The Cloche and Its Critics: Muting the Church's Voice in Pre-Revolutionary France

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The Cloche and Its Critics: Muting the Church’s Voice in
   Pre-Revolutionary France

   Fayçal Falaky

   Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 81, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 239-255
   (Article)

   Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2020.0015

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/753536

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

The Cloche and Its Critics:
                    Muting the Church’s Voice in
                     Pre-Revolutionary France

                                       Fayçal Falaky

Two Frenchmen are searching for one another in a large crowd at Piazza
della Signoria in Florence. Suddenly, the Angelus bell rings. All of the Ital-
ians kneel down in prayer and the Frenchmen, having remained on their
feet, finally find one another.1 Although premised on the kind of exaggera-
tion natural to the genre, this joke, which first appeared in print in
the 1760s, is a little testament to the waning of religious observance in
eighteenth-century France. Compared to the Italians who immediately and
unthinkingly drop to the ground at the sound of the tolling bells, the
Frenchmen are represented as irreligious but also as more enlightened, free
from the coercive summons of the Church. The gap between the cultures
was so profound that the authors of a historical and geographical diction-
ary of Italy, published in 1775, felt it necessary to define the term Angelus
for their French readers:

     ANGELUS. Prayer of a very ancient tradition, which is said in the
     morning and evening at a certain hour. Great attention is paid in
     Italy to ringing the bell to announce the hour of the Angelus. At

1
  “Deux Français se cherchaient l’un l’autre à Florence dans la place du vieux Palais, sans
pouvoir se trouver, à cause de la grande foule qui regardait un baladin; on vint à sonner
l’Angélus, et tous les Italiens s’étant mis à genoux, les deux Français restés seuls debout,
et ainsi se retrouvèrent.” In Sébastien Joseph Ducry, Amusement curieux et divertissant

        Copyright  by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 81, Number 2 (April 2020)

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2020

the first toll of the bell, everyone kneels down. This practice is
particularly evident in Rome, where one sees in the public squares,
in the streets, in the walks, all the people stop and fall devoutly on
their knees to recite the Angelus. The coaches and all the carriages
are brought to a halt. Foreigners who do not conform to this cus-
tom could be met with people from all sides saying non sono cristi-
ani and run the risk of being insulted by the populace and frowned
upon by members of the religious orders.2

The definition’s description and ethnographic tone may imply—misleadingly
—that this prayer was a relic of a time long gone or a custom that could
exist only among backward, superstitious nations. As Diderot and
d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie makes clear, the Angelus prayer has been “re-
cited by Roman Catholics, especially in France, ever since Louis XI estab-
lished the practice.”3 In other words, the bells of the Angelus have been
ringing on French territory, unceasingly, since the fifteenth century; and
with the exception of a brief period during the French Revolution, they
have continued to be heard, by those paying close attention, all the way up
to present day. Yet there is some truth in the joke and the subtleties of
the definition. In eighteenth-century France—and particularly in Paris—the
bells of the Angelus had become, for many, just a sound among many oth-
ers. Unlike the people of Rome or Madrid, for instance, Parisians did not
pace their lives according to the rhythm of an ecclesiastical order. More-
over, they looked at the Christians who did as unpolished and fanatical or,
to quote a line attributed to Voltaire, as people with whom “we are no
better acquainted than the most savage parts of Africa.”4

propre à égayer l’esprit (Marseille: Chez Jean Mossy, Libraire au Parc, 1768), 66. All
translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
2
“ANGELUS, (l’) Prière d’une très-ancienne institution, qui se dit le matin et le soir à une
certaine heure. On a grande attention, en Italie, de sonner la cloche pour avertir de l’heure
de l’Angélus. Au premier coup, tout le monde se met à genoux. Cet usage s’observe plus
particulièrement à Rome, où l’on voit dans les places publiques, dans les rues, aux prome-
nades, tout le monde s’arrêter et tomber dévotement à deux genoux pour réciter
l’Angélus. Les carrosses et toutes les voitures suspendent leur marche dans cet instant. Les
Etrangers, qui ne se conformeraient pas à cet usage, s’entendraient dire de tous côtés: non
sono Christiani et courraient risque d’être insultés par la populace, et d’être regardés de
mauvais œil par les personnes de tous les Ordres.” In Dictionnaire historique et geograph-
ique portatil de l’Italie (Paris: Lacombe, 1775), 57–58.
3
“Prière que récitent les catholiques romains, et surtout en France, où l’usage en fut établi
par Louis XI,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des
métiers, etc., s.v. “Angélus,” ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, available
online at ARTFL Encyclopédie, ed. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, Spring 2016, http://
encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.
4
“Dont nous ne savons pas plus que des Parties les plus sauvages de l’Afrique.” In Martin

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Falaky ✦ The Cloche and Its Critics

