The Citizen Priest: Politics and Ideology among the Parish Clergy of Eighteenth-Century Dauphiné

T h e C itizen P riest: P o litics a n d Id eo lo g y a m o n g th e P a rish C lerg y o f E ig h teen th -C en tu ry D a u p h in e T I M O T H Y T A C K E T T mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Historians have long b e e naware of the widespread disaffection of the French parish clergy at the end of the Old Regime. The critical role played by the majority of cure deputies in the formation of the National Assembly of 1789 was, in many respects, the culmination of a developing “revolt of the cures” against many of the ecclesiastical and economic institutions of the eighteenth-century Gallican Church.1 The purpose of the present study2 is to examine this phenom­ enon in the context of one French province, Dauphine, and to trace the interaction at the local level between ecclesiastical politics, socio-economic structures, and ideology. By all previous accounts, the cures of Dauphine had been at the forefront of the clerical revolt throughout the period just prior to the Revolution.3 The cures of this province present the additional interest of a clergy which did not withdraw its support of the Revolution after the enactment of the revolutionary reorganization of the French Church: between eighty and ninety percent would affirm their acceptance of the Civil Con307 308 / WVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA T I M O T H Y T A C K E T T stitution of the Clergy, among the highest proportions of any region in France.4 I In the emergence of a revolutionary ideology among this corps of cures perhaps no factor was more important than a regional peculiarity in the mode of distribution of the Church’s revenues. The principal sources of income for most parish priests in France were the tithes and the beneficed lands or glebe. In some parishes, however, these ecclesiastical revenues were not controlled by the cures themselves, but rather by non-resident tithe-owners— clergymen or even laymen— who paid only a set salary, the so-called p o rtio n congrue, to the residing clergyman. This distinction between tithe-owning and “congruist” cures is well known to historians of the Old Regime. Less commonly known is the geographical distribution of the salaried parish priests. In most of the dioceses of northern and western France, they represented from about twenty-five to as little as five percent of the total number of cures; and many of those who were congruists received all or part of their salaries in kind— the gros as it was called in many areas. But the proportion increased considerably to the south and southeast. In the seven principal dioceses of Dauphine, the con­ gruists represented about seventy-five percent of the whole— and of these, the near totality received only a fixed money payment.5 The effects of these economic structures on cure attitudes in Dauphine were far-reaching. The fixed salary of from 300 to 700 livres— depending on the period— was decidedly mediocre and well below that of the various lay notables of the rural community. During periods of inflation, such as the early seventeenth century and the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the great majority of the parish clergy of Dauphine found their ecclesiastical income continually erod­ ing in its real value. W hatever the diversity of their backgrounds and educational experiences, they all found themselves bound together before the common problem of financial insecurity. This economic homogeneity of the cures of the Southeast formed a stark contrast to T h e C itizen P riest ImlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFED 309 the situation in many d ioce se sof northe rn and western France, in which cure incomes typically spread across the entire gamut from a few hundred to several thousand livres per year— and in which the median income might be two or three times greater than the median income in Dauphine*6 The nature of the congruists’ income also led to diffi­ culties over the decime, the ecclesiastical tax which the French clergy levied on its members* Many cures were...