Consciences épiscopales en exil (1789-1814): À travers la correspondance de Mgr de La Fare, évêque de Nancy (review)

Anne-Louis-Henri de La Fare was a pre-eminent leader of the Catholic Church in France during the Restoration. Aside from becoming Archbishop of Sens in 1817 and a Cardinal in 1823, he served as an assistant to Talleyrand when the latter led his government's administration of cultes. Monseigneur La Fare never would have amassed such ecclesiastical cache, however, had it not been for his earlier intransigence toward the Revolution, Napoleon, and the religious legislation enacted by both. Becoming the bishop of Nancy while the Old Regime was in its last throes, La Fare went into exile shortly after passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He remained outside of France until 1814, refusing to recognize the Napoleonic Concordat and not submitting his episcopal resignation before 1816. It is this earlier part of La Fare's pastoral career that is the subject of Bernard de Brye's book.

Much of Brye's study reads like a conventional biography. Like many high prelates of his time, La Fare was groomed from an early age to become a prominent clergyman. Before becoming the bishop of Nancy, La Fare proved himself as a syndic of the clergy in the diocese of Dijon, a member of the Estates of Bourgogne, and a participant in the General Assembly of the Clergy in 1782. Shortly after becoming bishop in 1788, La Fare was one of the relatively few (forty-five) bishops sent to the Estates General to represent the clergy. He quickly aligned with the far right in the Constituent Assembly and vehemently opposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which when passed led to his resignation from the assembly in July 1790 and his subsequent exile six months later.

Monseigneur La Fare first found refuge in Trier, but remained there for less than a year. By November 1791 La Fare was in Vienna, where he spent the balance of his exile. Aside from keeping tabs on his diocese, which was no easy task, he also directed efforts whereby expatriated French priests were sent into Hungary to minister and evangelize. La Fare also assisted other exiled bishops who lacked proper passports and came to the material aid of the exiled clergy from his diocese. This study is at its best when Brye describes La Fare's attempts to administer his diocese from afar; one finds subtle depictions of relationships that La Fare forged with the vicars general of his diocese, who clandestinely acted on his behalf in Lorraine. Also significant here is Brye's explanations for why La Fare not only rejected the latter clerical oaths during the Directory period but also the Concordat of 1801 throughout the Napoleonic regime.

As welcome as this book is, especially since it provides valuable glimpses of the refractory Church both in France and beyond it and is generally well researched, one is hard pressed to see how Brye's work differs from the outdated polemical historiography of the Catholic Church during the French Revolution that casts the refractory clergy as right and the constitutional clergy wrong. What does Brye say about the Constitutional Church in and around Nancy? Hardly anything. To cite one example, the Constitutional bishop of the Meurthe, Luc-François Lalande, is mentioned only once in the book, in an obscure footnote, no less (p. 250). That Brye obviously considers the Constitutional Church illegitimate is beside the point; the greater issue here is his obfuscation of the institution's relevance by omitting it from the narrative. Scholars yearning for a comprehensive view of the Catholic Church in France during the Revolution deserve better, even in a book about a counterrevolutionary cleric.