In 1852 the enormously profitable Catholic publishing firm run by the abbé Migne produced a Dictionnaire des conversions, a volume of sixteen hundred pages, with entries on “more than eight thousand conversions, and references to millions of others.” Although the dictionary ranged widely, going back to Augustine and the early church, the editor, Charles-François Chevé, singled out “the immense movement back to Catholicism in our era” as “the most striking characteristic of the nineteenth century.”1 For Chevé, conversions testified to the truths of Catholicism, and the failure of other faiths, including rationalist disbelief, to provide religious certainty and social cohesion. Chevé praised converts for their successful struggle to overcome a devotion to individual judgment, the erroneous principle that “destroys the unity of the human race, isolates and separates man from man, in taking as its point of departure the contingent, variable, and limited individual being; it . . . leads to individualism, egoism, absolute disassociation, and universal skepticism.” Individuals who embraced this sens privé were constantly changing their position, “affirming one day what they denied the day before, moving from religious belief to philosophical system, to political and social convictions, shifting from one idea to another . . . destroying what they once adored, adoring what they once condemned, affirming at the same time yes and no, for and against. Nothing is more general or more ordinary than this sad spectacle.”2
Chevé’s last comment challenges his previous claim that conversion to Catholicism was the defining trait of the modern world, which now seems marked by an uncertainty that leads to constantly changing religious postures. But if we extend the concept of conversion to cover all the choices that Chevé finds so disturbing, as well as moves into the Catholic Church, his two positions can be reconciled and together capture the underlying argument of this book. Stories told by and about converts in the period after the revolutionary era were a crucial element in French culture, fascinating a broad audience drawn by a heightened consciousness of religious liberty, and a deep anxiety about the exercise of this newly acquired right. At their most immediate level, conversions raised questions about the imperatives of individual salvation and religious truth, set against the love and loyalty that people owe to their family and community. The dramatic scenes in which these conflicts unfolded illuminate the frustration and anger that often accompanied the decision to convert, though they at times show the possibility of reconciliation and family unity across religious boundaries.
Converts provoked domestic and communal dramas, but in exercising their religious liberty they also became involved in issues that extended well beyond the confines of homes and families, churches and synagogues. Crossing sacred boundaries also involved confronting the political, social, and historical implications of religious choice. In exercising their individual religious liberty converts reflected on the appropriate relationship between churches and congregants, and between church and state. Religious choice meant as well sorting out obligations to others in an age when poverty and social inequality were generating new concern with the “social question,” and new solutions in the programs of socialist thinkers. And finally, in making their religious commitments converts were also assessing the place of religion in the rapidly evolving history of Europe and the world, positioning themselves within older traditions, newer alternatives, or a combination of old and new that they deemed most likely to shape the future. In the aftermath of the French Revolution converts made choices about individual salvation and fundamental religious truths that were intimately bound up with a range of complex issues that continue to intersect with personal religious identity.
Paris provided a liberating space where individuals could consider their religious beliefs and choices, but the converts we have studied brought to the French capital cosmopolitan experiences and concerns. The Ratisbonne brothers of Strasbourg were members of a family involved in international banking and were preoccupied with finding an appropriate place for Jews in the modern world. Heinrich Heine explored religious choices in Paris from the perspective of an ambivalent conversion from Judaism to Protestantism in Germany. Ivan Gagarin was a Russian diplomat who knew Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, and Munich as well as Paris, travels that led him to question Russian Orthodoxy and autocracy. George Sand and Félicité Lamennais spent long periods at their family estates in Berry and Brittany, adding a provincial flavor to their lives in Paris. But they also traveled beyond France, Sand to Spain and Italy, Lamennais to London, Munich, and Rome. Both Sand and Lamennais wrote extensively about their travels, experiences that broadened the perspective from which they viewed the religious landscape, and their places within it. At the time of his conversion Renan had never lived elsewhere than his native Brittany and Paris, but his correspondence with his sister during her travels as a tutor, and his own intense interest in German scholarship, opened up to him the wider world and expanded the religious choices he felt free to make in the heart of France. All of these converts profited from the freedom available in Paris, but they made their choices while looking out on Europe and the rest of the world, and engaging in the religious questions raised by the upheaval of the revolutionary era.
