The French Revolution and the Catholic Church

presented by Father Hewko

Playing time: 45 minutes

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In 1789, the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution, Catholicism was the official religion of the French state. The French Catholic Church, known as the Gallican Church, recognised the authority of the pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church but had negotiated certain liberties that privileged the authority of the French monarch, giving it a distinct national identity characterised by considerable autonomy. France’s population of 28 million was almost entirely Catholic, with full membership of the state denied to Protestant and Jewish minorities. Being French effectively meant being Catholic. Yet, by 1794, France’s churches and religious orders were closed down and religious worship suppressed. How did it come to this? What did revolutionaries hope to achieve? And why did Napoleon set out to reverse the situation?

The Vendean army was called at times “The Army of the Sacred Heart.” The nobility of Vendée had virtually disappeared by 1793, so the peasants summoned mostly former officers and career soldiers to lead them into battle. These colorful characters include Charette, a veteran officer of the American Revolution, and the Marquis de Bonchamps, a former officer in India. Such experienced soldiers knew they faced impossible odds, yet they gallantly answered the peasants’ summons. At one point, they led some 35,000 Catholic peasants into battle, many of them poorly equipped. At its peak in 1793, the Catholic army defeated the Mayençais, a force of 20,000 veterans that had never retreated before an army in Europe.

They were knightly men. The Marquis de Bonchamps, for example, made a last request as he lay dying at age 33, asking that the lives of the captured government soldiers be spared. So 5,000 prisoners were released, but meanwhile, on the government side, 29 cartloads of Catholic prisoners were drowned in the reservoir at Vihiers. It was hard for the Catholic army to abide by a code of decency in the face of the unremitting atrocities of their foes. The prisoners released by Bonchamps went on to devastate La Chapelle, where the inhabitants at the time were old men, women, and children.

Among the many atrocities carried out against the Vendean Catholics was the massacre at a hospital near Yzernay, where 2,000 wounded soldiers, old men, women, and children were slaughtered. A Chapel of the Martyrs now stands at the spot. There was also the massacre of 6,000 Catholic prisoners, many of them women, after the battle of Savenay. In addition, there were the Martyrs of Avrillé, half of them women who were marched out of town in batches of some 400, lined up 50 at a time against a ditch, and shot by fusillade. Then there was the drowning of 5,000 in the Loire River at Nantes — priests, old men, women, and children. And 3,000 Catholic women killed by drowning at Pont-au-Baux. Drownings became a form of entertainment for the soldiers. Comic names were given to the drownings: They were called “republican marriages” when young Catholic men and women were tied naked in pairs and cast into the water. They were also called “vertical deportation in the national bathtub” and “patriotic baptism.”