Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720-1815

By E. Claire Cage

In Enlightenment and revolutionary France, new and pressing arguments emerged in the long debate over clerical celibacy. Appeals for the abolition of celibacy were couched primarily in the language of nature, social utility, and the patrie. The attack only intensified after the legalization of priestly marriage during the Revolution, as marriage and procreation were considered patriotic duties. Some radical revolutionaries who saw celibacy as a crime against nature and the nation aggressively promoted clerical marriage by threatening unmarried priests with deportation, imprisonment, and even death. After the Revolution, political and religious authorities responded to the vexing problem of reconciling the existence of several thousand married French priests with the formal reestablishment of Roman Catholicism and clerical celibacy.

Unnatural Frenchmen examines how this extremely divisive issue shaped religious politics, the lived experience of French clerics, and gendered citizenship. Drawing on a wide base of printed and archival material, including thousands of letters that married priests wrote to the pope, historian Claire Cage highlights individual as well as ideological struggles. Unnatural Frenchmen provides important insights into how conflicts over priestly celibacy and marriage have shaped the relationship between sexuality, religion, and politics from the age of Enlightenment to today, while simultaneously revealing the story of priestly marriage to be an inherently personal and deeply human one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813937137

Book preview

UNNATURAL

FRENCHMEN

The Politics of

Priestly Celibacy

and Marriage,

1720-1815

E. Claire Cage

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS   CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cage, E. Claire, 1982–

Unnatural Frenchmen : the politics of priestly celibacy and marriage, 1720–1815 / E. Claire Cage.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3712-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3713-7 (e-book)

1. Celibacy—Catholic Church—History—18th century. 2. Celibacy—Catholic Church—History—19th century. 3. Catholic Church—Clergy—History—18th century. 4. Catholic Church—Clergy—History—19th century. 5. Catholic Church—France—Influence. I. Title.

BX1912.85.C34 2015

253'.252094409033—dc23

2014042620

All illustrations courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

To my parents

   CONTENTS   

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

ONE: Clerical Celibacy from Early Christianity to the Ancien Régime

TWO: An Unnatural State: The Clerical Celibacy Controversy in Enlightenment France

THREE: Priests into Citizens: Clerical Marriage during the French Revolution, 1789–1793

FOUR: A Social Crime: Clerical Celibacy from the Terror to Napoleon

FIVE: Married Priests in the Napoleonic Era

EPILOGUE

Notes

Bibliography

Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  

It is a great pleasure to thank the many colleagues, friends, and institutions whose generous intellectual, financial, and moral support made this book possible. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to David Bell for his invaluable criticism, guidance, and support. He has been an exemplary advisor, thoroughly dedicated to his students and remarkably generous with his time and advice. Other outstanding mentors and the vibrant intellectual community at Johns Hopkins were also crucial to this project and to my development as a scholar.

In researching and writing this book, I have incurred many other debts. For their insights and comments on my work, I would like to thank Kaitlin Bell Barnett, Joseph Byrnes, Toby Ditz, Mary Fissell, Michael Fried, Frye Gaillard, Julie Hardwick, Jennifer Heuer, Gary Kates, Eddie Kolla, Antoine Lilti, Xavier Maréchaux, John Marshall, Mary Ashburn Miller, Mollie Nouwen, Jennifer Popiel, Elena Russo, Mary Ryan, Timothy Tackett, Judith Walkowitz, and David Woodworth. Khalid Kurji deserves special thanks for tirelessly reading and commenting on various drafts of this manuscript; he has been a constant source of ideas, support, encouragement, and friendship. I am also grateful for the excellent feedback from my dear friends and colleagues in the Johns Hopkins gender workshop. My work has also benefited from my French history colleagues’ comments and questions at the meetings of the Western Society for French History and the Society for French Historical Studies.

The Fulbright Commission, a Bourse Chateaubriand, and the Camargo Foundation made possible my two years of research and writing in France. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies also provided generous funding for this project. I am grateful for additional financial support from the University of South Alabama and for the moral support of my colleagues there, especially Clarence Mohr. I would also like to express my appreciation to the staffs at the Archives nationales, the Bibliothèque nationale, and the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal.

It has been a pleasure to work with the University of Virginia Press. I thank its editors and staff, especially Angie Hogan, Morgan Myers, and Ellen Satrom. I am also deeply grateful for the insightful feedback from the two anonymous readers.

