The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Even before the oath of 1790 further irreparable losses had been sustained, not all of them material. The old corporate organization of the Gallican Church, self-governing and self-taxing, had disappeared in effect well before the Civil Constitution of the Clergy pronounced its death-warrant. Nothing like it was restored by the Concordat. Monasticism was also doomed by 1790; and although many monks seemed to have welcomed release from their vows, France’s 45,000 nuns were almost unanimous in opposing the dissolution of their convents. ‘In the world,’ complained the Carmelites of the diocese of Paris,6 ‘people like to say that the monasteries are full of victims, slowly consumed by regrets, but we protest before God that if there is true happiness on earth, we enjoy it, in the shelter of the sanctuary.’ The Concordat made no provision for the restoration of the cloistered life, and although monastic orders did reappear, they never proliferated as they had under the old order. And meanwhile the oath, and its various successors, had torn the clergy apart. Those who refused it and therefore resisted the Revolution, suffered most. Deprived of their benefices, refractories soon became pariahs in the eyes of patriots, a subversive influence wherever they operated, and once war began a treasonable one. Priests were the first victims of the September Massacres of 1792. In addition to the 223 slaughtered then, almost 1,000 were condemned in the Terror, while nearly 25,000, almost one-sixth of the whole clergy, emigrated or were deported. Since 90 per cent of clerical émigrés were seculars, the loss of parish clergy was not far short of a half. By 1794 even the constitutional clergy were under suspicion, having faced repudiation by Rome and the majority of the French population apparently for nothing. Some found belated vindication under the Concordat, but for others the break with Rome that their oath-taking signified could not be healed and they soldiered on into the nineteenth century in an ever-dwindling ‘little church’. The French clergy had been forced by the Revolution into a bitter, tragic schism, its pain only compounded by the outrages of dechristianization. The depth of the trauma was vividly expressed by an Italian cardinal7 as the Sacred College discussed the last details of the Concordat.

  Oh, God, [he agonized] … what will a government do which, after having proscribed the Catholic religion, after having persecuted it by the most scandalous laws, after staining itself with the blood of so many martyrs, today reopens the door to it not as the dominant religion, but as the religious opinion of the majority of the people, not out of love, but out of fear, not from respect but from policy? Meanwhile it desires it stripped and naked, with rare ministers, ministers in its pay, ministers appointed by the government itself, ministers who, in the past, have fed the flames, ministers who are supposed to pass for Catholics yet are the authors of schism, neither repentant nor reconciled. And in contrast we see legitimate pastors, confessors of the faith of Jesus Christ exiled from their homeland … separated from their flocks … religious hounded out from the whole of that great empire; holy virgins without refuge, chapters and seminaries without the means to subsist; temples which, after profanation, remain soiled and ruinous; foundations, pious works, prerogatives and immunities abolished and destroyed; in a word, a soulless, bloodless, powerless skeleton. That is the shadow of a religion being re-established in France, and those who thought up this sorry project are glorying in it and usurping the title of restorers of the altars. …

