Michael's introductions

An introduction I particularly enjoy

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity then he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the dispatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, anti tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

My own introduction

It seems incomprehensible to think of modern France without reference to the Revolution. The maelstrom that grew out of 1789 not only inaugurated a new Republic, but the broader trappings of a society remade. The political and social consequences of the Revolution have proved surprisingly lasting, perhaps most clearly with the role of religion in French life. Over its five incarnations, the French Republic has been considered in dialectic with the Catholic church - whether with the persecution of priests during The Terror or the birth of laïcité, or modern French secularism, a century later, Church and Republic are too often seen in opposition.

Yet the course of history over France’s five republics is by no means clear, and one embodiment of these intricacies and contradictions were 1789’s revolutionary priests. This thesis presents a broader intellectual biography of one such cleric, Abbé Claude Fauchet, a devout Catholic priest and Girondist leader. Both a prolific writer and politician, Fauchet presents an interesting yet little studied life. Prior to 1789, he had steadily climbed the ranks of the church, eventually becoming preacher to the king. However, upon the outbreak of the Revolution, Fauchet found himself in the center of France’s political whirlwind: he helped lead the attack on the Bastille, and was later elected to the Paris Commune and National Convention. Fauchet made his way through the Revolution while constantly preserving a deep sense of faith, a faith that he publicly proclaimed until his death at the guillotine in 1793. As I follow Fauchet through the Revolution, I hope to discern how he managed his two allegiances, and furthermore, how his conception of the church served as his blueprint for a constitutional republic.

If this study succeeds, it will do so by raising questions: Is this relationship between the Church and Republic as simple as one imagines? Are there multiple paths to a Revolutionary imagination? While Fauchet only provides one case in this narrative, it is a case that confounds simple explanations.