While comparison with the southern European might suggest to the
Frenchman his own relative cultural progress, it also pointed to relics of
France’s past that were still tenaciously standing. In a letter from the
Marquis d’Argens’s Lettres juives, a traveling merchant by the name of
Aaron Monceca describes his encounter with a French monk who confides
in him the alienating state of servitude to which he and his likes were
reduced. The sound of a bell announcing the curfew cuts short his litany of
complaints, beckoning him back to his cloister cell and prompting Monceca
to hold up, like Rica in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, a critical mirror to
French society and to point a mocking and critical finger at continued reli-
gious practices. Monceca blames France’s obstinacy in clinging to such an
antiquated practice on a tenacious veil of religion which was “kept up by
the superstitious, and protected by the sovereign pontiff.” On the other
hand, “The French who make use of their reason,” he says, “know the
abuse of convents and monasteries.”5
Scholars of the Enlightenment have generally sketched a genealogy of
modernity through a cultural tension similar to the one portrayed by d’Ar-
gens’s Monceca: one that pits clerical, traditionalist discourse against the
reformist—and at times radical—ideals of those who proclaimed the sover-
eignty of reason. In this essay, I revisit that tension by considering the fault
line through the debate in eighteenth-century France over the character or
usefulness of the church bell—or what is known in French as la cloche. It
may serve in this regard as a brief prequel to Alain Corbin’s seminal Village
Bells, a work in which he investigates the political and cultural dimensions
of the cloche from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the dawn of
the twentieth century. For Corbin, the Revolutionaries’ efforts to end or, at
least, desacralize bell ringing did not quite succeed; and despite the general
trend toward secularization in the nineteenth century, bells continued to
exert an emotional hold over a populace unready to relinquish a sensory
experience of traditional and predictable rhythms and of sacred, cyclical
time. In this essay, I would like to reconsider the chronology posited by
Corbin by calling attention to the cultural and intellectual origins of the
Revolution’s measures against the cloche as well as against the religious
time marked by its tolling. Examples drawn from a variety of primary sources
—poems, novels, satires, travel diaries, encyclopedias, and dictionaries

Sherlock, Lettres d’un voyageur anglois (London: J. Nichols, T. Cadell and N. Conant,
1780), 138.
5
Marquis d’Argens, The Jewish Spy: Being a Philosophical, Historical, and Critical Cor-
respondence by Letters, which Lately Passed between Certain Jews in Turkey, Italy,
France, etc., trans. D. Brown and R. Hett (A. Miller, 1766), 2:13–14.

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2020

—show how, even before the French Revolution, the cloche was already
part and parcel of anti-clerical writing. This contestation of the cloche was
part of a broader and ongoing reconceptualization of time according to
more secular norms.
Several scholars such as Jacques Le Goff, Carlo Cipolla and E. P.
Thompson have linked the appearance of urban clock towers in the four-
teenth century to changing mental attitudes toward the experience of time.6
Workers gradually gained mastery over how they structured their labor,
initiating thus an epochal transition in which time, measured and articu-
lated increasingly according to secular social criteria, became progressively
detached from any sense of eternal sacrality. “The time which used to
belong to God alone,” writes Le Goff, “was thereafter the property of
man.”7 Although this new regime of time-discipline played a vital role in
Europe’s secularizing process, “Church time” remained a factor to be reck-
oned with, and European society lived in a sort of civitas permixta in which
the permanent time of God rubbed elbows with man’s saeculum, in a syn-
chronicity akin to the one Ernst Kantorowicz makes between the king’s two
bodies, one being permanent and substantial while the other is material,
transient, and changeable.8 While this concord has long been reflected in
the double usage of bell towers, serving to regulate both prayer and labor
times, the cloche’s religious function and purpose became increasingly
questioned and criticized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and
sacred time, cadenced by the clangoring of the cloche, gradually faded away
in favor of a new paradigm in which time’s arrow, as Rebecca Spang puts
it, “replaced nature’s cycles.”9 What follows, then, is not just an overview
of the anti-cloche literature that preceded the French Revolution but also
an attempt to grasp the epistemological implications of such literature. To
stifle the cloche meant not just silencing the loudest and most vocal of cleri-
cal voices; it also meant revolutionizing the citizenry’s sensorial and affect-
ive experience of time and change.
Unlike the obstinately pious Christian of Southern Europe, the French-
man saw and represented himself as more freethinking, more forward-
looking, and less attuned to the rhythms and routines of church life; and

6
See Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Gold-
hammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); C. M. Cipolla, Clocks and Cul-
ture: 1300–1700 (London: Collins, 1967); and E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline
and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, 38.1, 1967: 56–97.
7
Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture, 51.
8
See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political The-
ology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).
9
Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 16.

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Falaky ✦ The Cloche and Its Critics

this cultural or civilizational distinction became even more marked by the
time of the French Revolution. In a chant written in honor of the motion
passed in 1792 to limit to two the number of bells per parish and to remove
and melt down the rest, the vaudevillian Pierre-Antoine-Augustin de Piis
declares bell makers and bell ringers, for instance, undesirable citizens bet-
ter off in retrograde lands more befitting their superstitions. Sung sarcasti-
cally to the air of “O filii et filiae,” the chant also delights in saying good
riddance once and for all to the Angelus:

If three times three, the Angelus
By early morning stops ringing
The impious, between his sheets, will say
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah . . .

