France -- Civilization; France -- Politics and government; France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
At Séez, when constitutional priests are in disfavor, the bishop is
compelled to resign on the instant, while Abbé Langlois, his principal
counsellor, taken by the gendarmes, led to Paris from police station
to police station, is shut up in La Force, in secret confinement, with
straw for a bed, during fourteen days, then imprisoned in Vincennes for
nine months, so that, finally, seized with paralysis, he is transferred
to an insane retreat, where he remains a prisoner up to the end of the
reign.
Let us provide for the future as well as for the present, and, beyond
the present clergy, let us train the future clergy. The seminaries will
answer this purpose: "Public ones must be organized[5183] so that
there may be no clandestine seminaries, such as formerly existed in the
departments of Calvados, Morbihan and many others;... the formation of
young priests must not be left to ignorance and fanaticism."--"Catholic
schools need the surveillance of the government."--There is to be one of
these in each metropolitan district, and "this special school must be
in the hands of the authorities."--"The directors and teachers shall
be appointed by the First Consul"; men will be placed there who are
"cultivated, devoted to the government and friendly to toleration; they
will not confine themselves to teaching theology, but will add to this
a sort of philosophy and correct worldliness."--A future curé, a priest
who controls laymen and belongs to his century, must not be a monk
belonging to the other world, but a man of this world, able to adapt
himself to it, do his duty in it with propriety and discretion, accept
the legal establishment of which he is a part, not damn his Protestant
neighbors, Jews or freethinkers too openly, be a useful member of
temporal society and a loyal subject of the civil power; let him be
a Catholic and pious, but within just limits; he shall not be an
ultramontanist or a bigot.--Precautions are taken to this effect. No
seminarist may become subdeacon without the consent of the government,
and the list of ordinations each year, sent to him at Paris by the
bishop, is returned, cut down to the strictly necessary.[5184] From the
very beginning, and in express terms,[5185] Napoleon has reserved all
curacies and vicarages for "ecclesiastics pensioned by virtue of the
laws of the Constituent Assembly." Not only, through this confusion
between pension and salary, does he lighten a pecuniary burden, but
he greatly prefers old priests to young ones; many of them have been
constitutionnels, and all are imbued with Gallicanism; it is he who has
brought them back from exile or saved them from oppression, and they
are grateful for it; having suffered long and patiently, they are weary,
they must have grown wiser, and they will be manageable. Moreover,
he has precise information about each one; their past conduct is a
guarantee of their future conduct; he never chooses one of them with his
eyes shut.
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