What was the status of the Catholic church during revolutionary era France? I get the impression there was a fairly ambivalent attitude towards it by the revolutionaries, but I’ve not read a great deal about it. What about Protestantism? And how did these attitudes change in Napoleonic era?
What drove the extremely aggressive continental expansionism of Napoleon and why was he so successful? Why when he was captured for 1st and 2nd times wasn’t he executed?
Why would he be? Are you under the impression that it is, or was then, normal practice to execute the leaders of defeated enemy states?
Napoleon’s wars, I think, had their origin before he came to power when revolutionary France had to go to war against other countries trying to crush the revolution in France, which they saw as a threat to their own monarchical systems. How Napoleon was able to turn the tide of war so effectively for so long I do not know, but the origin of the wars lay in pre-Napoleonic revolutionary France defending itself against the aggression of other countries, and, with French success, carried over into trying to bring revolutionary freedom (albeit in its highly compromised Napoleonic form) to the peoples of the rest of Europe. And remember, despite the fact that Napoleon did come to control much of Europe for a while, he lost in the end, and a monarchy was re-established in France. His wars were at root defensive (although often using offense as the best form of defense), and ultimately failed in their defense of revolution.
Despite the fact that some came to see Napoleon as betraying the ideals of the revolution when he declared himself emperor, he continued to be supported by many French people as the defender of those ideals against hostile foes. I dare say that, for the same reason, he garnered admiration and support in other countries too, amongst the disenfranchised (which was almost everybody back then, of course). The rulers of the rest of Europe were strongly against him, but many of the people were at least ambivalent.
Napoleon was also able ride a major shift in military practice. For the past few centuries before his era, wars had developed into a contest between small professional long-service armies. The idea of an entire society going to war would have seemed as unlikely as the idea of an entire society joining the police force to enforce the law would seem today - fighting wars was something left to the professionals and everyone else mostly stayed out of it.
The French Revolution changed that (although there had been earlier signs in Sweden and Prussia). France was under attack by several other countries and the National Convention declared a new policy in 1793 - the mass levy. It basically said that when France was at war, then all the resources of France - men and material - must be placed at the disposal of the government for the purpose of fighting the war.
The result was access to a huge untapped reservoir of forces. France was able to turn the war around and defeat its enemies who were fighting under the old limited methods.
Napoleon then came along and took charge of this military force and used it to conquer a large part of Europe. But eventually his opponents adopted the same total war principles France had adopted and their greater resources wore France down.
He’s been here for five years and he’s a regular name in the advanced physics threads. How did you jump to this conclusion?
The attitude toward the church by the revolutionaries wasn’t ambivalent. They hated the church and tried to eradicate it and declare atheism. That’s a major reason why atheism became such a bogeyman for the next century even before Communism further made it vilified.
The three Estates of Franch were the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners, in that order. The clergy, which meant the Catholic Church, were as arrogant and power-hungry as the nobility and trod their boot over the commoner’s faces to a similar degree. As the Revolution ground on, and the extremists became more extreme, they attacked clergy with the same fervor as the nobles, and killed them, drove them into exile, and removed them from power with the same ruthless efficiency.
There were no Protestants in France, for most practical purposes. The persecution of the Huguenots had driven most out of the country, and those who stayed converted to Catholicism to survive.
The excesses of the Revolutionaries created a huge backlash. The country was not ready for a restoration of the hated monarchy so there was a huge power vacuum that could be filled by a champion of the people. Napoleon took that position. It helped that a small group of royalists tried a coup, which he put down. He then took control of the Army, which was needed because other nations were seeing France’s decline as opportunity. As head of the Army he defeated all challengers, restored France’s honor, and made himself Emperor practically by acclamation.
That really riled every other European power. His “expansionism” was a first strike mentality. Germany, Russia, and England would have done it first if they could. In the short run he was successful. Eventually he learned what others later did: one nation in Europe cannot defeat a coalition of all the other powers.
All this is ridiculously oversimplified, but the alternative is several books.
Thankyou for the answers, one thing I read is that ultramontanism took hold in France during the revolution which seems to suggest a fairly ambivalent attitude to the Church.
While the Revolution hated the Church, and despite the Church being a part of the upper two estates, there were many regions in France who fought against the Revolutionary government in order to protect the Church.
No, but it certainly was the practice for a restored government to lay treason charges against someone who led a temporarily successful coup d’état, which Napoleon did against the monarchy on his return from Elba. If he had fallen into the hands of the restored French monarchy after Waterloo, treason charges and the guillotine were a distinct possibility. That’s why he surrendered to the British.
I could see exiling Napoleon once, but when he escaped and tried to resume his old bad habits, executing him would’ve then seemed quite reasonable to me.
I wonder if he ever regretted that second attempt. He left a cush island in the Mediterranean with millions of francs in pension for a crappy island in the middle of the south Atlantic.
No, they didn’t do that . A kind of deistic, nondenominational “Cult of the Supreme Being” was implemented during the revolutionary era, but didn’t get much following. It was essentially used for ceremonial purpose during big events.
Also, priests had to swear an oath to the Republic. Those who refused (a lot of them) couldn’t access to churches, celebrate mass, etc…Many did it clandestinely. During the terror those priests were persecuted, and often killed. Also, the belongings of the Catholic Church were seized and sold (lands, monasteries,…). All bishops fled the country.
The Church as a whole was strongly opposed to the ideas promoted by the Republic. Priests who had refused to take the oath were instrumental in the counter-revolution in western France (the war of Vendee).However, on an individual basis many lowly priests did support it from the get go (and probably much less so later on).