At the most intimate level, all of the converts whose lives we have considered faced terrible struggles with themselves and their families as they confronted their religious choices. David Drach’s family fled to London after he converted, leading him to plot and carry out the kidnapping of his children, all of whom eventually joined religious congregations. Théodore Ratisbonne wept as he admitted to his father that he had become a Christian; his brother Alphonse exchanged anguished and bitter letters with his uncle and fiancé after a Marian apparition in Rome brought him to Catholicism. Ivan Gagarin’s parents were profoundly hurt by what they felt was his abandonment of family, church, and country, feelings that Ivan reciprocated in letters that produced only a fragile reconciliation. Lamennais’s departure from the church led to a break with his brother as well as his close friends, a wound that was never healed during his or their lifetimes. George Sand left the church at a time when she was also fighting a public battle to separate from her husband and engaging in a series of tempestuous love affairs. Ernest Renan hesitated for months to share with his pious mother his decision to leave the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, afraid of the disappointment she would feel. Renan’s mother eventually made her peace with his decision, an open-hearted attitude he did not foresee.
As they struggled to make their choices, all of the converts sought, in different ways and in some cases desperately, to ensure that their new religion would provide a sense of home and family that they knew was threatened by their decisions. As Renan moved away from Catholicism, and perhaps a break with his mother, he was reassured by his sister’s love and loyalty, which provided him with an altered but intact family on the other side of the religious border he was crossing. Théodore Ratisbonne’s conversion took place within an intimate circle in which the abbé Bautain served as a father figure for him and his close friends. Lamennais and Alphonse Ratisbonne joined their brothers and formed religious communities that provided a kind of extended family for them in their new lives. Alphonse’s letters to the Jesuit Ravignan in the months just after his conversion are laced with effusive references to his new father. Ivan Gagarin’s letters to Ravignan include similar sentiments, but his correspondence also suggests that he found a surrogate mother in Madame Swetchine. George Sand’s family situation is more complex. Her adolescent conversion to Catholicism was mediated by a young sister in a Paris convent school whom she always remembered fondly and stayed in touch with for years. As she moved away from Catholicism Sand was pulled in several spiritual directions, toward Lamennais, the Saint-Simonians, and Leroux, while also engaged in tempestuous earthly affairs with Musset, Michel de Bourges, and Chopin. This mix of religious and familial turbulence was relieved in part by her constant devotion to her two children, but of all the converts studied here Sand struggled most to find a place to settle. If we place Sand’s experience alongside the troubled stories of Emily Loveday and Sister Philomène, Protestant and Jewish women who converted to Catholicism, we observe how patriarchal attitudes presented an additional impediment to the exercise of their religious liberty. For all of the converts, their public accounts but especially their private correspondence reveal a profound anxiety that echoed the dilemmas of religious seekers portrayed in novels, plays, and operas. Taken together, these stories show us the costs of religious liberty paid by converts and those close to them as they struggled to reconcile personal belief and family feeling.
