Pope Benedict XVI has constantly been warning us against the dictatorship of relativism dominating the politics and culture of the Western world; indeed, the phenomenon is nothing more than a continuation of the “culture wars” that have been waged in Europe since 1789.
The Kulturkampf (the German term for culture wars) took place not only in Bismark’s Germany, but also found fervent imitators in France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The phenomenon mostly affected the Catholic countries (or those in which Catholics, as in Germany since 1871, comprised a large portion of the society). In all these countries, it took the form of a brutal struggle waged by various liberalist elements against the Catholic Church with the assistance of the state apparatus of which they had control. This was the case in France, Italy, the countries of the Iberian peninsula, and even in Bismark’s Germany, whose own liberalist elements were, for a time, favorable to them. All this was laced with a good dose of propagandistic sloganeering about “progress,” “spreading true education,” and “freedom.” Needless to say, of the latter there was always the least.
From the Spree to the Tagus, freedom, as understood by the liberals of the time, was established by the iron hand of the state, which seized the occasion to broaden the scope of its powers. In the culture wars of the nineteenth century, as in those of today, such notions as the freedom to choose one’s own path in life (e.g. pursuing a religious vocation) or the unhampered right of parents to educate their children in accordance with the dicatates of their conscience (e.g. sending them to Church-run schools) were regarded as unimportant from the standpoint of the higher aim, which was to create, with the aid of unprecedented legislation and the state gendarmerie, a “new and better culture.”
The prototype of this top-down separation of the Christian religion from the society (i.e. imposed by the state, contrary to the will of the people, on whose behalf appeals were constantly made) was the French Revolution. The anti-Christian face of the French Revolution sprang directly from the atheism of the Enlightenment which preceded the revolution. With the revolution in full swing, a certain member of the Jacobin club would expand on Voltaire’s notion of tolerance (N.B. the latter’s Treatise on Tolerance had no tolerance for Christianity). Speaking at a meeting of his section in 1795, he said: “Yes, citizens, religion is irreconcilable with the system of freedom. You feel this just as I do. Never shall free men bow their heads to the gods of Christianity. Never shall its dogmas, rituals, mysteries, and morality appeal to the Republican. Give us back our pagan gods! Gladly would I honor Jupiter, Hercules or Pallas Athena, but we will have no truck with that fabulous creator of the world. No longer do we want this incomprehensible God, who is supposed to inform all things.”
The author of these words was the Marquis de Sade, notorious for his life of debauchery (a sexual perversion derives from his name). He was even imprisoned at the Bastille—this at the request of his own family. In this context, the storming of the prison takes on a totally new meaning.
When de Sade uttered the above words, the revolutionary politics directed against France, the “first daughter of the Church,” had been in progress for over five years. It was the Church that felt the first blow. Already in 1789, she had suffered the confiscation of all her lands, which as in sixteenth-century England, became the basis of a new aristocracy—a republican one. (This new class speculated in so-called “assignats” providing security on the basis of confiscated Church lands.) In 1790, the National Assembly abolished all religious orders in France. On August 15, 1791, (a solemn Church feast day) priests were henceforth forbidden to wear cassocks. In September of 1793, at the height of the Jacobin terror, the National Assembly instituted the “law of suspects,” which made possible the guillotining of persons harboring “aristocratic sympathies.” These could also include concealing, or participating in, Holy Masses celebrated in private homes by so-called “unsworn priests, i.e. those who had not sworn the oath of fidelity according to the law known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The law was an attempt to establish a schismatic Church in France. It turned the Catholic clergy into state functionaries who were elected (bishops too) by the citizens of a given “department” (the territory of the diocese conformed to the administrative borders) regardless of whether they were atheists or not. On March 10, 1791, Pope Pius VI rejected and condemned this usurpation by the revolutionary state. King Louis XVI, although he signed the document, saw the Civil Constitution as the last drop of bitterness. He wrote of this in a letter he left behind shortly before his failed flight from Paris.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was also a turning point in that it served to unleash a spiral of violence against members of the clergy who had remained faithful to the visible head of the Church. On May 27, 1792, all religious refusing to swear the oath of fidelity were ordered deported to the colonies. On March 18, 1793, the Republic ratified the death penalty for refusing to swear the oath. As we know, the death penalty was also imposed on laypeople who provided shelter to the “unsworn priests” or took part in their liturgies, or received the sacraments from them. As the “Executioner of Lyons,” the Jacobin Commissary Chalier wrote in 1793: “Priests are the sole cause of France’s misfortune. The Revolution, which is the triumph of the Enlightenment, can only regard with loathing the long agony caused by this band of scoundrels.”
