Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720–1815 by E. Claire Cage (review)

During the radical phase of the French Revolution, all ties to Christianity became suspect. “Citizen-Priests” who had previously established their support of the Revolution were forced to prove that support through a variety of means, including abdicating their vows—or, if they preferred, getting married. These clerical marriages are the focus of Unnatural Frenchman, a brief but well-researched and often moving book about the thousands of Gallican priests who married during the Revolutionary era.

E. Claire Cage takes a long-term view of this phenomenon. Starting with a (mostly superfluous) discussion of the history of Catholic clerical celibacy, Cage then turns to the debate over clerical celibacy in the French Enlightenment, before devoting the three remaining chapters to a discussion of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Clerical celibacy had been a target of a number of Enlightenment authors, a discussion often tied in with the accounts of priests’ sexual misadventures. The arrival of the Revolution increased the volume of this discussion. Although the relationship between the Revolution and the Catholic Church was a problem from the start of the Revolution in 1789, it was during the Radical Revolution of 1793–94 that clerical marriage became a major political issue.

The book’s strength lies in the rich detail provided by Cage, particularly from the Terror and from the Napoleonic era. Cage helps make sense of the choices faced by clerics and the decisions they made—from the clerics who stood up for priestly celibacy during the Terror and those who married to protect themselves but tried to stay as true as possible to their vows to those who embraced their new status as husbands and fathers. When faced with the possibility of reconciliation with the Church under Napoleon, their choices were just as diverse (and far better documented). Meanwhile, both eras included any number of priests whose sexual practices were frowned on by opponents and supporters of clerical celibacy alike.

Cage gives more importance to some of her material than it warrants. The debates over clerical celibacy that she painstakingly reconstructed were a nonfactor during the Revolution’s early years, contrary to Cage’s depiction. Nor is she convincing in her claim that the long-term tensions between “understandings of what it meant to be a celibate clergyman and what it meant to be a good citizen” undermine the historiographically dominant view of the “essentially contingent” (p. 63) nature of the split between the Revolution and the Church. These shortcomings are more than made up for by the ways in which Cage re-creates the dilemmas faced by clerics—including, in some cases, the dilemmas that had originally led some women and men into vocations for which they were not particularly suited. Although Cage is sympathetic to the choices priests faced, the book provides a welcome counter-balance to the overly sympathetic accounts of the counter-revolutionary clergy common in histories of the revolutionary clergy.

Cage mentions the shadow cast over the book by current attempts to end clerical predations on minors in the Catholic Church and is well aware of the larger cultural attempts to move beyond heteronormativity and to validate women’s experiences. She includes brief discussions of Old Regime sodomy, the decisions made by women to enter the convent, and their experiences once they were forced to leave it. The focus of the book, however, is on the parish priests who lived through the Revolution. Theirs was a rich and varied history indeed and well worth the attention that it receives in Cage’s fine book.