CATHOLICISM AND FRENCH REGICIDE
Published in Issue 5 (September/October 2023), Letters, Volume 31Sir,—In his review in the last issue (HI 31.4, July/August 2023) Gerard O’Sullivan says that John T. McGreevy’s Catholicism: a global history from the French Revolution to Pope Francis ‘opens with the guillotining of the Catholic [my emphasis] king of France, Louis XVI, in 1793’. This is yet again another gross distortion of what too many in the anglophone world project as ‘the French Revolution’, defining it as the Terror and, here, brutal dechristianisation. The latter certainly did occur, but was only a brief (and horrific) phase of a decade-long redefining of political and social institutions, their relation to the state and its citizens, and increased secularisation of public life. When Tone was in France and French-occupied Europe (1796–8) he attended Catholic services. The regicide still stirs such ongoing controversy today that France’s Ministry of Justice has posted a useful page on the trial, listing the 33 counts indicting ‘Louis Capet’. Of these, only c. five pertain to state and church matters, and not religion itself. Overall, only one of the nine counts highlighted as ‘most significant’ pertains, somewhat indirectly, to the practice of Catholicism. It lists his royal veto of the decree against refractory priests, i.e. those not having accepted the new Civil Constitution of the clergy. Louis was not executed for his faith, nor as an act of absolutist atheism, and his sentence did not go unopposed.—Yours etc.,
SYLVIE KLEINMAN
