Religion and Revolutionary Politics

Abstract

Revolutions were anathema to the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century; anti-clericalism had been a powerful and, ultimately, a very self-destructive element in revolutionary thinking and policy in the 1790s. The revolutionaries, influenced in part by the ideas of the mid-eighteenth-century philosophes, had been determined to destroy the church as one of the most powerful privileged corporations in the country. The church was the first of the three estates into which ancien régime society was divided. It was one of the largest and richest landowners, its senior posts were dominated by old noble families and it exercised a major political role, not always in sympathy with the monarchy. In the eighteenth century the estates of Languedoc, in which the clerical first estate was a powerful force, fought to preserve their autonomy from royal interference.¹ Arguably it was a colossal block to innovation in ideas, institutions and behavior.