report is in the ironical style. "I have been unjustly accused of an onslaught on religion. The fact is that I asked most politely before I acted, and three or four hundred saints begged for permission to go to the Mint. The language employed on the occasion was something in this style: 'Ye who have been the tools of fanaticism, ye saints and holy ones of every description, show now that ye are patriots, and help your country by marching to the Mint!'"

In a third report the delegates congratulate themselves on the result of their "philosophic mission" in the Department of Gers. "Public feeling was ripe, and it was decided that the abolition of fanaticism should be solemnly celebrated on the last day of the third Decade. The whole population assembled in a rustic spot to hold the festival of brotherhood. After a Spartan meal they hurried into the town, tore down all the emblems of fanaticism, and trampled them under foot. A scavenger's cart drove up, bringing two miracle-working virgins and a variety of crucifixes and images of saints, to which, but a short time before, superstition had offered incense. All this ridiculous rubbish was piled upon a bonfire, on which already lay a collection of patents of nobility, and burned amidst the rejoicings of an enormous crowd. Round this philosophic pyre on which so many delusions were consumed the _carmagnole_ was danced all night."

In a fourth report we read: "Sixty-four refractory priests were living in a house belonging to the people. I ordered them to be marched through the town to prison. The new kind of monster, which had not as yet been exhibited to the gaze of the public, produced an excellent effect. Shouts of 'Vive la République!' rose from the crowd that surrounded the herd. Have the goodness to let me know what I am to do with the five dozen animals whom I have held up to the ridicule of the multitude. I gave them actors as an escort."

The debates which preceded the proclamation of religious liberty on the 3rd Ventôse of the year III. were all in this same tone. However divided the Convention might be upon other questions, upon this there was absolute unanimity. Marked as is the difference in the nation's frame of mind during, and after, the Reign of Terror, there is no difference in its attitude towards Catholicism. When, as one result of the proclamation of religious liberty, a few churches had been reopened, the fact was announced by the weekly paper _Le Décade Philosophique_, under the heading "Theatres," in the following terms: "On the 18th and 25th of this month a comedy was played in several parts of Paris. The chief character, in an absurd costume, performed a variety of foolish antics, at which the spectators did not laugh. As we are not in the habit of criticising revived plays when they are neither useful nor instructive, we shall take no further notice of this one."