Reviewed by: Confiscating the Common Good: Small Towns and Religious Politics in the French Revolution by Edward J. Woell Joseph Byrnes Confiscating the Common Good: Small Towns and Religious Politics in the French Revolution. By Edward J. Woell. (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2022. Pp. xi, 304. £80. ISBN 9781526159137.) The title requires some explanation, which the author immediately initiates in the epigraph to the book’s Introduction. “A law should be written not for private profit, but for the common benefit of the citizens” (Isidore of Seville, writing about the year 600). For “confiscate,” the common dictionary definitions will presumably do: “to seize as forfeited to the public treasury” or “to seize by or as if by authority.” The book, then, is a study of who was confiscating what in France during the early revolutionary years: local authorities in the small towns contending for the revenues of churches and monasteries by closing, seizing, or consolidating them; and national authorities ordering the closings, seizing, and consolidations in accordance with their own religio-political programs. Edward Woell vividly portrays citizens and their passions in Saint-Gaudens, on April 4, 1790, when town council members complained that any real and possible trifling with the bishopric, the seminary, and the collèges would cause spiritual as well as financial harm to the town. His thesis is that “the French Revolution`s religious politics tattered the social fabric of small towns to such an extent that it unraveled their democratic character,” because by 1789 their “institutions had become their communities` heart and soul” (p. 8). The “religious politics” of the book’s subtitle hindered the democratic process of nation building by polarizing financial and religious partis pris. Woell studies the “small towns”—five in number—of the book’s subtitle to show that their local divisions over religious politics were as salient as, or more salient than, the great nation-wide fights over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the religious history of France. These latter are the subject of the quasi-definitive study of Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Earlier events in Pont-à-Mousson, Gournay-en-Bray, Vienne, Haguenau, and Is-sur-Tille were the vitally important harbingers of, and the key to understanding, the 1791 dramas. In Pont-à Mousson, the contribution of the religious orders was sorely missed, especially at the university, which was in the main staffed by religious. Seizure of church property was financially problematic for many of the townspeople, whether they benefitted directly or were slated to benefit from the sale of the property. The bishop of the region strongly opposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the majority of the priests accepted it, but the townspeople had no voice in the election of their parish curés. Local interests, then, were primarily personal and private, which may have accounted for the lack of major public resistance to or promotion of the Civil Constitution. [End Page 210] In Gournay-en-Bray, the reduction of parishes ineluctably brought on competition for survival of two parishes, Notre-Dame and Saint-Hildevert, which had begun hundreds of years earlier. When authorities decided in favor of Saint-Hildevert, the parish leaders were first of all wary lest Notre-Dame’s parishioners turn against them, but subsequently anxious when the closure was delayed. Woell highlights this drama in light of a present-day controversy about the significance of parish closures, Tackett counting about two hundred parishes and Jean de Viguerie about four thousand. The number that Woell forefronts—warning that only estimates are possible—was 1,400–1,700. It would certainly seem that parish closure was the source of more religious tension than the oath or the two clergies. In Vienne, the “decimation of the town’s religious institutions by other reforms” (p. 121) was at the center of the town’s divisions rather than the Civil Constitution. The institutions most at issue here were the two ecclesiastical chapters with their member canons. These were originally episcopal advisory boards but had taken on their own independent lives in the 1700s. Given their reputation as dated artifacts...
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Sep 14, 2023
Amin Sobar + 2
Open Access
