The Unseen Terror

by Richard Ballard

  Marillet says that he could not bear to repeat all the things that were said then, but there is no doubt he feels as Casey felt. Robinet and Gastumeau started laughing at Casey, who shut his window again. Robinet, now realizing that he had been humiliated, went away, leaving Martin, also a friend of Casey’s since his time at Bords, behind to knock on the door again. Casey was surprised that Martin was still there and wanted to talk to him about something other than the constitutional bishop’s visit.

  Casey let him in and, when they were sitting down together, asked Martin whether he had taken the Oath to the Constitution. He said that he had, ‘but with every reservation he could muster’. Th

  ey went on to

  talk about ‘the great principles of religion’, and Martin was convinced that

  A Tribulation of Oath Takers

  149

  Casey had been right to refuse the oath. Casey told Martin to be sure to tell Robinet ‘that the only thing he could do before he came to see him again was to go and throw himself at the feet of M de Larochefoucauld and ask his forgiveness for the injury he had done him and the crime he had committed. Th

  en I will receive him in my embrace as in the past with the greatest pleasure.’23

  Marillet comments that ‘this fi rm and religious conduct brought fame to M. Casey in the minds of right-thinking people, and shame for M. Robinet, because he did have sensitivity and honour’. Later on that day, Martin, a close friend of Robinet, criticized him for wearing the purple cassock.

  Robinet answered in his usual way: ‘Everyone has his own way of thinking. I was nominated by the electors of the department. You are blathering (Tu badines). Leave all that, I tell you!’

  Th

  en he reminded Martin that he had not come to him for the holy oil before Easter. Martin’s reply was cutting: ‘No, ma foi. What do you want me to do? I do not want to give you recognition and if I made use of your holy oil for my sick parishioners, I fear that it would contribute to their deaths!’ Martin reported this conversation to Taillet and told him that his own conduct had been irresponsible.24 Marillet adds that Robinet was dis-regarded in general, ‘even by members of the Departmental Directory who ridiculed him’.25

  Robinet decided next to make a pastoral visit to Madame Baudéan de Parabère, who was still in charge at the Abbaye aux Dames on the other side of the Charente. She had won in verbal fi sticuff s with the last two lawful bishops, Germain du Chataignier de la Chataignerie and Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld, and the conversation showed her disdain for this intruder:

  She received him with honesty in her little parlour. He opened the conversation by saying that he was sorry that his busy time-table had not allowed him to have visited her before.

  She replied, ‘And I, Monsieur [not Monseigneur], if my conscience had allowed me, I would not have been less in haste to send someone to visit you; but my principles are in every respect opposed to yours.’ ‘Let us not speak of that,’ he said. ‘How are your ladies?’

  ‘Well enough, thank God, though one or two of them have colds,’ she replied. ‘It is true,’ he said, ‘that this weather goes against being healthy. It is has made the fruit in my little garden at Saint-Savinien suff er as well.’

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  e Unseen Terror

  He paid his respects and left the abbess. His visit had lasted ten minutes at the most. Th

  ere! It was a good reception for our Robinet.26

  Marillet now reports on the two papal bulls which arrived in France in May 1791: to the archbishops and bishops – ‘very voluminous’ – and to the priests who had taken the oath and were given 40 days to withdraw it or else be declared schismatics. Both of them made something of a sensation in the kingdom, and they did persuade some priests to withdraw from their oath, as we have seen.27

  Marillet welcomed a manifesto from the princes of the German empire, and gave it as his opinion that the papal bulls would not have been sent to France if the Pope had not been assured of tangible support from the princes.

  All that made us believe and trust in a counter-revolution happening soon.

  Th

  is manifesto was a superb piece of work, full of gentleness and assurance.

