The Turgot Collection

CHAPTER 19

Religious Equality

Memorial to the King “on Toleration”

ire,—When I proposed to your Majesty to alter the form of the oaths to be pronounced at your consecration, I could only indicate to you, summarily, the reasons which I considered warranted my proposals. I undertook to develop to you, in more detail, the principles pertaining to the most essential object of the alterations proposed, that is to say, to the use of the prince’s power in matters of religion. Your Majesty, while rendering justice to my views, dreaded the explosion which might result, in certain quarters, from the step I recommended. You know how deeply I have regretted your submission to formulas of obligation drawn up in times so deficient in enlightenment. But all is not lost, for your Majesty cannot hold yourself bound to take any action that would be unjust.

Your oaths, Sire, have been pronounced in presence of God and your subjects. Your subjects have an interest in, have a right to your justice; God has given you a law. To commit an injustice in order to execute the formulas which you have been induced to pronounce would be to violate the duty you owe to God, to your people, to yourself. You must, therefore, Sire, examine if the engagements included in the formulas of consecration with respect to heretics are just in themselves; and if they are unjust, it cannot be your duty to fulfil them….

I have never concealed from your Majesty my own way of thinking. You saw it in a letter with which I accompanied the new forms of oath which I proposed to you. I venture to repeat today that your Majesty is bound, as a Christian, as a just man, to leave to all your subjects the liberty of following and of professing the religion which in their conscience they believe to be true. I add, Sire, that your own political interests on this point are entirely conformable with what Christianity and justice prescribe. These three points of view form the natural division of this Memorial. I shall examine first the rights of conscience according to the principles of religion; I shall next establish these rights according to the principles of natural law; in the third place, I shall discuss the question of this liberty of conscience in its connection with the political liberty of the State.

1. What, Sire, is religion? It is the binding together of the several duties of man toward God; duties of worship to be rendered to the Supreme Being, duties of justice and of benevolence to men; those duties known by the simple light of reason which constitute what we call Natural Religion, and those which the Divinity Himself has taught to men by a supernatural revelation which constitute Revealed Religion.

All men do not agree in acknowledging divine Revelation, and those who do acknowledge it do not agree in interpreting alike particular revelations. It is notorious that there are on the surface of the earth a multitude of religions, the votaries of which believe that the one they profess is the only one that is the work of the Divinity, and which is agreeable to Him.

The principal religions, such as Mahommedanism and even Christianity, are divided into a multitude of sects, each of which believes itself to hold exclusively the true religion. All, or almost all religions, in exacting from man certain beliefs and the accomplishment of certain duties, add to this obligation the sanction of rewards and punishments in the life to come. A great number of religions teach that these punishments and these rewards are eternal. This is the doctrine of nearly all the Christian communities, and in particular of the Roman Catholic Church, whose doctrine your Majesty professes. So that on the belief and on the practice of a true or a false religion depends for man an eternity of happiness or of misery.

I can conceive that the men who believe all religions to be equally false, and who regard them as inventions of policy in order to govern more easily the people, can make no scruple about compelling them to follow the religion which it is thought most expedient to prescribe for them…. But if there is a true religion, if God is to demand account from each man of what he has believed and practiced, if an eternity of punishment must be the portion of him who shall reject the true religion, how can we imagine that any power on earth can have the right to order a man to follow another religion than the one which he believes true in his soul and conscience?

If there is a true religion a man must follow it, and profess it in spite of all the powers of the earth, in spite of the edicts of emperors and kings, in spite of the judgment of proconsuls and of the executioner’s sword. It is for having had this courage, for having fulfilled this sacred duty, that we have had held up to our veneration the martyrs of the primitive Church. If the martyrs were right in resisting the civil power, and following the voice of their conscience, their conscience, by that fact, did not recognize the civil power as judge.

All sovereigns have not the same religion, and each religious man feels himself, in his conscience, by his duty and for his salvation, obliged to follow that religion which he believes to be the truth. Sovereigns have not the right to order their subjects to disobey their conscience. God, in judging men, will demand of them whether they have believed and practiced true religion; not whether they have believed and practiced the religion of their sovereign. How could He demand that of them if all the sovereigns have not the true religion? Cast your eyes, Sire, on the map of the world; and see how few countries there are of which the sovereigns are Catholics. How can it be that with the greatest number of sovereigns of the world existing in error, they have received from God the right to judge of the true religion? If they have not the right, if they have neither infallibility nor the divine mission which alone could give it them, how dare they take upon themselves to decide the fate of their subjects, of their happiness or their misery during eternity? Every man, by the principles of religion, has his soul to save; he has all the light of reason and of revelation in order to find the way of salvation; he has his conscience in order to apply these lights—but this conscience is for himself alone. To follow his own conscience is the right and duty of every man, and no man has the right to make his conscience a rule for another. Each one is in this responsible for himself to God, none is responsible for another.

