Abstract
The Concordat of 1801 sought to repair the breach between the French State and the Catholic Church caused by the Revolution and especially by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790. It was negotiated by a newly powerful Napoleon Bonaparte and a recently elected pope, Pius VII. Opposition to the Concordat was centred in the clergy of the emigration, especially those in London. It was given leadership by the surviving bishops and bite by a group of energetic controversialists headed by the Abbé Pierre-Louis Blanchard. This chapter suggests that in fighting their corner for Gallicanism—a French Church largely independent from Rome and exemplified by an almost messianic episcopalianism—they lost the campaign but not the war.
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Notes
- 1.
For the Concordat see Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France 1780–1804 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 316–51 and Owen Hufton, ‘The Reconstruction of a Church, 1796–1801’, in Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815, G. Lewis and C. Lucas, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 21–52. See also Jean-Pierre Chantin, ‘Anticoncordataires ou Petite Eglise? Les Oppositions religieuses à la Loi du 18 germinal an X’, Chrétiens et sociétés 10 (2003): 95–107.
- 2.
Louis Kerbiriou, Jean-François de La Marche, évêque-comte de Léon, 1729–1806 (Paris and Quimper: La Goaziou, 1924), 356. La Marche came to Britain in 1791: see Nigel Aston, The End of an Elite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution 1786–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 281.
- 3.
For Dillon see ‘Arthur-Richard Dillon’, Bulletin de la Commission Archéologique et Littéraire de Narbonne, 51 (2008). See also Nigel Aston, ‘Dillon, Arthur Richard (1721–1806), Archbishop of Narbonne and Émigré Leader’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2003, September 23). Accessed 6 August 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-7654. See also Dominic Aidan Bellenger, Fearless Resting Place (Bath: Downside Abbey Press, 2016), 85–95. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), made bishop of Autun in 1789, one of the most colourful figures of his time and the subject of many biographies, was in exile in London on and off in the 1790s, but was an excommunicate. He was one of the negotiators of the Concordat on behalf of Napoleon. His excommunication was lifted in 1802 and he was laicised: see Alan Sked, ‘Talleyrand and England, 1792–1838: a Reinterpretation’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 17 (2006): 647–64.
- 4.
See Juliette Reboul’s chapter with reference to E. Burke in British private libraries, in Chap. 6.
- 5.
Kirsty Carpenter’s develops for example the details of the collaboration between the French clergy and Burke in running the Penn school for émigrés boys in Chap. 5.
- 6.
F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. 2, 1784–1797 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 431–32. See also Colin Lucas, ‘Edmund Burke and the Émigrés’, in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 3. The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, (Oxford: Pergamon, 1990), 101–30. Juliette Reboul discusses regulation of English and French identities in French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 82–3.
- 7.
Jean-François de La Marche, Lettre de M. l’évêque de Léon aux ecclésiastiques français en Angleterre (London, 1793).
- 8.
Bernard Plongeron, La Vie quotidienne du clergé français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1974), 92.
- 9.
Kirsty Carpenter, ‘Secularization by Stealth? Émigrés in Britain during the French Revolution’, in The French Revolution and Religion in a Global Perspective: Freedom and Faith, eds. Bryan Banks and Erica Johnson, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 73–94.
- 10.
Mémoire des évêques français (London, 1802).
- 11.
Mémoire des évêques français, 10.
- 12.
Ibid., 20.
- 13.
Ibid., 28.
- 14.
Ibid., 59.
- 15.
