30 FRENCH PERSONALITIES AND PROBLEMS
realities of any revolutionary situation* And it is not only critical
learning that saves Mr, Thompson from underestimating the tragic
difficulties of the rcmakers of France. Living in a revolutionary age,
he is better fitted than past generations of scholars were to under-
stand some of the psychological problems. His account of the great
trials, the purges, the propaganda campaigns, the role of the parties
and the pressure of civil war, obviously owes something to his
contemplation of recent history, although the comparison is never
stressed and is not formally stated.
Of all the quarrels bred or embittered by the Revolution, the feud
with the Church was the most lasting awl the most important. In
France, until very modern times—and in some places and «o0\e
classes to this day—the Revolution was blcfttecl or damned for its
church policy. Mr. Thompson, with his usual clarity and charity,
makes plain how easy it was for the actors on each side to err and
how the legislative settlement of the church question wan swept
through the rapids over the waterfall into schism, despite the clear-
sighted fears of just that disaster which were shared by all sides,
As far as there was a villain, it was the old, frivolous friend of
Voltaire and Pompadour, the Cardinal do Iternte, ambassador in
Rome and saboteur of any policy of compromise. PWH VI, of whom
Mr. Thompson has a poor opinion, was a victim of itertun a« well
as of his own faults,
But, in more ways than one, the average reader will find the
church problem, the rights and wrongs* of the Civil Constitution of
the Clergy, the most difficult part of the book, Mr- Thompson, with
his usual command of detail, makes plain the irrational, extravagant,
unedifying state of the Gallican Churchy and makes the need for
reform evident. But the intelligent, if in thin field not learned,
reader may miss more than one point. He may not remember how
like the Church of England the Church of France was, The portion
congrue of the French perpetual curate wan, after all, not much leaa
than the stipend of the Vicar of Sweet Auburn—sin d it was caster
for a celibate priest to pass rich on it than a married parson, even in
Ireland. Indeed, the portion congrue was not much inferior in form
and rather higher in fact than the commencing stipend of u pro*
fe$$eur suppliant, or of Trollope's Mr, Crawley, two generations
later. An Archbishop of Bordeaux was no richer than a Bishop of
Durham or Derry, nor the life of Dillon any more scandalous than