The bell ringers confounded
And the bell smelters astounded
Will leave for Rome and Malaga
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah10

Calls to melt France’s church bells date to the immediate aftermath of the
nationalization of Church property in November 1789 and, as Richard
Clay notes, these calls found echo in the National Assembly with the April
1790 decree “authorizing the use of bell metal in minting that would help
secure France’s precarious economy.”11 Despite strong opposition from
constitutional Catholics, the gradual silencing of France’s church bells was
underway. In 1791 and 1792, around 100,000 church bells would be taken
down for minting purposes, and on July 23, 1793, the National Convention
passed another law to melt some of the remaining cloches for the produc-
tion of cannons. The closure of churches or their conversion to revolution-
ary temples during the dechristianization campaign that took place between
October 1793 and July 1794 put an end to the reverberation of church
bells; and on February 21, 1795, they were legally banned along with other
external signs of religion.

10
“Par trois fois trois si l’angélus / De bon matin ne sonne plus / L’impie entre ses draps
dira / Alléluia alléluia alleluia . . . Les carillonneurs consternés / Les fondeurs de cloche
étonnés / Gagneront Rome ou Malaga / Alléluia alléluia alléluia.” “Couplets au sujet de
la motion faite à l’Assemblée nationale de fondre toutes les cloches du royaume, 17 mai
1792,” in Louis Damade, Histoire chantée de la première République, 1789 à 1799:
Chants patriotiques, révolutionnaires et populaires (Paris: P. Schmidt, 1892), 148–49.
11
Richard Clay, “Smells, Bells and Touch: Iconoclasm in Paris during the French Revolu-
tion,” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2012): 521–33.

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2020

All of these measures were part of a number of policies during the
revolutionary era seeking to republicanize the nation’s mores and to nullify
the influence of the Church in the public sphere. They were also—and the
conversion of church bells into money and cannons is in this regard highly
significant—a symbolic expression of France’s transformation into a utili-
tarian, progressive society. If priests were considered an idle and use-
less class—just like the bell-ringers, befitting more “retrograde” nations—
church bells were in a sense no different. The Dominican theologian and
historian Charles-Louis Richard saw these features in positive terms:
“Church bells are the image of the pastors who came after the apostles,
whose voice, it is said, could be heard all over Earth.” It is for this reason,
continues Richard, that church bells are baptized, anointed, perfumed, and
washed: “Before being elevated to the dignity of pastor, it is necessary to be
entirely washed of one’s sins.”12 In the Catholic tradition, therefore, bells
play a role similar to the Muslim muezzin. They are, in role and sacrament,
living clerics; and for this reason, too, they didn’t escape the anticlerical
purges of the French Revolution. As Corbin puts it in Village Bells, the bell
towers were razed because they gave “material form to the domination
exercised by the advocates of fanaticism.”13 Yet, while the Revolution may
have marked a momentous turning point in France’s transition toward a
secular future where utilitarian justifications trumped religious beliefs, this
transformation was long in the making.
One of the stanzas in Piis’s revolutionary chant about the melting of
the bells reminds us that he is simply following in a long continuing tradi-
tion of anti-cloche literature. As Piis writes, when Nicolas Boileau learns
from beyond the grave that the bells ring no more, he too will sing hallelu-
jah, hallelujah, hallelujah.14 The reference here is to a well-known passage
in Satire IV, in which Boileau lashes out against all the street noises disturb-
ing his sleep, Paris’s cloches being one of the main culprits:

And now and then I hear the early shopman’s cry,
The chipping mason and the wagons rumbling by,

12
“Les cloches sont l’image des pasteurs qui ont succédé aux apôtres, dont il est dit que
le son de leur voix s’est fait entendre par toute la terre, . . . On lave la cloche en dedans
et en dehors. Avant que d’être élevé à la dignité de pasteur de l’Eglise, il faut être entière-
ment lavé de ses péchés,” Charles-Louis Richard, Analyse des conciles généraux et parti-
culiers, contenant leurs canons sur le dogme, la morale et la discipline, 5 vols. (Paris:
Vincent, 1773), 3:455.
13
Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French
Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 22.
14
“Quand il va savoir, au surplus, / Qu’en ce monde on ne sonne plus / Boileau chez les
morts chantera . . . / Alléluia alléluia alleluia!” in Damade, Histoire chantée, 150.

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Falaky ✦ The Cloche and Its Critics

     The while the air is rent by dismal clashing bells,
     Which give forth mournful strains reminding me of knells,
     And mingling with the roar of storms of wind and hail,
     In honour of the dead make living mortals quail.15

