!

have covered his own case-but Pius VII. was obdurate, and, while promising to give to his legate Caprara faculties to absolve simple priests, he refused to comprehend bishops and members of the religious Orders.1

The Concordat adopted in this shape left Talleyrand in an awkward position. A fascinating woman with a dubious past, known as Madame Grand, had for some years been his acknowledged mistress, doing the honours of his house. In the easy morality of the Directory this had caused no scandal, but Napoleon, in re-establishing order, insisted on external decency, and moreover, when relations were resumed with foreign powers, ambassadorial ladies murmured at being obliged to associate with a concubine. He therefore offered Talleyrand the peremptory alternatives of marrying Madame Grand or of dismissing her, and Talleyrand chose the former. Two pressing applications were made to the Holy See and urged with all the force that Napoleon could bring to bear, but in each case the only outcome was a brief enabling Talleyrand to be unfrocked, to be reduced to lay communion, deprived of sacerdotal functions, and authorised to lead a secular life, without a word as to marriage. Thus checked, Talleyrand made the best of the situation. He caused the second brief to be laid before the Council of State, which duly accepted it and ordered its registration, and it was officially gazetted in a concise form stating that it restored citizen Talleyrand to secular life. All the world assumed this as conferring on him the full privileges of the laity, and it was in vain that the Holy See caused the insertion in foreign journals of a statement that it reduced him to lay communion without relieving him of his vows. His civil marriage with Madame Grand was celebrated on 10 September, 1802, and the lady had the 1 Bernard de Lacombe, Le Mariage de Talleyrand (Le Correspondant, Paris, 25 Aout et 10 Septembre, 1905).

It is to this exhaustive article that I owe the details of this celebrated case.

satisfaction of styling herself Talleyrand-Périgord, or subsequently Princess of Benevento. A sacramental marriage, it is said, followed, performed quietly by the curé of Epinay, but the parish register of that place has disappeared and the assertion cannot be confirmed, though there is little reason to disbelieve it, for no one at the time, save the Curia, doubted the legal validity of the union.

The question of celibacy was not settled by the Concordat. Notwithstanding the certainty of ecclesiastical penalties following such infraction of the Tridentine articles of faith, the practice which had been introduced could not be immediately eradicated. Priests were constantly contracting marriage, and the question gave considerable trouble to the Government, which hesitated for some time as to the policy to be pursued. Portalis, in 1802, as we have seen, declared the full legality of such marriages, and the unimpaired right of ecclesiastics to contract them; and the provisions of the Code respecting marriage, adopted in 1803, make no allusions to vows or religious engagements as causing incapacity. Yet in 1805, when Daviaux, Archbishop of Bordeaux, opposed the application of a priest named Boisset to the civil authorities for a marriage contract, Portalis, then Minister of Religious Affairs, on being appealed to, replied that the Government would not allow its officers to register such contracts. The local administrations sometimes assented to such applications and sometimes referred them to the central authority, until at length, in 1807, a definite conclusion was promulgated. This was to the effect that although the civil law was silent as regards such marriages, yet they were condemned by public opinion. The Government considered them fraught with danger to the peace of families, as the powerful influence of the pastor

1 Code Civil, Liv. I. Tit. v.

could be perverted to evil purposes, and, if seduction could be followed by marriage, that influence would be liable to great abuse. The Emperor therefore declared that he could not tolerate marriage on the part of those who had exercised priestly functions since the date of the Concordat. As for those who had abandoned the ministry previous to that period and had not since resumed it, he left them to their own consciences. Thus in practice, although marriage was regarded as purely a civil institution, a limitation was introduced which was not authorised by the Code, which rested solely upon the authority of the Emperor, and which, far from indicating respect to the Church, was a flagrant insult. As Napoleon withdrew himself more and more from the principles of the new order of things, we find him disposed to take even stronger ground in opposition to the civil privileges accorded to the priesthood by the Concordat. The question of sacerdotal marriage continued to present itself under perplexing shapes, and at length the Emperor, on the eve of his downfall, perhaps with a view to propitiate the sacerdotal power, proposed to apply to married priests the penalty imposed by the law on bigamy. It was too late, however the Empire was rapidly vanishing, and these suggestions were soon forgotten in the hurrying march of events.2

1 In an address to the Council of State, December 20, 1813, Napoleon said: "Le sacerdoce est une sorte de mariage; le prêtre étant uni à l'église comme l'époux à son épouse, il n'y aurait aucun inconvénient à appliquer au prêtre qui se marierait la peine de la bigamie: un tel ecclésiastique ne mérite aucun sorte de considération.”Bouhier de l'Ecluse, de l'Etat des Prêtres en France, Paris, 1842, p. 17.

2 For many of the above details I am indebted to the curious but ill-digested little work, "Histoire du Mariage des Prêtres en France," published by Grégoire in 1826. Grégoire, though a priest of the ancien régime, was a sincere and consistent republican. A member of the States General, of the Convention, and of the Council of Five Hundred, elected Bishop of Blois by the voice of a people who knew and respected him, he preserved his ardent faith through all the excesses of the Revolution, and his democratic ideas in spite of the injuries inflicted on his class in the name of the people. The sincerity and boldness of his character may be estimated by a single example. When, on 7 November, 1793, Gobel, Bishop of Paris, appeared before the Convention with twelve of his vicars and publicly renounced his sacred

functions on the ground that hereafter there should be no other worship than that of liberty and equality, almost all the ecclesiastics in the Convention followed his example. To hold back at such a moment was dangerous in the extreme, yet Grégoire had the hardihood to utter a defiant protest. "I am a Catholic by conviction and by feeling, a priest by choice, a bishop by the voice of the people, but not from the people nor from you do I derive my mission, and I will not be forced to an abjuration.' To him perhaps more than to any one else is attributable the skilful management which carried the Church through the storms and persecutions of the Revolution, but the same inflexibility which maintained his Catholicism through the ordeal of 1793 and 1794 caused him to stand by his republicanism long after it had gone out of fashion. He was not to be bought or bullied: the Legitimist was less tolerant than the Terrorist, and under the Restoration he was reduced almost to absolute indigence. Together with the other constitutional bishops, he had been compelled to resign his bishopric by order of the Pope after the Concordat of 1801, and he was too dangerous a man to be rewarded for his invaluable services to religion. He died in 1831.

VOL. II.

X

CHAPTER XXXII

THE CHURCH OF TO-DAY

THE question of sacerdotal marriage was left in France, on the collapse of the Empire, in a curiously unsettled condition, giving rise to very remarkable contradictions in the judicial decisions which since then have from time to time been rendered by the tribunals as cases were brought before them.

Under the Restoration, a priest named Martin, an old réfractaire of 1792, committed the imprudence of marrying in 1815. Not long after he died without issue. His relatives contested the succession with the widow, and in 1817 the inferior court decided in her favour. The next year the court of appeals reversed the judgment on the ground that sacerdotal marriage had only been sanctioned indirectly by the legislation of the Revolution, and that the Charter of 1814 (Art. 6) had restored Catholicism as the religion of the state. In 1821, however, the final decision of the Court of Cassation settled the question in favour of the widow, thus legalising such unions, for the incontrovertible reason that the Code did not recognise vows or holy orders as causes incapacitating for marriage.1

Even yet, however, the matter was not held to be finally disposed of. In 1828, Louis Thérèse Saturnin Dumonteil, a priest of Paris, who desired to contract marriage, failed to obtain from the courts the customary assistance required by the law to set aside the refusal of

1 Grégoire, op. cit. p. 102.