The Abdicating Clergy of the Gironde

THE ABDICATING CLERGY OF THE GIRONDE BY Kenneth R. Fenster* On December 21, 1793, Jean Sabes, the curé of Beychac for over a decade, sent an irate letter to the district administration of Bordeaux complaining bitterly that its commissioner had threatened to arrest him if he refused to abdicate the priesthood. "There you have it, citizen administrators ! The conduct of your commissioner and the manner in which he extorted from me my letters of priesthood. ... It was in the name of the law that he stripped me of my property!"1 In addition to signing his name to the municipal deliberation recording his abdication , Sabes indignantly wrote, "resigning, forced, protesting!'2 A few days later the administration received a similar letter from curé JeanBaptiste Anglade of Montussan. He too protested vehemendy about having been browbeaten by a district commissioner to relinquish his letters of ordination.3 An outsider to the local community had forced these two clergymen to abdicate the priesthood. But was their experience typical in the department of the Gironde? Almost ninety years ago, the French historian Albert Mathiez lamented the lack of studies of the abdicating clergy of the Year II.4 For over fifty years, historians ignored his call for research on this subject. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, scholars interested in the clergy during the French Revolution generally wrote from a Catholic perspective and focused on the controversies arising from the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the persecution ofthe refractory priests, *Dr. Fenster is an assistant professor of history in DeKaIb College, Central Campus, Clarkston, Georgia. 'Sabes to the district ofBordeaux, December 21 , \191>,Archives départementales de la Gironde (hereafter A.D.G.), 4 L 282. 2Emphasis in the original. Municipality of Beychac to the district of Bordeaux,July 30, 1794, ibid. 'Deliberation of the district of Bordeaux, December 28, 1793,A.D.G.,3 L 26. 4"Coup d'oeil critique sur l'histoire religieuse de la Révolution," in Contributions à l'histoire religieuse de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris, 1907), p. 13. 541 542THE ABDICATING CLERGY OF THE GIRONDE neglecting the abdicating clergymen of the Terror.5 A turning point in the study ofthe abdicating clergy ofthe Year II occurred in 1964. Under the leadership of Marcel Reinhard, a team of historians responded to Mathiez's plea for systematic research into the experience of the clergy during the movement known as de-Christianization.6 Reinhard, Bernard Plongeron, Michel Vovelle, and others established statistics of abdicating priests for various departments and regions of France. They determined a chronology and geography of clerical abdications, and they sought to measure the extent of this aspect of de-Christianization.They followed the careers of the abdicating clergy through the later stages of the Revolution and into the nineteenth century, determining how many of them returned to ecclesiastical functions and how many remained among the laity. When this group of scholars presented their findings at the 89e Congrès national des sociétés savantes held at Lyon, they established the quantitative foundation of analysis of the abdicating priests of the Year II. Simultaneously, they opened a historical debate about the abdicating clergymen and the motives behind their decisions. Bernard Plongeron concluded that the abdicating priests were the victims of desperate circumstances beyond their control; they abdicated under pressure and out of fear to avoid arrest and deportation. The attack on the clergy was imposed from above by the Revolutionary government and its representatives .7 Michel Vovelle, however, argued that some priests abjured in response to the wishes of the local community while others abdicated spontaneously, abandoning the priesthood to support deChristianization or to rid themselves of an unwanted vocation. Rather than being initiated exclusively by strangers to the local community, the attack on the clergy depended on local efforts and revealed a longstanding and ongoing detachment from traditional Catholicism.8 Plongeron and Vovelle have continued to study the abdicating priests, 'Bernard Plongeron and Jean Godel, "1946-1970. Un quart de siècle d'histoire religieuse . A propos de la génération des secondes lumières, 1770-1820," Annales historiques de la Révolutionfrançaise, 44 (1792), 187-188. 'Marcel Reinhard...