The Unseen Terror

by Richard Ballard

  ey worked on empty stomachs since black bread

  was issued only after the weeding was fi nished. Th

  e supplier of the bread

  gave them less than half the ration that was ordered. Th

  ere was chronic

  hunger, ‘the sort that takes you over little by little’.

  Sometimes a soldier would fi nd a nurse who had looked after him in one of the hospitals, and try to show some kindness in return. When some of the soldiers saw them being set to pull up the grass, they tried to help them do it. Others brought them glowing logs under cover from the guardroom fi re to warm their fi ngers that were reddened and paralysed by the cold. Some slipped them bits of bread taken from their own ration, which was not very plentiful in this time of general misery. Help had to be given secretly when the offi

  cers were not looking. ‘If these humane gestures were

  seen, some martinet was appointed to take the place of any warder or sentry with too kind a heart.’ Also, from time to time, the nuns had to deal with carts full of the town’s fi lth.

  After July 1794, when the national régime changed, the nuns were treated a little better, but the ‘sordid butcher’ fed them just as badly. Th ey were allowed

  to go outside the town gates as long as they were back for their roll-call.

  Th

  ose who did not go out were a guarantee for the parole given by the others. Th

  ese were not walks for pleasure; rather a case of the nuns going out to forage for necessities. Th

  e two youngest sisters usually took on this task: Sister

  Ménodore was 28 and Sister Cécile 33. Th

  ey left early in the morning with a

  bag they borrowed from a Brouage citizen and went round the isolated houses begging, even in conditions of ice and snow. Th

  e mistress of one house they

  went to asked them if they knew about marking items of linen because all her daughter’s trousseau needed it. Th

  e two sisters did it during several days, and

  the sympathetic woman took the risk of providing them with enough to eat and take home for the others all the time they were there.

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  e Unseen Terror

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  e sisters looked after a great number of sick and dying people in the fortress. Th

  ey were good at making people laugh as well. Th

  e chronicle has

  the air of making the best of a horrifi c situation, as religious people have sometimes been known to do, but it is a great tribute to them that they were able to do it in winter conditions amid horizontal stair rods of Atlantic rain.

  Robespierre’s downfall at the end of July 1794 was the prelude to the end of the Terror and, with it, the systematic detention of suspects. From the middle of August on, those sentenced to imprisonment on the grounds of the Law of Suspects were freed immediately, but it took longer to decide upon the release of those detained under other laws, who left a few at a time.

  Th

  e paperwork on their appearance before the revolutionary tribunals was produced, each case reviewed in a lengthy process sometimes taking months, and only then were they regarded as free. When the Charente and the inlet at Brouage froze over in January 1795, no sea- or river-borne foodstuff s could be delivered. Th

  e scarcity applied to everyone there, from the guards

  and the suspects to the few residents who were still there. In the end, the District Directory of Marennes sent enough by road to keep them alive.23

  Deprivation, bad food and water, being at close quarters with everybody else during epidemics, and rotting marshland which bred malarial mosquitoes meant that the health of the inmates was threatened if not ruined, as seems to have happened in the case of Mathieu Levesquot from Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud, who died soon after his release. Th

  e nuns had the

  highest death rate, probably because their instinct as nurses could not be overcome by the rigours of internment while their constitutions were ruined by deprivation. Th

  irteen guards and the camp commandant died as well.

  Th

  en, just as the few residents of Brouage thought that life was getting back to what passed for normal in such a ruined place, the refractory priests from ships blown off course from Bordeaux who had not yet been freed were set down among them, and forgotten about for a long time.24

  It is all very well to say that the detainees were set at liberty, but they must have found themselves involved in a great deal of unrecorded misery since their houses and property had been confi scated and their lifestyle had been destabilized. Once they were back where they came from, they had to petition for certifi cates of civism, now possible since revolutionary extremists were no longer in control. Revolutionaries of a more moderate outlook were in charge by then, chief among them being the new representative on mission, Charles-Auguste Blutel, but it had been a brutal and intentional humiliation all the same.25

  Part III

  A Redundant Church

  chapter 9

  The End of the Bishop

  of Saintes

  Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld-Bayers had been bishop of Saintes since 1781. His annual revenue before the Revolution was 80,000

  livres, which included the taxes on everything brought to market in the town each July and August, and he took his cut from the parish tithes.

  Th

  e parish clergy could reasonably expect 800 a year. In the winter, the bishop lived in an impressive house across the road from the cathedral’s magnifi cent west door. In summer, Baron de Chaudruc rented him the châ-

  teau at Crazannes, set among water-meadows by the Charente River ten miles north of Saintes.1 He had noble neighbours there whom he met on equal terms: Mme de Saint-Dizant at Panloy, the next château upstream, with whom he had lunch on Fridays; the Marquis de Saint-Hermine’s family at Coulanges; and the de La Tremoille family at Taillebourg.

  Th

  ere was a story that Pierre-Louis and his brother, François-Joseph, were born into straightened circumstances. Th

  e register of his baptism in

  the little church at Le Peirat, a hamlet near Villebois in the Angoumois, says that his father was the Chevalier Jean de Larochefoucault, the seigneur of at least four villages and the holder of two military orders. Th e godparents

  were domestic servants, and the witnesses were vine-growers who could not sign their names.

