Xavier Maréchaux’s Les prêtres réfractaires: L’Église contre la Révolution et l’Empire (1789–1815) offers a detailed and vivid study of the priests who refused the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the civic oath during the French Revolution. Covering the years from 1789 through the end of the Napoleonic Empire, the book seeks to understand “why these men resisted the new ecclesiastical order, how a decade of opposition affected them, and how their experience shaped religious life during and after the Revolution” (10). Rather than proposing a tightly argued thesis, Maréchaux presents a narrative of the religious history of the Revolution largely through the lens of the experiences of eighteen clerics.
Maréchaux places his work within a shifting historiography. While nineteenth-century studies of the Catholic Church in the French Revolution focused heavily on refractory clergy—often with an explicitly apologetic end—recent scholarship has turned most of its attention to the Constitutional Church. Earlier works on refractory priests, he notes, tend to be local, amateur, and polemical, often written by ecclesiastical authors intent on “glorifying martyrs of the faith” (10). By contrast, Maréchaux seeks to revisit these same materials with a critical eye, mining them for information and anecdotes and restoring attention to a group that has become somewhat marginal in modern scholarship.
The book is organized chronologically, beginning with a chapter on the Old Regime Church and proceeding through the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Each chapter typically opens with contextual synthesis, drawing heavily on established scholarship and major printed sources such as the Archives parlementaires and the records of the Committee of Public Safety. After laying this groundwork, Maréchaux turns to the experiences of his sample set, using anecdotes and personal documents to illustrate how these broader developments appeared “on the ground.”
Methodologically, Maréchaux’s study is defined by its focus on this relatively small but diverse group of eighteen clergymen. He aims to balance upper and lower clergy in his sample, though he admits that printed sources are more abundant for the former. The cast includes archbishops, bishops, and a range of parish priests whose memoirs, letters, sermons, and other writings form the core evidentiary base for the book. Archival materials play a limited role. The most noteworthy methodological contribution is his creative reuse of nineteenth-century Catholic histories and documentary compilations. While acknowledging their biases, Maréchaux treats them as valuable repositories of information about the lived experience of refractory priests—an approach that pays dividends in the richness of his anecdotes.
If the introduction lacks a clear thesis, the body of the book nevertheless advances several insights. Maréchaux highlights strong regional variation in the experiences of many clergymen. Jean-Baptiste-René Rabeau, an abbé and vicar in the small town of La Chapelle-Craonnaise in the Mayenne, for example, was one among many priests in his department to refuse to take the clerical oath. As a result, he was imprisoned and transported to nearby Laval, but his confinement in Laval allowed him complete freedom of movement in the city, save for a morning “check-in,” and regular access to family members (82). By contrast, Pierre-Grégoire Labiche de Reignefort, a priest from Limoges, was imprisoned, marched to Rochefort, and confined on a ship under terrible conditions for close to a year, awaiting deportation to the French penal colony in French Guiana (107). Maréchaux also stresses that not all clergy technically fell under the oath requirement. The redrawing of dioceses created loopholes; bishops whose sees were eliminated were not compelled to swear the new oath, and this allowed these clerics far more leniency from the state. Maréchaux also describes the experiences of those who left France as refugees, including, notably, the vast majority of his upper clergymen. During the period of the Directory, the landscape was complex: some priests returned, some departed again, and many carried on ministry in unstable conditions, including secret masses. The story of the two Rose sisters—who served as couriers for Archbishop Antoine-Elénore-Léon Leclerc de Juigné while he was in exile—and the remarkable tale of Pierre-Paul Guillotin—who remained in France and, in the most tumultuous years of the Revolution (1793–1794), managed to baptize over 200 babies in his community—are among the most memorable portions of the book.
In his conclusion, Maréchaux reflects on what the experiences of these refractory priests contribute to broader debates about the French Catholic Church during the revolutionary era. These stories provide anecdotal evidence for how the Revolution initiated a decline in the number of clergy in France, how lay leadership often took the clergy’s place in parishes, and even why the early nineteenth century saw an increased prominence of women in church life. In this way, he connects his own work to scholarship by Suzanne Desan, Carol Harrison, Michelle Vovelle, Roger Price, and others. Although he does not mention this explicitly, I would add that it also provides an important social historical grounding to intellectual histories of the “counter-Enlightenment,” including Darrin McMahon’s Enemies of the Enlightenment and Didier Masseau’s Les ennemis des philosophes.
Les Prêtres réfractaires is strongest in its detailed, humanizing anecdotes, many of them recovered from neglected nineteenth-century sources. These stories animate a group often overshadowed in current historiography and shed light on the religious, social, and political complexities of the revolutionary era. Maréchaux has produced a valuable and engaging contribution that restores refractory priests to the story of the Revolution and highlights the long-term significance of their experiences.
