Revolution and the Church

The church of the Old Regime

In 1789 the Catholic Church in France was rich and powerful. It owned perhaps 6–10 percent of the land, collected the tithe, ran nearly all schools, hospitals and poor relief, and kept the records of births, marriages and deaths. The clergy were the "First Estate," exempt from most taxes. Bishops were almost all nobles, some living lavishly at court. Many parish priests, by contrast, were poor and sympathetic to reform. Enlightenment critics like Voltaire had made the church a symbol of privilege and intolerance (see The Enlightenment).

From reform to revolution

When the Estates-General met in 1789, many parish priests joined the Third Estate (the commoners) to form the National Assembly. On the night of 4 August 1789, the clergy gave up the tithe and their privileges. In November, at the suggestion of a bishop (Talleyrand), the Assembly nationalized church lands to pay off the state's debts. Monasteries were dissolved.

The decisive break came in 1790 with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. It redrew dioceses to match the new government departments and made priests and bishops state employees, elected by local citizens, Protestants and unbelievers included. The pope's authority was reduced to a formality. All clergy had to swear an oath of loyalty to the constitution. About half the parish clergy and nearly all bishops refused. Pope Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution in 1791. France now had two churches: the "constitutional" clergy who took the oath, and the "refractory" clergy who did not, supported by most devout Catholics.

King Louis XVI, a pious Catholic, was tormented by having signed the Civil Constitution. His attempt to flee France in 1791 was partly motivated by religion. It destroyed trust in the monarchy. The king was executed in January 1793.

The Terror and dechristianization

As war and revolution radicalized, refractory priests were treated as traitors. In the September Massacres of 1792, mobs killed over 1,000 prisoners in Paris, including about 200 priests and three bishops. Some 30,000 clergy fled abroad. In 1793–1794, during the Terror, radical revolutionaries launched a campaign of dechristianization:

• Churches were closed, stripped and turned into barns, stables or "Temples of Reason." Bells were melted for cannons.
• Priests were pressured to renounce their vows and marry. Thousands did.
• A new Revolutionary Calendar abolished Sundays and saints' days, replacing the seven-day week with ten-day "decades" and starting year one in 1792.
• In November 1793 a "Festival of Reason" was held in Notre-Dame de Paris, with an actress playing the goddess Liberty.
• In the Vendée in western France, a Catholic and royalist peasant uprising was crushed with mass killings that some historians have called genocidal. Tens of thousands died. In Nantes, priests and others were drowned in the Loire.

Even Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the Terror, thought atheism was dangerous. In 1794 he staged a Festival of the Supreme Being, a Deist civil religion. Weeks later he himself was guillotined. Dechristianization faded, but the Revolution had shown that the old union of throne and altar could be overthrown, and that a modern state could try to replace Christianity entirely.

Church and revolution in Europe, 1789–1929

Napoleon and the Concordat

In 1798 French troops occupied Rome and proclaimed a republic. The aged Pope Pius VI was carried off to France, where he died a prisoner in 1799. Some predicted that he would be the last pope. Then a new ruler took charge. Napoleon Bonaparte Bonaparte was not religious, but he saw religion as essential for social order. "Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes," he reportedly said, "and inequality of fortunes cannot exist without religion."

In 1801 Napoleon signed a Concordat (agreement) with the new pope, Pius VII:

• Catholicism was recognized as "the religion of the great majority of the French," but not the state religion.
• The church gave up claims to its confiscated lands. In return the state paid clergy salaries.
• The government nominated bishops, and the pope consecrated them.
• Protestants and, later, Jews were also recognized and their clergy paid.

Ironically, by forcing all existing bishops to resign and having the pope appoint the new ones, the Concordat increased papal power over the French church. In 1804 Pius VII came to Paris for Napoleon's coronation as emperor. At the climax, Napoleon took the crown from the altar and crowned himself. Later, Napoleon annexed the Papal States and held Pius VII prisoner (1809–1814). The pope's dignified resistance won him widespread sympathy.

Romantic revival

After Napoleon's fall in 1815, Europe's monarchs restored the old order, the alliance of "throne and altar." The Jesuits were restored (1814). Religion also became fashionable again through Romanticism, which valued feeling, imagination, beauty, history and the Middle Ages over cold Enlightenment reason. François-René de Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity (1802) celebrated the beauty of Catholic worship, cathedrals and art. Gothic architecture was revived. In Germany, Friedrich Schleiermacher defended religion as a feeling of dependence on the infinite (see Faith, Science and Liberal Theology). In England, the Oxford Movement led by John Henry Newman revived Catholic tradition in the Church of England, and Newman himself became a Roman Catholic in 1845.

A century of church–state battles

Throughout the 1800s, European politics divided between liberals, who favored constitutions, free speech, secular education, civil marriage and limits on church power, and conservatives, who defended monarchy, tradition and the established church. The Catholic Church mostly sided with the conservatives, especially after the revolutions of 1848 (see Rome Against the Modern World). Some Catholics, like the French priest Félicité de Lamennais, argued that the church should embrace liberty and democracy. The pope condemned his views in 1832.

Battles raged over who would control schools, marriage and cemeteries:

• In Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck launched the Kulturkampf ("culture struggle," 1871–1878) against the Catholic Church. He expelled the Jesuits, imposed state control over clergy training, and jailed or exiled bishops. Catholics resisted through their own political party, and Bismarck eventually backed down.
• In Italy, the new kingdom seized the Papal States and Rome itself (1870). Popes refused to recognize the Italian state until 1929.
• In France, the Third Republic's anticlerical governments expelled religious orders from education and in 1905 formally separated church and state, ending the Concordat. The principle of laïcité (strict secularism in public life) still defines French politics.

In Protestant countries the conflicts were milder, but there too, established churches lost privileges. In Britain, Catholics were emancipated in 1829, and Nonconformists gained full civil rights. In 1869 the Church of Ireland was disestablished.

What changed

By 1914, the old world of "Christendom," where church and state were one and everyone belonged to the established church, was largely gone in Western Europe. Churches lost legal privileges and much of their control over education and public life. But many also gained independence from state control and found new energy as voluntary communities. Popular piety flourished, with new religious orders, Marian apparitions (Lourdes, 1858) and missions. Historians call the result secularization, but it was uneven, contested and far from complete.