Earthly Powers

The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War

Michael Burleigh

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780060580940
• eBook ISBN: 9780061741456
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

In this masterful, stylish, and authoritative book, Michael Burleigh gives us an epic history of the battles over religion in modern Europe, examining the complex and often lethal ways in which politics and religion have interacted and influenced each other over the last two centuries. From the French Revolution to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, Earthly Powers is a uniquely powerful portrait of one of the great tensions of modern history—one that continues to be played out on the world stage today.

CHAPTER 1

Age of Reason, Age of Faith

I ELDEST DAUGHTER OF THE CHURCH

We begin with the illusory stability of a Church with venerable roots but whose spiritual dynamism arguably lay in the past too. Since the time of St Louis (1226–70) French kings have been ‘the most Christian’, a term extended to France itself. Since the reign of Philip the Fair (1285–1314), France was known as ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’ and the French as God’s chosen people. The Church and the French monarchy were linked in a hierarchy that reached down from God in His heavenly kingdom. Throne and altar were inseparable, with senior clerics omnipresent at solemn public occasions well into the French Revolution.¹

Higher clergy dominated the coronation ceremonies at Rheims. On the afternoon of 10 June 1774, Louis XVI attended vespers to prepare him for the following day’s long proceedings. The cathedral had already filled at four in the morning for ceremonies that commenced at six a.m. Louis took several oaths, silently praying as he carefully emphasised each word in Latin. He promised to protect the Church and to extirpate heretics, dipping his voice for this part since it did not accord with the sentiments of the late eighteenth century. The regalia were blessed and Louis was girded with the sword of Charlemagne, with which he was obliged to protect the Church, widows and orphans. He prostrated himself on a square of violet velvet, while the litanies of the saints were said over him. Kneeling before the aged archbishop la Roche-Aymon, Louis was anointed with six unctions, his gloves and ring were blessed, and he was handed Charlemagne’s sceptre. He could touch people for scrofula, which he did a few days later.

The coronation proper was attended by the massed peerage. As the crown was held just above Louis XVI’s head, the archbishop proclaimed: ‘May God crown you with the crown of glory and of justice…and you will come to the everlasting crown.’ Sitting on his throne in his new blue robe with the fleur-de-lis, Louis was now the ‘rex christianissimus’, the most Christian King of the Church’s ‘eldest daughter’ of France. The doors were opened to enable the people to see the new king. Birds were released and trumpets blew as the archbishop declaimed: ‘Vivat rex in aeternum.’ The ceremonies finished with a mass and the Te Deum.²

Clergy were very visible in eighteenth-century France, especially in the towns. To take one not untypical example, there were twelve hundred in Toulouse, a city of about fifty-three thousand people. In Angers, one in sixty of its thirty-four thousand inhabitants were clerics, not counting seminarians and the like. Clerics participated in all major public occasions, singing Te Deums to celebrate a royal birth or military victory; they interceded with God to avert man-made and natural disasters. Chaplains accompanied the fleets on dangerous voyages and administered the last rites to soldiers dying on the battlefields. Dedicated religious orders negotiated with pirates and Islamic rulers who had enslaved Christian captives. Unfortunates condemned to death received sacramental consolation even if they did not want it. Since we have been effectively deafened by ambient noise it is easy to forget that this was a sensitive auditory culture. The peal of church bells marked sacred days, invasions, fires and storms.³ The feasts of the Church gave the year articulation and meaning. The French clergy were not like Lutheran pastors in Frederick the Great’s Prussia, who had become little more than state officials, but they had various quasi-governmental functions.⁴ In the countryside, priests relayed government pronouncements after the Sunday sermon, often literally interpreting the high French of officialdom into the low patois (or foreign languages such as German or Spanish) spoken by their parishioners. Priests recorded the most rudimentary information on the lives of the king’s subjects. Religious orders virtually controlled education, with many future revolutionaries indebted to Jesuit or Oratorian schoolmasters for their easy Latinity and knowledge of the politics of Roman antiquity.

The clergy were responsible for setting the moral tone in society in general, with these functional merits of religion being blindingly obvious even to sceptics such as Voltaire. There was virtual unanimity on the need for Hell to stop the servants stealing the spoons: anyone who cast doubt on the reality of eternal torment was certain to experience it.⁵ The clergy tried to enforce Sunday as a day of rest and prayer and the Lenten fast, fighting back the pernicious influence of village tavern-keepers who offered men rival consolations. They denounced games of chance, loose women and rotten literature. They had to walk a fine line between curbing practices that made the Church look ridiculous to smart opinion in an age so concerned with reconciling reason and revelation, and alienating their flocks by outlawing customs which made abstract belief meaningful and tangible to them.

