became more menacing and revolutionary. Forced, therefore, into the position of reactionaries, the clergy ere long became objects of suspicion and soon after of persecution. The progressives devised a test-oath, obligatory on all ecclesiastics, which should divide those who were loyal to the Revolution from the contumacious, and lists were kept of both classes.1 Harmless as the oath was in appearance, when it was tendered, in December 1790, five-sixths of the clergy throughout the kingdom refused it. Those who yielded to the pressure were termed assermentés, the recusants insermentés or réfractaires, and the latter, of course, at once became the determined opponents of the new régime, the more dangerous because they were the only influential partisans of reaction belonging to the people. To their efforts were attributed the insurrections which in La Vendée and elsewhere threatened the most fearful dangers. They were accordingly exposed to severe legislation. A decree of 29 November, 1791, deprived them of their stipends and suspended their functions; another of 27 May, 1792, authorised the local authorities to exile them on the simple denunciation of twenty citizens. Under the Terror their persons were exposed to flagrant cruelties, and a prêtre réfractaire was generally regarded, ipso facto, as an enemy to the Republic.

Under these circumstances, sacerdotal marriage came to be looked upon as a powerful lever to disarm or overthrow the hostility of the Church, and also as a test of loyalty or disloyalty. Yet the steps by which this conclusion was reached were very gradual. In the early stages of the Revolution, while it was still fondly deemed

1 "D'être fidèle à la nation, à la loi, au roi, et de veiller exactement sur le troupeau confié à léurs soins.” It was not only the objections of the King and of the Pope that rendered this oath unpalatable, but also the fact that it gave adhesion to the law for the secularisation of ecclesiastical property and of the monastic Orders. It was ordered in the Constitution civile du Clergé, Tit. II. Art. 21, 38 ted July 12, and promulgated August 24, 1790.

that the existing institutions of France could be purified and preserved, the National Assembly was assailed with petitions asking that the privilege of marriage should be extended to the clergy. These met with no response, even after the suppression of the monastic Orders. As late as September 1790, when the Abbé Professor Cournand, of the Collège de France, made a motion in favour of sacerdotal marriage in the assembly of the district of St. Etienne du Mont in Paris, the question, after considerable debate, was laid aside as beyond the competence of that body. It was not until 3 September, 1791, that Mirabeau introduced into the Assembly a decree providing that no profession or vocation should debar a citizen from marriage or be considered as incompatible with marriage, and forbidding the public officials and notaries from refusing to ratify any marriage contract on such pretext. Though no allusion was made in this to ecclesiastics, its object was evident, and was so admitted in the eloquent speech with which he urged its adoptiona speech which contained a very telling résumé of the arguments in favour of priestly marriage, but which, in its glowing anticipations of the benefits to be expected from the measure, affords a somewhat lamentable contrast to the meagreness of the realisation. The principle, when once established, was considered of sufficient importance to deserve recognition in the Constitution of September 1791, a section in the preamble of which declares that the law does not recognise religious vows or any engagements contrary to the rights of nature or to the

2

1 I have before me one of the pamphlets issued about this time (Le Mariage des Prêtres, Paris, Laclaye, 1790, 8vo, pp. 102), addressed to the Assembly. It is a tolerably calm and well-reasoned argument, basing its demand upon the usages of the primitive Church, the precepts of Scripture, the rights of nature, and public utility. The author asserts himself to be a priest well advanced in life, and he assumes that the corruption of society disseminated by the licentiousness of ecclesiastics is generally recognised and understood.

2 This speech is printed in full from a MS. in the public library of Geneva, by the Abbé Chavard (Le Célibat des Prêtres, pp. 483-500).

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constitution 1; and this was followed, as Mirabeau had proposed, by a decree of 20 September, 1791, which, in enumerating the obstacles to marriage, does not allude to monastic vows or holy orders.