Sharon Cage has graciously read successive drafts of this work and has been a tremendous help. I want to thank her and the rest of my family, especially Roy Cage, Courtney Monk, and Earl Mc-Callon. Their love and support mean more to me than I could possibly express.

  INTRODUCTION  

In 1805 Jacques-Maurice Gaudin, a seventy-year-old librarian and judge in La Rochelle, published a treatise designed to educate and advise his son. Fearing that he would not live long enough to see the seven-year-old into adulthood, Gaudin laid out an educational program designed to ensure that the boy would be well equipped to fulfill his duties both to God and to the patrie, or fatherland. While Gaudin’s publication followed the conventional norms of fatherly advice, his background was anything but conventional. He had married and become a father late in life after renouncing his vows of priestly celibacy and marrying his housekeeper in 1793 at the height of the French Revolution.¹

Gaudin had in fact been a strong advocate for the abolition of clerical celibacy before revolutionaries legalized the marriage of priests. A vicar in Corsica in the 1770s and later in the Vendée region of western France, Gaudin anonymously published in 1781 a lengthy treatise attacking the practice. The Disadvantages of Priestly Celibacy, Proven by Historical Research criticized celibacy as a useless, unnatural, and immoral institution. Gaudin argued that it was harmful both to society and to the well-being of priests themselves. He urged the French state and the papacy to permit priests to marry so there would no longer be such a sharp contradiction between their priestly duties and their natural inclinations. He implored the pope "to release to the patrie and to humanity these millions of unfortunate souls groaning under the weight of their chains." Gaudin believed that marriage and family life would more closely tie priests, their wives, and their children to the patrie. "The paterfamilias, who is tied to society by a multitude of bonds, is more concerned with treating its members with care and respect, Gaudin asserted, than the celibate who only has concern for himself alone." He argued that a priest who was both a spiritual and a biological father was immeasurably more useful to society than a celibate priest.²

Although banned, the book sold rapidly. An Italian translation soon appeared, and a second French version was printed under a different title in 1783. The printing of a new French edition in 1790 spurred the French jurist and theologian Gabriel-Nicolas Maultrot to publish a tract refuting Gaudin’s claims and defending the theological and historical foundations of clerical celibacy.³ To Maultrot’s dismay, Gaudin was nonetheless elected in September 1791 as a deputy to the revolutionary Legislative Assembly, on the day after the government lifted legal restrictions on the marriage of ecclesiastics. Gaudin later became one of the approximately six thousand priests who married during the French Revolution.

Clerical celibacy had been a controversial issue in eighteenth-century France long before Gaudin stepped into the fray. Starting in the 1720s, a burgeoning literature argued that the marriage of priests was essential to promoting population growth and prosperity, to combating sexual depravity and disease, and to making better priests and citizens. Over the course of the century, proliferating and increasingly urgent appeals for the abolition of clerical celibacy appeared, which were primarily couched in the language of nature, social utility, citizenship, and patrie. Debates between critics and advocates of clerical celibacy came to involve a diverse group of commentators: theologians, jurists, medical authorities, political economists, legislators, journalists, playwrights, pornographers, prelates, and ordinary men and women. The most influential figures in eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century France weighed in on the issue, including Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maximilien Robespierre, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Napoleon Bonaparte. But most of the interlocutors in the debates were little known, and many of the most significant were priests themselves.

After the abolition of vows of celibacy and the legalization of clerical marriage during the Revolution, the movement against celibacy became a campaign to make priests fulfill their patriotic duties of marriage and procreation. During the Terror (1793–94), radical revolutionaries treated celibacy as a crime and a threat to the moral, political, and social order. Some aggressively promoted clerical marriage by threatening unmarried priests with deportation, arrest, imprisonment, and even death. A priest from the department of Vienne, for example, claimed that asleep in his bed at night, he was taken by force by revolutionary brigands . . . [with] a pike and bayonet to his stomach to the town hall where he married in a moment when fear had stripped him of any kind of judgment or reflection.⁴ Many priests indeed married under duress. Others, such as Gaudin, married with great enthusiasm and revolutionary fervor.