Historians have made various attempts to test the depth of religious conviction, an exercise as precise as encountering warm and chilly areas while swimming in an ocean. There seems to have been an increase in bastards born to servants, judging by the numbers of foundlings left outside the church doors. This was probably more indicative of rising grain prices than what these servants believed. Likewise, more and more couples resorted to contraception, but this may have reflected an upward valuation of children. The diminution in testamentary demand for masses for the repose of one’s soul may speak to changes in how people regarded their own deaths, with the Church failing to convince them of the imminence of hellfire. It has been equally well argued that, urban sophisticates apart, most people may have had a more intelligent and personal comprehension of their faith than at any time since the Middle Ages.⁶

The clerical Estate was self-administering and self-taxing. Its 130,000 members were exempt from taxation, instead voting ‘free gifts’, amounting to up to 12 per cent of their revenues, at its five-yearly General Assemblies to bellicose or spendthrift monarchs. Between 1715 and 1788 this gift amounted to 3,600,000 livres, rising to an annual average of 5,700,000 livres under Louis XVI. Land and tithes meant that the Church was immensely rich, although this wealth was so unevenly distributed as to cause widespread resentment. The incomes of the 135 bishops varied immensely, from ten thousand livres per annum to two hundred thousand. One bishop in 1789 was from a bourgeois background; the rest were aristocrats, 65 per cent of them from families whose nobility emerged in illustrious mists before the year 1400. Bishops from leading aristocratic dynasties started well up the income scale, making a couple of strategic leaps to achieve the big money on offer at Rheims or Strasbourg. They pursued a variety of vocations according to their class, inclinations and temperaments. A few, such as Bernis or Brienne, continued the tradition of Mazarin, Richelieu and Fleury as first-rate administrators, diplomats and politicians. Brienne was sufficiently indistinguishable from his enlightened friends that in 1781, when his candidacy for promotion was being canvassed, Louis XVI famously averred ‘that it was necessary that an archbishop of Paris should at least believe in God’.

Most bishops were efficient administrators of their dioceses, keeping their clergy up to the mark, or improving the local infrastructure with canals and roads. A few had the stereotypical vices of their class, preferring feasting, hunting or loose women, the stock-in-trade of anticlerical jibes over the centuries. Some of them never condescended to visit their dioceses, with a fifteen years’ absence being a record many thought scandalous, although that did not mean they were not profitably employed, just that they did not like life in the provincial boonies or sticks. However, the majority organised diocesan seminaries or clerical conferences and routinely visited their clergy with sufficient investigative rigour as to be widely resented. The remainder of the six thousand or so higher clergy consisted of cathedral canons. These were aristocratic oligarchies, of say fifty canons per cathedral, whose function was to ensure that worship there was appropriately magnificent. This left them with much time on their hands for such hobbies as antiquarianism, botany, charity or visiting relatives, which, taken together with combined incomes of, say, the 3,500,000 livres that ninety canons shared at Chartres, caused envy.

Half the French clergy were regulars, that is, monks or nuns, indeed 60 to 70 per cent of regulars were women. After 1768, monks had to be over twenty-one, nuns aged over eighteen. There was a decline in entrance to the traditional orders, some of whose houses were inhabited by fewer than ten monks. Across eighteenth-century Europe monarchs cast a beady eye over religious orders whose wealth might be used to extend the network of parishes, provide education, once the monks had been converted into teachers, or boost the state’s revenues in general. In France a commission on the regulars led to the suppression of eight orders, and the closure of 458 monasteries out of the three thousand or so in the country. The very wealthy abbeys and convents of France represented a supplementary source of income for aristocratic bishops. The bishopric of Orléans brought in forty-two thousand livres per annum, but two abbeys added a further sixty-five thousand livres to the bishop’s income.⁷ Apart from being the source for bread doles to the indigent, abbeys and convents were useful places to beach an illegitimate daughter or a libertine uncle. Many monks had abandoned habits for coats, stockings and the pleasures of very well-laid tables. Monks and nuns came in for the special scorn of the philosophes, the incipient intelligentsia of their day, although the regular clergy were rationalised and reformed during the late eighteenth century. Much eighteenth-century pornography was set in abbeys and convents. Indeed in French slang ‘abbaye’ is still a synonym for whorehouse. Pornography could also simultaneously be philosophy; notably the novel Thérése philosophe (1748) in which the heroine is so appalled by a lascivious Jesuit that she abandons her faith and embarks on a life of copulation and discussions of ontology with an equally libidinous philosophic count. The anticlerical philosophe–pornographers had less to say about pious women who led exceptional lives as nurses in non-conventual communities, without whose ministrations the lives of the blind, foundlings, orphans, the sick and the elderly would have been unfathomably wretched.⁸

