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CHAP. X.: Riches of the Clergy. - Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Complete Works, vol. 2 The Spirit of Laws [1748]

Edition used:

The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu (London: T. Evans, 1777), 4 vols. Vol. 2.

Part of: Complete Works of Montesquieu, 4 vols.

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CHAP. X.

Riches of the Clergy.

SO great were the donations made to the clergy, that under the three races of our princes they must have several times received the full property of all the lands of the kingdom. But if our kings, the nobility and the people, found the way of giving them all their estates, they found also the method of getting them back again. The spirit of devotion established a great number of churches under the first race; but the military spirit was the cause of their being given away afterwards to the soldiery, who divided them amongst their children. What a number of lands must have then been taken from the clergy’s mensalia! The kings of the second race opened their hands, and made new donations to them: but the Normans, who came afterwards, plundered and ravaged all before them, wreaking their vengeance chiefly on the priests and monks, and devoting every religious house to destruction. For they charged those ecclesiastics with the subversion of their idols, and with all the oppressive measures of Charlemaign, by which they had been successively obliged to take shelter in the north. These were animosities which the space of forty or fifty years had not been able to obliterate. In this situation what a loss must the clergy have sustained! There were hardly ecclesiastics left to demand the estates of which they had been deprived. There remained therefore for the religious piety of the third race, foundations enough to make, and lands to bestow. The opinions which were broached and spread in those days, would have deprived the laity of all their estates, if they had been but honest enough. But, if the clergy were actuated by ambition, the laity were not without theirs; if dying persons gave their estates to the church, their heirs would fain resume them. We meet with continual quarrels between the lords and the bishops, the gentlemen and the abbots; and the clergy must have been very hard pressed, since they were obliged to put themselves under the protection of certain lords, who granted them a momentary defence, and afterwards joined their oppressors.

But a better administration having been established under the third race, gave the clergy leave to augment their possessions; when the Calvinists started up, and having plundered the churches, they turned all the sacred plate into specie. How could the clergy be sure of their estates, when they were not even safe in their persons? They were debating on controversial subjects, while their archives were in flames. What did it avail them to demand back of an impoverished nobility, those estates which were no longer in the possession of the latter, but had been conveyed into other hands by different mortgages. The clergy have been long acquiring, and have often refunded, and still there is no end of their acquisitions.