In the history of catholicism in France the years 1789–1801 constitute a watershed. It was not merely that the church lost its landed wealth or its claim to a monopoly of truth, that 50 per cent or more of those responsible for the cure of souls in 1789 found themselves in flight or that images were broken and acts of orgiastic desecration were perpetrated. It was that the total experience had a profound and lasting effect upon the laity. Neither catholics nor the institution to which they lent adherence were ever quite the same again. The revolutionary decade emphatically severs a world of almost unquestioned obeissance to catholic teaching from one in which significant sectors of the populace slipped away into indifference.

The eighteenth-century church was very much the product of the post-Tridentine reform movement. Its most outstanding characteristic was a seminary-trained priesthood whose education, periodically reinforced by conference and retreat, committed the parochial clergy to define their chief function as the elevation of the spiritual level of their flock by unproved catechetical instruction, a remorseless attack on lax morality and on the ‘superstitious’ aspects of popular religion, such as local cults of pagan or doubtful derivation, or customs, such as the ringing of the parish bell to avert hail.