From the Church to the State and to Lordship

Abstract

Despite a succession of advances and setbacks observed here and there, the suppression of regular religion in the age of revolution represented a definitive and irreversible process of the ascendancy of new social groups and classes and, at the same time, the suppression of the power of the two pillars of the ancien régime: the clergy and the nobility. It was also the nation that asserted itself as a “new historical actor”, with a new political and social agency of its own, and also with a new ambition for property and patrimony.

1. Introduction

Taken as events but also as a process extending over the medium term, the nationalisation of clergy property in France, alongside other confiscations, and its sale as Biens nationaux, decreed the day after the storming of the Bastille (14 July 1789), had an undeniable material impact on the structures of rural and urban France. They also had a symbolic and paradigmatic significance that extended far beyond the borders of France and Europe—extending well into the 20th century.

2. Suppression Measures

When the Etats généraux convened by Louis XVI to address the crisis of the regime and propose reforms were transformed into the National Assembly on 17 June 1789—on the initiative of Abbé Sieyès—one of the first questions raised was that of royal finances and state indebtedness. After the events of 14 July and the night of 4 August, with the abolition of feudal privileges—which had already affected the clergy, particularly through the abolition of the tithe—the discussion focused, among other things, on the nature of the Catholic Church’s ownership of property and the possibility of using its assets to meet pressing needs. On 2 November 1789 (just four months after the storming of the Bastille), the French National Constituent Assembly simultaneously decreed the nationalisation of the clergy and the confiscatory nationalisation (without compensation) of all their property and assets, to be allocated to the coffers of the nation, incarnated by the state.

Two figures from the ancien régime, members of their respective major orders, the clergy and the nobility, had been the promoters of such a measure: one was the Bishop of Autun, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand; the other, Count Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau. Comfortably approved by the majority of the National Assembly, with 60% voting in favour (568 votes), 36% against (346 votes), and 40 invalid votes, the provision was quickly implemented a few months later. Extending the differences that had existed within the Eglise de France since at least the 18th century, and which were apparent in the cahiers de doléances drawn up in the countryside and in the towns, it is a fact that the lower clergy, who were closer to the peasants and the urban working classes, generally joined in the revolutionary rural and urban protest. Their representatives, many of whom had joined the Tiers-Etat, even agreed to the nationalisation of ecclesiastical property by the National Assembly in order to meet the demands of the debt. In fact, it was not until the civil constitution of the clergy, passed in July 1790, that the divisions within the lower clergy became more apparent.

This first dispossession initiative was followed by a second in July 1793. Both gave rise to what has been called the mass of Biens nationaux, to be put up for public auction. While the first provision concerned the goods of the secular and regular clergy and that of the crown, designated as the property of the first origin, the second provision affected the goods of the fugitive or emigrated nobility, who conspired abroad against the Revolution, as well as that of the religious who had refused to take an oath to the constitution and obey the revolutionary act (between 1790 and 1791, in particular). These were designated as the assets of the second origin. Two origins, then, and two compact aggregates of assets, to be offered to the highest bidder.

Just five weeks after the first measure, in December 1789, the Revolution created a payment instrument, the assignat, secured on confiscated assets, which, after having been a state instrument, became a means of paying off the monarchy’s debts that the Revolution had recognised. The assignat was then rapidly transformed into paper money for general circulation, issued successively in excess of the value of the confiscated goods, paving the way for a hyperinflation that subverted wealth, fortunes, and the valuation of assets, while at the same time affecting existing social relations.1 By February 1796, six years later, the assignat had already lost all its value, as had the territorial mandate that was to replace it and whose total devaluation occurred between March and August 1796 (5–6 months): in other words, when the highest payments were made for the auction of Biens nationaux, to the benefit of their purchasers.

What is increasingly clear, however, is that the measures approved since June 1789 and beyond, by the French representatives in the National Assembly, have also reflected the legal confirmation of a much less visible socio-economic movement, of greater scope and dimension, and of longer duration, namely, the progressive victory of property owners, which began at least as early as the second half of the 17^e or early 18^e century—and which would continue thereafter, throughout the 19^e century, if not later. Of course, as in other comparable episodes, the laws enacted confirmed the process underway, while giving it additional impetus—with, moreover, new properties being placed on the market for appropriation.

