Transcript lecture powerpoint slides

Religion and Anti-clericalism
Dr Chris Pearson
Protesters against ban on veils in French schools, 2004
Lecture Outline
• Religious practice during the
ancien régime
• The church in the revolutionary
period
• Catholics vs. Republicans during
the nineteenth century
The Catholic Church in the 1780s
• 170,000 members of the clergy (0.6% of the
population)
• Powerful landowner; owned 7% of national
territory
• Wealthy – tithe provided 150 livres annually
• 90% church attendance rates
• Figures from MacPhee, Social History of
France, p. 18
A less than cheery worldview:
‘The joys, the pleasures, the happiness of life
are always dangerous and almost always fatal;
the games, laughter and amusements of the
world are like the mark of damnation and are
gifts given to us by God in his anger. Whereas
tears and suffering are the signs of God’s piety
and a certain promise of salvation.’
The Revolution and the Church
• Proposal of the deputies of the Third Estate:
reduction of dioceses, sale of Church lands, abolition
of tithes etc
• The National Assembly nationalizes church lands
and grants religious freedoms to Protestants and Jews
• Oath to the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” (July
1790)
• 50% of clergy, along with the King, Pope, and most
bishops rejected the oath
• Oath exposed a Catholic/anti-clerical fault-line
running through French society
Destruction and renewal
• Clergy attacked as anti-patriotic
• Revolutionary calendar, Armées
revolutionnaires attack church property
• By 1794, only 150 churches giving mass
• Churches re-open (1795), émigré priests
return (1796)
• Catholic revival – grassroots, led by
women
Painting by Gérard François Pascal Simon (1770-1837)
The Concordat, 15 July 1801
• Signed between Napoleon and the Vatican
• The Catholic Church was restored and the
state recognized Catholicism as ‘the
religion of the majority of Frenchmen.’
• State funding for the church…
• …but also state control over bishops and
priests
Napoleon on religion:
Society ‘cannot exist without inequality of
wealth, and inequality of wealth cannot
exist without religion. When a man is dying
of hunger next to another who has plenty, it
is impossible for him to accept this
difference unless there is an authority that
tells him: God wills it so, there have to be
both poor and rich in the world, but
afterwards and for all eternity things will be
different.’
The legacy of conflict
The revolution created ‘so bitter a division
between Catholics and republicans that it
would be impossible, for nearly another two
centuries, for the two to understand each
other. Too much blood was spilt in the
1790s, too many atrocities committed by
both side, for either to forgive or forget’
Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French
Catholicism (1989), p. 30
Charles X’s coronation (1825)
Republican-Catholic bones of
contention
• Two incompatible forms of belief
• Catholic education establishments
(Comte de Falloux’ 1852 law)
• Pope Puis IX’s Syllabus of Errors
(1863)
• Ultramontanism
• Catholics – unpatriotic?
‘The Jesuit… was a creature of extremes,
a warning both of the perils of losing
one’s masculinity, and the dreadful
consequences of pushing the qualities of
manhood to unreasonable lengths.’
Timothy Verhoeven, ‘Neither Male nor
Female,’ Modern and Contemporary
France (2008), 44
The seductive Jesuit:
‘How many convents have opened the
door to them. Deceived by their sweet
voice; and now they speak firmly there,
and everyone is afraid, everyone smiles
while trembling, and everyone does what
that say.’
Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet, quoted
in Verhoeven, ‘Neither Male nor
Female,’ 45
The (alleged) power of Jesuit
education:
‘Under the Second Empire… they have made
enormous progress in our country, and have
particularly sought to take control of the
education of our youth, in order to destroy the
principles which our society is built on and to
mould the new generations in the ideas of
clericalism.’
Larousse encyclopaedia (1887)
Priests ‘steal the
conscience of our
women.’
Lourdes: symbol of the
‘feminization of religion’?
The Sacré-Coeur
‘If the building of the monument of the SacréCoeur became a metaphor for the moral
reconstruction of France, pilgrims to it [were]
voting with their feet and demonstrating the vitality
of the Church and its vision in contrast with the
spiritual impoverishment of republican France.
Pilgrimage was a sacred instrument in a holy war
for the future of France.’
Raymond Jonas, ‘Pilgrimage, Politics and the SacréCoeur,’ Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques
(1994), p. 123
‘For eighty years two world
views have been present,
dividing hearts and minds
and fomenting conflict, a
desperate war in the heart
of society. The lack of unity
in education means that we
have been continually
thrown from revolt to
repression, from anarchy to
dictatorship, without any
chance of stability’
Léon Gambetta
Republicans fight back (late
1870s-early 1880s)
• ‘Clericalism is the enemy’ Gambetta in
1877
• Petitions, celebrations of Voltaire, hero
of the enlightenment
• Anticlerical decrees: e.g 29 March
1880 Jesuits dissolved
• Lay education in state-run schools
Secular schools:
‘important for
state security and
future republican
generations’
Jules Ferry
The end of the Concordat
• Law of 9 December 1905 separates
the church and the state
• The state would no longer pay the
salaries of the clergy, but the Vatican
could now appoint bishops
• Creation of the république laïque
[secular Republic]
‘Anticlerical arguments against the temporal
power of the Catholic Church increasingly
became arguments against belief itself. Religion,
in this new formulation, whether Catholic or
otherwise, was superstition, a primitive set of
beliefs rendered obsolete by the progressive
refinement of human reason’
John Warne Monroe ‘Cartes de visite,’ French
Historical Studies (2003), p. 120
Charles Péguy
(1873-1914):
Between
Republicanism
and
Catholicism?