By including the tolling of the church bells in a list of pestering sounds that
make it difficult to live peacefully in Paris, Boileau essentially strips them
of any sacrosanct status. Criticized alongside the shrieking cats, the clang-
ing of the blacksmiths, and the rumbling of the wagons, the sky-high
cloches fade, despite their loud presence, into the increasingly secularized
background of Paris’s soundscape. Jan de Vries writes that “in 1600, just
as in 1300, Europe was full of cities girded by walls and moats, bristling
with the towers of churches and charitable institutions.”16 Over the course
of the seventeenth century, however, France’s colonial and commercial
ambitions had transformed Paris from a “corporative, medieval city” to a
“metropolis where family life was less dependent on kin relations, where
dealings between individuals could no longer be based entirely on custom
and status, where strangers had to rely on contracts in their dealings.”17
From 1550 to 1650, the population of Paris exploded from 130,000 to
about half a million inhabitants; and church bells, whose purpose is to
summon, gather, and give a sense of identity to a community, were becom-
ing but part of the clamorous hustle and bustle of a growing commercial
city. They were also increasingly viewed as archaic vestiges of a cyclical
liturgical time that was encumbering the secular time that measured and
regulated the minutes and hours of the new workingman.
     For this reason, criticism of Paris’s cloches as noisy, sleep-depriving
nuisances was in fact not uncommon in the seventeenth century. Before
Boileau, Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant inveighed against the dread-
ful tolls whose sole purpose is to spook cowardly souls but which manage
nonetheless to disturb his peace day and night;18 Cyrano de Bergerac alleg-
edly scorned the resounding clanging of the bells as nothing more than calls

15
   “J’entends déjà partout les charrettes courir, / Les maçons travailler, les boutiques
s’ouvrir: / Tandis que dans les airs mille cloches émues / D’un funèbre concert font retentir
les nues; / Et, se mêlant au bruit de la grêle et des vents, / Pour honorer les morts font
mourir les vivants,” Nicolas Boileau Despréaux, The Satires of Boileau Despréaux and
his ‘Address to the King’, trans. Hayward Porter (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons,
1904), 44.
16
   Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis 1600–1750 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 148.
17
   De Vries, The Economy of Europe, 158.
18
   “Sonnant de rue en rue, / De frayeurs rend les cœurs glacés / Bien que le corps en sue; /
Mille chiens oyant sa triste voix / Lui répondent en longs abois. / Lugubre courrier du
destin / Effroi des âmes lâches, / Qui si souvent, soir et matin, / Et m’éveilles et me fâches, /

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2020

for money—the don, don, don of the cloche, it seems, is nothing but a
signal for Christians to give their dons to the Church;19 and Gilles Ménage
excoriated bell ringers as tormentors of humanity deserving to have around
their necks the ropes that with their hands they pull:

Tormentors of humankind
Who toll without pity
Why are not around your necks tied
The cords with which you ring . . .
Bells, if the laws of the Church
Ordained that you be baptized—
The ritual is puzzling—
It is, oh cursed one, for fear that the devil,
Each time you are rung too long,
Would come and take you for good.20

Although most of the criticism directed at the cloche in the seventeenth
century emanated from freethinking skeptics, the issue of the church bell’s
baptism, personhood, and initiation to priesthood also drew the censure of
authors who did not necessarily share the unorthodox views of the libertins
érudits. This was the case of Boileau, who was generally stern in matters of
morality and religion, and of Church reformists who were eager to rid
the faith of popular syncretic practices deemed incompatible with post-
tridentine aims to reinvigorate and reform Roman Catholicism.
This is the objective, for instance, of the ecclesiastic and theologian
Jean-Baptiste Thiers who attempted in his Traité des superstitions (1679)

Va faire ailleurs, engeance de démon, / Ton vain et tragique sermon.” In Marc Antoine
Gérard Saint-Amant, Les Oeuvres (Paris: Didier, 1971), 145.
19
“La Paroisse n’est pas d’un si grand revenu, il n’y a pas que trop de son pour si peu de
farine; mais en cas que vous vouliez faire votre devoir de Chrétiens, il vous reste encore
deux Cloches qui vous le prêchent assez: N’entendez-vous point qu’elles sonnent tous les
jours à vos oreilles don, don, don? Et que veulent-elles dire par là, sinon que vous fassiez
force dons à votre Curé,” “Le sermon du curé de Colignac, prononcé le jour des Rois,”
in Les Œuvres libertines de Cyrano de Bergerac, ed. Frédéric Lachèvre, 2 vols. (Paris:
Champion, 1921), 298. While this work is usually attributed to Cyrano de Bergerac,
there exists some doubt about its authorship.
20
“Persécuteurs du genre humain / Qui sonnez sans miséricorde, / Que n’avez vous au
cou la corde, / Que vous tenez en votre main? . . . / Cloches, si les lois de l’Eglise / Ont
ordonné qu’on vous baptise, / Le mystère en est délicat; / C’est de peur que le diable, à
qui chacun vous donne, / Lorsque trop longtemps on vous sonne, / Ne vous prı̂t et vous
emportât,” Gilles Ménage, Menagiana, ou Les bons mots et remarques critiques, histori-
ques, morales et d’érudition de M. Ménage, 4 vols. (Paris: Chez la Veuve Delaulne, 1729),
1:78.