Most Enlightenment and revolutionary attacks on celibacy specifically targeted celibate priests; some extended the critiques to all unmarried persons, but nearly all limited them to men. Ascribing women little agency, eighteenth-century writers tended to assume that women failed to marry because they were not asked, in contrast to bachelors (célibataires), who were seen as enjoying sexual activity without the responsibilities of marital and family life.⁵ Critiques of bachelorhood overlapped with those of clerical celibacy. But the celibate priest was no ordinary bachelor, and he remained the principal focus of attacks. Detractors of celibacy focused their vitriol on the figure of the celibate priest, decrying his loyalty to the pope, his abuses of power, his hypocrisy, his selfishness, and his sexual depravity. Debates about priestly celibacy were embroiled in heated disputes over the role of the clergy and the church in French society. Accordingly, the stakes of the debates over clerical celibacy and marriage were higher than those of the debates over lay bachelorhood, and denunciations of clerical celibacy were more multifaceted and vitriolic than criticisms of bachelorhood.

These debates were often further complicated by ambiguous usage of key terms in the clerical celibacy controversy, which included celibacy (célibat), continence (continence), and chastity (chasteté). Derived from the Latin caelebs, meaning alone or single, the term célibat first appeared in the French language during the sixteenth century, and célibataire appeared during the early eighteenth century. In its most general sense, the term célibataire or celibate refers to an unmarried person, including a lay bachelor or celibate cleric. Continent means sexually abstinent, whereas chaste implies a moral commitment to sexual purity, by either engaging exclusively in reproductive sex within marriage or abstaining from sexual activity of any kind. The Roman Catholic Church requires priests to be celibate—in other words, unmarried—and Christian sexual ethics, which proscribes sexual activity outside of marriage, requires him to be also chaste and continent. Critics of clerical celibacy have perennially observed that clergymen may be celibate but neither chaste nor continent. Critics in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century France claimed that the continence of some priests and the illicit sexual activity of others caused a host of problems.⁶

The eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century discourse on celibacy at times elided or obscured the differences between continence and celibacy, the secular and regular clergy, and male and female celibacy, and at other times put them in relief. This study attends to these differences but takes as its subject the celibacy of priests and focuses on secular clergymen. Unlike the secular clergy, who are not monastics or members of a religious order, the regular clergy live according to a set of guidelines called a rule and take solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. All of these clerics in the Roman Catholic Church are bound to celibacy.

Although the history of male celibacy and that of female celibacy are closely intertwined, I have restricted the scope of my study to the former. The meanings of the practices and representations of clerical life, celibacy, and marriage were significantly different, particularly in their social and political dimensions, for early modern men and women. It was common for elite families to exert particular pressure on daughters to enter convents for financial reasons, since the modest cost of placing a daughter into a convent was often much lower than a marriage dowry. Some upper-class families sought to preserve their wealth in the marriage market by sending one or multiple daughters to a convent while arranging for others to make advantageous marriage alliances. For some women, the convent represented an attractive alternative to marriage and subjugation to male authority within the patriarchal household. The religious vocation had particular importance and appeal for early modern women, since their conventional destinies were limited either to marriage or to the cloister. Even in the clergy, women’s options were far more limited than those of men, who could pursue various political, administrative, military, or ecclesiastical careers after having entered the holy orders. Nonetheless, women entered religious orders due not only to their narrower range of alternatives to the religious profession but also to their sense of religious vocation. Gendered power relations and gender inequality in marriage partially account for the reasons why religious celibacy had a different significance and often more appeal for nuns, brides of Christ, than for male clerics.

Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French men and women were concerned to a much greater extent with the issue of priestly celibacy and marriage than with female celibacy and the small number of nuns who married during the course of the Revolution. The eighteenth-century French public considered celibate priests more threatening than celibate nuns, who were often depicted as victims of parental authority, clerical despotism, and the cloister.⁷ The male eunuch seemed more of an unnatural figure than the female one. Furthermore, the centrality of sexual activity in constructions of manhood and masculinity complicated constructions of clerical masculinity.⁸ In the early modern period, the dominant model of manhood was associated with the capacity for self-control, the establishment of an independent household, marriage, and fatherhood. The celibate priest in some respects exemplified masculine virtue, through self-discipline and controlling his passions, and in other respects deviated from normative early modern manhood, which was tied to virility, marriage, fatherhood, and the role of the paterfamilias, the male head of the household who exercised authority over his wife and children.⁹

The construction of modern gender and sexual identities is in many respects indebted to the understandings of nature and the natural that animated the controversy over clerical celibacy in eighteenth-century France. Many scholars have pointed to the eighteenth century as a crucial, transitional period in understandings of gender and sexuality. The naturalization of gender was at the heart of the transition to modern gender and sexual identities. Ideas about so-called natural sexual difference and sexual desire stressed the role of nature or biology in determining gender roles and sexual behavior. The naturalization of gender categories shaped normative constructions of gender and sexuality as well as changing conceptions of men and women’s sexual desire. Although women had been viewed as the more lustful and libidinous sex throughout premodern history, a shift was underway in the eighteenth century. Women were increasingly seen as chaste, passionless, and sexually passive, while men had become the more aggressive, libidinous, and lascivious sex.¹⁰ New ideas about women’s lack of strong sexual desire and men’s lustfulness made celibacy seem all the more unnatural for men.

