Organic Articles

• 1. Introduction

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  "All ecclesiastics will be dressed in the French manner in black." That order was not a fashion note. It was one line in the Organic Articles, a French law on public worship dating from 1802. Napoleon Bonaparte placed the law before the legislators alongside an agreement with the Church, and it governed Catholic clergy and Protestant pastors alike. A law that reaches as far as the colour of a clergyman's clothing invites questions. Why would a ruler who had just made peace with the Church add rules it had never seen? How much of religious life could those rules really touch? And how long did they last, and where do traces of them survive?

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• 2. An Unsigned Addition

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  On the 8th of April 1802, Napoleon published a text that the Church had never agreed to. It was a unilateral addition to the Concordat of 1801, which is sometimes called the French Concordat. The text held 77 articles on Catholicism and 44 on Protestantism. Napoleon had it presented to the Tribunate and the legislative body at the very moment they voted on the Concordat itself.

  Pope Pius VII received the Concordat for his signature with the Organic Articles attached, and the attachment softened parts of the agreement. He protested that the articles had been issued without his knowledge. The protest achieved nothing. Pius was humiliated by the publication, and the episode created more difficulties for him than it solved.

  Why Napoleon wanted the two legislative bodies involved at all traces back to an uprising in 1797.

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• 3. Shadow of the Vendée

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  In 1797, lay Catholics in the Vendée rose in revolt, and the uprising was crushed with brutality. Napoleon seized power two years later, and that earlier violence is believed to have inspired the Organic Articles. By giving the Tribunate and the Corps législatif partial control of the concordat, he gave the state a way to watch for politically harmful Catholic or Protestant movements.

  The law also aimed to stop religious strife inside French cities. Article 45 is the clearest example. It states, "In cities where there are temples dedicated to different religions, no religious ceremony is to take place outside of the buildings consecrated for Catholic worship." Towns with adherents of different dogmas went further still, and public processions there were prohibited.

  The text also read as a list of fixes for older troubles, such as clerical abuses and sectarian quarrels. Title by title, the articles then spelled out who could publish, ordain and appoint.

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• 4. Rules for Catholic Life

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  Title I carried the long heading "Of the governance of the Catholic Church in its general relations with the rights and the police of the state." Its main demand was simple. No papal document could be published or carried out in France without the authorisation of the Government.

  Title II, "Of the Ministers," reached into the training and placement of priests. The rules of seminaries had to be presented to the State, and the Government fixed the number of people to be ordained each year. A bishop could not appoint the curés of important parishes without the State's consent.

  Title III, "Of the forms of worship," prescribed a single catechism for all the churches of France. The Imperial Catechism taught that love, respect and obedience toward the emperor were religious obligations. Title IV marked out the boundaries of bishops' jurisdictions and set the amounts of their salaries.

  Church bells were allowed, but the bishop and the prefect shared authority over them. The Government also controlled religious holidays. The Feast of the Assumption, on the 15th of August, was kept, and it happened to be Napoleon's birthday.

  Not every reader has treated these rules as mere housekeeping.

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• 5. Policing and Beyond

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  The historian Nicholas Atkin noted that the articles ostensibly dealt with the policing arrangements referred to in Article 1, "but in practice they went much further." His list is long. Government approval was needed before papal pronouncements could be published, councils convened, new parishes created or chapels set up. Church weddings could not come before the civil ceremony. Cathedral chapters were reduced to a ceremonial role, and the powers of papal delegates were tightly limited.

  Any breach of the articles was treated as a criminal offence and sent to the Council of State. Atkin adds that the Ministry of Cults, created in 1801, strengthened the push toward government oversight of church affairs, even though the Articles never mention it.

  The Church itself saw the law as a subtle attempt by the State to gain more control. The worship it permitted was limited and regulated, roughly enough to pray for the Republic. Peace between theological camps was not achieved.

  Protestants, however, read the same text from a different position.

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• 6. The Protestant Reading

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  For the 44 articles on Protestantism, the source describes rules largely similar to the Catholic ones. Protestants favoured the parts of the Articles that prevented Catholic domination in France.

  The Calvinist community, a branch of Protestant Christianity, was divided into congregations. Their clerical leaders were appointed by wealthy or powerful taxpayers. As with their Catholic counterparts, Calvinist pastors were paid by the State. A Calvinist revival followed among the Protestants.

  Pastors' pay was settled. The harder question was how many of these rules anyone would bother to enforce.

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• 7. A Dead Letter

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  Napoleon disregarded Pius VII's disapproval, yet many of the Organic Articles later became a dead letter. Their obscurities proved irrelevant over time, and enforcing them turned out to be unnecessary.

  The formal end came in 1905, when France issued a law declaring the separation of church and state. That law abolished the Organic Articles together with the Concordat of 1801.

  One exception survives. In the departments of Alsace and Moselle, which in 1905 were not part of France, the Organic Articles remain in force under the local law of Alsace-Moselle. A set of rules written for Napoleon's France still applies in those two departments.

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