French Revolution: Taking a Macro Book Review

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The dominant religion of France at the time (as now) was Roman Catholicism. Aston begins his book by discussing the special, privileged role of the First Estate, as well as different theological debates raging at the time, such as the Jansenism controversy. He also gives attention to other faiths, including Protestantism and Judaism, which were present in France at the time. Protestants and Jews were some of the Revolution's earliest recipients of additional rights in the new, secular, equal society.[footnoteRef:4] [4: Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780-1804, (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 244.]

Another important influence was what Aston calls a lack of 'enlightened piety,' or the persistence of a mixture of folk traditions and populist Catholicism despised by intellectuals, but professed in practice by members of the working classes. Although France would come to seem like the paradigmatic example of Enlightenment revolution (or non-religion) during the later phases of the Revolution, during the pre-Revolutionary period, the community ties of religion held the population fast. Intellectuals would come to see this as problematic later on, just as members of the official clergy preached against it. However, this is evidence that religion was a source of continual friction regarding the attitude of the state towards religion and often formed a way for the lower classes to articulate resistance. [footnoteRef:5] it was not always a mechanism of instilling state order and imposing ideas upon the populace, and the people had control over how they interpreted and articulated religion. [5: Aston, 55 ]

Despite the eventual, official atheism or quasi-paganism of the later revolutionaries, during the early phases the majority of the French public, even the revolutionary-minded French public was religious and supported the ideals of the faiths they professed. From Aston's specific analysis of the phenomenon of religiosity in France, it is possible to draw a conclusion about his view of the inevitability of the Revolution: unlike Doyle, Aston does believe the Revolution was inevitable.

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Tensions between higher-level members of the clergy and the lower orders that identified with the Third Estate were rife. However, while Aston may be more inclined to portray the Revolution with an inevitability lacking in Doyle's account, he does not believe that the culture clash between faith and revolutionary principles was inevitable. It only came when gradually, the tone amongst the revolutionaries in the Assembly turned bitterly against the clergy. Eventually, "the Assembly voted for the complete dispossession of the clergy, and turned its face against some powerfully argued last-minute speeches by those advocating leaving the First Estate with some property."[footnoteRef:6] [6: Aston, 138]

Rather than seeing this as commensurate with revolutionary ideals, Aston believes that the radicals fail to consider the real, important role many sympathetic clergy had taken during the revolution. During the 1790s, in reaction to the anti-religious rhetoric, there was a resurgence of religious fervor, and Aston makes it clear that people did not see their faith as inherently in conflict with the Revolution. They said: "We wish to be Catholics and republicans and can be both one and the other."[footnoteRef:7] in other words, the populace did not see itself as 'oppressed' by religion, but nor did it necessarily wish that things had remained the same, so they could hold on to their old faith structures as they existed during the Ancient Regime. This envisioning of alternative possibilities, suggests Aston, means that the trajectory of the Revolution was far from expected. With this personal testimony specific to religion, Aston thus echoes Doyle's more critically-focused and broader historical analysis that the Revolution did not have to take the extreme and bloody course that it did to enact change. [7: Aston, 284].....

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