THE ABBE GREGOIRE AND HIS WORLD

Transcription

1 THE ABBE GREGOIRE AND HIS WORLD

2 ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 169 THE ABBE GREGOIRE AND HIS WORLD edited by JEREMY D. POPKIN and RICHARD H. POPKIN Founding Directors: P. Dibont (Paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, SI. Louis & UCLA) Director: Sarah Hutton (Middlesex University, United Kingdom) Assistant-Director: J.E. Force (University of Kentucky, Lexington); J.e. Laursen (University of California, Riverside) Editorial Board: J.F. Battail (Paris): F. Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (New York); T. Gregory (Rome); 1.D. North (Groningen); M.1. Petry (Rotterdam); 1. Popkin (Lexington); G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht) Advisory Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); B. Copenhaver (University of California, Los Angeles); A. Crombie (Oxford); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); K. Hanada (Hokkaido University): W. Kirsop (Melbourne); J. Malarczyk (Lublin); J. Orcibal (Paris); W. Rod (Miinchen); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles); J.P. Schobinger (Ziirich); J. Tans (Groningen)

3 THE ABBE GREGOIRE AND HIS WORLD edited by JEREMY D. POPKIN University of Kentucky, Lexington, U.S.A. and RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. and UCLA, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Abbe Gregoire and his world / edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Richard H. Popkin. p. cm. -- (International archives of the history of ideas = Archives internationales d'histoire des idees ; voi. 169) Includes Index. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Gregoire, Henri, Political and social views. 2. Revolutionaries--France--Biography. 3. Bishops--France--Biography, 4. France--Politics and government Popkin, Jeremy D., Popkin, Richard Henry, Archives internationales d'histoire des idees ; 169. DC146.G84 A '.092--dc21 [B] ISBN Printed an acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2000 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

5 Contents LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS... INTRODUCTION I The Abbe Gregoire: A Hero for Our Times? - Jeremy D. Popkin... ESSAY 1 I Gregoire and the Anthropology of Emancipation - Hans-Jiirgen Liisebrink ESSAY 2 I The Abbe Gregoire's Program for the Jews: Social Reform and Spiritual Project - Rita Hermon-Belot ESSAY 3 I The Abbe Gregoire and the Societe des Amis des Noirs - Marcel Dorigny ESSAY 4 I Exporting the Revolution: Gregoire, Haiti and the Colonial Laboratory, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall ESSAY 5 I The Abbe Gregoire and the Quest for a Catholic Republic - Dale Van Kley ESSAY 6 I Tearing Down the Tower of Babel: Gregoire and French Multilingualism - David A. Bell ESSAY 7 I The Paradoxes of Vandalism: Henri Gregoire and the Thermidorian Discourse on Historical Monuments - Anthony Vidler 129 ESSAY 8 I Gregoire's American Involvements - Richard H. Popkin ESSAY 9 I Gregoire as Autobiographer - Jeremy D. Popkin AFTERWORD I Discovering the Abbe Gregoire - Richard H. Popkin 183 INDEX vii ix v

6 List of Contributors David Bell is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. Marcel Dorigny is professor of history at the University of Paris-VIII. Rita Hermon-Belot has recently completed a doctoral dissertation on "l'abbe Gregoire, une politique chretienne dans la Revolution." She lives in Paris, France. Hans-Jtirgen Uisebrink holds the chair of Romanische Kulturwissenschaft and Interkulturelle Kommunikation at the Universitat des Saarlandes in Germany. Jeremy D. Popkin is professor of history at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A. Richard H. Popkin is emeritus professor of philosophy at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., and adjunct professor of history at UCLA, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall is assistant professor of history at California State University, San Marcos, California, U.S.A. Dale Van Kley is professor of history at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. Anthony Vidler is professor of art history at UCLA, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. vii

