Nation and Church in the French Revolution

In the French Revolution, revolutionary legislators faced the problem of how to relate to the Catholic Church, to which the vast majority of citizens belonged. Inheriting theological, legal, and Enlightenment philosophical categories for thinking about religion and the Church, the legislators adapted to contingent circumstances by constructing a national church through a series of decrees motivated by different aims and partly conflicting in spirit and in their consequences. This reshaped version of eighteenth-century Gallican ideas of church reform created a problem faced by each successive regime, contributing to the escalation of violent conflict between the revolutionary governments and the Catholic Church.