The Ranums' Panat Times

Robert Forster reviews Van Kley

The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791. By Dale K. Van Kley. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. ix + 390. Cloth, ISBN 0-300-06478-0.

This is an impressive book on three counts: it presents a new and persuasive thesis; it is thoroughly researched; it is written with clarity and elegance. Based on a large sample of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French pamphlets, periodicals, treatises, and works of the philosophes as well as police reports, trial records, memoires, and observations of contemporaries, Dale Van Kley's opus blends intellectual, cultural and political history with unusual success. He demonstrates a keen awareness of the shifting clusters of ideas religious and secular, absolutist and constitutional, elitist and popular - which would slowly erode the sacred foundations of Bourbon kingship over two centuries.

Van Kley writes that "the failure of the Reformation meant the survival of a conspicuously propertied and privileged church with an episcopacy more perilously tied to the monarchy than ever before, as well as a monarchy with so positive a religious charge as to transform religious dissent into political challenge.... (P. 371). Jansenism, which served as a kind of reformation a century later, was also suppressed by an ever more "invasive absolutism." Nevertheless, Jansenism persisted, especially in its parlementary judicial guise and reinforced an ultimately subversive form of constitutionalism. By a meticulous charting of the mutations in Jansenist ideology and values, Van Kley demonstrates how Jansenism caused a vigorous reaction in the Catholic dévot party and thus extended religious sensibilities and their political implications throughout the population, especially in urban France. "Religious origins" for Van Kley are not only Jansenist; they include the whole spectrum of Catholic and even Protestant politico-religious values. Religious controversy over two centuries in this broad perspective is the heart of his book.

Van Kley is at his best when he demonstrates the changing nature of Jansenism, its eventual decline as a theological force, but its persistence as a judicial attitude in the Parlement of Paris as well as its capacity to evoke wide popular sympathy from the clumsy and arbitrary efforts of the episcopacy to withhold the sacraments from those parishioners who frequented Jansenist priests. Van K1ey emphasizes that after 1770 the Jansenist criticism of sacral-absolutism blended with an Enlightenment and Rousseauist critique, but he never loses control of Jansenist elements and real individuals like Abbé Grégoire and Armand Gaston Camus, whose religious attitudes infiltrated the Patriot Party on the eve of the Revolution. These attitudes included the assumption that ultimate Church authority lies with the entire "Assembly of the Faithful" (the Nation?) and originates from a conciliar tradition in which the parish priest plays a major role in governance (Richerism). This anti-corporatist stance weakened the sacral underpinnings of monarchical absolutism. Church property also belonged to the Church as a whole and might be redistributed among the clergy or perhaps even more widely among the "faithful". Moreover, Jansenists stressed the need to recapture the pristine purity and discipline of the early Church, which placed bishops on the same spiritual level as the curds. More, it contributed to a wider demand for "regeneration" of the Nation and support for the legislation of the National Assembly.

Van Kley traces the transfer of the Jansenist alliance with the Parlement of Paris and the constitutionalism it espoused to the Estates General as the true representative of the Nation. He describes the complementary Jansenist shift to the antiaristocratic thrust of the Patriot Party after 1788. And in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1791 Van Kley detects many elements of the Jansenist credo. Of course by this time Jansenism was a "ragtag remains of a movement;" it was not a party. Yet the Jansenist controversies over the eighteenth century had left deep cleavages in religious feelings throughout France (pp. 373-374). Van Kley is convinced that these deep cleavages led to the radical and uncompromising ecclesiastical reforms of the Revolution and that the resulting religious divisions plagued French Political life for another century or more. As Van Kley concludes, 11.... if, in an obvious sense, French republicanism put religion behind it,, it did not do so without retaining the ideological stigmata of religion." (p.375)

Robert Forster  
Professor Emeritus
Johns Hopkins University