Vol. 11: O’Connor, Thomas.

Type: Article

O’Connor, Thomas. ‘Surviving the Civil Constitution of the Clergy: Luke Joseph Hooke’s Revolutionary experiences’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 11 (1996), pp 129-145..

The French Civil Constitution reforms of 1790 forced ancien regime ecclesiastics to take the civic oath or be sacked from their posts. Among those who refused to pledge allegiance to the state was the Dublin-born priest, Luke Joseph Hooke, a resident in Paris since the 1720s and member of the Jacobite diaspora. Hooke was the chief keeper of books at the Mazarine library at the time of his dismissal, which he formally disputed to the court. Returning to his earlier radical strategies, Hooke reissued a pamphlet he had first written in the 1760s, in which he defined the Church as an equal if not more powerful entity than the state and one that should be independent of the civil authority. This article examines the pamphlet in both its original and reissued forms, discussing Hooke’s theories on ecclesiastical and civic power.