Those watching the cultural news of the past week probably saw the festivities in France on July 14, Bastille Day, which is celebrated annually. In some ways, the original Bastille Day marked the beginning of modern France, as it awoke violently from its feudal and early modern heritage. It certainly changed both church and state.

France in 1789 was a vast and confusing place. There was no central code of laws. The language was still not standardized, nor were weights and measures. The decentralized character was best seen in the different forms of local government. One might be subject to the rule of a local nobleman, a bishop, a municipal council or a local university. Many political reforms had begun under the long reign of Louis XIV, and more would be done by Napoleon. Presiding over this confused mass of authority was, of course, the king, whose authority came from God Almighty alone. But the explosive cause of change was without much doubt, the Revolution of 1789.

Of all the parts of French society that faced major changes, few felt the blow more sharply than the Catholic Church. Before the Revolution, Catholicism was the state church of the realm, its clergy’s income was tax free, and the various levels of church authority owned a vast amount of land and its income. Unlike priests, Protestant pastors and rabbis held no legal authority. Most charity money was passed through the church. Of course, there was a great deal of difference between the lifestyle of a rural parish priest and the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, but in 1789 all of this was about to come to an end.

By 1788, the royal government was completely bankrupt. Years of state building had been expensive, the existence of standing armies cost a great deal as did the frequent overseas adventures. French intervention in the Jacobite rebellion in Britain, the American Revolution, and brawling with the British in India emptied the coffers. The government was so far in debt that it could no longer pay the interest on the loans, taken out to pay the interest on earlier loans. King Louis XVI appealed to both the nobility and the clergy for financial assistance but they refused without power sharing. In retrospect, they might have fared better if they had paid up.

The king summoned the Estates General, the parliament of the kingdom, which had not met in well over a century. However, this resulted only in months of squabbling and argument. In frustration the Third Estate, the house of the legislature reserved for commoners, met on a royal tennis court and declared themselves to be the National Assembly and began to take control of the government. It was in the wake of this that an angry mob of Parisians stormed the royal prison, the Bastille, in search of arms on July 14, giving rise to the French national day, Bastille Day. In August, when the king refused to recognize the authority of the Third Estate, the Parisians stormed the Palace of Versailles, grabbed the king and forced him back to Paris where he recognized the new National Assembly.

A series of revolutionary laws were passed in quick succession. One of the earliest was the declaration on religious freedom which removed the Church’s monopoly on religious discussion. In February of the following year, the new government passed laws suppressing the taking of religious vows and suppressed the religious contemplative orders. Soon after, parish priests across the land were required to read aloud the decrees of the revolutionary government in all churches. In March the government decreed the sale of church lands. By the following July, the Catholic clergy lost all special privileges and were required to take an oath of loyalty to the revolutionary government. All the French bishops, along with about half of the priests, refused to take the oath. This accelerated the persecution of the “non-juring clergy.” The national government followed this up by declaring the clergy to be employees of the state, and it ordered the democratic election of all church offices. These reforms were denounced by Pope Pius VI.

As the revolution accelerated, localized mob violence was very often aimed at the church and clergy. Priests were ordered at sword point to marry, often to the village prostitute. The problem of clergy refusing to take the oath of loyalty was soon delegated to the guillotine, as was the king in 1792 France. Larger scale massacres of priests, brothers and nuns were not uncommon. One famous outburst occurred on July 17, 1794, when a group of Carmelite sisters were put to death by guillotine, as they sang the Salve Regina. The revolutionaries were inspired by the popular writers of the French enlightenment, such as Voltaire, who earlier declared, “Every sensible man, every honorable man must hold the Christian religion in horror.” Others were even more blunt, such as Denis Diderot, who wrote, “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

The death toll among the clergy, laity and sisters is not known but historians regard it as being well into the thousands, and the destruction of shrines and holy places is incalculable. This round of persecutions finally came to an end in 1801, when Pope Pius VIII and Napoleon signed a historic document known as the Concordat, which legally defined a compromise between church and state. This ended the persecutions and handed a few rights over the churches back to the broken hierarchy. Today, about 4.5% of the French population attends Mass, and the French government still claims legal title to all church property.

In 1848, in “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx described periods of rapid change in the words, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Perhaps that might describe well the religious experience of France so long ago.

Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor emeritus of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. Write to him at Professing Faith, P.O. Box 8102, Redlands, CA 92375-1302, email him at gnyssa@verizon.net or follow him on Twitter @Fatherelder.