The sixty thousand parish curates or curés and their insecure and often indigent vicars were the real clerical workhorses, exempt from the opprobrium that enlightened opinion heaped on their sybaritic superiors and idle regulars. Since every candidate for priestly ordination had to have a minimum of a hundred livres independent income, these men were usually the sons of affluent artisans, manufacturers or such professional people as lawyers and notaries. The curés admonished, advised and consoled their parishioners, and as learned men brought a little agricultural or medical knowledge to places bereft of it. They promoted vaccination for smallpox, or lightning conductors on their village’s tallest structure. Dominique Chaix, a country cleric in the Gapençais who was too poor to own a horse, was an authority on alpine plants, which he sold to buy the occasional book. This background enabled him to practise herbal medicine. Almost imperceptibly the clergy’s role shifted from the care of souls to improving the brutish manners of their parishioners, although the artistry involved working with, rather than against, the grain of the old Adam. From here it was but a short step to offering opinions on what to do about such social issues as begging. Keeping parish records often led to an interest in local history, as they livened up their registers with events and happenings. The clergy were part of the intellectual culture of their time. Twenty-nine per cent of elite Academicians were clerics; and so were seven hundred of the twenty thousand freemasons, whose lodges were often the hubs of local intellectual activity. By the eighteenth century many of them had quite considerable libraries, of a hundred books or more, the majority being liturgical manuals or collections of sermons rather than anything as unearthed as theology. Some of them were notorious drunkards or gluttons, although standards had markedly improved since the previous century, due to the institution of diocesan seminaries. Reports on pastoral visits and the records of diocesan courts in the seventeenth century revealed any number of drunken, brawling, whoring secular clerics; by 1720, the roll-call of such delinquents had fallen to 5 per cent of the total. In fact, most secular clergy had spent about sixteen months in a seminary, and took their Counter-Reformation inspired status as part of a strict hierarchy watched over by God-as-judge seriously.

The majority were overworked and underpaid, and were respected by many philosophes for their work with the poor, with whom the latter rarely made any acquaintance. Clerical incomes derived from tithes and ancillary sums from land or surplice fees. Where he did not hold tithing rights, the priest received a much more meagre handout from the bishop, chapter or monastery which did, called the ‘portion congrue’. Reformers thought that fifteen hundred livres would represent a living commensurate with the dignity of the clerical office. While some received over four thousand livres, the majority had to make do with about eight hundred, and sometimes considerably less. Demands on their slender resources were constant. They had to maintain a housekeeper and a horse to reach outlying areas, to contribute to the pension of the previous incumbent, and to anyone seeking emergency sustenance. The number of ordinations fell, especially among young townsmen, the result being the creeping countrification of the parochial clergy. By 1770, some 70 per cent of the clergy were from villages or small country towns.⁹

II JESUITS, JANSENISTS AND PHILOSOPHES

We need to go back to the exalted heights where Church and state met. The French monarchy enjoyed a supremacy over the Church that was as real as that exercised by Henry VIII in England, but without the deeper social support that came with Protestant nationalist messianism. The French monarchy negotiated rather than seized these rights. Gallicanism, as it is known, was the complex of agreements and traditions that served to limit or repulse the papacy’s pretensions to power in France, beginning with the Concordat of Bologna in 1516 that enabled Francis I to nominate appointments to the most senior ecclesiastical positions. His successors never looked back. This monarchical ascendancy characterised several other Catholic countries in the eighteenth century. The substantial spectre of Henry VIII haunted the papacy’s increasingly fraught dealings with an exceptionally independent-minded array of eighteenth-century Roman Catholic sovereigns. The popes had nothing to say anywhere about who should be king, that being a matter of dynastic lottery. By contrast, the ambassadors and crown cardinals of the major European Catholic powers could frustrate the election of candidates to the throne of St Peter, if they were thought unsympathetic to their respective national interests. In extreme circumstances they could exercise their right of veto.¹⁰ In France, the pope had no power to intervene between king and clergy, usually approving the appointment of abbots and bishops, who were routinely aristocratic beneficiaries of royal patronage. Publication of a papal bull on doctrinal questions was dependent upon royal approval.