  Th

  e princes announced that they would not come into France as enemies but as friends to put the king back on his throne and re-establish things in the state in which they ought to be, that they wanted to break the power of the assembly claiming to be national and make its vile men return to the dust from which they ought never to have emerged. Th

  e princes would

  make the Departments, Districts and Municipalities responsible for the blood which they would have to shed.28

  Th

  e authorities, Marillet asserts, started to raise money to resist this threat by stripping the religious communities bare:

  Th

  ey confi scated furniture, and the day before yesterday, yesterday and today (20th May), sold it to profi t from the money that would come from it. To help them in their larceny, they made gifts of bad furniture to poor people and to their supporters: this administration is a horror, atrocious!

  Th

  ese people, at the instigation of the national assembly, started to enrich themselves by stripping the clergy, the religious communities and our own people. A great deal of national property was sold, but the national defi cit is still fi ve millions. Part of this property and the profi t is in the hands of these malcontents; the goods went at a low price and they shared the profi ts. If there were no divine justice, we would all be dead of grief, but it consoles us and gives us the hope that a better order of things will emerge.29

  Marillet’s instantaneous reporting is more valuable than Taillet’s nourished grievance. Marillet was just as disillusioned as the former archdeacon, but he had not had time to refl ect on his complaints when he wrote them down.

  A Tribulation of Oath Takers

  151

  Robinet went to Bordeaux to join in the consecration of a constitutional archbishop. He ignored the canonical times of ordination, and the age of the candidates for it. He ordained monks who had not kept their rule, men who were not properly qualifi ed, and all those whom de La Rochefoucauld had refused to ordain. He was accused of not controlling the seminary properly, and allowing too much freedom to the students.

  Th

  ere was also an occasion on the île d’Oléron when people saw and heard Robinet, with an old apostate monk who was his inseparable friend, singing the revolutionary song ça ira in plainchant. Robinet had thrown in his lot with the Revolution, so it is not surprising that he attended meetings in the popular societies in the diocese where Republican ideals were discussed.30

  Taillet rebukes Robinet for giving public honours to Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, the comte de Mirabeau, who is written off as ‘one of the principal makers of change, one of the blackest subversives’. Robinet had a bust of Mirabeau carried in a religious procession after his death, ‘as the principal object of veneration, a spectacle unheard of in a catholic country’. Furthermore, he either instigated or permitted a memorial service for him in the former cathedral on 18 April 1792. An address in praise of Mirabeau was given by Pierre Deschamps, the constitutional curé of Chaniers, ‘turning his vices into virtues’, as Taillet slightingly comments, and Robinet listened to it ‘with a patience which signifi ed corruption: he applauded the panegyr-ist’s talent and rewarded him’.31

  Behind Marillet’s and Taillet’s disapproval we can recognize that there may have been a genuine intention on the part of the clergy who had taken the civic oath to make the Church available to the nation. Robinet could read the newspapers as well as Marillet, and perhaps he wanted constitutional monarchy as much as Mirabeau. Mirabeau was accused of duplicity and treason in December 1792 after the discovery of the contents of the king’s strongbox in the Tuileries,32 the bust that had been carried in the procession and then displayed in the Club was broken, and the street named after him called somet
hing else.33 A diff erent street was given his name in 1932.34

  But yet, after so much invective, Taillet saw Robinet’s most courageous action as giving up the post of constitutional bishop after not quite two years. After the execution of the king on 23 January 1793, the Jacobin Club in Paris sent an order to the Clubs in the provinces that all members must sign a document saying that they approved of it or be banned

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  e Unseen Terror

  from membership. Robinet refused and his membership was revoked. Taillet belittles the refusal: ‘it is praiseworthy, when one is associated with the wicked, to be less wicked than the others’.35

  Robinet stayed in his moribund offi

  ce until December, and then left

  for the Château de Péné in Torxe owned by his nephew, abdicating his bishopric and even his letters of priesthood. When he died on 8 September 1797,36 no one thought that he ought to be replaced at Saintes. When Bonaparte made his Concordat with Pius VII, the new diocese for the Charente-Inférieure was based on La Rochelle and remains so.