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Falaky ✦ The Cloche and Its Critics

to sort the wheat from the chaff. On the subject of the cloches, l’abbé Thiers
does not completely deny the virtue of bells but calls on priests, nonetheless,
to disabuse the people of their belief in bell baptisms. Bells, he says, are
neither capable of driving away the devil as many believed, nor are they
capable of being endowed with the justifying grace that is entailed in the
sacrament of baptism. Moreover, he says, bell ringing should be kept at a
minimum and its abuse is a reflection of vulgar, obtuse ignorance:

The little people and the rabble rush in crowds from all parts to
the Church, not to pray but to make noise; and the house of the
Lord, which is a house of prayer, becomes a house of discord and
confusion; and a place as little respected as a public place. I say
the little people and the rabble since it should be said that vulgar
people are those who are most fond of bells and their sounds. . . .
Peasants, people of low condition, children, madmen, the deaf and
dumb like to ring bells or to hear them ring. Spiritual people, on
the other hand, have no inclination for this. The sound of bells
annoys them, inconveniences them, gives them a headache, and
puts them in a daze.21

Most theologians of the time agreed that bells as well as all the sacramental
ceremonies associated with their supposed consecration into “priesthood”
were a later addition to Christianity. In another treatise, devoted more par-
ticularly to the question of the cloche, l’abbé Thiers says that the early
Christians, who lived and prayed in hiding, could not have used bells for
their call to communion because the clanging “would have infallibly
betrayed them, and exposed them to the rage of their persecutors.”22 This
perception of the cloche, even within religious circles, as a historical accre-
tion that appealed to popular superstition rather than untainted godliness
explains why freethinkers of the seventeenth century did not pull their

21
“Le petit peuple et la canaille accourt en foule de toutes parts à l’Eglise, non pour prier,
mais pour sonner; et la maison du Seigneur, qui est une maison de prière, devient une
maison de trouble et de confusion; et un lieu aussi peu respecté qu’une place publique. Je
dis le petit peuple et la canaille. Car, il faut ici remarquer en passant que les gens les plus
grossiers sont ceux qui aiment davantage les cloches et le son des cloches. . . . Les paysans,
les gens de basse condition, les enfants, les fous, les sourds et muets, aiment beaucoup à
sonner les cloches ou à les entendre sonner. Les personnes spirituelles n’ont pas de pen-
chant pour cela. Le son des cloches les importune, les incommode, leur fait mal à la tête,
les étourdit,” Jean Baptiste Thiers, Traité des superstitions selon l’Écriture sainte, les
décrets des conciles, 4 vols. (Avignon: Chez Louis Chambeau, 1778), 2:141–42.
22
“Les aurait décelés infailliblement, et exposés à la rage de leurs persécuteurs,” Thiers,
Traité des cloches (Paris: Chez Benoı̂t Morin, 1781), 30.

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2020

punches against its unsolicited, sleep-interrupting summons, or why, in the
eighteenth century, the cloche became eventually part and parcel of what
Voltaire called l’infâme.
     In the Encyclopédie’s entry on cloche, Diderot gives a brief historical
account of church bells and describes how their consecration through bap-
tism involves holy water, oil of the sick (oleum infirmorum), oil of chrism
(sanctum chrisma), incense, and prayers said in the name of the Father, the
Son and the Holy Spirit. Diderot then follows this description with a terse
appeal to move on: “After this historical account that we have made as
short as possibly can be, we will move on to more important things.”23
Compared to what follows, the more practical knowledge of bell casting,
the question of the bell’s supposed baptism appears silly, frivolous, and
unimportant. For Diderot, however, the cloche, taken in its religious dimen-
sion, was also dangerous. In the Discours d’un philosophe à un roi (1774),
a text where his anticlericalism is at its most militant, Diderot, like the
Marquis d’Argens, attacks the clergy as both an idle class and a threat to
the nation:

     If you deign to listen to me, I shall be the most dangerous of all
     philosophers for the priests. For the most dangerous is he who
     brings to the monarch’s attention the immense sums which these
     arrogant and useless loafers cost his state; he who tells him, as I
     tell you, that you have a hundred and fifty thousand men to whom
     you and your subjects pay about a hundred and fifty thousand
     crowns a day to bawl in a building and deafen us with their bells;
     who tells him that a hundred times a year, at a fixed hour, these
     men speak to eighteen millions of your assembled subjects, dis-
     posed to believe and to do all that they enjoin them to do in God’s
     name.24

If Diderot presents himself as the most dangerous of philosophers, it is
because, for him, the threat is also dangerous. Not only are priests a waste-
ful burden on the state, they have at their unquestioned disposal a pulpit

23
   “Après cet historique que nous avons rendu le plus court qu’il nous a été possible, nous
allons passer à des choses plus importantes.” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des
sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., s.v. “Cloche,” ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, available
online at ARTFL Encyclopédie, ed. Morrissey and Roe, Spring 2016, http://encycloped-
ie.uchicago.edu/.
24
   Diderot, “Discourse of a Philosopher to a King,” in Diderot, Diderot, Interpreter of
Nature: Selected Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 216.