The preceding two centuries had experienced terrible religious civil wars between Catholics and Protestants and international wars with a powerful religious dimension.¹¹ Memories of these conflicts haunted enlightened opinion, rather in the way that the ghosts of recent genocides help shape the contemporary imagination if not international conduct. As the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 brought major inter-state religious wars to an end, rulers still had to decide the fate of religious minorities within their own borders. In 1731 the archbishop of Salzburg scandalised Protestant Europe by giving all Protestants over twelve years of age eight days to pack up and go, which resulted in twenty thousand people being resettled by the Prussians.¹² The empress Maria Theresa also believed in confessional homogeneity and was prepared to deport Protestant ‘heretics’ to achieve it. But in England Christianity had ceased to be a compulsory society. Its state Church had a genius for accommodating a variety of opinions, while formal sanctions against religious dissenters were flouted with official connivance. This more tolerant atmosphere spread to what had been bastions of orthodoxy. Joseph II, Maria Theresa’s heir, argued that ‘with freedom of religion, one religion will remain, that of guiding all citizens alike to the welfare of the state. Without this approach we shall not save any greater number of souls, and we shall lose a great many more useful and essential people.’ His 1781 Edict of Toleration allowed dissenters to worship privately, and Calvinists, Lutherans and Greek Orthodox Christians to have churches without steeples. Frederick the Great of Prussia thought that the best way of integrating his burgeoning territories and of enhancing their prosperity was to tolerate Jews, Catholics and Calvinist immigrants in his predominantly Lutheran polity, one of the reasons why there are so many French surnames in the Berlin telephone book.

In France the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed a monopoly of public worship, but there were Lutherans in Alsace and a croissant-shaped scattering of Calvinists, stretching southwards from Poitou towards the Languedoc and then upwards again into the Dauphiné. The wealth of Protestant bankers, shipbuilders and traders in cities such as Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Marseilles and Nîmes, and their utility to the crown in raising its improbable loans, militated in favour of grudging toleration, provided Protestants were not too ostentatious in practising their faith. Wealth and religious difference combined were powerful incentives to resentment. The Edict of Toleration in 1787 legitimised Protestant marriages, inheritance and burial in exclusive or mixed cemeteries, while forbidding Protestants to worship in public. France’s small Jewish community of forty thousand people consisted of Sephardim in places like Bordeaux and Carpentras or Paris, who hankered after integration, and yiddish-speaking Ashkenazis in Alsace, who wished to retain their communal independence. Enlightened opinion about the Jews ranged from Voltaire, who saw Judaism as the source of religious backwardness and fanaticism, to the abbé Grégoire who sought to ‘reform’ the Jews by opening up to them a range of professions including farming in return for their abandonment of their particularisms.

Censorship, lax in practice but all the more resented in theory, as well as ferocious blasphemy and sacrilege laws, sought to compel orthodoxy. The philosophes tended to highlight the most extreme cases, often omitting crucial details that might have modified their starkly contrived contrasts. In 1765 the chevalier François-Jean de la Barre was arraigned for defacing a crucifix on the bridge at Abbeville and various other instances of blasphemy and sacrilege, such as not doffing his hat to passing Capuchin friars on the ground that it was raining. The first charge did not stick, but that he had worn his hat in the presence of the sacrament, mocked priestly practices and had illicit books was proven. After the parlement of Paris confirmed his sentence, executioners spent twelve hours tormenting La Barre before striking off his head. In fact, individual malice by a lay legal official had led to his prosecution, with the parlement of Paris going the whole way in order to counter the reputation for anticlericalism it had accrued from its vindictive pursuit of the Jesuits. Senior clerics had actually intervened to commute La Barre’s sentence; the Assembly of French clergy requested clemency, and the papal nuncio said a year in jail would have sufficed.¹³

The Gallican Church faced several threats. They were live or latent, from within as well as from without. Across Europe Catholic rulers in the Holy Roman Empire, Spa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: Age of Reason, Age of Faith
• CHAPTER 2: The Church and the Revolution
• CHAPTER 3: Puritans Thinking They are Spartans Run Amok in Eighteenth-Century Paris
• CHAPTER 4: The Alliance of Throne and Altar in Restoration Europe
• CHAPTER 5: Chosen Peoples: Political Messianism and Nationalism
• CHAPTER 6: Century of Faiths
• CHAPTER 7: New Men and Sacred Violence in Late-Nineteenth-Century Russia
• CHAPTER 8: Rendering Unto Caesar: Church versus State, State versus Church
• CHAPTER 9: The Churches and Industrial Society
• CHAPTER 10: Apocalypse 1914
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• SEARCHABLE TERMS
• About the Author
• PRAISE FOR Earthly Powers
• ALSO BY MICHAEL BURLEIGH
• Copyright
• About the Publisher