For my contribution our group did an oral presentation infront of the class. I spoke about the role religion played leading up to the French Revolution. Some of my notes on the presentation are as follows:
Religion played a huge part in the events leading up to the revolution and the entire face of Catholicism and the Church went through a sort of revolution of its own. During the beginning of the New World Spanish and Portugese rulers decided to establish Christianity among the native people which gave the Catholic Church an extremely important role to play. In the Old Order it was considered a particularly important part of life. Because of money issues a lot of the church’s lands were taken away and assignats were issued….assignats were a form of paper money for the security of the newly nationalized church property.
On July 1790 a new civil constitution was issued. This basically said that the bishops and the priests of the Catholic Church were to be elected by the people and paid by the state. Aside from this, it wanted the clergy to swear an oath of allegiance to the civil constitution….most of the bishops refused to do this.
This was critical to the events that followed as the Catholic Church was still a really important convention for the people in France and thus the new rules and restrictions involved with the Church caused a lot of the French people to get angry. Creating hostility towards the Church gave people more of a reason to counter revolt. As a result of the National Assembly obtaining the Church’s lands, the poor people of France started to view the bishops and the Church as tyrants…and started associating them with the King and the aristocracy, seeing no difference between the two. These strong feelings about the Church eventually led to the demolition of many cathedrals, abbeys and monasteries during the French revolution.