  Th

  e story was that the chevalier was in fi nancial diffi

  culties and his Bayers

  branch of the ducal family were poor relations. Someone called M. Duval, or even the duke himself, came by sheer chance while out hunting to the house where Jean and Marguerite lived, which is still a substantial manor with a courtyard, and found the two brothers, whose intelligence impressed him so much that the duke undertook the expenses of their education. Th e

  meticulous Louis Audiat – royalist, Catholic, teacher of rhetoric, archivist, 129

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  e Unseen Terror

  9. Crazannes: Th

  e Château.

  and antiquarian – writing in 1897, dismisses the story as a ‘ridiculous invention’,2 and he could not accept the idea that the chevalier should be found plying the trade of a joiner. Th

  at extension of the story comes from

  Canon Legrix, who, as a member of the cathedral chapter, knew the bishop, and tells us that M. Daval (sic) was seigneur of another village nearby, and found ‘two little peasants playing with his own children, and so called them to the attention of the aged duke’.3 If the story did have truth in it, it might explain the timidity of a scholarship boy in the presence of people for whom education was not an unexpected gift. Th

  ere is a major diffi

  culty in this tale,

  however, since nine years separated the elder brother, who became bishop of Beauvais, from the future bishop of Saintes. Th

  is
rather discredits the

  notion of them being little boys together.4

  De La Rochefoucauld did have a reputation for being timid in company but, by the time of the elections for the Estates-General, his uncompromising discipline had alienated many of the clergy in his diocese, especially those whose Jansenist5 views led them to distrust the power and rigidity of pre-revolutionary bishops in any case. So, in March 1789, when the clergy met to elect their two deputies for the Estates-General, what stands out in

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  e End of the Bishop of Saintes

  131

  the diarist Marillet’s comments about the bishop is that his clergy did not want him to be their deputy at Versailles, although he ‘showered them with politeness’. Every day of the eight the assembly lasted, he invited some of the curés to splendid dinners, and his pressure upon them was successful.

  On 21 March, the clergy decided that they would vote twice, fi rst for one of the curés and then for the bishop. In the fi rst vote, they chose Canon Beauregard, who was a canon in the Augustinian Order. Th

  e second vote

  was unanimously for Bishop de La Rochefoucauld, ‘to his great satisfaction because he had shown a great desire for it and the possibility of not securing the vote was a great anguish to him’.6

  Exiled in Spain, Canon Augustin-Alexis Taillet, the bishop’s friend since they were students together, wrote a necessarily one-sided memoir of what turned out to be the last two and a half years of his life. Abbé Pierre Lemonnier found Taillet’s book in the Vatican Archives and published it in 1902. Taillet says the bishop opposed most resolutions of the National Assembly. Some clergy joined with the Th

  ird Estate (‘or rather, the third

  had caused the clergy to fall into its net, like a prey it was sure to devour’, says Taillet), and de La Rochefoucauld understood that ‘the bishops and the priests would be reduced to the cruel impossibility of doing nothing good, nor even stopping anything evil’.7

  In February 1791, de La Rochefoucauld heard that, in Canon Legrix’s words, ‘the clergy were ordered to cease . . . all public prayer whatever in his cathedral, and not to preach at all any more’. Ten days later, some of his clergy took the oath to maintain the Civil Constitution of the Clergy ‘as required by the decrees of the National Assembly of 27th November 1790’.8

  Gone were the days when, fi nding a springtime short of rain in 1785, Maire Gaudriaud had asked for the sacred relic of St. Eutrope’s head9 to be carried round the town in April in a solemn procession, with the bishop in attendance, along with all the clergy and the monks and nuns in the town,

  ‘ pour demander de Dieu de la pluye’. Th

  e lawyers had all been in that proces-

  sion too, and they would have remembered that, all the same, it had not rained until July and food scarcities had been great.10

  Ten per cent of all the deputies of the fi rst estate elected nationally to the Estates-General were Jansenists, and they formed a strong pressure group together. Jansenists were found not only in the ranks of the French clergy, but had been an eff ective force among the lawyers who held offi ce

  in the Parlement of Paris for a long time before 1789. Jansenist antagonism towards the methods of royal power had previously been circumspect, but

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  e Unseen Terror

  this group of clergy in the Estates-General energetically represented a large, if deliberately inconspicuous, body of an infl uential subculture which de La Rochefoucauld and his fellow bishops had tried unsuccessfully to suppress.

  Th

  e Jansenists had been careful in their opposition to Louis XV at the time of the attempt to murder him in 1757 by a servant called Damiens, who had worked in some of their houses and been motivated by their overheard conversations. Th

  ey had expressed themselves in favour of Damiens’ sav-

  age execution. Nevertheless, Jansenist antagonism towards the methods of royal power had been purposeful.11

  Henri Grégoire12 was a persuasive and sincere member of the committee that devised the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and fed into the project a good number of Jansenist ideas about the way the Church in France should be organized.13 As a result of this committee’s pressure, the power of the diocesan bishops was broken and a ‘constitutional’ bishop was to be elected for each one of the 83 new departments. To be eligible for the new bishoprics, priests were to have been in offi

  ce as curés for not less than 15

  years. It was asserted that election would mean they were given authority by the church as a whole rather than by the exercise of the royal prerogative as under the old system.