7 Introduction - The Abbe Gregoire: A Hero for Our Times? JEREMY D. POPKIN In 1989, on the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the remains of the Abbe Henri Gregoire were transferred to the Pantheon, where France honors great figures from its past. In selecting Gregoire for this honor, together with two other figures of the period, the philosopher M.-J.-A.-N. Caritat, marquis de Condorcet and the scientist Gaspard Monge, the French government proclaimed the clergyman and revolutionary legislator as a fit hero for the world at the end of the twentieth century. Gregoire now enjoys a privilege withheld from many far more famous actors of the Revolution: the Pantheon's crypt remains firmly closed to the ashes of Mirabeau (entombed there at the time of his death in 1791, but expelled when his secret contacts with the royal court came to light in 1793), to Danton, to Robespierre, to the leaders of the Revolution's many political factions, from the monarchiens to the enrages. He enjoys this privilege because he, more than any of his revolutionary contemporaries, seems to have held a notion of human rights that often seems surprisingly close to modern conceptions. Gregoire the defender of the Jews, Gregoire the enemy of slavery, Gregoire the advocate of racial equality: the country priest from Lorraine appears indeed to have been a prophet of modern values. In choosing Gregoire as one of the few revolutionary figures to be accorded the honors of the Pantheon, the French government of 1989 very deliberately chose to honor a man who was more than an icon of late twentieth-century political correctness, however. Gregoire was singled out because he was both a man of enlightenment and progress and because he was a Catholic priest. A priest of a particular kind, however: one whose support for the French Revolution's effort to reform the Church had led to his being labelled a schismatic and denied last rites when he died in Gregoire's steadfast adherence to the Christian faith, as he understood it, in the face of both

8 x Jeremy D. Popkin revolutionary secularism and the injunctions of the Papacy are evidence that he cannot simply be classified as a forerunner of modernity. In his own eyes, he was a defender of tradition, loyal to values proclaimed once and for all by Jesus. The French government officials who chose to put Gregoire in the Pantheon may have thought that their decision would reconcile secularists and Christians; their gesture was intended to bridge over the great divide that has traditionally separated those who celebrate the achievements of the Revolution and those who question them. At the same time, the honor bestowed on Gregoire was designed to underline the universality of the values of the French Revolution and its continuing relevance to the present. As it happened, however, the choice of Gregoire highlighted new questions about what he and the traditions he represented really stood for. His sarcophagus was put forward as a symbol of reconciliation, but it proved to be an inspiration for new divisions. Was he truly a defender of Jews and blacks, or was he an assimilationist bent on imposing a uniform set of European values on the other peoples of the world, including the rural populations of France itself? Was his purpose to create a better secular world, or was he trying to bring about the Christian millenium? Was he a genuine Catholic, or was the French government renewing its two-century-old campaign against the Church by giving public honors to a heretic? The attempt to elevate the abbe Gregoire to the status of a national, and perhaps international, hero has demonstrated instead that he retains, even today, the power to generate controversy. Gregoire remains controversial because he managed to place himself at the center of so many debates of his own day that remain relevant in our own time, and because he remains one of the most puzzling figures of the revolutionary era, a man who claimed to reconcile values that seemed contradictory, both to his contemporaries and to many of those who study him today. How could one and the same man demand Jewish emancipation and condemn the behavior of the French Jews of his time? Hail the independence of a black republic in Haiti and insist that it conforms to European norms? Defend the French Revolution and simultaneously remain a Catholic? These questions have challenged students of Gregoire's career from his own time to the present, and they lie at the heart of the essays in this volume, a product of a scholarly conference on "The Abbe Gregoire and His Causes" held at UCLA's Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies in February, I We would like to thank the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies and its director, Peter Reill, for their support of this project. Anthony Vidler's contribution 'The Paradoxes of Vandalism: Henri Gregoire and the Thermidorian Discourse on Historical Monuments." has been added to the papers delivered at the conference. We regret that it was not possible to include the paper delivered by Emmanuel Eze, "'How Can We Annihilate the Unjust and Barbaric Prejudices against Blacks and Mulattos?': An Answer to Abbe Gregoire." in this volume.