  And yet Cardinal Antonelli still voted for the Concordat. Its saving grace was that it restored free worship in France, a properly constituted clergy, and papal power. Despite serious material losses, in fact, the papacy was one of the great gainers from the work of the Revolution. In the 1780s it had appeared an institution in perhaps terminal decline, scorned by secularizing monarchs and defied in Germany and Italy by Jansenizing bishops. Its apparent helplessness did much to mislead the drafters of the Civil Constitution. But before the end of the 1790s the Holy Father himself was sharing in the glory of martyrdom visited on his fellow priests by a Godless republic and its sympathizers abroad. Throughout France and the areas of Europe it dominated, meanwhile, the vast majority of the population was showing itself loyal to a clergy which had rejected the Revolution on his instructions. These were facts which the First Consul of France had the perception and the courage to recognize, against the advice and inclination of most of those who had tried to manage France’s affairs throughout the 1790s. Instant harmony did not follow. Within a few years he would find himself as exasperated as any Jacobin at priestly wiles. But he never tried to undo the basic settlement of 1801; and the clergy restored then, stripped of indefensible excrescences and abuses, now for the first time ever devoted almost all of its energies to the cure of souls, under Rome’s unchallengeable doctrinal and spiritual authority. Not that they thanked the Revolution for all this. As in the case of the nobility, the experience from which it had arisen was altogether too painful. Throughout the nineteenth century the Roman Catholic Church would anathematize the French Revolution and all its works as an outburst of atheistical excess fomented by malignant philosophers and scheming freemasons, lending its full authority to the unhistorical ravings of Barruel. Republicans in turn, whose convictions were rooted in the Revolution, would see the Church as their most formidable foe, and join masonic lodges to express their antagonism. Nothing but the complete separation of Church and State, as between 1794 and 1802, would allay their suspicions. In 1905 it was eventually brought about, after decades of mounting extremism on both sides, all traceable back ultimately to 1790.

  Also traceable back to that fateful divide was the breaking of the Church’s hold on the two social services it had controlled throughout the old order—education and poor relief. The men of 1789 saw education as yet another area to be regenerated on rational lines. Grandiose schemes were mooted throughout the 1790s, including one drafted by the last of the philosophes, Condorcet, in 1792. But other priorities repeatedly postponed practical action. Meanwhile, the existing system fell to pieces. Although lands owned by educational institutions were at first exempted from nationalization, other sources of support, such as impropriated tithes and standard donations from chapters and monasteries, dried up. Clerical teachers refusing the oath were dismissed; those who took it were often called away to become parish priests. Teaching orders (such as the Oratorians) at first escaped the Revolution’s attack on monasticism, but in August 1792 suspicion of all priests in positions of influence was such that they were dissolved. Finally even lands owned by schools and colleges were swallowed up as national property by a Republic desperate for resources in March 1793. Not until 1802 were comprehensive measures taken to fill the vacuum thus created, even though the constitution of 1793 had declared education to be among basic human rights. That of 1795 made no such ambitious commitment, and although the Directory set up a central school in each department and established a number of higher schools in Paris to replace the universities abolished by the Convention as bastions of corporatism, it left primary education to local initiative and made no public financial provision for it. Bedevilled at every level by a shortage of trained teachers (clerics being too dangerous to entrust with the education of republican youth), the Revolution, itself the fruit of unprecedented educational advance, created chaos in education, and a marked drop in numbers undergoing it. Whereas 50,000 pupils were attending colleges in 1789, only 12,000 or 14,000 were in the central schools a decade later. Basic literacy fell from 37 per cent in 1789 to more like 30 per cent in 1815.

  In the field of poor relief the record was even bleaker. Again, there was no shortage of reforming intentions and bold projects to tackle a problem which everybody could see in the 1780s was getting worse. The Constituent Assembly set up a committee on mendicity which collected impressive information on the scale of the problem. The Legislative established its own committee, and in its brief existence passed no fewer than 56 decrees in the area of poor relief. Every citizen in need, declared the constitution of 1793, had a right to public support, and in May 1794 a ‘Great Book of National Benevolence’ was institu
ted where deserving cases could register their needs. Two months earlier, a comprehensive law on poor relief had been passed, which among other things forbade private alms giving on the grounds that the State would now provide. In October came the corollary: begging too was forbidden. Some of these measures would have been rashly ambitious at the best of times. In a country desperately at war and diverting all available resources towards fighting it, they were practically meaningless. In some districts, local authorities made heroic efforts to establish the Great Book, but under the Directory the project was abandoned. Yet by then the problem was far worse than it had been in 1789. The poor were far more numerous thanks to the economic disruption which six years of upheaval had brought about, and previous provision, inadequate though it obviously was, had been shattered by the attack on the Church. Monastic charity dried up when church lands were nationalized and houses dissolved. Parish-based relief, largely derived from endowments and pious donations, was disrupted by the schism among parish priests over the oath, and those with money to give closed their purses for fear of drawing envious attention to themselves. And the last resorts of the indigent, hospitals and poor houses, had their already overstretched resources pitilessly blighted by almost every wave of revolutionary legislation. Like schools and colleges, many lost important sources of income in the reforms of 4 August 1789. Fiscal changes which abolished municipal tolls took away others. The value of investments was slashed by the inflation which had taken hold by 1792, and institutions which depended on direct grants from the Crown found the National Assembly unwilling to continue them. Like teaching orders, the charitable ones who were the backbone of nursing in the hospitals were at first exempted from dissolution and from the oath. But as in teaching, too, it did not last, and by 1792 the piety with which nuns ministered to the poor was viewed with suspicion by patriots. They were not allowed to recruit novices, and in October 1793 they were at last subjected to a clerical oath. Those who refused were arrested and imprisoned, despite the clear impossibility of obtaining adequate replacements. A final blow came when in July 1794 hospital property was nationalized.

