Ecclesiastical Structures and Clerical Geography on the Eve of the French Revolution

Abstract

On March 25, 1817 the government of the Duc de Richelieu obtained passage of a law consolidating all pensions issued by the previous Revolutionary and Imperial regimes and requiring the Ministry of Finance to compile and publish a single alphabetical list of pension holders. The resultant compilation ran to ten large volumes, specifying the name, the date and place of birth, the place of residence, and the amount of and reason for the pensions of close to two hundred thousand French citizens. While almost three-fourths of the individuals involved had civil or military pensions-above all, the veterans and widows of the Grand Army-another fifty-five thousand were ecclesiastics, the survivors of the French clergy of the early years of the Revolution. Indeed, the pensioners list of 1817 stands as perhaps the single best existent source for the reconstruction of the Gallican Church in 1790, allowing us to resolve some long unanswered questions about the size, origins, and regional distribution of the clergy throughout France as a whole at the end of the Old Regime.' It can thus serve as a valuable complement to the series of

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