Professor Cournand was probably the first man of position and character to take advantage of the privilege thus permitted, and his example was followed by many ecclesiastics who had won an honourable place in the Church, in literature, and in science. Among them may be mentioned the Abbé Gaudin of the Oratoire, the author of a work already alluded to on the evils of celibacy, who in 1792 represented La Vendée in the Legislative Assembly, and who in 1805 did not hesitate to publish a little volume entitled "Avis à mon fils âgé de sept ans "-although in the preface to his work in 1781 he had described himself as long past the age of the passions. Even bishops yielded to the temptation. Loménie, coadjutor of his uncle the Archbishop of Sens, Torné, Bishop of Bourges, Massieu of Beauvais, and Lindet of Evreux were publicly married. Many nuptials of this kind were celebrated with an air of defiance. Pastors announced their approaching weddings to their flocks in florid rhetoric, as though assured of finding sympathy for the assertion of the triumph of nature over the tyranny of man. Others presented themselves with their brides at the bar of the National Convention, as though to demonstrate that they were good citizens who had thrown off all reverence for the obsolete traditions of the past.

A nation maddened and torn by the extremes of hope, of rage, and of terror, which met the triumphal march of three hundred and fifty thousand hostile bayonets with the heads of its king and queen, which blazoned forth to

1 La loi ne reconnait ni vœux religieux, ni aucun autre engagement qui serait contraire aux droits naturels ou à la constitution.

Europe its irrevocable breach with the past by instituting festivals in honour of a new Supreme Being and parading a courtesan through the streets of Paris as the goddess of reason, was not likely to employ much tenderness in coercing its internal enemies, and chief among these it finally numbered the ministers of religion. To them it soon applied the'marriage test. To marry was to acknowledge the supremacy of the civil authority and to sunder allegiance to foreign domination; celibacy was at the least a tacit adherence to the enemy and a mute protest against the new régime. Matrimony, therefore, rose into importance as at once a test and a pledge, and every effort was made to encourage it. Among the records of the revolutionary tribunal is the trial of Mahue, curé of S. Sulpice, 13 August, 1793, accused of having written a pamphlet against priestly marriage, and he was only acquitted on the ground that his crime had been committed prior to the adoption of the law of 19 July, 1793.1 A decree of 19 November, 1793, relieved from exile or imprisonment all priests who could show that their banns had been published, and when, soon afterwards, at the height of the popular frenzy, the Convention sent its deputies throughout France with instructions to crush out every vestige of the dreaded reaction, those emissaries made celibacy the object of their especial attacks. Thus, in the Department of the Meuse, deputy De la Croix announced that all priests who were not married should be placed under surveillance; while in Savoy the harsh measures taken against the clergy were modified in favour of those who married by permitting them to remain under surveillance. One zealous deputy ordered a pastor to be imprisoned until he could find a wife, and another released a canon from jail on his pledging himself to marry. Many of those thus forced into matrimony were decrepit with years,

1 Desmaze, Pénalités Anciennes, p. 222, Paris, 1866.

and chose brides whose age secured them from all suspicions of yielding to the temptations of the flesh. Such was the venerable Martin of Marseilles, who, after seeing his bishop and two priests, his intimate friends, led to the scaffold, took, at the age of 76, a wife nearly 60 years old. As an unfortunate ecclesiastic, who had thus succeeded in weathering the storm, fairly expressed it, in defending himself against the reproaches of a returned émigré bishop, he took a wife to serve as a lightning rod. These unwilling bridegrooms not infrequently deposited with a notary or a trusty friend a protest against the violence to which they had yielded, and a declaration that their relations with their wives should be merely those of brother and sister.

Yet in this curious persecution the officials only obeyed the voice of the excited people. The press, the stage, all the organs of public opinion, were unanimous in warring with celibacy, ridiculing it as a fanatical remnant of superstition, and denouncing it as a crime against the state. The popular societies were especially vehement in promulgating these ideas. The Congrès fraternel of Ausch, in September 1793, ordered the local clubs to enlighten the benighted minds of the populace on the subject, and to exclude from membership all priests who should not marry within six months. A petition to the National Assembly from the republicans of Auxerre demanded that all ecclesiastics who persisted in remaining single should be banished; while a more truculent address from Condom urged imperiously that celibacy should be declared a capital crime, and that the death penalty should be enforced with relentless severity. In times so unsparing, when suspicion was conviction and conviction death, and when such were the views of those who swayed public affairs, it is not to be wondered at if many pious Churchmen, unambitious of the crown of