  * * *

  Taillet singles out Benjamin-Henri Chasseriaux du Chiron for his fi rst vol-ley of invective against Robinet’s episcopal vicars. Chasseriaux was a former Oratorian of the Diocese of La Rochelle,

  who often repeated in a lively, cheerful way that he was going to be the bishop’s fi rst vicar and that, instead of twenty fi ve louis a year, he would have more than a hundred. However, before that option arose he had been a stern opponent of the changes, telling his parishioners that those who took the oath would be damned. But those hundred louis had lessened the severity of his theology. He had no longer found that it was such a great evil to take the oath. He had even ended up by fi nding that it was a great sin to not take the oath, took it, and then persecuted those who did not. Afterwards he not only married, but married a Protestant woman.37

  Gounin de La Côte was the curé at Crazannes and took the oath as soon as he was free of the lawful bishop’s infl uence. Taillet castigates him for his ingratitude to de La Rochefoucauld, who had often had him as a guest at his table in the chateau.38 Th

  en there was Alexander-Eutrope-Charles

  Huon, who out of the 60 years of his life had spent 30 cursing his lot, ‘furious with de La Rochefoucauld who had not given him a benefi ce worthy of his self-esteem [Juicq is a very small village], furious with the chapter which had not made him a canon, and furious with all the universe which did not appreciate that he was worthy’.

  He took the oath, and adopted an especially strong formula for it: he declared that he swore as a citizen, as a priest, and as a curé:

  A Tribulation of Oath Takers

  153

  that is to say he wanted to give evidence that he was a bad citizen, a priest without principles and an unworthy pastor. One fi nds it diffi cult to fi nd a man

  of an imagination more enlightened and of a soul more sadly disturbed.39

  Th

  ere was Jean-Baptiste Forget, a young teacher at the College of Saintes,

  of suspect convictions before the schism and scandalous manners after it . . .Eventually he gave up his priesthood and his faith, and even all natural shame, because he lived publicly in the infamous ties of a union which he described as a marriage, but which the faithful regarded as a dreadful concubinage.40, 41

  His wife’s name was Marie-Charlotte Lacheurie, who upset Marillet by singing the Marseillaise from the pulpit in the cathedral at a Republican festival.42 Forget ended his working life as a teacher in Paris. Th ere are

  worse things he could have done. His son was well known as a surgeon at Strasbourg in the Second Empire.43

  Other episcopal vicars received the same rebuke for breaking their ordination vows, for allying with the Revolution, and, especially, for marrying. Taillet writes with denunciatory eloquence, making his opponents out to be notorious, open, evil livers. Th

  ere is a Spanish inquisition quality

  about it all.44

  His concluding invective is lanced against Jacques Roux, who was very critical of the Revolution because it was not extreme enough from his point of view, and became chaplain to the sans-culottes in Paris. He was vicaire at Cozes in the Diocese of Saintes in 1787, then moving to the parish of Saint-Th

  omas-de-Cosnac and preaching a sermon in which he urged tenant farmers to refuse to pay seigneurial dues and denounced the seigneurs.45

  Taillet, who is good at imputing base motives to all his opponents, says that the diocese suppressed a parish of which he wanted to be curé, so Roux moved to Paris in 1790, eventually to be elected vicaire of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, in the poorest area of the city, the Gravilliers Section, his base for urging extreme economic measures on the government.

