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‘The D’Éprémesnil of the Clergy’: Bishop Lauzières de Thémines of Blois and the Politics of Reform During the Pre-Revolution
1 Nigel Aston teaches at the University of Leicester. He is especially grateful to the late Canon Philippe Boitard, diocesan archivist of Blois, for his assistance in earlier researches and, more recently, to the staff of the Archives départementales de Loir-et-Cher at Blois. Thanks should also go to the staff of the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Archives Nationales and the Bibliothèque de Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the University of Warwick on 1 April 2004 and has benefited from comments made there
Lauzières de Thémines, Bishop of Blois, is one of the overlooked leaders of resistance to royal policies in the ‘pre-revolution’ of 1787–9, masterminding the opposition of the First Estate in the General Assembly of the Clergy of 1788 and in his own anonymous publications. Thémines’ own uncomfortable relations with the lower clergy of the Blois diocese gave him no chance of election as a representative of the First Estate in the Estates-General and, rather than stand and be defeated, he chose to air his opinions from the sidelines, in what was effectively a ‘virtual’ cahier de doléances, the Cahier du hameau de Madon. His restrained, cautious conservatism, neither subversive of the monarchy nor uncritical of it, was part of a tradition rooted in a reading of the history of France that had a wide intellectual and cultural appeal, and also a continuing viability that was subsequently obscured by the upheaval of the Revolution.