Social History of French Catholicism, 1789-1914

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I Routledge LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1989 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Contents

© 1989 Ralph Gibson Typeset in 10/ 11+ pt Garamond Compugraphic by Scarborough Typesetting Services, North Yorkshire. Printed and bound in Great Britain by T. J. Press (Padstow) Ltd, Cornwall

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

List of illustrations Preface

Bniish Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gibson, Ralph, 1943A social history of French Catholicism 1789-1914. 1. France. Catholicism, 1789-1914 I. Title 282' .44 ISBN 0-415-01619-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gibson, Ralph, 1943A social history of French Catholicism, 1789-1914/Ralph Gibson. p. em. -(Christianity and society in the modern world). Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-415-01619-3 1. Catholic Church-FrancL~History-19th century. 2. FranceChurch history-19th century. 3. FrancL~Rcligious life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. BX1530.G45 1989 282'. 44-dc 19 88-28652 CIP

IX

1 Catholicism under the ancien regime The warning lights of dechristianization Differentiating factors in French catholicism The causes of dechristianization

8 14

2 The Revolution The Revolution in the west of France The consequences of the Revolution

49 51

3 The secular clergy A clerical and hierarchical church The bishops The parish clergy: recruitment The parish clergy: social origins and motivation The parish clergy: standard of living L 'espn·t de domination The clergy and intellectual enquiry Clerical values The clergy and 'the world' The clergy and sexuality The clergy and modernity the cure d'Ars Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clergy 4

01~5850

Vlll

The regular clergy Female religious orders

1

3

30

57 57 61 63

68 76

78 80 87

90 92 94 100

102 104 105

Vl

A Social HZ:rtory of French Catholicism 1789-1914 Male religious orders Geography and social class Reasons for growth Anticlerical hostility to the orders Reasons for hostility

Contents 107 111 117 127 130

5 Popular religion The clerical recuperation of popular religion The upsurge of Marian devotion Relics Embourgeoisement and feminization of popular religion Popular religious art

134 138 145 151

6 Religious practice: region, gender, and age

158 170 178 180 190

Region Town and countryside Gender Age 7 The Church and social class The nobility The bourgeoisie: early hostility to catholicism The clericalization of the bourgeoisie after 1848 Problems between the bourgeoisie and the Church The Church and the working class Reasons for the irreligion of the working class 8

9

Dechristianization and rechristianization: from a God of fear to a God of love The evolution of religious practice Anticatholic forces An unattractive and inappropriate religion? Forces favouring catholicism: post-Revolutionary reconstruction Forces favouring catholicism: from a God of fear to a God of love The decline of hell and damnation Marian devotion Eucharistic devotion Liguorism Ultramontane piety Conclusion

152 154

193 193 195 199 207 212 218 227 227 233 241 248 251 253 254 256 260 265 268

Notes Guide to fitrther reading Index

vu 274 305 312

Preface

List of illustrations

The dioceses of France in the 1860s Ordinations to the priesthood ( 1800-1913) Ordinations to the priesthood, 1875-1886 Male and female religious orders, 1861 La carte Boulard Religious vitality of French dioceses in 1877

Xll

66

74 112 171

172

How it came to pass that an Australian, son of a Unitarian minister and of atheistic tendencies, should try and write a social history of French catholicism would take too long to explain. It does need pointing out at the beginning, however, that this book is not written by a Catholic. I am far from being unsympathetic to catholicism - or indeed to any attempt to give meaning to a human existence which appears to me ultimately absurd. I do not, however, have a Catholic culture (nor even a French one. except such as I have acquired second-hand and late in life), and that defect will be evident in much of what I write. One might hope that an outsider's view would have at least the advantage of a certain objectivity. The writing of history is, however, always a comment on the present in terms of the past, quite as much as it is an attempt objectively to understand that past. It is thus always informed by the values of the present day, and specifically by the values of the writer. I cannot therefore help judging the past, being sympathetic to some aspects of it and not to others. It will soon become apparent to any reader that I am largely out of sympathy with the Tridentine model of catholicism (which I attempt to evoke in chapter 1). While admiring the spiritual heights achieved by many of its practitioners, I find myself irredeemably hostile to its devaluation of the world, its Manichaean distinction between the soul and the body, its cultivation of an obsessive sense of guilt and sin (what Jean Delumeau has called the hyper-culpabilization of the west), and its use of the weapon of fear to get the mass of ordinary people to accept a model of catholicism originally developed for a spiritual elite. Hence I am led to conclude that many of the problems confronted by the French Church in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sprang from the rebarbative form of the religion that it was purveying - and that its biggest successes

x

A Social History of French Catholicism 1789-1914

in the later nineteenth century came from having begun to throw it off. Conversely, however, I find myself much in sympathy with ordinary and limited people who struggled to give meaning to their own lives and to help others to find such meaning - perhaps all the more because I suspect that the quest is ultimately futile. Men and women will always try and make sense of their existence, even if it is ultimately absurd; religions basically consist of that attempt. It is thus with sympathy, indeed with admiration, that I have tried to chronicle the religious experience of French men and women, both clergy and laity. In so doing, I make no claim to capture the will-o' -the-wisp of objective history. The best I can do is spell out dearly at the beginning where my sympathies lie, such that a reader may the more easily judge how they distort my perceptions. I would never have written any book without the kindness of the University of Lancaster Humanities Research Grant Committee, which provided a replacement for my teaching duties for two terms. I am particularly grateful to Dick Geary for his role in this matter, as for his friendship and support in general - even if, as an unreconstructed anticlerical, he will probably never read a word of the book, and would soon be horrified if he did. I am also grateful to Alan Forrest for reading a draft of the chapter on the Revolution to weed out the more egregious factual errors, and to Austin Gough (the great stylist of French religious history) for his encouragement and advice. A particular mention is due for Thelma Goodman and all the staff of inter-library loans at the University of Lancaster; most of the sources for this book have passed through their office, and their help has been both tolerant and unfailing. My greatest professional and intellectual debts are to my maitres in France,Jacques Gadille and Yves-Marie Hilaire, and latterly Gerard Cholvy (the latter two's new Histoire religieuse de Ia France contemporaine is a far more knowledgeable and complete treatment of the subject than I would dare to attempt). Above all, I want to record a personal debt to Jean Briquet, Vicar-General of Perigueux, whose unfailing welcome to a foreign researcher (and slightly despairing concern for my spiritual state) has enabled me to spend numberless happy hours in the archives, and to acquire a sympathy for French catholicism even if I cannot accept it as my personal faith.

Xll

Diocese

Map ref Corresponding department

Agen Aire AIX Aiaccio ALB! Amiens Angers Angouleme Annecy Arras AUCH Autun AVIGNON Baycux Bayonne Beauvais Belley BESAN