Such a trend and the metamorphosis underway, accelerated and overlaid by the revolutionary event, could at the same time become an example and an abomination, also outside the French geographical hexagon, depending on the attitude towards the transformation process (of what it established as a precedent for the future) and its expansion, or on the local structures of land possession and their dominant groups. However, it is possible to say that this affirmation of property (or proto-property) over possession, whether civil or ecclesiastical, which the Revolution revealed and highlighted in France but which it did not invent because it was already at work, well before,2 was also evident not only in England and the United Provinces of the Low Countries, but just as clearly in many parts of the German territory, on the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, and in the American colonies, particularly those of the Iberian monarchies.3

The certainty that “direct seigneury” (directum dominium) was no longer anything more than a formal or ceremonial seigneury had become particularly widespread in France (perhaps more so than elsewhere in Europe), in the same way that the conviction had grown that the rights of “useful seigneury” (utile dominium) were more or less total and full, even though the latter owed recognition, also formal, to the “direct lord”. The Encyclopédie (1571–72) and many jurists and magistrates before it had also pointed out that “useful seigneury” was “true property” and that all those who benefitted from it were owners. These people had different social origins and gradually accumulated “property rights” derived from ancient rights of possession and use and from communal possessions. Whereas “direct seigneury” was merely a “superiority retained through inheritance”. At the same time, the royal administration, albeit mainly for tax reasons, considered the tenure as property in its own right so that it could be taxed for property income tax—le vingtième—and for the transfer of ownership—le centième denier. It was even exempted from inheritance tax (Béaur 2000).

3. The Modalities and Challenges of the Revolution

The main instrument for the nationalisation and confiscation of property was the law, applied quickly and effectively. It was the law that struck down the owners of the ancien régime, including God and the king. But it was a law born of the shift in the balance of power that had taken place in favour of the Revolution. It was a law of general validity and mandatory application across all the territories of the State, with no priority zones but no areas of exclusion either, no special domains or enclaves, and which left little room for arrangements or compromises with previous legislation or jurisdictions and their beneficiaries (or with Rome, for example, in order to soften its impact). In other words, legislation without privileges, derogations, or exceptions that had not been decided by the new power in place.4 It was a law with a universal vocation, with no prerogatives granted to ecclesiastics or the military; a law that responded to a new power that was taking over. In addition, it was a law to which the Revolution had to give the necessary means for its practical application, while transforming the existing state structures, creating the necessary bodies, equipping them with the appropriate personnel to requisition, intervene, and store, as well as to record confiscation operations and inventories of confiscated goods.

In fact, it was a question of adapting and modifying the previous mechanisms for organising public auctions in order to invest the space of the old monarchical state with a new majesty and legitimacy. In other words, to do what a revolution needs to do with the tools of power of previous political structures, by eliminating and/or replacing them with the application of new forms, sometimes unprecedented, often innovative, also due to their massive nature.

However, as with the process of secularisation5 at work in civil society, it is also important to emphasise the importance of duration and stability for the achievement of the whole process.6 In other words, successive governments throughout the 19^e century (and beyond), despite their political differences or their desire to “correct revolutionary excesses”, were not to question the validity of the measures adopted, their effective application, or their effects. Some of the most serious and comprehensive research work has made it possible to observe the duration of these measures over time and to specify the sociological profile of long-term beneficiaries after resales or speculative operations.

The goods of the clergy, the nobility, and the crown were purchased by other social actors, either already landowners or in the process of becoming landowners. These new buyers were mainly from bourgeois or peasant backgrounds, although there were also “straw men” of the former owners who sought to preserve their interests underhand. There is tangible evidence of the participation of peasants in public sales, individually or in groups, as well as the participation of the urban and rural bourgeoisie.7 But the documentation also corroborates the fact that there were very few farm labourers, day labourers, or domestic workers among the buyers. Despite the consequences of the scrip episode already mentioned, it is not possible to assert, as some interpretations presented at the time (who claimed that certain families or certain buyers in particular had been favoured), that the Biens nationaux had been misappropriated, sold off, or poorly sold, that they had simply been used to fuel speculation, or that the nobility and ecclesiastical assets had been liquidated in a bad way. This does not mean that there were not cases of this nature, but only cases and not the generality.