9 Introduction xi In their efforts to understand Gregoire and his significance, the contributors to this volume have focused on several issues. The largest number of papers presented here, including those of Hans-Jiirgen Liisebrink, Rita Hermon Belot, Marcel Dorigny, Alyssa Sepinwall and Richard Popkin, deal with the question of Gregoire's definition of humanity and of human rights, and particularly of how he foresaw the extension of those rights to groups outside the mainstream of European civilization. A second set of essays, by Dale Van Kley and David Bell, looks at the relationship between Gregoire's prerevolutionary Catholic commitments and the positions he took during the French Revolution. Anthony Vidler examines Gregoire's contribution to the Revolution's cultural politics. Finally, Jeremy D. Popkin's article examines Gregoire's effort to define his own image by writing his memoirs. Gregoire's humanitarian commitments, Hans-Jiirgen Liisebrink argues, were rooted in his universalistic conception of man. Gregoire wrote no systematic treatise on human nature, but his approach to problems ranging from the emancipation of the Jews to the appreciation of literature written by blacks grew out of a conviction that the human race was one, and that all people were capable of being educated for freedom. The differences between human beings were due, Gregoire maintained, only to differences in the social conditions under which they lived. He found support for this conviction not only in his observations about the achievements of Jews and blacks when they were given appropriate opportunities, but in his musings about the phenomenon of autodidacts among the European poor - a phenomenon with direct personal meaning to him, since he was himself the son of uneducated peasants who had risen by his own efforts. Although he believed that humanity was one, however, Gregoire was equally convinced that some groups had had the opportunity to more fully realize their potential than others. The consequence he drew from his universalistic conception of humanity was not cultural relativity, but a passion to give Jews, blacks, and European peasants the opportunities that educated Europeans enjoyed. Egalitarian emancipation and assimilation were always linked in his thinking. The complexity of Gregoire's attitude toward groups that, in his view, had not had the benefit of European civilization is brought out in the essays of Rita Hermon-Belot and Alyssa Sepinwall. Gregoire had first come to public attention two years before the Revolution because of his prize essay on the question posed by the Metz Academy: "What are the means to make the Jews happy and useful?" Elected to the National Assembly two years later, he was quickly recognized, by Jews and non-jews alike, as the leading spokesman on behalf of their rights. As Hermon-Belot indicates, French Jews remembered Gregoire's efforts with gratitude down to this century. Only in the wake of the Holocaust, which showed the incompleteness of Jews' acceptance in France, did some critics begin to question Gregoire's motives. Had he favored Jewish emancipation only because he hoped it would bring about the Jews' eventual

