High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 641
the American clergy were not unduly shocked by the Reign of Terror. In the
French Dechristianization of 1793, which was not unlike the original Protestant-
ism in its smashing of images and repudiation of vestments, the American minis-
ters tended to see another awful judgment on the errors of popery. What turned
them more conservative, and to more of a belief that Christianity was itself in
danger from democratic excesses, was rather, it seems, the furor raised by Paine’s
Age of Reason, the spread in America of unitarianism, deism, and movements like
the Philadelphia Theophilanthropy, and probably also the collapse of the custom-
ary order in such respected Protestant countries as Holland and Switzerland after
- In America, dependent on England for news and interpretation, these devel-
opments were seen purely as cases of French aggression, of the French Revolution
degenerating into cynical conquest and exploitation; no native democratic or revo-
lutionary impulse among the Dutch or Swiss was perceived. By the end of the
decade, it was more common among the American clergy to look upon the whole
European revolution of the past ten years as a sad mistake.
In many countries, however, there was enough sympathy for the new republican
order on the part of contemporary Christian ecclesiastics to make it possible for
some modern writers, looking back from the middle of the twentieth century, to
find anticipations of Christian democracy at that time. Books of this tenor have
appeared in France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany.^58
But with the French occupation of Rome in 1798, the promulgation of the
Roman Republic, and the ensuing fate of Pope Pius VI, the relations of religion
and the Revolution took another downward step, which further embroiled the
conflict between Christianity and democracy.
trasted with Our Own (Boston, 1795), 15 n. I am indebted for this item, and for the general findings
here expressed, to a paper in my seminar by Mr. Gary B. Nash, “The American Clergy and the French
Revolution,” based on a wide reading of the sermons and writings of American clergy in the Middle
and New England states.
58 For France, the works by Reinhard, J. Leflon, A. Latreille; for Italy, V. Giuntella, “Cristiane-
simo et democrazia in Italia al tramonto del Settecento: appunti per una ricerca” in Rassegna storica del
Risorgimento, XLII (1955), 289–96; for Belgium, H. Haag, Origines du Catholicisme libéral en Belgique,
1789–1839 (Louvain, 1950); for Germany, H. Maier, Revolution und Kirche: Studien zur Frühgeschichte
der christlichen Demokratie 1789–1850 (Freiburg, 1959). J. N. Moody et al., Church and Society: Catholic
Social Thought and Movement 1789–1950 (New York, 1953), is very slight on the earlier years.