This study demonstrates the significance of debates about priestly celibacy and marriage to understandings of manhood and the gendered politics of citizenship. Perceiving the family as the foundation of the social and political order, revolutionaries associated men’s identities as fathers and heads of the household with civic virtue and citizenship. As Jennifer Heuer explains, "From an ambiguous and multivalent model of ‘French citizenship, ’ which implied that both men and women were part of the sovereign nation, legislators would progressively identify the citizen explicitly with the paterfamilias and limit not only the application of measures on political rights, but also those affecting women’s legal membership in the nation."¹¹ The père de famille was not only a father but also the head of the household, with weighty responsibilities and authority that was at once religious, economic, social, and political. As political rights and good citizenship or civisme became increasingly associated with the paterfamilias or père de famille, the celibate priest’s place in the French nation became contested and precarious. The campaign against clerical celibacy sought not only to incorporate priests into the nation through marriage but also to transform priests, whose deviant and unnatural celibacy had flagrantly violated sexual, gender, and social norms, into ideal pères de famille and paragons of public and private virtue.

Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the discourse on celibacy in eighteenth-century France was its emphasis on fatherhood. Critics of celibacy and married priests themselves generally privileged the priest’s paternal role over his spousal role. But fatherhood and masculinity are underdeveloped areas of historical study in comparison to motherhood and women’s history, especially in early modern France. While Lynn Hunt has emphasized the absence of the father in revolutionary political culture, I contend that the Revolution did not do away with but rather revivified the ideal of the good father. Tied to understandings of citizenship and manhood, fatherhood became seen as an emotionally fulfilling source of personal virtue, public utility, and patriotism. Some Jacobins saw it as a political imperative and civic duty.

In tracing the rise and fall of the figure of the good father in eighteenth-century France, Hunt has also argued that the French Revolution brought about a shift from paternal patriarchy to republican fraternity, a shift that relegated women to the realm of domesticity.¹² Rather than framing the history of gender in eighteenth-century France in terms of women’s exclusion from full citizenship and the masculine public sphere, I explore how debates about clerical celibacy and marriage blurred rather than sharpened the distinction between public and private and brought into relief the importance of the family as the foundation of the nation, as Suzanne Desan and Jennifer Heuer’s works on revolutionary debates and legislation on family and citizenship have shown.¹³ My research adds another dimension to these historiographical debates by foregrounding religion and masculinity, particularly the tensions between religious practices and the emerging equation of a good citizen and a père de famille. Debates about priestly celibacy shaped and were shaped by the mutually constructed meanings of manhood and womanhood as well as the gendered meanings of citizenship. Revolutionaries conceived of companionate marriage based on heterosexual love and gender complementarity as an obligation to the nation and as the crucible of citizenship. Invoking the power of conjugal and parental love to cultivate civic virtue and love of the patrie, many Jacobins believed that marriage, even if foisted upon priests, would make them into citizens.

The controversy over priestly celibacy and marriage stemmed from eighteenth-century constructions of gender and sexuality, the cult of nature, and the valorization of the everyday sphere of family and work, termed by the philosopher Charles Taylor as the affirmation of ordinary life.¹⁴ In eighteenth-century France, there was lessening emphasis on the otherworldly and salvation, and there was greater attention to the natural sphere and temporal concerns, particularly finding fulfillment and personal happiness through the new ideal of a companionate marriage based on love and affection. The celebration of the pursuit of happiness, pleasure, and perfectibility through marriage and reproductive heterosexuality was tied to a vilification of clerical celibacy as an unnatural perversion. As sexuality became seen as the essence of a person (as Michel Foucault has shown), ¹⁵ sexual renunciation became deeply troubling to those who viewed celibacy as a renunciation of one’s humanity. The figure of the celibate priest became a source of profound sexual anxieties and a kind of deviant in the eyes of some, as sexual deviance, perversion, and pathology were defined in opposition to normative conjugal heterosexuality and the so-called natural. The supposed unnaturalness of clerical celibacy, according to its critics, made celibate priests a threat to and enemies of the nation. Arguments about the unnaturalness and foreignness of celibate priests were not radical innovations of the eighteenth century.¹⁶ These polemics were deeply indebted to earlier iterations of the same controversy, especially those of the Reformation era, but took a radical direction in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century France. A significant transformation in Western culture in understandings of sexuality, nature, religion, and citizenship that occurred elsewhere in a slow, hesitant manner coalesced in France in the most dramatic way possible, producing tensions that helped tear the country apart.