This principle is so clearly evident, that it would seem a waste of time to prove it, if the illusions opposed to it had not blinded the greater part of the human race, if they had not inundated the earth with blood, if even today they did not make millions unhappy.

Will the defenders of intolerance say that the prince has only the right to command when his religion is true and that then he ought to be obeyed? No, even then we cannot and ought not to obey him, for if we ought to follow the religion he prescribes, it is not because he commands it but because it is true, and it is not and it cannot be because the prince commands it that it is true. There is no man so irrational as to believe a religion true for such a reason. The man who submits himself to it in good faith does not obey the prince, he obeys only his conscience, and the order of the prince does not add, and cannot add, any weight to the obligation which, conscience alone imposes. Let the prince believe or not believe a certain religion, let him command or not command his subjects to follow it, it is neither more nor less than it is—either true or false. The opinion of the prince is thus absolutely foreign to the truth of a religion, and consequently to the obligation to follow it; the prince then has, as prince, no right to judge, no right to command in this respect; his incompetence is absolute on things of this order, which are beyond his jurisdiction, and in which the conscience of each individual has only, and can have only, God Himself for Judge.

Some theologians say: “We admit that the prince has not the right to judge of religion, but the Church has this right, and the prince, in submission to the Church, ordains in conformity with its judgments…. He himself does not judge, but orders his subjects to submit themselves to a legitimate judgment.” As this reasoning has been used and is still used seriously, it has to be answered seriously.

The Church has the right to judge of the things of religion— yes, without doubt; it has the right to exclude from its body, to anathematize, those who refuse to submit to its decisions, its decisions are obligatory [upon those who belong to it, and who believe that] what the Church binds and looses shall be bound and loosed in heaven. But the Church is not a temporal power, it has neither the right nor the power to punish in this world; its anathemas affect only the penalties which God reserves in the future life for the obstinately refractory. The prince, if he is a Catholic, is the child of the Church; he is subject to her, but only as a man concerned with his personal salvation; as a prince he is independent of the ecclesiastical power. The Church, then, can order him in nothing so far as he is prince, but only so far as he is a man; and as it is only in quality of prince that he could compel his subjects to submit to the judgment of the Church, it follows that the Church cannot make it a duty for him to use his authority to compel his subjects against their conscience. The Church cannot give him the right to do so, because she has it not herself, and besides, because the prince, as prince, not only does not acknowledge the superiority of the Church, but is not competent to judge for others what are the rights of the Church, or whether such a society is the true Church.

Is there an infallible Church? Is the society of Christians united with the Pope that Church? This is precisely the question that divides all Europe into two parties nearly equal—the question of judgment between the Protestants and the Catholics. There is even another question to be judged on before that. The Protestants and the Catholics both recognize the truth of Christianity and the divinity of the Scriptures, on which all Christian Communions profess to found their beliefs. But the Jews do not accept all the Scriptures; a great part of Asia follows the religion of Mahommed and rejects that of Jesus Christ. The Mussulman countries are as extensive as those where Christianity is established; the rest of the earth, still vaster, recognizes neither Mahommed nor Jesus Christ, and follows different religions.

[This doctrine of making the prince the creature of the Church is] the same doctrine, the same spirit, which produced the infernal St. Bartholomew and the detestable League, placing alternately the sword in the king’s hand to massacre the people, and in the people’s hands to assassinate their kings. This, Sire, is a subject of meditation which should ever be kept in princes’ minds. But, without ascending to those high principles, would the simplest common sense allow it to be imagined that princes could have any right over the conscience and the salvation of their subjects? If the fate of men during eternity could depend upon other men, should there not be a reasonable certitude that these other men should be endowed with natural or acquired enlightenment, superior to those of common men? Without such light—or even with it, without an express mission from the Deity, what man could dare to take upon him the eternal happiness or misery of other men?

