The Abbé Grégoire and the Quest for a Catholic Republic

Abstract

The French Revolution, as we all know, dramatized if it did not inaugurate the great parting of the paths between Christianity and modern political culture. Unlike, say, the sixteenth-century revolution in the Northern Netherlands provinces or the mid-seventeenth-century English or Puritan Revolution, both of which drew energy from movements of Christian reform, the French Revolution’s attempt to ‘regenerate’ the French nation and mankind bore no explicit Christian legitimation and tried to effect a clean break with the past, including the Christian past. Influential for the French Revolution though it was, even the more recent American Revolution still drew ideological sustenance from pulpit jeremiads and justified itself in terms of secularized covenantal theology. Although the spectacular attempt to ‘dechristianize’ France waited until the eve of the Terror in 1793, the French Revolution’s reorganization of the Gallican Church — the so called Civil Constitution of the Clergy — was already anti-clerical enough for Edmund Burke to observe as early as 1790 from across the English Channel that “this new ecclesiastical establishment is intended only to be temporary, and preparatory to the utter abolition, under any of its forms, of the Christian religion, whenever mens’ minds are prepared for this last stroke against it, by the accomplishment of the plan for bringing its ministers into universal contempt.”¹ In the England described by Burke, by contrast, “atheists” were not yet ‘preachers’ and ‘madmen’ had not yet become the realm’s ‘lawgivers.’