The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791

by Dale K. Van Kley

Although the French Revolution is associated with efforts to dechristianize the French state and citizens, it actually had long-term religious―even Christian―origins, claims Dale Van Kley in this controversial new book. Looking back at the two and a half centuries that preceded the revolution, Van Kley explores the diverse, often warring religious strands that influenced political events up to the revolution.

Van Kley draws on a wealth of primary sources to show that French royal absolutism was first a product and then a casualty of religious conflict. On the one hand, the religious civil wars of the sixteenth century between the Calvinist and Catholic internationals gave rise to Bourbon divine-right absolutism in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, Jansenist-related religious conflicts in the eighteenth century helped to "desacralize" the monarchy and along with it the French Catholic clergy, which was closely identified with Bourbon absolutism. The religious conflicts of the eighteenth century also made a more direct contribution to the revolution, for they left a legacy of protopolitical and ideological parties (such as the Patriot party, a successor to the Jansenist party), whose rhetoric affected the content of revolutionary as well as counterrevolutionary political culture. Even in its dechristianizing phase, says Van Kley, revolutionary political culture was considerably more indebted to varieties of French Catholicism than it realized.

Genres: History, France, French Revolution, Religion, Nonfiction

401 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Yann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce livre n'a pas tant pour sujet la révolution française elle-même que les querelles qui ont agité le catholicisme français depuis le lendemain des guerres de religion jusqu'à la veille de la révolution. Aussi, ce n'est pas tant la thèse principale du livre - d'ailleurs assez peu convaincante, à savoir que la révolution a parmi les raisons de son avènement une origine religieuse - qui m'a intéressé, que la matière que l'auteur nous met sous les yeux: c'est tout le détail des événements, des controverses, des pamphlets, bref, les sources historiques elles-mêmes qui valent le plus.

Pour brosser un tableau grossier et rapide du contexte couvert par l'ouvrage, et sans rentrer dans la foule de détails qu'il survole, la réforme, en séparant les protestants des catholiques, a radicalisé chacun des camps. Les guerres de religions qui ont ravagé la France au cours des XVIeme et XVIIeme siècles ont conduit la doctrine de l'absolutisme à proposer une porte de sortie à l'insécurité générée par le conflit entre les deux sectes rivales, souvent instrumenté par des factions soutenues par des puissances étrangères qui se livrent sur le territoire une guerre par procuration. En imposant une seule religion, l'absolutisme permet de régler le problème d'insécurité, et inaugure même une période de prospérité et de rayonnement, au prix de l'intolérance religieuse et des persécutions à l'égard des protestants.

Pour autant, le catholicisme, en dépit de son organisation hiérarchique, ne pense ni ne parle d'une seule voix. Contre les jésuites, les Jansénistes vont s'opposer, d'abord sur la question de la liberté humaine et de la grâce, puis sur des questions politiques. A la différence des Calvinistes, les Jansénistes n'ont pas pour ambition de se séparer de l’église de Rome, mais se prétendent être, contrairement à leurs rivaux, les plus légitimes des catholiques:

Accusés à l'origine de crypo-calvinisme, les jansénistes répondent qu'eux seuls sont des catholiques orthodoxes, aussi éloignés des calvinistes schismatiques que des jésuites molinistes. Accusés de subversion à l'égard de la hiérarchie ecclésiastique, ils maintiennent être les seuls bons gallicans et affirment que leurs persécuteurs au sein de l'épiscopat sont véritablement des ultra-montains.

Les Jansénistes, s'opposant à l'absolutisme, vont se retrouver persécutés à leur tour. Le pape prononce même une bulle contre eux: la bulle Unigenitus, à la fin du règne de Louis XIV, au début du XVIIIeme siècle. Loin de mettre tout le monde d'accord, cet acte accentue les divisions et aigrit plus les esprits: ceux qui refusent de se soumettre sont excommuniés, les derniers sacrements leurs sont refusés.