Ibid., 106. For the bishops’ careers see Jean Armand, Les Évêques et archévêques de France depuis 1682 jusqu’à 1801 (Paris: A Picard, 1891) and the Catholic Hierarchy website: http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/. [Accessed 6 August 2018]. An overview has been provided by John Mc Manners in the first volume of his Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: The Clerical Establishment and its Social Ramifications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and in ‘Aristocratic Vocations: French Bishops of the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Church History 15 (1978): 305–25. For Dillon and La Marche see notes 2 and 3 above. The other bishops, all of aristocratic lineage and all resident in London, were in other respects varied. Philippe-François d’Albignac de Castlenau (1742–1814), bishop of Angoulême from 1784 and a delegate at the States General in 1789, spent a long and continuous exile in London, from 1791 to 1814. Louis-François-Marc-Hilaire de Conzié (1732–1805) became bishop of Saint-Omer in 1766 and was translated to Arras in 1769. He declined the offer of the archbishopric of Tours, which went to his brother. He acted as the chaplain to the exiled Prince of Condé (1739–1818) and came with him to Britain in 1800: see papers in Archives Nationales, Paris, T221, Papiers Conzié. Pierre-Augustin Godard de Belbeuf (1730–1808), bishop of Avranches from 1774, had a busy episcopate and a quiet exile: see Abbé Deschamps du Manoir, ‘Mgr Godart de Belbeuf, dernier évêque d’Avranches, et son épiscopat’, Mémoires de la société d’archéologie, de littérature, sciences et arts d’Avranches (1873): 399–438. Alexandre-Henri de Chauvigny de Blot (1741–1805), bishop of Lombez from 1787, came to Britain via Italy. Joseph-François de Malide (1730–1812), bishop of Avranches from 1766 and of Montpellier from 1774, was buried at St Pancras. Louis-André Grimaldi d’Antibes (1736–1804), of the house of Grimaldi of Monaco, became bishop of Le Mans in 1767 and of Noyon in 1777. He ordained Talleyrand to the priesthood and consecrated him as a bishop. Grimaldi was probably the most courtly of the prelates, if not the most devout. Emmanuel-Louis de Grossoles de Flamerens (1736–1815) was, like La Marche, a former army officer and was bishop of Cornouaille (Quimper) in 1772, before translation to Périgeux the following year. Charles Séignely-Colbert de Castle-Hill (1735–1813)—born into the Cuthbert family of Castle Hill, Inverness, Scotland—bishop of Rodez from 1781, was a notable opponent of the Civil Constitution: in his area of Aveyron most of the clergy remained solidly refractory and after the Concordat the Petite Église was particularly strong there. Henri-Benoît-Jules de Béthizy de Mézières (1744–1817) came to London after initial exile in Brussels, Germany and the Netherlands. He was in Paris in 1814–1817 but returned to London where he died and was buried at St Pancras, next to Malide of Montpellier.
- 16.
La Tour, having acted as almoner to exiled royalty in Trieste, was active pastorally in the years after the Concordat. He served as chaplain to the French prisoners of war at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire from 1807 to 1814, with a government stipend and a servant. See Paul Chamberlain, The Napoleonic Prison of Norman Cross (Stroud: History Press, 2018), 106–7.
- 17.
Phillip Emery and Kevin Wooldridge, St Pancras Burial Ground (London: Gifford Monographs, 2011). Godart de Belbeuf, whose coffin breastplate survives, was reburied in Avranches in 2009: Emery and Wooldridge, St Pancras Burial Ground, 106, 210. Arthur Dillon, many of whose relatives had been interred at St Pancras, was exhumed and his remains translated with great ceremony to his cathedral at Narbonne in 2007: ibid., 103–5, 210. La Marche’s remains were returned to Léon in 1868 where there is a magnificent marble tomb and effigy by Louis-Léon Cugnot (1835–94): ibid., 195.
- 18.
La Laurencie had been a persistent opponent of both the Civil Constitution and the Concordat and returned to France without office in 1814: Aston, The End of an Elite, 280.
- 19.
Amelot, as a young bishop—consecrated by Boisgelin in 1774—was one of the most determined episcopal critics of the Revolution. He was first exiled to Switzerland but came to Britain intending to go on the royalist invasion of Quiberon in 1795: Aston, The End of an Elite, 281. The failed Quiberon expedition cost the life of the bishop of Dol, Urbain-René de Hercé (1726–1795): see Charles Robert, Urbain de Hercé, dernier évêque et comte de Dol (Paris: Victor Retaux, 1900).
