Religion and Revolution in France, 1780-1804 (review)

Abstract

Religion and Revolution in France, 1780-1804. By Nigel Aston. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 435. $44.95 clothbound, $24.95 paperback.) [Published in the United Kingdom by Palgrave Publishers Ltd. ] After his valuable study of the French episcopacy at the end of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1992), Nigel Aston now publishes a comprehensive survey of the religious history of France from the eve of the Revolution through the early years of the nineteenth century. It is work of great erudition, drawing on an immense array of secondary materials and printed sources. Inspired perhaps by the recent writings of John McManners-to whom the book is dedicated-- Aston asserts the fundamental vitality of French Catholicism at the end of the Old Regime. He acknowledges, to be sure, the deep social and economic divisions within the clergy, dominated by aristocratic bishops and abbots who kept the lion's share of the Church's wealth for themselves and who utterly blocked advancement for talented commoners. He also takes note of the enormous regional diversity within France: the great variations in clerical density, in ecclesiastical revenues, in religious fervor from province to province. Geography, he writes,is crucial (p. 48).Yet overall the French clergy was highly educated and dedicated, and the French laity, in his view,remained overwhelmingly attached to the Catholic faith and practice (p. 56). He rejects the idea of an incipient dechristianization at the end of the Old Regime, and he puts into question the whole thesis of a desacralization of the monarchy before 1789. Even the French Enlightenment, he argues, a Christian dimension too readily overlooked (p. 88). The terrible religious divisions which marked the Revolutionary period arose less from intrinsic tensions in the Old-Regime Church, Aston suggests, than from the of the Revolution itself. Here he assigns particular blame to the leaders of the Constituent Assembly of 1789-1791. If only the patriots had avoided the requirement of an ecclesiastical oath and had permitted the convocation of a National Council of the French clergy to ratify the Revolutionary reorganization of the Church, the clerical leadership might have given its assent, and the de facto alliance between the Revolution and the Gallican Church which marked the first months of the Revolution might have endured: events would have taken a more moderate course and scores of thousands of lives would have been saved (p. …