E. Claire Cage. Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720–1815.

Abstract

Celibacy (the state of being unmarried) was a concern of many French economists and social commentators before and during the Revolution. Many of them believed that celibacy was becoming more and more common, partly (some argued) because increasing numbers of men avoided marriage since, in the absence of divorce, it ended only when one of the spouses died. Celibacy, they argued, was a drag on population growth (and thus harmful to the economy and the power of the state) and detrimental to morality: unmarried men were sexually active, and they not only corrupted the women they slept with but added to the growing numbers of illegitimate children. In Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720–1815, E. Claire Cage focuses on one aspect of the celibacy issue: the celibacy of priests. Although many priests of the early church married, the practice was questioned and attacked from the fourth century on, and eventually forbidden in the Western church in the twelfth. By the eighteenth century, it was an almost unquestioned doctrine that priests should not marry. Even so, there were some priestly and even more secular voices in favor of priestly marriage. The physical and emotional benefits of marriage were extolled, and Enlightenment writers such as Denis Diderot and Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach, condemned celibacy as “unnatural.” Others argued that married priests would be a model to their parishioners.