On the other hand, it should be noted that the new revolutionary and republican state was able to make the most of the operation, to finance the start of the new regime, to pay for its consumption and expenditure, to clean up and buy back some of the debt of the monarchy and aristocracy, or even to meet military expenditure in the face of combined aggression from the domestic and foreign fronts. And all this without having to raise new taxes for several years by abolishing feudalism and its tax burden without any backsliding.8 In other words, and to put it simply, with the aim of abolishing and liquidating, literally and figuratively, the ancien régime.

The Revolution extended beyond its original borders, seeking to spread its example and exploits, often through occupation. One of its first destinations, before several others,9 was the Iberian Peninsula, where it repeatedly sought to find support and extensions, both directly and through military penetration of the frontiers, even before Napoleon’s occupation in 1808.10 However, it was also able to do so by less visible, indirect, and intellectual means, or by osmosis (in the words of Pierre Vilar), which gave rise, for example, to several waves of sales of ecclesiastical property.

The precedent of its confiscation mechanisms and its echoes also reached Spanish America, sometimes arousing expectation, but more often fear, within the governing circles of the Spanish monarchy, the Church, and the religious orders, and in the middle sectors of society;11 even in certain plebeian circles. But its influence was also medium- and long-term, in ideological, political, and institutional terms—as discussed below—since the French “model” and the ways in which it was practiced continued to haunt the dominant classes in these territories throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century, just as what happened to the Catholic Church, reconstituted after the Spanish-American wars, with its centres of secular and regular power—old and new—after 1814 or after 1824, following the successful independence of the Iberian colonies.12

4. Aftermath

At the beginning of the 20th century, Georges Lecarpentier, a specialist in the confiscation and auctioning of property during the Revolution, calculated on the basis of scattered surveys that the ecclesiastical property affected by the measures of the Biens nationaux amounted to 6% of all French land. At the same time, he coined the famous phrase that the sale of the Biens nationaux had been the “greatest event” of the Revolution, although he also referred to the importance of its social and political achievements.

At the same time, it marked the end of a period in which polemical, ideological, and political approaches to the issue still prevailed (dividing the camps between supporters and opponents of the revolutionary event). Then, under the impetus of Jean Jaurès and thanks to a commission set up for this purpose in 1903, historians began to examine the documentation available through historical analysis in order to go beyond conflicting approaches or intuitions and attempt to make a real assessment of the exact impact of the operation, its results, and its consequences.

After a century of work by historians on a subject that mobilised the best-known and most recognised practitioners of the profession in France, the work by Bernard Bodinier and Eric Teyssier, published in 2000 by the Société d’études robespierristes and the Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, drew up an assessment, if not definitive, at least global, credible, and reliable, of what this major event was, by establishing average figures and giving benchmarks for its scale, results, and consequences. Thus, if we take into account the two masses of assets from both origins auctioned and sold, we arrive at a percentage of 8.5% of arable French land, or roughly 4.7 million hectares. If we add forest sales, this percentage probably rises to 10% of French land, or more than 5 million hectares (Bodinier and Teyssier, 2000). This is far less than what was transferred, for example, by some of the most radical “agrarian reforms” of the 20th century.

Is 10% of the total arable area too much or too little? Without wishing to give a “Norman answer” (or a Galician one, as it is said in the Iberian Peninsula), we can say that it is not much if we take into account the fact that much more was expected if the scale of the operation had corresponded to the controversy it generated and the fact that it was considered to be the “greatest event” of the Revolution. However, it is significant if we consider that the land involved was of excellent quality, fertile, and productive, like the cereal-growing land in the Paris basin, and that selling it was no mean feat. If we also consider the timing of these transactions and the upheaval they represented.

In France, during the first phase of the sale, from 1789 to the beginning of the 19th century, 1,100,000 sales took place, with between 500,000 and 700,000 beneficiaries (one in ten French households). The bourgeoisie consolidated its position as a social class right from the start of the auctions and was the main purchasing force.13 However, the peasants, as we have already said, also benefitted from this general increase in the number of owners in the course of the victory of the owners already mentioned in a long-term process that had begun long before. However, the peasants benefitted above all in the most rural, least fertile, and least wealthy areas, with strong local roots, sometimes against the Revolution itself, as was the case in western France.