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Falaky ✦ The Cloche and Its Critics

from which, at the summons of a bell, they stuff the bulk of the nation’s
population with useless, metaphysical gibberish. Since the king has the
authority to censure and silence philosophers, Diderot wonders, why not
employ this power “to silence the priest?”25 For Diderot, the former are
“friends of reason and the promoters of science” whereas the latter favor
ignorance and superstition; his protest also suggests that the liturgical hours
actually devoured time.26 By beckoning the masses a hundred times a year
to the timeless realm of God, the clergy were essentially eating up time that
could be used for a utilitarian promotion of human welfare.
Diderot’s Discours contributes to a larger endeavor among the philo-
sophes of the eighteenth century to judge Christianity according to external
criteria, to view it, as Michel de Certeau writes, from “the standpoint of
the ‘students of man.’ ”27 This ethnographical reframing of religion also
entailed a reconsideration of what a society deemed useful or not. “It was
no longer enough for something to be pious, holy, or truly Christian; it had
to benefit society as well,” writes Noah Shusterman. “Religious matters
would be decided according to criteria like the ‘good of society’ or ‘social
utility.’ ”28 This is Diderot’s main point of criticism against cloisters in La
Religieuse and he expresses it most poignantly in the judicial brief M.
Manouri writes to have Suzanne’s vows annulled. Rhetorically wondering
whether convents are “so essential to the constitution of a state,” Manouri
presents cloister life as incompatible with nature’s laws as well as a hin-
drance to the state’s social and political development.29 Not only are con-
vents “chasms into which future generations will be lost,” they are also
alienating spaces that transform the hermits within into socially inept
automatons. In La Religieuse, the nuns’ activities and movements are in
fact dictated and cadenced by the regular sound of the bells to the point
where, upon her escape from Ste-Eutrope, Suzanne is unable to shake the
habits and reflexes that were drilled into her: “I was never suited to being
in a cloister, and it shows clearly in what I am doing now, but I did become
accustomed to certain religious practices which I now repeat automatically.
For example, what do I do when I hear a bell ring? I either make the sign
of the cross or kneel down. When someone knocks at the door I say Ave.”30

25
Diderot, “Discourse of a Philosopher to a King,” 217.
26
Diderot, “Discourse of a Philosopher to a King,” 214.
27
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), 152.
28
Noah Shusterman, Religion and the Politics of Time: Holidays in France from Louis
XIV through Napoleon (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
2012), 99.
29
Diderot, The Nun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 74.
30
Diderot, The Nun, 151.

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In Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, the philosopher is defined
as a machine “that, by his mechanical constitution, thinks about his own
movements” and he is contrasted with the rest of humans who “are deter-
mined to act without feeling, without knowing the causes that make them
move, without even thinking that there may be a cause.”31 Whereas
Suzanne’s eventual introspection is worthy of the philosopher’s capacity for
self-reflective analysis—she is able to determine the cause of her mechanical
movements—the same cannot be said of the rest of those who submit with-
out question to a system where every movement is regulated by monastic
discipline. The sisters left behind remain unthinking automatons. Every
aspect of their lives is dictated and structured by the uncompromising
authority of the Church.
For the Baron d’Holbach, as for Diderot, the idleness and uselessness
of the clergy was also compounded by their numbing effect on people’s
senses and minds. Priests, he says, have hijacked and deformed early Chris-
tianity to their profit and they have at their disposal a whole apparatus by
which they hoodwink an uneducated populace. Their dazzling and pom-
pous robes serve to suspend all judgment and excite the people’s veneration,
and the bells, he writes, “designed to assemble the people, seem by their
lugubrious sound purposely made to drive the soul to a superstitious melan-
choly.”32 D’Holbach’s definition of cloches in the caustic Théologie porta-
tive, ou Dictionnaire abrégé de la religion chrétienne reiterates this idea
and, in passing, mocks their supposed baptism: “Bells. Theological or noisy
instruments intended, like priests, to stun [étourdir] the living and to invite
the dead to pay the Church. The bells are very Christian since they are
baptized; we must even presume that they always preserve their baptismal
innocence, an advantage which they have over most Christians.”33 The verb

31
“Une machine qui par sa constitution mécanique, réfléchit sur ces mouvements . . . sont
déterminés à agir sans sentir, ni connaı̂tre les causes qui les font mouvoir, sans même
songer qu’il y en ait.” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des
métiers, etc., s.v., “Le Philosophe,” ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, available online at
ARTFL Encyclopédie, ed. Morrissey and Roe, Spring 2016, http://encyclopedie.uchica-
go.edu/.
32
“Destinées à rassembler le peuple, semblent par leur son lugubre être faites pour exciter
dans les âmes une mélancolie superstitieuse,” Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach, L’Esprit du
clergé, ou Le Christianisme primitif vengé (London, 1767), 226–27.
33
“Cloches. Instruments théologiques ou bruyants, destinés, comme les prêtres, à étourdir
les vivants, et à inviter les morts à bien payer l’église. Les cloches sont très-chrétiennes vu
qu’elles sont baptisées, nous devons même présumer qu’elles conservent toujours l’inno-
cence baptismale, avantage que n’ont point la plupart des chrétiens,” Paul Henri Thiry
d’Holbach, Théologie portative, ou Dictionnaire abrégé de la religion chrétienne (Hildes-
heim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1977), 71.

