The principles proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man are tested with the civil constitution of the clergy and its consequences. The Declaration regarded religion as an opinion while the religion was maintained in the public sphere and not yet relegated to the privacy in an ambiguity which can be seen in the oscillations of the religious policy of the French Revolution. In 1791, the supporters of the Catholic Church appealed to the rights of man against the religious laws of the Constituent Assembly and emphasized the infidelity of the Assembly with its own principles, even when these same rights of man were at the core of the refoundation of a political and social order free from the Church. Evicted of a Church integrated int he State when they refused to take the oath to the Civil constitution of the clergy, the Gallican bishops used the principles of 1789 to claim the liberty of cult as an extension of their liberty of opinion, when the National Assembly had to manage its principles, its constitutional and legislative work, and its interest to protect the new public cult.
