Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791

by Timothy Tackett

The imposition of a loyalty oath on French clergymen in the winter of 1790 was a turning point in the Revolutionary decade after 1789. What is more, there is a remarkable similarity between the geography of this oath--the regional percentages of those who accepted or rejected it--and the geographic patterns of religious practice and political behavior persisting into the twentieth century. Timothy Tackett investigates the origins and nature of this fascinating phenomenon.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Genres: History, French Revolution

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Jim Gulley · Rating 2 out of 5]

During the early stages of the French Revolution, the French National Assembly issued a decree requiring clergy members of all ranks to publicly swear fealty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This act of submission to the Revolution came to be known as "the Loyalty Oath." The Oath was immediately divisive, both in French ecclesiastical circles and society in general. Oath takers became known as the "Constitutional clergy," those refusing to take or appending the oath "Refractories." The Refractories paid a heavy price for their recalcitrance. The government stripped them of their positions, livelihood, and social status. The Roman Catholic Church also suffered as the Revolution consolidated dioceses, reduced clerical headcount, secularized many aspects of the priesthood, and diminished the authority of the church within French society.

Timothy Talcott argued that the Loyalty Oath of 1791 was a critical turning point in the French Revolution. The government used the Oath as a litmus test of allegiance to the new French government and the political transformation it fomented. He further argued that the Loyalty Oath caused the first great division of the Revolution: the great schism within the French church and its clergy, with far-reaching social and religious implications.

Talcott advances three themes in the book: the regional differences in French society at the time of the Revolution, the influence of Enlightenment thinking, and the transition of French politics from the Old Regime to the Revolution. He extensively used maps to depict regional differences in the factors influencing oath-taking. He also emphasized that many regions of France, like the Alsace, did not speak French, thus pointing to a cultural hurdle facing the Revolution. The ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, particularly Rousseau and Voltaire, influenced the Revolution and urban elites to reform French society in a more secular, non-religious manner. The secularization created execrable tensions between church and state. The Old Regime was a monarchy where everyone was a subject of the king and a member of an estate and province. The Revolution deposed the monarchy and reordered the three "estates": the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners.

The book's primary sources are extensive and drawn primarily from statistical analyses of church and government records. Tackett slices and dices the data and presents the information in a mind-numbing assortment of tables and maps. These data summaries support the topics of each chapter. The book organizes its narrative into three parts: a background to the French Revolution, the Loyalty Oath as it pertained to the clergy, and the Loyalty Oath as the French people perceived it. Its literary style is a third-person, topical narrative with chapters focused on either a regional, demographic, political, or ecclesiastical orientation.

The Refractory clergy faced many conflicts in their decision about the Oath. Peer pressure, unclear direction from the Pope, and theological and philosophical disagreements all contributed to their decision to either not take the Oath or take an Oath appended with provisos. On the other hand, the Constitutional clergy viewed the Oath as a civil, not religious, issue. Also known as "jurors," these clergymen viewed the Civil Constitution as a societal good, emphasized morality and ethics over theology and dogma, and integrated Enlightenment thinking into their worldview. The non-jurors were orthodox in their theology and loyal to the hierarchy of the Roman church.

Tackett used statistical analyses of primary sources to profile each side of the oath-taking controversy. Refractories were more likely to be experienced clerics located in non-French-speaking provinces, serving parishes hostile to the regime, and trained in Old Regime diocese seminaries. Jurors tended to be younger, located near Paris, and studied in contemporary seminaries. The author also took statistical deep dives into urban vs. rural, affluent vs. poor, and personality traits of clergy. All of these analyses proved inconclusive. In his conclusion of the clergy section, he identified two strands of the Refractory opposition: Jansenist sympathies (he does not adequately explain what Jansenism is) and dissatisfaction with ecclesiastical economics.

The "bottom up" analysis of the French people indicated that there was popular outrage at the Oath in areas less supportive of the Revolution, that a majority of women rejected the Oath, and that both sides used the Oath controversy as a wedge issue in local politics. Tackett also pointed out that while Protestants only constituted 2% of the French population, they had an outsized influence in certain provinces to support the Oath. They viewed the issue through anti-Catholic lenses. Tackett devoted an entire chapter (11) to an analysis of how urban elites influenced the Oath issue, only to conclude "that the actions and inactions of the urban elites were far from constituting a critical factor" (page 282).

The main problem with the book is that it is boring. Tackett does not use anecdotes, suspenseful episodes, or biographical sketches to humanize the narrative and spice up the story. His "bread and butter" is opaque references to provinces, towns, clerical ranks, and other segments of his statistical analysis. An equally vexing problem is that most chapters advance inconclusive analytical findings. The author constantly referenced the difficulties of understanding the sources, complexity of the subject matter, and argued that sources could support multiple interpretations. The book is also inaccessible to a lay reader of French Revolution history. Tackett needed to provide the reader with the courtesy of defining key terms that are replete throughout the book. For instance, what is a "cahier?" The term appeared as early as page ten and recurs throughout the tome, but it needed to be defined or explained. (I looked it up: "Cahier" is French for notebook and, apparently, referred to lists of regulations that the Revolution presented for ratification.)

Tackett's central thesis holds up in the book; however, his primary sources needed to be more conclusive to pinpoint the underlying causes of the Loyalty Oath issues. I would not recommend this book for a graduate seminar syllabus.