The attack on clerical celibacy made for one of the most significant religious controversies that shaped ideas, culture, and politics in eighteenth-century France and contributed to the explosive conflict between the Revolution and the Catholic Church. Many scholars have attributed the ultimate break between the Revolution and the church to the unintended consequences of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a package of extensive reforms to the Catholic Church in France passed by the revolutionary legislature in 1790.¹⁷ In this book, I argue that the fissures were deeper and more durable than this interpretation would suggest. Accelerating hostility and violence of revolutionaries toward the clergy owed a great deal to the notion of celibate priests as unnatural, alien presences in the nation, rather than to any resistance to the Revolution and to revolutionary religious policies. This view of celibate priests significantly contributed to the anticlerical and iconoclastic de-Christianization campaign peaking during the Terror. The attack on celibacy and the marriage of priests during the Revolution is often attributed to de-Christianization, but they were productive of and not mere products of de-Christianization.

While persecution from de-Christianizers played a role in some priests and their wives’ decision to marry, it did not in others. Moreover, it was rarely the sole determining factor. Priests and their wives married for a variety of complex social and personal reasons, including love, economic support, companionship, and social pressure. However, most clerical wives remain largely silent in historical records, and many revolutionaries did not dwell on them. Although Jacobins charged women with the weighty task of regenerating men and transforming denatured priests into patriotic citizens, they concentrated almost all of their efforts to promote priestly marriage on the priests themselves rather than on the women who might marry them. Women, particularly those who were widowed or divorced with children, were under considerable pressure to marry, but not to marry a priest specifically. Clerical status was a significant factor in some women’s decision to marry a priest but not in others. It was particularly important in cases in which a woman, often a nun, pious woman, housekeeper, or relative, married in hopes of shielding a priest from persecution.

The following chapters of this book examine both ideological struggles and lived experiences, the polemical as well as the intensely personal. In order to assess the significance of the attack on clerical celibacy during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the first chapter presents an overview of the history of celibacy in the Christian West and of the state of the clergy in eighteenth-century France. Chapter 2 analyzes the explosion of anti-celibacy literature in France from the 1720s to the 1780s and the theological, moral, social, and physiological debates about the practice that ensued. In chapter 3, I consider the politicization of debates about clerical celibacy during the Revolution between the years 1789 and 1793. I argue that the notion of celibacy as an unnatural state led revolutionaries to question whether celibate priests could be at all integrated into the ranks of citizens. Chapter 4 examines the politics of clerical marriage during the height of the radical revolution, when celibate clerics were denounced as enemies of the state and of humanity, and after the Terror, as revolutionaries attempted to reestablish political and social order. The final chapter analyzes how political and religious authorities responded to the vexing problem of reconciling the existence of several thousand married French priests with the formal reestablishment of Roman Catholicism and clerical celibacy. It also considers how married priests negotiated the changing political and religious landscape of post-revolutionary France.

Throughout the Enlightenment, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary eras, the issue of clerical celibacy was a point of uncompromising conflict, since a priest could not be partly celibate. As long as the church held onto the ideal of clerical celibacy—and arguably the church was driven to defend the practice even more strongly as a result of Enlightenment and revolutionary attacks—there could be no common ground with those who saw celibacy as entirely abnormal, corrupting, and dangerous. These polemics over clerical celibacy played an integral role in shaping attitudes toward gender, religion, and citizenship that were crucial to the making of modern France.

            ONE            

Clerical Celibacy from Early Christianity to the Ancien Régime

In the past few decades, clerical celibacy has been hotly debated. Should priests be allowed to marry? Would marriage compromise priests’ ability to perform their pastoral duties? Is celibacy even natural? Does that matter? Although recently resurgent, the debate over clerical celibacy has a rich and long history. In the age of Enlightenment, new and pressing concerns about celibacy emerged, and ensuing contests