10. CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE. At the outbreak of the Revolu tion of 1789, the Apostolic and Roman Catholic religion was the religion of the state, and, since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, no other religious sect, Christian or non-Christian, had had (except in Alsace) any legal existence in France. Nevertheless, a royal decree two years before had granted a sort of tolerance and legal status to the Protestants. The king had likewise allowed the Jews to live in certain cities in the kingdom, and there to carry on their worship in private: a regime of tolerance, not of freedom of conscience. The relations between the king and the Pope were deter mined by .the concordat concluded in 1516 be tween Francis I and Leo X.
The men of the Revolution had no intention at first of secularizing the state or of sepa rating it from the Church, nor even of estab lishing any real liberty of conscience. The Dec laration of Rights of 1789 granted, in fact, only tolerance, and it was not until the 27 Sept. 1791 that the Constituent Assembly placed the Jews on a similar footing with tither citi zens. While it confiscated the possessions of the Church, it nevertheless tightened the bonds of Church and State by means of the law entitled the "Civil Constitution of the Clergy)) (12 July 1790). This gave to the clergy a salary from the state, by which the parish priests especially profited, and this first budget of the religions rose to about 100,000,000 francs. As a consequence and climax of the Gallican policy of the kings, the Civil Constitution of the clergy tended to make the Catholic religion national. Thenceforth the bishops and the priests were elected by the people; the bishops no longer received from the Pope their canonical institution; it was given them by another bishop. The newly elected clergyman could not address to the Pope any request for confirmation; he had to confine himself to writing to him, as visible head of the universal Church, in testimony of unity of faith and communion. Thus without any diplomatic
notification, the concordat of 1516 came to an end.
But the Catholic religion continued to be the religion of the state, and no salary was allotted to the ministers of other creeds; it was thought that enough was done for them in leaving them undisturbed. Such were the events which, little by little, led the Revolu tionaries to loosen the bonds which united Church and State. The Pope, after much hesi tation, condemned the Civil Constitution, and the clergy divided into two factions whose numerical proportions are not well known. Those who accepted the Civil Constitution and took the oath it demanded were called Constitu tionals, or Assermentes; those who in obedi ence to the Pope refused the oath were called Refractories.
There were thus a Papal Catholic clergy and a non-Papal Catholic clergy whose par tisans quarreled for the possession of the churches almost to the point of civil war. The inclinations of both parties alike were adverse to the liberty of sects; but most violent objec tion to such liberty was made by the Papal clergy, who had become an opposing minority, The Constituent Assembly with very ill grace finished by granting the principle of it by the law of 7 May 1791, which authorized the Papal party to carry on their worship in the churches in concurrence with the non-Papal party with reservations and irksome restrictions. This was to some extent a recognition and consecration of the existence of the schism, but the people, attached to the idea of religious unity, had no wish for any schism. Consequently, in one part of the country the Papal clergy, in another the non-Papals were harassed ; and continual religious disturbances took place during the years 1791-92. It was the recognition of this situation which inclined many enlightened Frenchmen to the then very unpopular idea of the separation of Church and State and the secularization of the state.