- 20.
Archives Nationales, Paris, AF IV 1044. Rapports du ministre de l’intérieur, ans VII–XII. Dossier 1.
- 21.
Noé had been a monarchical loyalist during the Revolution but accepted the Concordat. He came to Britain via Spain: Aston, The End of an Elite, 271. Osmond was born in Haiti of Norman parents. He succeeded his uncle to become the last bishop of Comminges. He was bishop of Nancy from 1802 to 1823, although he spent the years 1811–14 in Florence as an intruded Napoleonic archbishop. For the Florentine context see Michael Broers, Politics and Religion in Napoleonic Italy (London: Routledge, 2004).
- 22.
Jérôme-Marie Champion de Cicé, a Breton, became bishop of Rodez in 1770 and was moved to Bordeaux in 1781. He was keeper of the seals for Louis XVI in 1789. Having accepted the Concordat he was quickly installed in Aix-en-Provence. He published a letter to his diocesans in Bordeaux in 1801 justifying his resignation. His brother Jean-Baptiste (1725–1805) was bishop of Auxerre before the Revolution and died in exile in Saxony: see François Cadilhon, ‘Jérôme-Marie Champion de Cicé: Vire en archevêque à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 202 (1993): 47–62. Like Champion, Fontagnes benefitted from the friendship and patronage of the finance minister Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne (1727–1794), later briefly a cardinal, who accepted the Civil Constitution and repudiated the Church. He died in prison. Fontagnes was successively bishop of Nancy (1783), archbishop of Bourges (1787) and archbishop of Toulouse (1788).
- 23.
Boisgelin, a Breton by birth, was a scholarly administrator whose ‘Exposition des principes sur la constitution du clergé’, written in response to the Civil Constitution, was signed by all but four of the French episcopate. He became bishop of Lavaur in 1764 and archbishop of Aix-en -Provence in 1770. In London he was viewed as a politique by many of his colleagues. Burke, who had befriended Boisgelin, was warned by Rougane, a curé from the Auvergne, that the archbishop had been willing to support revolutionary legislation: see Nigel Aston, ‘Burke, Christianity, and the British State’, in Religious Change in Europe 1650–1914, ed. N. Aston, (Oxford, 1997), 184–211, at 203n. He preached at Napoleon’s coronation: see E. Lavaquery, Le Cardinal de Boisgelin (1732–1804), 2 vols. (Paris, 1920).
- 24.
Barral, bishop of Troyes, appointed in 1791, emigrated to London via Switzerland. He was appointed to Meaux in 1802 and translated to Tours in 1805. An enthusiastic supporter of Napoleon, he preached at the Empress Josephine’s funeral. He wrote a spirited defence of Gallican liberties and an attack on the idea of papal infallibility published posthumously: Louis Barral, Défense des libertés de l’église gallicane (Paris, 1817).
- 25.
Alexandre-Amédée-François-Adon-Anne-Louis-Joseph de Lauzières de Thémines (1742–1829), bishop of Blois, published a pastoral letter in 1810 and a collection of letters in 1811, both in London. His manuscript ‘Considérations’, in various redactions, is preserved in the Downside Abbey Archives (DAA). Thémines was an eloquent orator and devout despite a lavish lifestyle in Paris before the Revolution. His ‘constitutional’ successor at Blois was Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire (1750–1831), a leading advocate for the abolition of slavery and a fierce anti-monarchist who, as an opponent of Napoleon, was in London around 1810. Thémines was one of several late-arrival bishops in London. They included Alexandre-Angélique de Talleyrand-Périgord (1736–1821), archbishop of Reims from 1777 and uncle of the more famous Talleyrand, who came to Britain with the future Louis XVIII in 1808. He did not resign his see until 1816 although he died as a cardinal and archbishop of Paris. The bishop of Boulogne, Jean-René Asseline (1742–1813), also came with the king, having previously been exiled in Münster. The bishop of Aire, Sebastian-Charles-Philibert de Cahuzac de Caux (1745–1817), and more surprisingly the bishop of Tarbes, François de Montagnac (1744–1806?), who was said to have died in Portugal, arrived about 1809: see Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, vol. 1 (London, 1911), 94. Ward quotes the contemporary diary of Bishop John Douglass for 11 March 1809 on Thémines: ‘The Bishop showed himself too warm in his observations and reasonings, seemed to require from me an obsequious deference to his opinions, and let fall some things which appeared to me pert or petulant and threatening.’