10 xii Jeremy D. Popkin conversion to Christianity? The republication of Gregoire's famous essay in the 1980s raised new questions. Gregoire had given an unflattering portrait of the Ashkenazi Jews of his native eastern France, one that echoed traditional anti-semitic charges about usurious money-lending and dishonest business practices. Sepinwall shows that similar questions can be raised about Gregoire's attitudes toward the Haitians. Gregoire celebrated their achievement in creating an independent republic, but he made his approval dependent on the Haitians' willingness to adopt the Christian religion and European social practices, including a model of family domesticity completely alien to Haitian conditions. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, it is indeed clear that Gregoire failed to fully respect the autonomy of the non-european or non Christian Others who fascinated him so much. Sepinwall shows that his insistence on imposing European and Christian norms makes him an ancestor, not only of modern humanitarian attitudes, but of nineteenth-century French imperialism's faith in its mission civilisatrice. Furthermore, she finds an uncomfortable connection between his racial egalitarianism and his insistence on gender hierarchy: the degree of Haitian progress toward enlightenment would be measured by their adoption of European models of female subordination. Hermon-Belot's interpretation of Gregoire's treatment of the Jews is more nuanced. Gregoire's interest in the Jews did indeed have religious roots, she argues, showing the impact on him of Jansenist 'figurist' interpretations of Biblical prophecies. As a believing Christian, he could not envisage a culmination of history without a final conversion of the Jews. But he sincerely believed that only God could bring this about, and that humans had no right to meddle in the 'mystery' of Jewish destiny by persecution. Gregoire, who knew many Jews, never made any effort to persuade any of them to convert, and, whatever late-twentieth-century critics may think of his views, the Jews of his time enthusiastically welcomed his efforts on their behalf. They did so even though Gregoire envisaged a society in which Catholicism would remain a privileged, public religion and minority faiths would simply be tolerated. Gregoire, Hermon-Belot suggests, needs to be interpreted in the context of his times; he could not have anticipated the way in which perspectives on religious toleration were to change in the late twentieth century. How much influence did Gregoire actually have on the legislation affecting blacks and slavery enacted during the Revolution? Marcel Dorigny shows that he had surprisingly little to do with the famous Societe des Amis des no irs, the abolitionist group founded in 1788 whose members included many of the most prominent Patriot deputies of the National Assembly. The deeply religious Gregoire, Dorigny suggests, felt out of place in a group whose most vocal members regularly voiced rationalist and deist critiques of Christianity; socially, the former village cure may not have been able to mingle comfortably with the club's many aristocratic members. But, Dorigny shows, Gregoire

11 Introduction xiii had no principled objection to collective political action in favor of abolition. He became the recognized leader of the second Societe des Amis des noirs, founded in 1796 to defend the emancipatory legislation passed two years earlier and threatened by the reactionary atmosphere after Robespierre's fall. His involvement with this group coincided with his period of greatest influence in the constitutional church, as Dale Van Kley's essay shows, and underlines the originality of Gregoire's role during the Directory period, the most neglected phase of revolutionary history. Dale Van Kley's and David Bell's essays turn to other issues raised by Gregoire's participation in the French Revolution. Few figures of the period were as active in the revolutionary legislatures as Gregoire, who sat in both the National Assembly of and the National Convention of It sometimes seems as if no significant issue could be decided without him: he involved himself prominently in questions ranging from language policy to the enactment of the metric system, from the preservation of art treasures to the mechanics of the annexation of Savoy. But Gregoire differed from most of his fellow revolutionary legislators because he remained deeply influenced by the pre-revolutionary traditions of the French Catholic church. Dale Van Kley shows that Gregoire carried into the Revolution an elaborate, theologically based critique of the existing church. In the early years of the Revolution, Van Kley argues, Gregoire was less a Jansenist in the strict sense than a Gallican defender of the French church's autonomy and a Richerist believer in the lower clergy's right to share in church governance. The Revolution initially seemed to him to offer the possibility of a thoroughgoing revival of the church that would lead to a spiritual redemption of the French nation, although he was critical of the National Assembly's refusal to grant the clergy any special voice on religious issues. As the Revolution came into ever-increasing conflict with the church, however, Gregoire's theologically based optimism about its outcome turned to pessimism. The traditional Jansenist insistence that only a small remnant of the faithful would remain steadfast in the face of persecution now seemed to Gregoire an apt description of the church's situation. This belief in the vital role of the godly minority gave Gregoire the energy to take the leadership of the 'constitutional' church after thermidor, when its cause seemed especially hopeless, caught as it was between the deist cults sponsored by the republican government and the resurgence of an intransigently counterrevolutionary Catholicism spread by 'refractory' priests who had never accepted the National Assembly's Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Like Van Kley, David Bell sees Gregoire's views in the revolutionary years as reflecting his pre-revolutionary theological background. In particular, his concern with the persistence of regional languages had strong parallels with issues debated in the Old Regime church, which had had to choose between preaching the faith to its flock in the dialects they understood or trying to