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étourdir has the double function of denoting the deafening ringing of the
bells as well as their deadening and dazing effect on so-called Christians, as
if the purpose of these theological instruments, to further play on d’Hol-
bach’s antiphrasis, were to turn the living into lifeless automatons. The
term étourdir implies a divide, as perceived by the philosophes, between the
enlightened and the religious masses. Whereas the latter are eager or willing
to submit to the normative sounds of the cloches and to live their lives like
machines dispossessed of agency, the former are forced to suffer the noises
of these unsolicited and intrusive “theological instruments.” In Jean-Paul
Marana’s L’Espion turc (1686), this divide is rendered in humorous fash-
ion. The French Nazarenes are “accustomed here to this kind of tinta-
marre” punctuating their days and nights, but the bemused oriental traveler
who observes them laments that “the bells that are tolled in all the churches
have almost made me deaf.”34
In eighteenth-century France, this notion of the bells’ theological intru-
sion reaches perhaps its best expression at the eve of the French Revolution,
in Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (1783). In a chapter titled
“Sonneries,” Mercier pleads with the reader to pity those who live next to
Paris’s churches:

What a tintamarre! It is no longer permitted to be indisposed. No
more sleep for the sick, no more meditation for the scholar in his
study. How can one live next to Saint-Germain-le-Vieux? I pose
this question to whoever heard this miserable and harsh bell.
Almost all these bells that are set in motion for a convoy, a
mass, or a bad sermon, have a sour and biting sound. It is then
that cotton is needed for the ears; for what head is strong enough
to read or write in such hullabaloo! . . .
The King at Versailles has the bells silenced every day of the
year, and none ring except at the hour of hunting. But if a poor
dying man were to ask the Archbishop of Paris for one peaceful
hour of sleep, he would do so to no avail.35

34
“On est ici accoutumés à cette espèce de tintamarre . . . Les Cloches qu’on sonne pour
cela dans toutes les Églises, m’ont presque rendu sourd,” Jean Paul Marana, L’Espion
dans les cours des princes chrétiens ou Lettres et mémoires d’un envoyé secret de la porte
dans les cours de l’Europe, 2 vols. (Cologne: Erasme Kinkius, 1700), 2:341.
35
“Quel tintamarre! Il n’est plus permis d’être indisposé. Plus de sommeil pour les
malades; plus de méditation pour l’homme de cabinet. Comment peut-on demeurer à côté
de Saint-Germain-le-Vieux? Je le demande à qui a entendu ce misérable et dur carillon.
“Presque toutes ces cloches que l’on met en branle pour un convoi, pour une messe,
pour un mauvais sermon, ont un son aigre et mordant. C’est alors qu’il faut du coton

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Mercier inveighs against the cloches for disturbing the rest of so many who
would like nothing more than to sleep in peace, but, as was the case for
many bell critics before him, Mercier’s recrimination is directed less toward
the noise than to its presence in a public sphere where socio-economic pri-
orities and visions of a hardworking, vibrant citizenry increasingly trumped
religious considerations. Anthony Vidler writes that, for Mercier, “the pro-
gressive hope of the Enlightenment . . . remained attached to the dream of
a therapeutically reconstructed city.”36 This therapeutic reconstruction of
Paris was tied to a hygienic concern for the sensory pollutions, olfactory or
auditory, that could affect man’s health and for how this health could in
turn enhance man’s productivity in an urban environment. As told by Mer-
cier, the tableau of Paris’s polluting church bells captures in a sense the
shifting challenges created by the professionalization of time in late
eighteenth-century France or by what Daniel Roche calls time’s sudden
finitude. “The fact that time is finite,” he writes, “was a political as well as
an economic problem, a religious as well as a secular issue.”37 Since the
tintamarre of the Church’s “theological instruments” were potentially
depriving citizens of their sleep, they were also depriving them of valuable,
monetizable time they would otherwise spend more industriously. The cri-
tique of the church bell reflects then the same themes underpinning the
philosophes’ general reproach against liturgical holidays. As Shusterman
notes, these were “the valorization of work, the belief in the importance of
commerce and trade, and the need to limit the influence of the Catholic
Church.”38 Within this paradigm, time, to quote Benjamin Franklin’s
famous aphorism, became money;39 and man was expected to follow the
pressing dictates of commercial and industrial needs. The church bell, on
the other hand, which had long regulated life according to an eternal pat-
tern and purpose, became a nuisance, a hindrance especially to sleep, the
period devoted to renewing the energy needed for work.

dans les oreilles; et quelle tête assez forte pourrait lire ou écrire à côté de cette discord-
ance! . . .
“Le roi à Versailles fait taire toutes les cloches tous les jours de l’année, et aucune ne
sonne qu’à l’heure de la chasse. Mais un pauvre moribond présenterait vainement requête
à l’archevêque de Paris, pour obtenir une heure paisible de sommeil,” Louis-Sébastien
Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 12 vols. (Amsterdam: 1783–88), 1:106.
36
Anthony Vidler, The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (New York: Monacelli
Press, 2011), 68.
37
Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998), 83.
38
Shusterman, Religion and the Politics of Time, 98.
39
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Macmillan,
1901), 188.