  In this way the old structure of charity was pulled apart and, for all the talk, nothing constructive put in its place. Under the Directory, all thought of national provision was abandoned. Nevertheless, after 1794, some recovery began. The sale of hospital lands was halted, and those still unsold returned. Imprisoned nuns were released and resumed their ministrations. Rich laymen, who had played a crucial part in fund-raising and management before 1789, re-emerged gingerly to take on something like their old co-ordinating roles. Local taxes and surcharges on luxuries like theatre tickets were also reintroduced as a means of subsidizing hospitals. In Napoleonic France all these trends would be officially fostered, and charitable giving would revive. But pre-revolutionary levels were not restored. Even by 1847, the number of hospitals in France, for a population seven millions higher, was still almost 42 per cent less than in 1789. Nobody, therefore, suffered more than the poor and the sick, over several generations, from the blind destruction of established institutions before viable alternatives had been devised and funded. In no sphere was more human damage done by the French revolutionaries’ failure to match rhetoric with reality.

  It is true that their difficulties, here and elsewhere, were compounded by severe economic problems. In fact, the Revolution was an economic disaster for France. But much of that was the revolutionaries’ own doing, too.

  The Revolution broke out at a moment of rare economic crisis, and this circumstance was to affect its whole subsequent character. Much of the boundless, unrealistic hope invested in the Estates-General by all classes in the spring of 1789, which did so much to ensure the success of the third estate, sprang from anxieties aroused by the harvest failure of 1788, a harsh winter, rising prices, and the slump in demand for manufactures. Popular support for the patriotic cause in Paris in July was based on the assumption that under the new regime there would be guaranteed supplies of cheap bread. In the eyes of those who would become the sansculottes, failure to achieve this would mean betrayal of the Revolution. Their determination to maintain it would constrain the economic policies of successive revolutionary assemblies down to 1795. Even when their power was broken, no government was unpragmatic enough to leave the provisioning of Paris to the free market forces in which almost all men of education believed in principle. Finally, the concessions made on 4 August 1789 to appease a peasantry paranoid with fear for the safety of the harvest would become, despite the Assembly’s initial misgivings, central to the Revolution’s anti-feudal ideology. Left to itself, once the good harvest of 1789 was in, the economy might have been expected to improve. But almost at once its development began to be affected by revolutionary legislation.