12 XIV Jeremy D. Popkin impose standard French on them. Paradoxically, Bell shows, Gregoire turned away from the French Catholic Church's traditional tolerance of language plurality and embraced a position normally associated with the Protestants, by insisting on the necessity of a single national tongue. The reason for Gregoire's choice of this policy are not clear, but, just as Sepinwall sees in Gregoire's ideas the origin of the Third Republic's zeal to spread a uniform French culture abroad, Bell sees him as the key figure in making elimination of patois an essential part of subsequent republican ideology. Another area in which Gregoire was a forerunner of later French republican policies was in his articulation of a justification for the preservation of historical and artistic monuments from the country's pre-republican past. Anthony Vidler highlights Gregoire's creation of the concept of 'vandalism' as a way of stigmatizing the radical revolutionaries' campaign to demolish artistic and architectural creations that had glorified the church, the monarchy, and the aristocracy. Gregoire's campaign in 1794 and 1795 paved the way for the creation of France's first historical museum, directed by Alexandre Lenoir, but, as Vidler shows, this institution, in which objects were wrenched from their original context, was in some ways as contradictory to Gregoire's notion of historical monuments embedded in their communities as the revolutionaries' policy of destruction had been. Gregoire's interests were never limited only to France. Richard Popkin's discussion of 'Some Aspects of Gregoire's American Concerns' shows us how Gregoire's multiplicity of commitments led him to take an interest in projects scattered all across the globe and brought him into contact with people from the most diverse backgrounds. Even as he was devoting himself to the development of the Caribbean republic of Haiti and working for the revival of the republican cause in France, Gregoire also worried about the consequences of the American model of the separation of church and state and followed the prospects of a proposed Jewish settlement in upstate New York. Taken as a whole, these essays show the continuing difficulty of subsuming the abbe Gregoire's thought under any simple label. Gregoire was shaped by traditions with deep roots in the past, notably the theological teachings he absorbed in his early years, and there can be little doubt that a sincere faith guided many of his actions. The conclusions he drew from his religious convictions often closely matched those of his more secularly-minded contemporaries, however, and he does not seem to have given much thought to the question of why he was so often at odds with the majority of his fellow Catholics. In the final essay in this volume, this author considers Gregoire's own effort to make sense of the many different aspects of his life during the revolutionary period, and suggests that Gregoire was as much a mystery to himself as he remains to us. Convinced that reason and religion could not be fundamentally at odds, Gregoire remained baffled by the fact that, even in conjunction, these two forces had not been able to make the Revolution a

13 Introduction xv success. Sure that he had always acted in good faith and for the best of reasons, he could not comprehend why so few of his efforts had borne fruit. Gregoire's autobiography mirrors the confusion of the revolutionary era, and lays the basis for the many contradictory readings of his significance that have continued down to the present. The celebrations of the French Revolution's bicentennial in 1989 were meant in part to demonstrate, as Fran~ois Furet, the leading French historian involved in the debates of those years put it, that "the French Revolution is over." The transfer of the Abbe Gregoire's remains to the Pantheon was meant as part of that process. The inclusion of a devout priest in the monument the Revolution had erected was meant to reconcile two faiths that had fought each other for so long, and the recognition of Gregoire's efforts on behalf of religious minorities and the abolition of slavery was intended to underline the the Revolution's continuing significance in the struggle for human rights. Just as the bicentennial observances notably failed to bring the French public together in a consensus about the meaning of 1789, the 'Pantheonization' of Gregoire has not ended the debates about his role. As these essays show, Gregoire remains an emblematic figure, and his life raises in microcosm the continuing questions that make the revolutionary era so difficult to assess. Gregoire looked to the faith of the past, but defined a new humanitarian creed for the future. A sincere defender of liberty, he defined it in terms that sometimes opened new possibilities of oppression. Resembling at times a belated participant in the Enlightenment republic of letters, he reminds us at others of a modern human-rights activist. He left us his own attempt to assess the significance of his life, but in many ways his memoir leaves us with more questions than answers. These essays broaden our understanding of a remarkable figure, but they also show how elusive and contradictory this man who claimed to have aspired to be nothing more than a simple country priest remains.