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Criticism against the bells’ deafening clangor was not only about the
need to rest or to sleep. As d’Holbach’s use of étourdir implied, it was also
about awakening a slumbering populace, freeing it from the clutches of the
clergy and silencing the voices and sounds that impeded such emancipation.
What was at stake was not just the silencing of the bells per se but also the
silencing of the Church itself, the need, as Corbin writes, to “free municipal
existence from the sensual ascendancy and the auditory injunctions of the
ecclesiastical authorities.”40 Underpinning the anti-cloche literature, there-
fore, was an apprehension for religion’s continued presence within a sound-
scape that was increasingly shaped by secular, this-worldy considerations,
and the need to fight the Church over control of the public sphere. In the
Discours d’un philosophe à un roi, Diderot wondered why the state sought
to silence the rational voice of the philosopher rather than the useless, yet
dangerous, absurdities of the priests. The next century would see the
appearance of progressive pamphlets and journals with names such as La
Cloche, Le Tocsin, Le Carillon, and Le Tintammarre.41 To compete against
and drown out the noise of religion, it is as if the calls to progress had to
usurp, albeit symbolically, the Church’s main mouthpieces.
This does not mean that all of a sudden the church bells had ceased
their ringing. Soon after Robespierre’s death, many a revolutionary was
complaining about their comeback. “Today,” remarks the agent national
of Mâcon on March 11, 1795, “people in the countryside are publicly
sounding what they call their Angelus, their baptisms, their funerals, etc.,
and some are already assembling at the toll of the bell to celebrate common
services; all that is needed to complete their fanaticism is a priest.”42 In
Paris, too, the silence of bells during the Revolution did not last long; yet
the time they kept quiet, says Mercier, also seemed to be the loudest. “The
bells,” he writes in Le Nouveau Paris, “have no longer any tongue,” but
they “have never made so much noise as since we have taken out their
clappers.”43 If the void they left behind was resounding, it is because bells
were ultimately not just mouthpieces for the Church. They were also tem-
poral markers structuring patterns of sociability and sense of community
during the ancien régime.

40
Corbin, Village Bells, 23.
41
Jean Daniel Blavignac, La Cloche: Études sur son histoire et sur ses rapports avec la
société aux différents âges (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1877), 447.
42
“Aujourd’hui, les campagnes sonnent publiquement ce qu’ils appellent leur Angélus,
les baptêmes, enterrements, etc., quelques-uns s’assemblent déjà au son de la cloche dans
leur église pour y célébrer des offices communs; il n’y manqué plus qu’un prêtre pour
achever de les fanatiser.” In Annales de l’Académie de Mâcon (Mâcon: Protat Frères,
1899), 156.
43
Mercier, New Picture of Paris, 2 vols. (London: H. D. Symonds, 1800), 2:447–48.

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John McManners notes that when examining the era’s religious senti-
ment, there is “difficulty in disentangling religion and custom, for this was
a social order in which human relationships evolved and secular business
was transacted within a religious cadre.”44 This entanglement is in part the
reason behind the rise of the poésie des cloches among authors such as
Chateaubriand and Lamartine, a poésie which emphasized the bells’ power
to evoke childhood memories and expressed a loyal longing for a sense of
time experienced as sacred, immutable, and cyclical. This sense of sensory
and aesthetic stasis is palpable, for instance, in a passage from Chateaubri-
and’s Réné where the rhythm of the sentences is metaphorically linked to
the repeated tolling of the bells:

On Sundays and holidays I often stood in the deep woods as the
sound of the distant bell drifted through the trees, calling from the
temple to the man of the fields. Leaning against the trunk of an
elm, I would listen in rapt silence to the devout tolling. Each
tremor of the resounding bronze would waft into my guileless soul
the innocence of country ways, the calm of solitude, the beauty of
religion, and the cherished melancholy of memories out of my
early childhood! . . . All is embraced in that magical revery which
engulfs us at the sound of our native bell—faith, family, homeland,
the cradle and grave, the past and the future.45

Here, the role of cloche is not to be the public voice of the Church, but
to evoke rather everything else that religion connotes—faith, communal
belonging, and the pattern and meaning imparted by the faithful repetition
of rites and customs. The source of nostalgia, in other words, is not the
religious institution or affiliation but what Corbin calls “a social order
founded on the harmony of collective rhythms.”46 It should not come as a
surprise, then, that the silencing of bells was very short lived and people in
the countryside were already sounding the Angelus in the spring of 1795.
While many could live without the clergy’s blessings, it was more difficult
to do without the temporal and social structure provided by the bell’s toll-
ing. In Paris, too, the bells, to paraphrase Mercier, did not take long to
regain their tongues and clappers but they did not seem to make as much

44
John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 2:104.
45
François-René de Chateaubriand, Atala and René (University of California Press,
1952), 88.
46
Corbin, Village Bells, 290.

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noise as when they fell completely silent. Compared to Boileau’s Paris, Mer-
cier’s was even more crowded, more bustling and cacophonous, a “city
essentially commercial, essentially industrious, essentially cooking.”47 This
economic dynamism, which would only keep on growing, explains why the
sensibility of the poésie des cloches was as campagnarde as it was campan-
arian. If the likes of Chateaubriand turned to the countryside to express
their yearning for the sound of bells, it is because they found there a sense
of community and rootedness that was waning in urban conglomerates. In
post-Revolutionary Paris, church bells began to ring anew but the tolling
resonated less profoundly, drowned out by the frantic hustle and bustle of
modern capitalism. The cloches were no longer at risk of being turned into
coins but, in a sense, time itself had been forever and irreversibly turned
into money.

        Tulane University.

47
     Mercier, New Picture of Paris, 1:xxvi.

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