Ce que montre le livre, c'est à quel point ces mesures sont impopulaires, et finissent par nuire au catholicisme et à la royauté qui fonde sur lui sa légitimité. A côté de la querelle qui sépare Jésuite et Jansénistes, les philosophes des Lumières renvoient dos-à-dos les deux camps opposés. L'utilisation de la religion à des fins politiques finit par dégouter les gens de bons sens, épris de paix et de justice, et donner des forces à l'anticléricalisme, au déisme et à l'athéisme.

La controverse sur le refus des sacrements a énormément contribué à la privatisation du sentiment religieux en France. Cette jurisprudence conduit à la désacralisation de tout ce qui se trouve entre Dieu et la conscience de l'individu, sans excepter la monarchie de droit divin.

Le lien que fait l'auteur avec la Révolution Française est au final peu convaincant. On sent qu'il maitrise bien moins cette période que les précédentes qui ont fait l'objet de son étude, car il accumule manifestement les raccourcis, les poncifs et les approximations. Les liens sont trop lâches, les périodes trop grandes, la lumière n'est pas assez faite sur l'ensemble des circonstances. Faire de la religion le moteur de l'histoire comme Marx le faisait de l'économie offre une perspective intéressante, mais insuffisante. Il recycle également l'idée de Tocqueville d'une continuité entre l'ancien régime et la révolution au travers de la centralisation en l'étendant et la reliant au catholicisme.

Enfin, le livre examine également l'historiographie, et s'inscrit en faux contre ce qu'il présente comme la thèse de Quinet, contemporain de Tocqueville, à savoir que seul le protestantisme est force de progrès: bien évidemment, ces dernières se retrouvent chez des individus de toutes les sectes, et la force de la Révolution a été de les rassembler. Les religions sont fondées sur suffisamment d'erreurs, de contradictions et d'absurdités pour qu'elles puissent servir de support et de caution aux discours et aux projets les plus opposés.

[Ietrio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, Yale University Press reinforces the idea Kley is just another academic leech pushing his private beliefs as science, but maybe this would turn into a nice surprise. As far as I recall, the king just impoverished the population with his wars and the power was fragmented enough to permit change. And every nut tries to stick his favorite group: carbonari, masons, liberals, whatever.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overview: Van Kley surveys the influence of religion on the politics of France from its rejection of Protestantism to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790). He argues that the monarchy's right to exist rested on a set of religious claims that were undermined by the Jansenist controversy of the 18th century, particularly of the status of the papal bull Unigenitus. These religious parties of the Jansenist controversy shaded into the ideological parties of the Revolution, which itself depended on theoretical structures laid during the preceding religious controversy. A corollary argument is that the Enlightenment became politicized relatively late, entering a terrain already heavily shaped by religious controversy.

Method: Van Kley offers a narrative political history with a keen eye for the material conditions of print culture and for the influence of social networks. Although billed as a religious history, it focuses only on the aspects of religion that influence the political narrative. Sources include official publications but also a vast quantity of polemical literature, including pamphlets and even court reports of "seditious discourse." Much attention is lavished on determining the intellectual ancestry of documents. Although Van Kley draws attention to the changing shape of Jansenism over time, including its transition from a primarily religious/theological commitment to a political/ideological party, it can often be a challenge to determine in a given instance what he means by referring to someone or a document as "Jansenist." Also, the book was in great need of a more activist editor. Typographical errors, awkward grammatical structures, and rambling paragraphs abound.

Narrative: The identity of the Bourbon dynasty was bound up with certain religious concepts incompatible with Calvinism: relics, miracles, a sacramental concept of the king's two bodies. The monarchy also drew validity from its position as arbiter of religion and safeguard of religious conformity. It was religiously as well as politically commited to absolutism. The rise of Jansenism was problematic for the monarchy because Jansenism combined a (mostly) orthodox Catholicism with resonances of Calvinism, presbyterian or conciliar ecclesiology and a tendency to downplay human mediation of divine things.