  Soon Roux was a member of the Paris Commune, and it sent him to escort the king to his execution. Th

  e newspapers reported that, as Louis

  XVI was leaving the Temple prison, he had presented his will to Jacques Roux to give to the queen and that, in a reply ‘harder than the executioners themselves’, Taillet says, he pushed the paper away saying, ‘I am here to take you to execution, not to receive your notes.’46

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  e Unseen Terror

  He became leader of a group called the Enragés and used the Cordeliers Club as a base to attack the new constitution that was being drawn up in June 1793. He brought a petition to the Convention, demanding that the penalty for hoarding food become a capital off ence, whereupon Robespierre denounced him and he was arrested. He took his own life with fi ve thrusts of the penknife he had managed to keep while waiting for execution.47

  * * *

  In the church of the village where Citizen Bouquet formed his cadet force, there are two memorial tablets on the south wall.48 Th

  ey commemorate Jean

  Bertry and Pierre Guillemetau, curé and vicaire of Rioux until the Revolution had been established. ‘He preferred exile to perjury’ is what the memorials say of both of them. Jacques Roux, before being faced with the choice between execution and suicide, had aligned himself with extremists to the left of the Jacobins for the sake of his starving parishioners in the Gravilliers section of Paris. He also saw his position as honest and consistent.

  Th

  e imposed civil oath was the dividing line between Taillet, Bertry, and Guillemetau on the one hand, who saw it as a betrayal, and Robinet, his episcopal vicars, and Roux on the other, who accepted it as necessary.

  Guillemetau came back to Rioux after the Concordat of 1802 to be the curé, and remained in offi

  ce until 1823. Taillet moved on to Portugal in 1797,

  then to England. He maintained a correspondence with Bishop Charles de Coucy, who stayed on in Spain because he did not accept the Concordat that Bonaparte imposed on Pope Pius VII. When at last de Coucy accepted King Louis XVIII’s invitation to become Archbishop of Reims (although he did not move there until some years after), he made Taillet an honorary vicar-general. Taillet died in Paris in 1828.

  Th

  e traditionalists saw themselves set apart from their people, and Roux became a revolutionary to be identifi ed with his. Both sides of the divide were sincere and, soon after, representatives of both opinions found themselves together coughing blood every morning in utter dereliction between decks on rotting hulks anchored off the estuary of the Charente. Th eir

  choice had been a matter of principle. Th

  eir misery was the direct result

  of a clash with other people’s principles. Th

  e Convention, and then the

  Directory after it, tried to make them disappear.

  chapter 11

  National Property and

  Closed Convents

  The king and his ministers called the Estates-General in the spring of 1789 to make good the national defi cit and to regenerate the nation.

  Successive fi nance ministers – Calonne, Loménie de Brienne, and even the people’s Necker – had failed to do anythin
g about the crown having to spend so much on servicing national debt incurred largely as the result of the costs of warfare against Great Britain.

  In old order France, crown defi cit was national defi cit once it was known about in public. In 1786, Calonne had declared an expected defi cit of a 112 million livres, which represented a quarter of the year’s likely income.1

  Everybody knew about it now. Indebtedness was no longer the king’s secret, as it always had been. During the war of American Independence, Necker had written an account of the royal fi nances, for which he was then responsible to the ‘upstairs council’ ( conseil en haut), maintaining that all was well, helped along by new loan after new loan. Public opinion was now asking why there was such a large defi cit after so short a time. It was easy to blame the expenses of the court, the pensions paid to the queen’s Polignac friends, or the extravagance of Versailles which Calonne fostered in order to spend the way out of a crisis, but they were small compared with the total debt and, as the unforeseen Revolution gathered momentum, a drastic solution was needed.

  Th

  e privileged position of the Catholic Church in relation to national life had been revoked in the National Assembly on the night of 4 August, so an opportunity to refl oat the nation’s capital assets emerged. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, still in offi

  ce as bishop of Autun, devised a way

  for the nation to take over the lands of the French Church and sell them to restore national solvency.2 Th

  e Church’s capital assets were reckoned

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  e Unseen Terror

  at something like 2.1 billion livres, upon which the annual interest was 70 million or so, and there was great hope for the success of the scheme.

  Monastic buildings would be sold after the monks and nuns had been dispersed from them, and there were reasonable arguments made that the dispossessed religious should be compensated with adequate pensions. In some places this would not be very diffi

  cult: at Saint-Jean-d’Angély, there