Constitutional bishop

A constitutional bishop (French évêque constitutionel ) was a bishop of the Catholic Church of France, which was reorganized during the French Revolution .

The dioceses of the constitutional bishops corresponded to the départements established in 1790 . The constitutional bishops were mostly priests who were close to the ideas of Gallicanism and the French Revolution. They were elected by cooperative clerics and believers in their dioceses from that part of the French clergy who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the civil constitution of the clergy (1790), and they officiated without the consent of the Pope. Rome regarded them as schismatics and the bishops of the Ancien Régime who had fled abroad as the only legitimate holders of the French bishopric.

At the end of the reign of terror in 1794, 59 constitutional bishops were still in office of the original 87, and 32 in autumn 1801. In 1797 and from June 20 until August 16, 1801, they met in Paris in national councils and emphasized their independence from the Roman ones Curia. With the signing of the Concordat of 1801 by Napoléon and Cardinal Consalvi as the representative of Pope Pius VII , both the constitutional bishops and all 94 bishops of the Ancien Régime who were still alive were urged to resign. Of the latter, 58 submitted, while 36 initially rejected their resignation . Some of the constitutional bishops also tried to preserve their own diocese or to continue to use it within the reorganized episcopate. In October 1801 49 constitutional bishops resigned, all without admission of guilt and without denying their election and ordination. Twelve bishops willing to reconciliate received their new state appointment in 1802, but initially no papal documents. Their integration into the “new”, concordat episcopate took place differently in individual cases, but mostly with considerable diplomatic efforts.

Well-known constitutional bishops:

• Yves Marie Audrein , Bishop of the Finistère department
• Marc-Antoine Berdolet , Bishop of the Haut-Rhin department , later Bishop of Aachen
• Claude Debertier , Bishop of the Aveyron department
• Jean-Baptiste Demandre , Bishop of the Doubs department
• Charles-François Dorlodot , Bishop of the Mayenne department
• Louis-Alexandre Expilly de la Poipe , Bishop of the Finistère department
• Claude Fauchet , Bishop of the Calvados Department
• Léonard Honoré Gay de Vernon , Bishop of the Haute-Vienne department
• Jean Baptiste Joseph Gobel , Bishop of Paris
• Henri Grégoire , the abbé Grégoire, bishop of the Loir-et-Cher department
• Marc-Antoine Huguet , Bishop of the Creuse department
• Louis Jarente de Sénac d'Orgeval , bishop in the Loiret department
• Antoine-Adrien Lamourette , Bishop of the Rhône-et-Loire (Lyon)
• Jean-Claude Leblanc de Beaulieu , Bishop of Rouen , later Bishop of Soissons
• Claude Le Coz , Bishop of the Ille-et-Vilaine Department , later Archbishop of Besançon
• Jean-Baptiste Massieu , Bishop of the Oise department
• Guillaume Mauviel , Bishop of Saint-Domingue
• Michel-Joseph de Pidoll , Bishop of the Sarthe Department
• François-Ambroise Rodrigue , Bishop of the Vendée department
• Barthélemy-Jean-Baptiste Sanadon , Bishop of the Basses-Pyrénées department
• Jean-Baptiste Pierre Saurine , Bishop of the Landes
• Noël-Gabriel-Luce Villar , Bishop of the Mayenne department

literature

• Paul Pisani: Repertoire biographique de l'épiscopat constitutionnel (1791–1802) . Paris 1907 (reprinted 2004).
• Simon Delacroix: La reorganization des l'Église de France après la Révolution (1801-1809) . Ed. du Vitrail, Paris 1962.
• Rodney J. Dean: L'Église constitutionelle, Napoléon et le Concordat de 1801 . Diff. Picard, Paris 2004. ISBN 2-7084-0719-8
• Bernard Plongeron: Face au Concordat (1801), résistances des évêques anciens constitutionels . In: Annales historiques de la Révolution française 337 (2004), 85-115.