Assembly of the French clergy

The assembly of the French clergy (assemblée du clergé de France) was in its origins a representative meeting of the Catholic clergy of France, held every five years, for the purpose of apportioning the financial burdens laid upon the clergy of the French Catholic Church by the kings of France. Meeting from 1560 to 1789, the Assemblies ensured to the clergy an autonomous financial administration, by which they defended themselves against taxation.

During the Middle Ages the Crusades were the occasions of frequent levies upon ecclesiastical possessions. The Dime Saladine (Saladin Tithe) was inaugurated when Philip II Augustus (1180–1223) united his forces with those of Richard of England to deliver Jerusalem from Saladin. At a later period the contributions of the clergy were increased, and during the reign of Louis IX (1235–70) we find record of thirteen subsidies within twenty-eight years.

Francis I of France (1515–48) made incessant calls on the ecclesiastical treasury. The religious wars of the sixteenth century furnished the French kings with pretexts for fresh demands upon the Church.

In 1560, the clergy held a convention at Poissy to consider matters of Church-reform, an occasion made famous by the controversy (Colloque de Poissy) between the Catholic bishops and the Protestant ministers, in which the chief orators were the Cardinal of Lorraine and Theodore Beza. At this assembly the Clergy bound themselves by a contract made in the name of the whole clerical body to pay the king 1,600,000 livres annually for a period of six years; certain estates and taxes that had been pledged to the Hôtel de Ville of Paris for a (yearly) rente, or revenue, of 6,300,000 livres. In other words, the clergy bound themselves to redeem for the king in ten years a capital of 7,560,000 livres. The French monarchs, instead of settling their debts, made fresh loans based on this revenue, paid by the Church, as if it were to be something permanent. After lengthy discussions, the clergy assembled at Melun (1579–80) consented to renew the contract for ten years, a measure destined to be repeated every decade until the French Revolution. The "assemblies of the Clergy" were now an established institution. In this way the Church of France obtained the right of freely meeting and of free speech just when the meetings of the Estates-General (États généraux) were to be discontinued, and the voice of the nation was to be hushed for a period of 200 years.

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