While the French Revolution has been much discussed and studied, its impact on religious life in France is rather neglected. Yet, during this brief period, religion underwent great changes that affected everyone: clergy and laypeople, men and women, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The 'Reigns of Terror' of the Revolution drove the Church underground, permanently altering the relationship between Church and State. In this book, Nigel Aston offers a readable guide to these tumultuous events. While the structures and beliefs of the Catholic Church are central, it does not neglect minority groups like Protestants and Jews. Among other features, the book discusses the Constitutional Church, the end of state support for Catholicism, the 'Dechristianization' campaign and the Concordat of 1801-2. Key themes discussed include the capacity of all the Churches for survival and adaptation, the role of religion in determining political allegiances during the Revolution, and the turbulence of Church-State relations. In this masterly study, based on the latest evidence, Aston sheds new light on a dynamic period in European history and its impact on the next 200 years of religious life in France.

Sample Text

Excerpt from The French Revolution and Religious Reform: An Account of Ecclesiastical Legislation and Its Influence on Affairs in France From 1789 to 1804 The troubles of a governmental system in which church and state were for centuries so closely identified that responsibility could be fixed upon neither have dislocated the proportions of both in the field of history. The ever growing disintegration and disorganization of ecclesiastical government in the Teutonic or Reformed Church, have in contemporary times discredited ecclesiasticism still further, and now its most modern forms appear well-nigh contemptible as historic forces. No wonder, therefore, that the latest generations have fallen into the natural but serious error of establishing for themselves, as a judicial standpoint, the total separation of church and state, not alone institutionally but likewise historically. The stubborn efforts to explain mediaevalism with little or no consideration for the unifying political influence of the church are pitiful; the widely heralded discovery that the Thirty Years' War ended ecclesiastical politics is fantastic; the so-called secular history of the revolutionary epoch, relegating church influence to a few paragraphs, utterly fails to satisfy the demand for logical sequence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

This book has been carefully planned to give a coherent account of the impact of religion in France over the last two hundred years. Most books in English dealing with the subject are now dated, and in any case concentrate on institutional questions of church-state relations rather than on the wider influence of religion throughout France. These essays summarise recent French research and provide a concise up-to-date introduction to the history of modern French Catholicism.

Now in its second edition, The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics has been updated to include a discussion about how the actions by soldiers and citizen-soldiers shaped the course of the Revolution, as well as the daily lives and concerns of everyday French people. Throughout the study, Shusterman highlights the crucial role that religion and sexuality played in determining the shape of the Revolution and examines key themes such as: the impact of the crown’s war debts on the fall of the Old Regime, the organization of citizen militias in 1789, and their eventual transformation into France’s National Guard. This edition has been revised to include a fresh analysis of classic nineteenth-century accounts of the Revolution, including those by Jules Michelet, Jean Jaurès, and Edgar Quinet. It also explores the lives of the people who lived through the French Revolution and uncovers the messages about gender, sex, religion, and faith which surrounded them, concerns which did not exist outside of the events of the Revolution. With a brief chronology of the Revolution and a guide to further reading, this book is an invaluable resource for students of the French Revolution, women and gender, and the history of Catholicism.