Reading Matt Taibbi’s furious denunciation of the Roman Catholic Church this afternoon, I thought, Oh dear, let’s not. Let’s — as I suggested last week — remember how revitalized the old Church was by the attempt of the New French Order to secularize it in 1790.

The French Revolution had many turning points; but the oath of the clergy was, if not the greatest, unquestionably one of them. It was certainly the Constituent Assembly’s most serious mistake. For the first time the revolutionaries forced fellow citizens to choose: to declare themselves publicly for or against the new order. And although refusers branded themselves unfit to exercise public office in the regenerated French Nation, paradoxically their freedom to refuse was a recognition of their right to reject the Revolution’s work. In seeking to identify dissent, in a sense the revolutionaries legitimized it. That might scarcely have mattered if, as the deputies expected, nonjurors had amounted only to a handful of prelates and their clients. But when, months rather than the expected few weeks later, the overall pattern of oath-taking became clear it was found that around half the clergy of France felt unable to subscribe.*

“Unprepared to subscribe” — soon they were inflated by all the reaction that the Revolution inevitably generated. The oath of the clergy transformed the Church from an outmoded institution into a unified receptacle for opposition to the new régime. And from that, in the course of the Nineteenth Century, it swelled into the bulwark against liberal humanism that persists to this day. 

So let’s not repeat Voltaire’s expostulation, Écrasez l’infâme. Let’s keep the strong language to a minimum. It has a tendency to echo.

*William Doyle: The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989, 1999), p. 144.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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