Martyrs of the Revolution
According to the estimates, about three thousand Catholic priests gave up their lives during the French Revolution. In 1793, one of these these martyrs was Fr. Julien d’Herville—an unsworn Jesuit. The records of the Orléans Revolutionary Tribunal state, among other things: “Found on him were all the means of confecting fanaticism and superstition: a scapulary with two medals, a small round box containing enchanted bread, a large silver cross with a ribbon, a heart made of silver, and a glass reliquary.”
Danton urged his colleagues in the Revolutionary Convention to load all “obstinate priests” onto ships and cast them off on the beaches of Italy, the country of fanaticism.” In the event, they chose the murderous tropics of French Guiana, which became the place of exile and martyrdom for the “unsworn.” For over half a year (from late 1793), over 800 priests awaited such a fate on board ships at the entrance to Bordeaux harbor. Cramped together under inhuman conditions, deprived of food, medicine, and the basic means of existence, they waited for the ocean voyage. Out of 829 priests, 547 died. Despite everything, they endured to the end in such torments. They prayed together, confessed each other. On October 1, 1995, Pope John Paul beatified 64 of them, for, as the Holy Father stated in his beatification homily: “At the limits of their torment, they preserved the spirit of forgiveness. They considered the unity of the faith and the unity of their country as a matter more important than anything else.”
But John Paul II’s martyrology of the French Church in the years of the Revolution did not end there. In February of 1984, he beatified 99 martyrs from Angers, victims of the bloody pacification carried out by the Republic on Wandei. He also raised eleven priests and three nuns to the altar. In this respect, the Pope from Poland was continuing the work of his predecessors. In 1906, Pius X had beatified sixteen Carmelite nuns from Compiègne, more victims of the de-Christianizing policy of the Republican authorities (1793-1794). The nuns had been taken out to the place of execution in ox-drawn carts. They sang the Miserere and Salve Regina. On mounting the scaffold, they intoned the Veni Creator and renewed aloud their baptismal and religious vows.
The laity represent another group of martyrs during the French Revolution. These went to the scaffold for showing mercy to members of the religious, by opening their homes to them. To some of these laypersons (e.g. the Anger martyrs), the Church has given official recognition, but most of them remain nameless saints. Some of them we do know. Condemned to death, in Morlaix, on July 1, 1794, were the widow Anna Leblanc and her 60-year-old daughter Anastasie. Their crime was to provide shelter in their home to the fugitive priest, Augustine Clech of the diocese of Tregnier. There was also Marie Gimet, a laborer in Bordeaux, who with the help of Marie Bouquier (a servant) concealed in their house three priests: Jean Moliner (Cahors diocese), Louis Soury (Limoges diocese), and Jean Lafond de Villefumade (Perigueux diocese). The justification for their death penalty read as follows: “for sharing the counterrevolutionary sentiments of the unsworn priests (…) for boasting of concealing them, and for repeating several times that it was better to obey the Law of God than the law of man. No mitigating circumstances for their actions have been found (e.g. the plebean origins of the accused).”
Destroy Papal Rome
The hostile actions of the revolutionary state (both the Republic and the First Empire, which sprang from the “ideals of 1789”) against the Apostolic See and successive popes, merit separate discussion. In 1790, the French state annexed the papal possession of Avignon. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy instituted that same year was a declaration of war (against the pope as well). The Republic moved from words to deeds in 1796 with General Bonaparte’s lightning offensive in Italy. Two years later, on February 1, 1798, French forces under General Berthier occupied Papal Rome. Shortly thereafter, the Roman populace (stirred up by active members of the Masonic lodges) proclaimed (under the watchful eye of the allied armies from across the Alps) the Roman Republic, thus bringing down the Church State that had existed for over a thousand years. To further humiliate the pope, the proclamation was made on February 15, 1798, the anniversary of Pius VI’s election to the papacy. The French revolutionaries drove the 80- year-old, ailing pope from Rome and incarcerated him under harsh conditions in the fortress of Valence. There, on August 29, 1799, Pius VI dies. His last words were the prayerful appeal: “In te Domine speravi, non confundar in aeternum” (“In thee, Lord, have I hoped. Never shall I be disappointed”). The Republican messenger would write to the Paris Directorate: “I, the undersigned citizen, certify the death of one Braschi Giovanni Angelo, who practised the profession of pope and bore the artistic name of Pius Vl.” To this, he added ironically, “Pius VI—the last.”
