The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (review)

Alyssa Sepinwall's biography of the Abbé Grégoire makes an important contribution to French Revolution historiography and not just because of Grégoire's extraordinary career. At the heart of her study is an intellectual, even moral, dilemma that has marked not only the evolution of the modern French state but also that of every heterogeneous society: the place of diversity and multiculturalism in national identity. With the French state's recent ban on the donning of religious symbols in schools, and the movement in the United States to declare English the only official language, Sepinwall's timing is perfect. To study the history of this contentious issue, one must go back to the French Revolution and to Grégoire in particular.

Sepinwall recognizes this in her acknowledgments: she thanks David Bell for urging her "to tackle some of the most contested questions in modern history" (p. 240). Unfortunately, beyond this acknowledgment, she does not explicitly orient her work toward these questions, leaving this task to readers and reviewers. If one thing is lacking in this otherwise fascinating and thorough "intellectual biography" it is this hesitation to draw out the meaning of Grégoire's life and times for our own.

Since his time, nationalists, anti-colonialists, and multiculturalists have found in Grégoire an intellectual precursor if not a hero. He was an early proponent of Jewish toleration and an influential member of France's antislavery society. Though Catholic, he helped achieve the secularization of the French state, and remained a committed republican throughout his life. At the same time, his vision of the French polis was one in which difference would be erased, gradually, through education and intermarriage. As Sepinwall writes, "the universal human family that Grégoire sought to build would ultimately place Europeans and other peoples in brotherhood. These other peoples would have to abandon their cultures and adopt the republican Christian values of Europeans like Grégoire, however, before they could belong" (p. 196).

Animating Grégoire's universalism was "regeneration." Implying an existing state of degeneracy, the younger Grégoire saw the Enlightenment as the key to creating citizens out of self-interested, particularistic populations, including Jews, Blacks, and patois speakers. Originally a theological concept, "regeneration" would take on gargantuan proportions in the first French Republic where corrupted aristocrats and other dissidents would be "forced to be free" according to Rousseau's famous dictum. Disillusioned by the failure of republicanism to achieve regeneration, the older Grégoire believed only Catholicism, indeed divine intercession, could regenerate the peoples of the world. Yet this conservative turn did not lead him away from either republicanism or a broad toleration of diverse peoples. Excepted were women who, marked by biological difference, could never be assimilated into the polis. His life-long misogyny (though Sepinwall does not call it that) was shown even in his refusal to allow priests who had married during de-Christianization to resume their vocations once the Catholic Church was restored. "If he and his friends had survived the Terror without getting married, others could have done so too" (p. 146).

Though devout and strict in his observance of his priestly role, Grégoire remained estranged from Rome throughout his career. He was the first priest to take the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, believing that the Church should advance the interests of the French state and eager to advance a more democratic Church hierarchy. On his death-bed he still refused to renounce that oath, though it precluded the administration of the last rites. Readers of this journal will perhaps find Grégoire's religious trajectory the most interesting section of the book. Positioned at the intersection of world historical events, we find him advising Haitian republicans, alienated from American Catholics, and called the "modern Las Casas" by some Latin Americans, Grégoire...