Persecutions calmed down after the Terror, under the “Directory” regime, but the obligation to swear an oath was maintained.
Napoleon put an end to this situation, and drafted a “concordat” with Rome. Essentially, the property of the Church wouldn’t be returned but the clergy would be paid by the government. The oath was abolished. The pope signed the concordat and attended Napoleon’s coronation.
Protestants (there still were some under the monarchy, practicing clandestinely, mainly in center France) and Jews were “emancipated”, being granted equal rights and in particular the right to practice their religion freely.
Well, in his defense, the Bourbons reneged on their agreement to provide him with a pension. They probably figured they could safely ignore any deals they had made with Napoleon once he was on Elba.
Napoleon used this as justification for his return. He said if the King wasn’t going to keep up his end of the agreement, then he wasn’t obligated to keep his promise to stay on Elba.
I’ll grant you that even if Louis had faithfully followed the terms of the agreement, Napoleon would most likely have found some other excuse to try a comeback.
There was a commonly-held opinion among the Revolutionary leaders (including Napoleon) that democracy and/or republican ideals required a strong middle class, and having a strong middle class required a weakened Catholic Church. One of the reasons that the Spanish resisted French occupation so fervently is that Napoleon tried to crush the Catholic Church there, too, and the Spaniards were having none of it.
It didn’t need much following, because its main proponent was Robespierre at the peak of his powers. As with every aspect of the Terror the excess begat a backlash and that doomed him, but the symbolic memory of his actions would loom for decades.
The entire process of action against the Church was called de-Christianization. As seen in that brief description, the attempted upheaval of the Church was massive and was intended to be total. It lasted for only a few years in the historic record, but you can do a huge amount of damage in three years living day by day through them. De-Christianization brought about the Cult of Reason, which was widely popular throughout the revolutionary ranks. Robespierre tried to trump that with his Cult of the Supreme Being. That failed but the anti-Church sentiment can’t be dismissed as without much following. I reject the term “ambivalent” for this intended eradication.
Applying this to every part of France would be a mistake, I admit. Certainly there were pro-clerical areas of the country and many of the clerics fleeing Paris took refuge there for as long as they could. You can oversimplify the situation to say that France was Paris and Elsewhere. French wasn’t even the language of all of France. Parisians spoke a variation called langue d’oïl, the forerunner of modern French; most of the south spoke langue d’oc variants like Gaston and Provencal. It was still a country of loosely affiliated nobles and highly disparate cultures. When people talk of the revolutionaries, they mostly mean Parisians, possibly adding in some other areas. You can find differing histories wherever you look in France. To outsiders and to history these all blend together and that’s the only way to discuss things in paragraphs. In the same simplistic fashion you can say that Napoleon unified France into a nation that thought of itself as the French nation. That deified him internally and demonized him externally.
Nobody was ambivalent about anything during the Terror. That’s what made it so terrifying.
Exapno Mapcase has it about right when he says: “All this is ridiculously oversimplified, but the alternative is several books.” in post #8. As it is the professional historians are not in agreement about the interactions between the French Catholic Church and the various factions within the French Revolution.
In general the higher clergy were members of the nobility, what do you do with the second or third son of a Lord? You can’t put to him work, what would diminish your family standing. (At least during the time period we are considering, working as a merchant would have been considered far beneath a nobles dignity.) So the French Catholic Church is very wealthy and you ship your excess male heirs off to the priesthood. Excess female decedents also got shipped of to the church, but being female they don’t get a shot at any real powerful/profitable higher clerical positions.
The French Revolution was initiated by a confluence of poor financial management by the monarchy and the rise of a small but significant middle class. All most all the men, and there were no females, in the various assemblies were from this growing middle class, universal male suffrage was later.
This middle class felt the most conflict with the Nobility and by extension the Clergy, the Church was not seen as serving the people in any meaningful way and was widely seen as an intolerable burden.
Again the French Revolution is an extraordinarily complex series of events, people who have made it the subject of their entire academic career will be in considerable disagreement as to the facts. As for the interpretation of facts that have broad consensus, well the acrimony is simply astounding.
I am not a Scholar non have I made the French Revolution a particular subject of study.
Exapno Mapcase has it about right when he says: “All this is ridiculously oversimplified, but the alternative is several books.” in post #8. As it is the professional historians are not in agreement about the interactions between the French Catholic Church and the various factions within the French Revolution.
In general the higher clergy were members of the nobility, what do you do with the second or third son of a Lord? You can’t put to him work, what would diminish your family standing. (At least during the time period we are considering, working as a merchant would have been considered far beneath a nobles dignity.) So the French Catholic Church is very wealthy and you ship your excess male heirs off to the priesthood. Excess female decedents also got shipped of to the church, but being female they don’t get a shot at any real powerful/profitable higher clerical positions.
The French Revolution was initiated by a confluence of poor financial management by the monarchy and the rise of a small but significant middle class. All most all the men, and there were no females, in the various assemblies were from this growing middle class, universal male suffrage was later.
This middle class felt the most conflict with the Nobility and by extension the Clergy, the Church was not seen as serving the people in any meaningful way and was widely seen as an intolerable burden.
Again the French Revolution is an extraordinarily complex series of events, people who have made it the subject of their entire academic career will be in considerable disagreement as to the facts. As for the interpretation of facts that have broad consensus, well the acrimony is simply astounding.
I am not a Scholar non have I made the French Revolution a particular subject of study.
