Clerical celibacy is a perennially controversial issue, a source of tension within the Catholic Church, and a defining element in the split in Christianity between Protestants and Catholics. As is often the case, the French Revolution offers a dramatic instance of conflict over such fundamental questions. In her recent book, Claire Cage covers the broad history of celibacy in an introductory chapter, and then moves on to a detailed and fascinating account of how debates over priestly marriage shaped attitudes toward the clergy, the church, and the meaning of citizenship in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Cage's overview in chapter 1 moves quickly from the endorsement of sexual renunciation in early Christianity to the early modern period, when the seminaries that emerged from the Catholic Counter-Reformation worked to create a clergy committed to living the celibate life that had been adopted as church policy in the Middle Ages. Luther and Calvin both condemned celibacy as an impossible standard that led to sexual misconduct and created an insidious distinction between ministers and laity, arguments that would be transformed into a secular register during the Enlightenment.

In chapter 2, Cage draws on her extensive research in published literature to review the debate over celibacy during the French Enlightenment. It is no surprise, of course, that the philosophes would attack celibacy, viewed as a violation of nature, the universal standard by which all behavior should be judged. Cage's contribution here is to show the extent to which such arguments were advanced as well within the Catholic clergy, adding another dimension to the Catholic Enlightenment that has been studied by Jeffrey Burson and Ulrich Lehner. Orthodox Catholics fought back, insisting that unmarried priests were uniquely able to perform their pastoral duties, including the distribution of charity, because they would not be distracted by the love and loyalty they owed to their own families.

With chapter 3, Cage moves into the turbulent and tragic years of the French Revolution, when celibacy was not just a topic for debate, but a key issue in public policy and, for many clergy, a matter of life and death. Driven by arguments inherited from the Enlightenment, and echoed by those clergy who wished to become ‘citizen-priests’ fully identified with the emerging regime, revolutionaries removed marriage as an impediment to ordination in the Constitution of 1791. The revolutionary years saw the terms of the debate sharpen, with a celibate clergy now seen as “an unnatural foreign presence in the nation” (62). Most clergy chose to remain celibate, but Cage views the rhetorical assault on celibacy as a crucial factor in explaining the violence directed against the Church that occurred during the years of the Terror. Other historians of the Revolution have emphasized the immediate crisis over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which established state control over a democratized church in 1791, as the source of the campaign of violent dechristianization. Cage's research does not overturn this scholarship, but her analysis of the long-standing conflict over celibacy deepens our sense of the political and cultural divisions that tore France apart during the revolutionary era.

Cage's chapters on the Terror and the Napoleonic era provide a moving account of the criminalization of celibacy that became state policy during the Terror. Five of the six thousand priests who married did so in 1793 and 1794, acting from a variety of motives that ranged from fear of exile and death, to a sincere desire to accommodate themselves to a republican regime that identified celibacy as a sign of disloyalty. At the height of the Terror, revolutionaries made clerical marriages centerpieces of elaborate rituals designed to celebrate heterosexual marriage as the basis for a society of regenerated citizens, and to demonstrate the collapse of celibacy as an ideal. Following the Terror, the Directory continued to promote clerical marriage, but abandoned the policy of coercion. Abbé Henri Grégoire, the leader of the Constitutional Church, led a renewed defense of celibacy based on the idea of a selfless citizen-priest devoted both to the Republic and a reformed Catholic Church. But the status of married priests remained unclear, resolved only with the Concordat between Napoleon and Pius VII in 1801. Under the Concordat, priests could appeal for reconciliation and have their marriages canonically recognized; they could resume their ministry only if they were willing to abandon wives and children. As many as four thousand clergy sought some form of reconciliation, writing to the papal legate Cardinal Caprara to make their case. Cage makes excellent use of these letters, many of them poignant expressions of attachments to wives and children. The vast majority of the rehabilitated clergy remained with their new families, finding work as teachers and civil servants. Many of them used the petitions to defend conjugal and paternal love as a moralizing force superior to the principle of celibacy.

In a brief epilogue, Cage notes the continuing preoccupation with celibacy over the last two centuries, with recent debates fueled by scandals which led some to assert without compelling evidence a link between celibacy and pedophilia. Here and throughout her book, Cage is evenhanded in her dealing with controversial arguments, while also illuminating with sympathy the political and social pressures and moral dilemmas faced by the clergy. Cage acknowledges the absence of women for the most part from her analysis; for the French of the eighteenth century, celibacy was primarily a male issue. I found myself curious about the attitudes of parishioners, which receive some attention, and seem to indicate a confusion in public opinion that may have mirrored the anxiety of the clergy. Cage avoids drawing any easy lessons from her research, but the conflicts she treats clearly resonate in a contemporary world in which celibacy remains a fraught issue. In substance and tone, Cage's book argues for approaching this issue in a spirit of tolerance and civility, traits not always on display in the revolutionary era, or now.