The monarchy moved quickly against Jansenism, securing the bull Unigenitus (1713), condemning it. However, enforcement proved a problem. For a while, priests loyal to the episcopacy and Unigenitus were refusing last rights to all those who would not name as confessor a conforming priest. Popular sentiment turned indignant as several laypeople, including an old washer woman, died without last rights. The policy proved impossible to maintain. Decades of vacillating royal policy over Unigenitus and Jansenism dismantled both popular trust in and conceptual frameworks for royal absolutism in religion.

The rise of "judicial Jansenism" as a pro-parlementary force as well as a Jesuit parti dévot polarized political opinion over religious issues. Each undermined the monarchy in its own way. The judicial Jansenists developed theories of church and government that undermined absolutism's conceptual foundations. The parti dévot, while strongly supporting the concept of absolutism in terms of the king's immortal body, directed increasingly harsh moral criticism at the king's all-too-mortal body. The political acts of the mid-century tended to desacralize the king, transforming his identity from a quasi-sacred ruler into a more purely secular magistrate.

In the latter part of the 18th century, the Jesuits were expelled and judicial Jansenism was transitioning into an ideology less united by a shared religious outlook than by similar political concerns. The Enlightenment philosophes now began to politicize explicitly, often radicalizing judicial Jansenist ideals. (Van Kley posits a genetic connection between Jansenism and both Diderot's and Rousseau's political ideas.) Even though Jansenism as a religious force was largely spent by the Revolution, the theoretical concepts and grammar of discourse it laid featured heavily in the National Assembly's debates. In particular, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, although far more radical than anything Jansenists wanted, depended on key principles first enunciated by Jansenist theorists. In summary, the religious component of the French Revolution was the monarchy's gradual inability to maintain the position of absolutism that justified the creation and sustenance of the Bourbon dynasty.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surprisingly solid study. I am wary of making religion central to the story of the Revolution, but Van Kley makes a good case for its inclusion somewhere in the mix of factors leading us to the Bastille.

Following the general revisionist tendency to see continuity between the old regime and the revolutionary period, Van Kley argues that religious debates of the early modern period contributed substantially to the constitutional crisis of the late eighteenth century. It is possible, Van Kley argues, to trace "a gradual, almost imperceptible, transition from religion to ideology" in French life (10). This took place not because the French ceased to care about religion but rather because religious controversy actually became very heated during the eighteenth century. Disputes over Jansenism within the Catholic Church tended to undermine the divine authority of the king by embarrassing his efforts to unify the French church. The highly public nature of the Jansenist-Jesuit struggles tarnished the public image of the monarchy, particularly because the Crown sided with the frequently unpopular Jesuits. Furthermore, the king's efforts to keep Jansenism under control by enforcing the papal bull Unigenitus forced the dissident churchmen into fierce political opposition. By mid-century, Jansenism and parlementaire intransigence were closely linked; "judicial Jansenism" appealed to the French constitution over the head of the king and appealed to the lay church over the heads of the episcopate. Theological differences thus became ideological differences, and during the Revolution, ideological differences brought partisans into open warfare.

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Religion was an important factor in the French Revolution.

That's pretty much it. Oh sure, the argument is a bit more sophisticated than that -- Van Kley centers his study around the rise and fall of sacral absolutism, arguing that Calvinist theology eroded previous acceptance of the divine mandate of the monarchy. And he provides heaps of detailed support that would no doubt be fascinating to those interested in Jansenism, the Unigenitus, Jesuit political involvement, Roman influences on Christian law, et alia. But really, this is all just to build a case to counter previous historians' assertions that the causes of the Revolution were economic, cultural, and political, with religion playing little part. He doesn't try to downplay those influences, either, just to show that religion was significant as well. His material is well-researched if dry, but it is hard to assess how important this really was as the Revolution was, most historians agree, primarily a popular one and Van Kley gives no attention to popular religion.It would be nice to know how he thinks the ideas he's talking about trickle down to the populace.

This is an important book for those who study European religious or intellectual history. The material is dense and the author makes no effort to make his theories lively or accessible. Recommended for specialists in this field only.