Even before the death of Pius VI, General Bonaparte, future emperor of the French, expressed similar hopes. To his brother Joseph, who served as French envoy to the Church State, he wrote: “ If the pope dies, we must do everything to prevent the election of a successor, that a revolution [in the Church State] may occur.” But the next successor to St. Peter was elected during a conclave outside of Rome (in Venice), and he took the name Pius VII. It was with him that Bonaparte, as First Consul, concluded, in 1801, a concordat that put an end to the worst wave of persecutions in France, thus enabling the rebuilding of the structures of French Church. In order to make himself successor of Charlemagne, the Corsican needed the pope to celebrate his imperial coronation in Paris. But all the time he treated the Bishop of Rome as a subordinate functionary. He brooked no opposition and demanded total obedience. When, in 1809, Pius VII had the temerity to express his opposition to the brutal war being waged by the Empire against Catholic Spain, he was arrested and brought to France, where he remained a prisoner of the French Emperor until the latter’s fall in 1814.
A new France—new culture, new time
The aim of the Revolution was not only to destroy the Christian face of France. It was also to create, in place of the “eldest daughter of the Church,” a “new France” and a “new French citizen.” Whoever did not fit “Republican dimensions” was cut to size by the guillotine. But it was not just a matter of people. In 1793, during one of the debates held at the National Convention, serious attention was given to a plan by one of the Jacobin delegates to have all the church towers in France destroyed in the name of Republican equality. (No doubt the Strasbourg Tribunal today would add “violation of religious freedom” owing to the fact that these towers are topped by crosses.) Fortunately, the plan did not come to realization, but this does not alter the fact that the French Revolution was a moment of radical, anti-Catholic iconoclasm. Entire cathedrals were razed to the ground (including the splendid basilica at Cluny), and others suffered partial destruction (as in the case of the “royal portals” of Notre Dame in Paris and the cathedral at Chartres). That pearl of Gothic architecture, the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris (built by St. Louis IX in the thirteenth century as a reliquary for the Crown of Thorns) was turned into a granary. Chartres Cathedral was saved from destruction by a citizen, who purchased it from the authorities for the price of the rubble. (Today UNESCO lists the cathedral as a world heritage site.) At Bourges, site of another magnificent cathedral, the revolutionary committee, ratified the destruction of two churches (including a cathedral), since, “in a situation in which philosophy triumphs, every effort must be made to destroy all places of worship that testify to the stupidity of our fathers and keep alive hopes owed to superstition and charlatanry.”
The “new man” had to function in a new time (“new” meaning anti-Christian). In this context, the introduction of the new “republican” calendar (1792) deserves mention. The date of proclamation of the French Republic (September 22, 1792)—not the birth of Christ—was to be the start of the new era. The Lord’s Day (Sunday) was abolished, as were all other Christian feast days. The seven-day week was replaced by a ten-day decade (the aim being to blur Sunday’s identity). As one of the designers of the republican calendar, Fabre d’Églantine, observed: “Our long habituation to the Gregorian calender has filled the popular memory with a great number of fancies, which have been honored since time out of mind and which even today are the source of religious errors. Therefore we must substitute for these visions of ignorance the real world of the rational mind. For the priestly office we must substitute the truth of nature.”
A new school was to educate the “new man” in “republican virtue.” The aim of this school was to remove the citizen from any kind of Church influence and hand him over to the total domination of the revolutionary state. The republican model of education was based on wholly anti-Christian principles. As the above-mentioned theoretician and practitioner of revolution, the Marquis de Sade, observed: “Fellow Frenchmen, only deal the first blow [to the Catholic religion] and public education will do the rest.”
The Russian novelist, Fiodor Dostoevsky, aptly characterized the upshot of the “republican education” to which the French people were subjected for the period of a generation (almost thirty years, from 1789 to 1815—when the monarchy was restored): “If man were to attempt some day, wherever it might be, to build his life on atheism, we would create something so abominable, so blind and inhuman, that the whole structure would come crashing down under the weight of people’s curses.”
The generation that grew up and was formed by the revolution (the First Empire was its continuator) signified a broken continuity not only with the old Royal France, but also with Christian France—the “eldest daughter of the Church.” Revolution is not only worst in what it destroys, but in what it creates. (To be continued).
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