  The first series of disruptions resulted from the losses sustained by the nobility and the clergy. The destruction of a privileged society setting a high value on services could scarcely be brought about without serious shock waves which reached far beyond the immediate sufferers. Faced with the loss of feudal revenues, which in some regions might constitute as much as 20 per cent of landlords’ income, their immediate reaction was to raise rents. In December 1790 proprietors were specifically authorized to add the equivalent of the abolished tithe to the rents they charged. On some estates by 1791 the notional rental had risen by a quarter. It was no coincidence that the most persistent peasant resistance to the Revolution came in areas where leaseholders predominated. The disappearance of the aristocratic lifestyle also had serious repercussions. For a town like Versailles the shock was brutal and irreparable, as the English visitors haunting its abandoned, crumbling glories found in 1802. Formerly fashionable parts of Paris suffered a similar fate. ‘The Fauxbourg St. Germain can never recover,’ wrote an unduly pessimistic diplomatic visitor in 1796.8 It was ‘quite depopulated; its hotels almost all seized by Government, and the streets near the Boulevard are choked with weeds.’ And every city where a parlement had sat, or provincial estates regularly convened, found its economy rocked when these institutions disappeared and their rich and noble members emigrated, or shrank into unostentatious obscurity. The spoliation of the Church compounded such problems. Monasteries, chapters, and cathedrals provided innumerable jobs for the laity, directly or indirectly, from builders and painters all the way to washerwomen keeping surplices clean. All were now lost as these institutions were deprived of their property, their revenues, and ultimately their very existence. Servants were dismissed wholesale. In Bayeux, for example, the nobility and clergy had employed 467 between them in 1787: nine years later they only gave employment to 76. The luxury trades were also devastated by the disappearance of their main customers and the introduction of simpler fashions that went with it. The silk capital of Lyons, already in difficulties before the Revolution, found the 1790s as disturbed economically as they were politically. Between 1790 and 1806 its population fell by almost a third, from 146,000 to 100,000. Between 1789 and 1799, the number of silk workshops fell by more than half.

  Many of these convulsions were the consequence, ultimately, of the massive land transfer which proved one of the Revolution’s most enduring achievements. But the use to which nationalized property was put created its own range of difficulties in the form of the inflation of the assignats. Convinced by the Physiocratic nostrum that land was the only true source of wealth, the members of the National Assembly were only too willing to believe that a paper money based on land was more secure than the disastrous, still-remembered notes issued by John Law in 1720. And so it might have been if the assignats had not been massively over-issued, and had been withdrawn in an orderly way as originally envisaged. But, their minds set firmly against any forced reduction of the debt inherited from the monarchy on the one hand, and lacking both the power and the will to raise taxes and enforce their collection firmly on the other, the revolutionaries found the temptation to print money too strong. Already by January 1792 over-issue had brought down the value of the assignat
by 28 per cent; and once war began, financed as it had to be until 1794 largely by France’s own resources, there was little alternative but to go on. In all, a nominal 45,000,000,000 livres worth of paper was issued between 1790 and 1797, but its total real value (at 1790 prices) was less than a seventh of that. And three-quarters of the depreciation over that time can be convincingly attributed to over-issue. The consequences affected every area of the economy. Thanks to the inflation, even the sale of national lands which was supposed to underpin the whole operation only realized 25 per cent of these lands’ true value. Until the deflation of 1798, revolutionary France was a debtor’s paradise, since assignats were legal tender at face value. As one of their earliest opponents had predicted, ‘Every man in France who owes nothing, and to whom everything is owing, will be ruined by paper money.’9 Paradise for debtors was a hell for creditors. It was no atmosphere for business confidence, and outside the black market and the enforced activity of war industries, normal production and exchange stagnated for much of the 1790s. Credit was tight, interest rates usuriously high. Cash was hoarded, and what little could be extracted had to be spent on dealings with foreigners who refused to accept French paper. Wage-earners and all those on fixed incomes found their resources catastrophically eroded; and although wages eventually had to rise in the face of four-figure increases in the cost of living, they seldom caught up. Few rises equalled the 3,000 per cent achieved by government employees between 1790 and 1797. Government was the only employer whose demand for labour grew steadily throughout the Revolution. Others, faced with shrinking markets and spiralling costs, cut back and laid their workers off. By 1798 there were 60,000 unemployed in Paris, a tenth of the city’s population. There were clear links between such unemployment and the rise in crime which everybody commented on under the Directory—not to mention a marked increase in urban suicides. There was no longer, after all, even the former network of charitable institutions to fall back on.