GALLICANISM. - A body of doctrines on the Church and of political attitudes, prevalent in France under the ancien régime (with remnants in the 19th century), which tended to limit the jurisdiction of the Holy See in the French Church, claiming to rest on rights acquired in ancient times, and encouraging the sovereign's interference in the Church itself.
People have sought the origin of Gallicanism very far back, considering it a characteristic of the Frankish Church since the time of Charlemagne: but, while acknowledging significant examples from that period, its immediate antecedents are found in the 14th century (doctrines on Church and State arising from the controversy between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII, and their developments), and the true origin of Gallicanism is to be seen during the great Western Schism. The first explicit affirmations of "Gallican liberties" appear at the Council of the French bishops convoked in Paris by Charles VI in 1398 and then at that of 1406. The term, which until then indicated the immunities acquired by the clergy in the face of temporal lords and the Church's right to free itself from secular interference, now serves to formulate the idea that the Church of France, with the king's cooperation, must recover its "ancient liberties" against papal exactions, and that the pontifical authority is limited by the ancient conciliar canons and subordinate to them. These ideas were enshrined in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (7 July 1438). It represents the thinking of the French clergy convoked by Charles VII after the rupture between the Council of Basel and Eugene IV, and formulates, for the most part, the conciliar theories and reform proposals of the Basel assembly, adapting them to France. It affirms, accordingly, the superiority of the Council over the Pope, accepted as a certain truth by the French after Constance, and develops the principle that is the essence of the Gallican liberties, namely that the Pope has in the Kingdom of France a power tempered within the limits of the "holy canons" (as opposed to the papal decretals). The Pragmatic Sanction was abrogated by Francis I in 1516, and replaced by the Concordat with Leo X; in practice, however, it continued, because the Parliament refused to abrogate it and the University of Paris insisted that it be maintained. At the Council of Trent, the king's orators and the bishops (especially the Cardinal of Lorraine), appealing to the Pragmatic, openly opposed the definition of the pope's primacy. And when it came to the publication of the Council's decrees, willed by the king of France, the opposition came not from the clergy (which in the Assembly of 1615 solemnly declared the application of the Tridentine decrees), nor from the court, which made efforts to have them published, but from the group of the "politiques" and magistrates of the Parliament of Paris.
It is they who claim the liberties of the Gallican Church, considering it subject only to the ancient canons and therefore exempt from the authority of the recent Council. From their milieu and their polemics comes the work that would immediately become the code of Gallicanism: Les libertés de l'Église gallicane [1594] by Pierre Pithou, an advocate of the Parliament. Pithou's "liberties" are nothing but a confused list of the cases in which the Gallican Church is "free," that is, exempt from all obedience to the Holy See, starting from the two principles characteristic of Gallicanism: 1) the popes can command or ordain nothing, whether in general or in particular, regarding temporal matters in the Kingdom of France; 2) the pope must be recognized as "sovereign in spiritual matters," but in France this power of his is limited by the canons and the rules of the councils accepted in the Kingdom.
Pithou's work is above all political in nature; the defense of the liberties of the Gallican Church serves to exalt the authority of the king also in the ecclesiastical field, and comes to establish a kind of indirect power of the State over the Church, strongly limiting the spiritual jurisdiction of the Holy See. What determined this system, which is usually called political Gallicanism, was less the Gallican tradition than the controversies of those years over the absolute authority of the sovereign and the indirect power of the pope.
Pithou's political Gallicanism was developed in the first half of the 17th century by other authors: Edmond Richer, syndic of the University of Paris, in De ecclesiastica et politica potestate (1611) and other writings; the Dupuy brothers in Des droits et libertés de l'Église gallicane (1639); Pierre de Marca in De concordia sacerdotii et imperii seu de libertatibus gallicanis (first 4 books in 1641). The episcopate and the clergy of France did not adhere to this political Gallicanism (thus Richer was condemned in provincial synods through the work of Cardinal Du Perron): but with the reign of Louis XIV (1658-1715) Gallican theories prevailed, accepted and formulated (not without conflicts, however) also by the representatives of the French Church. With Bossuet, who had spoken of a Gallicanism of the magistrates and a Gallicanism of the bishops, their Gallicanism is usually called theological, as opposed to that of the politiques: but the difference is more apparent than real; in fact it was nothing but the acceptance of political Gallicanism, toned down in its dangerous jurisdictional principles and presented as a defense of the Gallican Church and its traditional doctrines. Lively theological controversies at the Sorbonne (which led in 1663 to the imposition of six propositions limiting papal authority) preceded the famous Declaratio cleri Gallicani of 1682, which represents the definitive formulation of Gallicanism. The declaration was provoked by the King, who had convoked an assembly of bishops and representatives of the clergy so that it might support him in the conflict with the Holy See over the question of the regalia (v. INNOCENZO XI); its draftsman was Bossuet (it is not known whether in the definitive form), who skillfully sought to soften the Gallicans' demands and to keep them within the common doctrine. He did not, however, succeed in safeguarding the orthodoxy of the declaration (v. text in Denz-U, 1322-23); the first article, in fact, while professing the pope's full authority in the spiritual field, rejects, against the common theological doctrine, his intervention even indirectly in temporal matters; the following three articles injure the pope's spiritual jurisdiction itself: the second upholds the superiority of the Council (affirmed tacitly, through the appeal to the decrees of Constance, whose validity is proclaimed); the third defends the Gallican liberties, presented within the more general framework of ecclesiastical customs and considered inviolable because once approved by the Holy See; the fourth, finally, is the most serious because it denies pontifical infallibility, conceived as dependent on the "consent of the Church." Louis XIV immediately approved the declaration, and imposed it on all the schools and seminaries of the Kingdom; this obligation was withdrawn in 1693, but the registration by the Parliament remained, and the court in practice maintained its principles until the Revolution. The Holy See opposed the Assembly of 1682, and the condemnation of the 4 articles was published in 1690 by Alexander VIII without mentioning them explicitly (to avoid a schism), but declaring null everything that had been deliberated in the Assembly of 1682 (Denz-U, 1326).
Great was the influence of Gallicanism during the 18th century; its developments were the various systems of jurisdictionalism and of State interference in the Church that manifested themselves in Europe in that century: in particular the Gallican doctrine served as a basis for the canonist Van Espen of Louvain, for Giannone in Italy, for Febronius in Germany. Napoleon, re-establishing the Church in France with the Concordat of 1801, wished to insert the Declaration of 1682 among the notorious organic articles abusively added to the Concordat. During the Restoration there was a certain revival of Gallicanism, supported by the court. The last its last signs of life appeared at the Vatican Council, in the controversy that arose around the definition of papal infallibility: the constitution Pastor Aeternus, which very precisely condemns the individual errors of Gallicanism, also marks its true end.