Motivation of The Civil Constitution
The following interlinked factors appear to have been the causes of agitation for the confiscation of church lands and for the adoption of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy:
- The French government in 1790 was nearly bankrupt; this fiscal crisis had been the original reason for the king's calling the Estates-General in 1789.
- Church lands represented 20–25% of the land in France. In addition the Church collected tithes.
- Owing, in part, to abuses of this system (especially for patronage), there was enormous resentment of the Church, taking the various forms of atheism, anticlericalism, and anti-Catholicism.
- Many of the revolutionaries viewed the Catholic Church as a retrograde force.
- At the same time, there was enough support for a basically Catholic form of Christianity that some means had to be found to fund the Church in France.
- Presumably, another factor, at least indirectly was Jansenist rejection of the cult of kingship and absolutism.
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