- 26.
Dominic Aidan Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789 (Bath: Downside Abbey Press, 1986), 121.
- 27.
Thémines’ financial affairs emerge in a Probate Lawsuit (1830)—Thomas de Merinville and Bishop de Thémines, ‘formerly of Edgware Road’—in the National Archives in Kew (PROB 18/124/42). Another document (dated 1827) refers to a trust intended to furnish funds for a publication of 1803 (TS 11/924/3246).
- 28.
DAA 717: ‘Considérations’, iii, 131.
- 29.
Ibid., 715: ‘Letter to the King’, 15 March 1815.
- 30.
Alongside Thémines stood for some years the bishop of La Rochelle, Jean-Charles de Coucy (1746–1824), who resigned in 1816 and died as archbishop of Reims.
- 31.
For the dissemination of Blanchardism, especially by means of émigré journals, and its critical impact on anti-Bonapartist feelings, see Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics 1792–1814 (Woodbridge, 2000), 190–96. The exile journal Ambigu lost interest in the religious policy of Napoleon: ‘By 1814 the religious issue had been reduced to an irrelevance and all but fizzled out’ (Burrows, 196). A full bibliography of Blanchard is provided by Bruno Gazave in his unpublished ‘mémoire de maitrise’: ‘Les Ouvrages imprimés des ecclésiastiques français exiles en Grande-Bretagne (1791–1815)’ (Unpublished Master diss., Université Paris IV, 1987), 144–47. Blanchard was probably the most prolific clerical writer of the emigration, outstripping the much more widely read Barruel.
- 32.
Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy, 119.
- 33.
Gazave, ‘Les Ouvrages imprimés’, 88–123.
- 34.
Ibid., 161. Saint-Martin was a vicar general of Thémines of Blois. He was one of seven clerics whose written support of Blanchard in 1808 caused difficulties with Bishop Douglas: see Ward, Emancipation, 92.
- 35.
Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, London, Bishop Poynter’s Papers, A63 Vicars General, Poynter to Hodgson, 30 November 1818.
- 36.
Pierre-Louis Blanchard, Réponse à une brochure (London, 1816), 95.
- 37.
Geoffrey Ellis, ‘Religion according to Napoleon: The Limitations of Pragmatism’, in Aston, Religious Change, 235–55.
- 38.
Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners (London, 1997), 214.
- 39.
Auguste Billaud, La Petite Église dans la Vendée et les Deux-Sèvres (1800–1830), (Paris, 1962).
- 40.
William D. Dinges, ‘Roman Catholic Traditionalism’, in Fundamentalisms Observed, eds. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, (Chicago, 1991), 66–101.
- 41.
Augustin Barruel, Du Pape et ses droits religieux à l’occasion du Concordat (Paris, 1803).
- 42.
The publication of Chateaubriand’s masterpiece, Génie du Christianisme, which evoked the glory days of the Medieval Church and its heritage and provided a powerful argument for an aesthetic and romantic Catholicism pre-dating the ‘grand siècle’ of the Gallican Church, as well as a critique of the Revolution and the Enlightenment, assisted the Concordat’s work. The Génie’s first edition appeared in 1802, two years after Chateaubriand’s return from Britain.
- 43.
Eugen Webber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-century France, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).
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Bellenger, D.A. (2019). The Last Ditch: The French Émigré Clergy in Britain and the Concordat of 1801. In: Philip, L., Reboul, J. (eds) French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe. War, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_12
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