The Social Origins of the French Episcopacy at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Every French historian has come to know a bishop or two. Fighting Albigensians or Huguenots, condemning Joan of Arc or being condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, being shot on the barricades in 1848 or by the Commune in 1871, the bishops of France have been actively involved in the history of their country. Despite the great differences in character, life, and activity that the well known bishops have exhibited (some are even remembered as men of prayer), there is a tendency to have basically only one mental picture of a bishop: that of a man of substance (physical as well as economic, corpulent and opulent), and of a man of the status quo or the status quo ante. But if Richelieu, Bossuet and Fenelon were so different from one another, what of their less famous brethren, the more than one hundred men who at any given time in the ancien regime administered the dioceses of France and by virtue of their office were the religious leaders of their country? At different times, with different backgrounds and training, with different ideas and ideals, they were quite different in thought and action. Only rarely has an attempt been made to study the bishops of France as a whole. Individual bishops have their biographies, groups of reformers or political activists their books, but until more is known about ordinary bishops, the well known ones cannot be seen in context, and a vital element is missing in our understanding of the religious life of the ancien regime.