Assuming that there were strong social divisions and disparities within the clergy, if we follow the conclusions of the work of Bodinier and Teyssier (2000), it is possible to point out two central characteristics of the French possessions and assets (patrimony) of the lower secular clergy: firstly, the possession of a considerable number of buildings (apart from those of the fabriques, which in principle did not belong to them). Secondly, they owned a relatively small number of agricultural plots and mills, with rather small plots of land. The lower clergy, who in Spain seemed to have a greater share in the decimal rents—in particular the parish priests—thus showed themselves to be more diverse in France, in terms of their sources of income.

However, taking a comparative approach, these assessments also had repercussions on another important question: that of knowing in retrospect the extent of the patrimonial wealth of the Catholic Church (and its various offshoots) towards the end of the French ancien régime. The work of the French historians indicated has shown that ecclesiastical land represented on average at least 6% of arable land (which was, let us remember, Lecarpentier’s initial intuition), and perhaps as much as 10%. This would mean that the weight of the French clergy under the ancien régime had traditionally been overestimated in terms of their land holdings or accumulated wealth. This may be due to the radical nature of the revolutionary confiscation, which took place in a single operation.14 Its real patrimonial importance would be much less than for the Italian Peninsula, or for the Iberian Peninsula, and even for Ibero-American colonial areas such as New Spain and Peru.

However, it is also necessary to take into account other characteristics of the ecclesiastical possessions of the ancien régime in France: the fact that they were spread out over the whole territory and that they were also more important in the richest regions (for example, the cereal-growing areas of the Paris basin), with large tracts of land, almost always fertile and/or arable, but not exclusively so. The high secular clergy and the high prelature of the regular clergy were also the main owners of French ecclesiastical possessions. The male orders were generally richer than the female orders;15 this does not seem to have been the case in either the Iberian Peninsula or Iberian America, for example, where the accumulation of surplus money by the regular female clergy was particularly great (Luna, 2016a).

The power of a regular clergy with large estates (and access to large regular rents), which appeared in the criticisms of the “enlightened” Spanish men of the 18th century (Jovellanos, Olavide, or Campomanes), has been clearly confirmed thanks to the work carried out on the basis of the documents and accounting instruments of these institutions.16 It is therefore possible to state that the size of regular ecclesiastical land holdings may have increased during the first part of the 18th century, before declining later on—even though the situation may seem contrasting, particularly from the point of view of financial assets. It has been estimated that the size of all ecclesiastical land holdings at the end of the Spanish ancien régime hovered around 20%,17 although there were considerable regional and intra-territorial differences. This was generally cereal land, which was much more fertile than average (Saavedra 2009).18

In the Iberian Peninsula too, it seems that the mid-18^e century saw the zenith of the Spanish Catholic Church’s financial wealth. Subsequently, from the expulsion and confiscation of the property—land and financial19—of the Society of Jesus by the monarchical state until the 19^e century (apart from exceptional cases), there was a very slow erosion of all the financial resources of the two components of the clergy—secular and regular—and even of the Inquisition. One of the most visible factors was the downward trend in tithes and other charges levied by the clergy, caused above all by the recurrent refusal of rural dwellers to pay them. However, the Spanish Catholic Church and the religious orders established on the Iberian Peninsula were able to defend their possessions.

More generally, as we have already mentioned, the influence of the results of the Revolution spread slowly but steadily throughout the 19^e century and even the 20^e century. This was particularly true for the future of the ecclesiastical possessions of the Old Regime, which had initially made a successful transition to the New Regime, both in the Iberian Peninsula and in the newly independent Spanish-American states.20 But this influence was also significant in terms of the destiny of possessions and undivided estates by forced substitution (including the majorat or mayorazgo), very often in opposition to the principle of equal sharing.

In this respect, various projects were launched in various parts of Hispano-America, often resulting in the abolition of convents, monasteries, and the religious orders themselves. In the Iberian and Hispano-American worlds, which had already seen comparable operations in the modern period—in the Iberian Peninsula, almost at the same time as in England—these projects and their practical application went through hesitant episodes, with advances and setbacks, during the 19^e century—and even in the 20th century. The first to be affected by these initiatives were the poorly run, heavily indebted, almost moribund, or disappearing religious institutions belonging to the regular clergy.21 Subsequently, it was the balance of power, sometimes retaliation, if not indebtedness, and the power of the market (or the currency) that played the main role. However, there was also resistance on the part of the clergy, allied with a favourable political power, to recover the patrimony that had previously been confiscated (in part), while obtaining contradictory final results (Juárez 2004; Luna 2017).