  Th

  e qualifi cation for an elector in each department was the amount of tax each one paid, but the electors need not be Catholics and so, for traditionalists like de La Rochefoucauld and Taillet, the new system was basically fl awed. Th

  e Jansenist priests, on the other hand, had been eager

  to take the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy after it had been ratifi ed by the king on the day after Christmas in 1790, and accepted their new rôle as paid functionaries of the state. All the clergy who took the oath supported the changes that soon led to the inauguration of the Republic.

  Th

  ose who did not were known as refractory or non-juring priests, and they opted for loyalty to the king in hopes of a continuing alliance between throne and altar.

  Taillet remarks that this division was complete by the time the elections for the constitutional bishops took place in the season of Lent in 1791. It was then that their ‘scandalous installations’ were arranged.14 On 27 February 1791 ‘the electoral assembly of the Department, convoked by the procurator-general-syndic of the said Department, proceeded to the replacement of de La Rochefoucauld, whose bishopric was considered vacant within the terms of the decree as if by resignation’.15 Isaac-Etienne Robinet, curé of Saint-Savinien, was elected as constitutional bishop of the

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  e End of the Bishop of Saintes

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  Department of the Charente-Inférieure to replace both de La Rochefoucauld of Saintes and the newly appointed de Coucy of La Rochelle.

  De La Rochefoucauld recognized his own opinions about the Civil Constitution in a 36-page pamphlet the Bishop of Boulogne had written.

  So he took it over himself and had it distributed in his diocese, while adding some blistering thoughts in an uncompromising ordinance. Th e main eff ect of

  this was to make Garnier, Bernard, Héard, and the other lawyers furious: they even went so far as to give it a public burning on a Sunday morning in Pons ‘in the presence of a crowd who applauded the patriotism of their maire’.16

  De La Rochefoucauld had already sent a huge letter, in careful writing which looks like his own, to the electors on an enormous sheet of blue paper.17 He said ominously that he was prepared, like the good shepherd, to lay down his life for the sheep. In other words, he off ered to be a martyr.

  Taillet suggests in his memoir that this had not really occurred to him as a possibility at this stage. He went on to tell the electors that if they did institute a successor for him when he had not actually resigned or been dismissed for some fault on his part by proper ecclesiastical authority – rather than by a law which he did not recognize – they would be excommunicated and would eventually fi nd themselves in Hell.

  Th

  e lawyers’ response was that his refusal to take the oath was understood as his resignation, as the law itself made clear. As far as they were concerned, he had no case. But the one they brought against him was for the crime of lèse-nation, which had replaced lèse-majesté in terms of treason against the State. Th

  e bishop of La Rochelle faced a similar indictment for

  the equally huge letter he had also written to the electors.18

  De La Rochefoucauld said the election of Robinet was ‘at root nothing, and of no eff ect. We are still the only true and lawful bishop of
the diocese of Saintes. . . and we will continue to govern with all episcopal authority until our death or a canonical judgement, or our dismissal accepted by the church’.

  Since he was ‘retained in Paris as a member of the National Assembly’, he was not able to supervise the carrying out of this ordinance in person, so he made it a matter of conscience for all the clergy and lay people to obey him. Th

  e printed document is dated 1 April 1791.

  Th

  e lawyers read his documents, and signed them at the bottom of each page. Bernard’s name is there. Jacques Garnier, as procurator general, denounced the former bishop. Th

  en on 20 April, Pierre-François Héard,

  as public prosecutor, produced his indictment and the folded papers were tied into a dossier with the bishop’s letter to the electors, a copy of the

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  e Unseen Terror

  ordinance, and all other documents relevant to the case for attention of the criminal tribunal of the District of Saintes. Th

  e dossier is kept in the

  Departmental Archives among others about horse thefts and rapes.

  Héard’s indictment has an eloquence that matches the bishop’s own (and commendable brevity by comparison) on four pages. It opens in an almost world-weary style:

  It is doubtless at the example of Archbishop Nicodême of Paris that Monsieur De Larochefoucaud ( sic) allows himself to turn into a travelling salesman ( colporteur) and causes an ordinance and a warning ( avertissement) to be spread about in several parishes by rebellious priests on 1st of this month, capable of causing fright in people’s consciences and troubling the sweet harmony of families. Warned by Article 5 of the decree of 27th November last that failure by the bishops to take the oath ordered would result in their replacement as in the case of a dismissal, M. de Larochefoucaud, if he were driven – as he says he is – by motives of true and holy religion, ought to hold back from any commands or ordinances, and principally from writing anything as seditious and as incendiary as those papers that he happens to have distributed by a malign sensitivity of conscience and, as a result, in breach of Th