Religion and Revolution in France, 1780-1804 (review)

The French Revolution is one of the most exhaustively studied subjects in modern historiography; monographs have been published on nearly every aspect of it, from political events in Paris to their effects in the provinces and the French overseas empire. According to Nigel Aston's new book, however, there remains a glaring omission: "the place of the clergy and religion" during the Revolution (p. x). Aston's book aims to remedy this defect by surveying the place of the Church in France from the late ancien regime into the Napoleonic years. Aston is not completely alone in treating the place of religion in the Revolution. Parallel to the vast literature on Jews and the Revolution, scholars like Dale Van Kley, Timothy Tackett, and Suzanne Desan have done much in recent years to deepen our knowledge of the relationship between Catholicism and the Revolution. What makes Aston's text unique, however, is its broad coverage and synthesizing ambitions, as well as its desire to treat Protestants and Jews alongside Catholics.

Aston begins his text with a survey of Old Regime religion (part 1). The first chapter discusses the special privileges enjoyed by the Catholic clergy, along with the principles of Gallicanism, Jansenism, and Richerism (Catholic strains which would help fuel the revolt of the lower clergy against the bishops at the Estates-General). The author is careful to include here, as throughout the book, treatment of women in religious orders alongside male clergy. The second chapter looks beyond the formal structures of the Church to analyze the diverse beliefs and practices of the clergy and laity. Rejecting the widespread idea that the French populace on the eve of the Revolution showed growing secularization and irreligion, Aston focuses on markers of continued religiosity.

Part 1 also includes a chapter on "Other Denominations" in the late Old Regime. The author begins by explaining the tenuous situation of Protestants and efforts in the 1780s to obtain toleration for them. He then turns to the Jews, aiming to summarize the work of leading historians of French Jewry in the period. On pp. 72–80, he explains the differing statuses of Ashkenazim and Sephardim, along with prerevolutionary initiatives toward improving their situation. The last chapter in part 1 focuses on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Enlightenment. In contrast to a historiographical tradition which has long viewed the Enlightenment and religion as immutable foes, Aston acknowledges the existence of a religious Enlightenment tradition in France, something which a new generation of scholars has begun to rescue from historical oblivion. Aston argues nonetheless that the idea of "enlightened piety" was much less strong in France than in other European countries. "Despite the Enlightenment," he concludes, "popular religious observances continued, a mixture of superstition and pity, deprecated by philosophes and abbés alike, but resistant to the strictures of both" (p. 99).

The second part of Aston's study looks at the relationship between religion and Revolution from the mid-1780s through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed in 1790. This section focuses exclusively on Catholicism and builds on earlier work by the author on French bishops during this period. Following Timothy Tackett, Aston notes that religion and Revolution were not on an inevitable collision course, and that many Frenchmen hoped that the Revolution could effect "religious reform and renewal" (p. 161). Nevertheless, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which required priests to swear an oath of allegiance to the Revolution and to be elected by the French people, rather than named by Rome) created an irreversible break by forcing clergy to choose between state and Pope, rather than finding some accommodation between them. "Faced with what was crudely reduced to a stark choice between religion and revolution," Aston writes, "half the adult population (and the great majority of women) rejected revolution" (p. 162).

The third section of the book traces the fate of religion in France in the less studied period of 1791–95. Chapter 8 explores the...