As in the French case, but over a much longer period of time, the beneficiaries of the ecclesiastical dispossession measures in the Iberian Peninsula and Hispano-America were the landowners who, having previously acquired such a condition, also had the financial means to accumulate new landed property. On both sides of the Atlantic, the gradual end of ecclesiastical mainmortes or manos muertas and the end of undivided inheritance consolidated the power of existing landowners, even if this did not always translate into productive development or agricultural growth, despite what the ideology of “property rights” might have predicted (Luna 2024).

5. Conclusions: Scope, Symbol, and Benchmarks

Despite the succession of advances and setbacks observed here and there, it must be emphasised that, on the whole, we witnessed a definitive and irreversible process of ascendancy of new social groups and classes and, at the same time, the suppression of the power of the two pillars of the ancien régime: the clergy and the nobility. It was also the Nation that asserted itself as a “historical actor”, with a new social and political content but also with a new perspective on possession and patrimony. It is thus property, constantly asserted throughout the modern period—in a variety of processes—that is at the heart of the inherent definition of the nations of contemporary owners.22 However, it was a process, let us repeat, which in its spread knew different variations and multiple manifestations, from one territory to another, from one continent to another.

The clergy lost their wealth, their fortune, and their power, as we have already said. They only managed to preserve part of their temples, buildings, and parish houses. While some of its members have intervened in auctions to recover some of their former property, there have also been those who have done so for purely individual or speculative purposes. We also know that, despite its claims, the Catholic Church never succeeded in imposing a right of compensation and did not recover the assets it had accumulated up to the end of the ancien régime. This was not the case for all the old nobility, some of whom were able to recover and partially adapt, even thanks to the Billion Compensation Act of 1825, without regaining their former splendour. However, we also know that the Catholic Church has not lost out everywhere and that it has also been able to adapt to the contemporary world.

While the nation-state burst onto the scene and asserted its existence during and after the Revolution as one of the victorious signs of the rise of property owners, two facts should be highlighted during the sale of Biens nationaux and during the revolutionary transition. These too were medium-term events, not attributable to political change alone. On the one hand, the confirmed existence of dynamic land markets even before the Revolution, contrary to certain opinions that did not admit their energetic activity or vigour.23 Secondly, the qualitative transformation of money and its assertion as an instrument for altering property and destabilising society.

On the one hand, then, the Revolution did not invent the property market, nor did it drown it in the flood of new goods or properties for sale. This market, which had already seen sustained activity across the whole of France, was able to “digest” (the word is Gérard Béaur’s) the annual introduction of tens or hundreds of thousands of new properties resulting from confiscations, for sale or resale. In other words, French society during the transition from the ancien régime to the nouveau régime was able, and had the means, to purchase this mass of property newly arrived on the land markets by fully taking on board the different fortunes of its new social actors—with the participation of the old ones too.

However, on the other hand, this also happened because the Revolution chose to accompany the confiscation and dispossession of property with the creation of a new monetary unit, the assignat, whose progressive and massive devaluation (and not just punctual or episodic, as in previous cases) was a fundamental, and decidedly subversive, protagonist of the revolutionary process. This constantly devaluing “representative paper money”, while financing the fiscal deficit and partially liquidating the debt (present and past), became the gnawer of the fortunes accumulated by the old social groups. This undermined them from within through devaluation and, as a result, overturned the structures and hierarchies of power in force, favouring social ascension and creating new riches and new fortunes, like a melting pot of new classes and new social groups, with a national vocation (Spang 2015; Tackett 1996).

Finally, it is possible to say that both in the Iberian Peninsula and in the majority of the new Latin American states created since independence, throughout the 19^e century (and well into the 20^e century), there have been a number of “French landmarks”, derived from the entire revolutionary experience, sometimes highlighted, sometimes denigrated,24 but always present. They have sometimes emerged as sources of inspiration for protest and for challenging the prevailing order, while at the same time emphasising their transformative and game-changing aspects.

They concerned the ownership of land and natural wealth, which had been monopolised by privileged groups, including the two clergies (secular and regular), as well as their necessary redistribution.25 At the same time, they recalled the weight of the law and the need for lasting institutional and legal transformations. They advocated the need to increase the number of citizen-owners in order to consolidate the new nations being formed. However, they also advocated the need to strengthen state structures and political and legislative representation. Even if France itself could, over more or less long periods, experience setbacks with regard to such benchmarks.