The mission of kings is to make the happiness of their people on earth. This mission is noble enough, beautiful enough, and the work it involves is weighty enough for the strength of anyone, whoever he may be. He who has fulfilled with success this sublime and laborious career can die content with himself, and need not fear to render an account of his life. With attention, straightforwardness, and diligence, a prince has every enlightenment and assistance to discover what is really just and truly useful; he has no need to know anything else. He may make mistakes; this is an evil no doubt, but it is an inevitable result of the nature of things.

Sire, I speak to a king, but to a king just and true; let him ask himself what he thinks on this matter, and let him answer himself. There are in the different universities and among the ministers of the different Protestant sects, men who, endowed with great mind, have grown white-haired in the study of religion, have all their life read the Holy Scriptures, have researched thoroughly into all ecclesiastical antiquity; and although in all religions there are men who concern themselves less to discover truth than to find means to prop up the doctrine they are interested to maintain, yet one cannot doubt that a great number of these learned men are quite sincerely convinced that the doctrine of which they make profession is the only true one. Who among Catholic princes would feel himself fit to convince these men, fit even to defend himself against their objections? Doubtless the Protestant princes would not be less embarrassed if their turn came to dispute against the learned Catholic doctors. Princes, to whatever religion they may belong, are not made to fathom theology. I recollect only one king who had this fancy, and he was a Protestant—James I of England. It did not succeed with him, and Europe felt that he would better have employed his time to become a great king than to be a middling theologian. Too many are given up only to pleasure and dissipation. Those who reflect apply themselves to the affairs of their state and to do good. I venture to ask you, Sire, if among the princes of different times and of different countries of whom you have read in history, there is a single one whom you would have taken as authority in the choice of a religion. And yet all those princes were believed to have the right to ordain the religion of their subjects, to render religion’s laws, to pronounce its penalties, and to subject to torture men whose only crime was having religious opinions different from those of the prince, and desiring to follow the dictates of their own conscience. What increases our astonishment is that the most of these princes, at the very time of issuing these orders, were violating in a thousand ways the precepts of their own religion, and were allying the scandal of debauch with the barbarity of persecution. Louis XIV, deservedly thought a great prince because he had probity, honor, character (although somewhat spoiled perhaps, being inflated by an excessive love of glory), but above all because he possessed that firm will without which kings can neither do good nor prevent evil, even Louis XIV knew very little. He candidly confessed that his education had been neglected. He made that confession, and he dared to judge what the religion of his subjects should be; he believed he had the right to deprive the Protestants of the liberty of conscience solemnly insured to them by Henry IV, whose succession to the crown had been cemented with their blood. Louis XIV reduced the Protestants to despair by a continued vexatious persecution, the details of which make us shudder while we read of them in the memoirs of the time, and the errors into which this despair drove them he punished with the most relentless cruelty. He believed himself to be doing a praiseworthy and pious action. This was a deplorable blindness in a prince otherwise well-intentioned, who knew not how to distinguish his duties as man from his rights as prince…. But the interest of the priests about the Court has always been to confound these two things, and, in order to support their credit and serve their ambition, to misuse the prince’s ignorance on these matters. That was not the only fault of the kind they caused Louis XIV to commit. The miserable disputes of Jansenism and Molinism, which have been the rain of so many and which served as pretexts for commotions dangerous to the royal authority, existed only as a consequence of the passion of the clergy to force the Government to interfere in questions with which it has neither interest nor right to meddle.

How can religion command sovereigns to use their power to constrain their subjects in matters of religion? Can religion then command, can it permit, crimes? To order a crime is to commit one; he who orders to assassinate is regarded by all the world as an assassin. Now the prince who orders some of his subjects to profess a religion they do not believe, or to renounce one they do believe, commands a crime; the subjects who obey act a lie, they betray their conscience, they do an act which they believe God forbids. The Protestant who through self-interest or fear makes himself a Catholic, and the Catholic who by the same motives makes himself a Protestant, are both guilty of the same sin, For it is not the truth or the falsity of an assertion that constitutes a perjury; the man who affirms on oath a true thing, but which he does not believe, is as much a liar, as much a perjurer, as if the matter were really false. The lie or the perjury consists in the contradiction between the assertion and the real belief of him who affirms or makes the oath….

[The remainder of the Memorial has unfortunately been lost.]

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Written 1775. To appreciate the style of thought and of composition adopted in the following Memorial, the reader must be reminded of two things: first, that it was written for the purpose of instructing the young king in the very elements of religious liberty; and, second, that at that time the doctrine of toleration was, by the religious classes, still deemed a heresy.