For those who embraced Catholicism, either for a time or for the rest of their lives, salvation achieved through the sacramental powers of the church was a primary motive that drove them to beseech their families and friends to join them. This is most clearly the case with David Drach and the Ratisbonne brothers, eager to bring to the baptismal fount family members and as many of their Jewish community as they could persuade, sometimes with methods that provoked bitter quarrels about coercive pressures that violated the freedom of conscience that the converts themselves embodied. Lamennais and Gagarin both sought to reconcile their personal experience of religious liberty with commitments to a Catholic Church that demanded respect and obedience and, if necessary, the submission of one’s conscience to its authority. For Gagarin, the church represented the perfect balance between conscience and authority, a position shaped by his experience with a Russian state that insisted on both autocracy and Orthodoxy. Like Lamennais in the early 1830s, when he was the editor of L’Avenir, Gagarin saw the Catholic Church as a beacon of liberty charged with a universal mission, and in particular with the incorporation of Russia into a European Christian civilization. For him, like the Romantic Catholics studied by Carol Harrison, Catholicism offered salvation in the next world, and a religious home in this one that was both comfortingly authoritative and tolerant of individual preferences, within boundaries that were expansive but also regulated.3
Lamennais’s long years of conflict with Rome showed the limits of Catholic tolerance and ended with his decision to leave the church behind, convinced that it had abandoned its historic mission to lead the world into a new age of liberty and equality. His struggle illuminates the tension between conscience and authority inside Catholicism, and the political and social challenges the church faced in the wake of the French Revolution. Lamennais’s concern with equality and justice was shared with his friend George Sand, both of whom came to see their religious choices as necessarily involving positions sympathetic to radical political and religious change. For Lamennais and Sand the exercise of religious freedom in post-revolutionary France was an act of resistance against the established social order, a posture incompatible with a Catholic Church traumatized by the attacks it suffered during the 1790s. But choosing to leave Catholicism behind did not mean adopting a view of the world as disenchanted. As they moved away from Catholicism Lamennais and Sand assumed complex religious identities that combined an idiosyncratic Christianity with radical political and social commitments. Their religious choices testify to strains with Catholicism, but also to the freedom of individuals to imagine new forms of Christianity that were shaped by contemporary issues.
Ernest Renan shared for a brief time the social concerns that were so important in the religious decisions of Lamennais and Sand. But he left behind the Catholic Church that had nurtured and educated him primarily because it failed to meet the standards of rational inquiry and judgment that he saw as imperatives guiding the individual conscience. Renan’s intellectual journey away from Catholicism was a brave personal decision, but one that he made with significant regret as he looked back on the spiritual security of Breton Catholicism, mediated by a loving mother and solicitous clerical mentors. Renan’s sharp critique of Lamennais in the 1850s, which accused his fellow Breton ex-Catholic of reducing Catholicism to a political party, shows him nostalgic for a lost world that he both valued and rejected. Religious liberty for Renan allowed him to assume a deeply ironic position that was both critical of the truth claims of Christianity and respectful of the social and psychological benefits that relied on them.
A number of recent scholars have explored the emergence of what Jan Goldstein has termed “the post-Revolutionary self.”4 Charly Coleman has sharpened the terms of analysis used by historians in this field by proposing a contrast between a “culture of self-ownership,” in which “men and women were thought to possess and stand accountable for themselves and their actions,” and a “culture of dispossession that valorized the human person’s loss of ownership over itself and external objects.” According to Coleman, the culture of self-ownership triumphed in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when “what had been a debatable, even dubious proposition—the human person’s status as an autonomous, possessive subject—became an obligatory point of departure for thinking about the self.”5 In one sense the stories of the converts I have studied here confirm Coleman’s position, for all of them took advantage of the freedom available after the revolution to reflect and decide on a personal religious identity that was defined against varying arrays of external constraints. Converts made themselves accountable for their religious identities, resisting the coercive power of family, friendship, community, and church. But their struggles, doubts, and frequent reversals over religious identities also qualify Coleman’s claim that the autonomous self was “an obligatory point of departure” for the construction of a modern self. Instead, the lives of converts might teach us that the “autonomous, possessive subject” was a difficult goal to reach, and a fragile accomplishment. The attention paid to their exercise of religious liberty, broadcast in sermons, pamphlets, and memoirs and on the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes, reveals a public fascination with issues of belief and belonging, faith and doubt that is found as well in the literature and theater of the romantic age.
The stories of the converts I have studied do not yield any simple lessons about religious liberty, a right that they struggled to understand and embody. Grappling with their beliefs and doubts, in an age when orthodox religious faith was both vigorous and contested, they saw the appeal of religious authority and certainty as claimed by Roman Catholicism. Some of them saw as well a threat that such authority could pose for an individual conscience determined to defend its autonomy. The issues raised about the exercise of religious liberty by the converts I have studied were not unique to France and the romantic age. To take a famous example, in England John Henry Newman embraced Roman Catholicism in October 1845, precisely the moment when Renan was leaving the seminary of Saint-Sulpice. Both men came to their decisions only after long and serious intellectual effort and anguished personal struggle.6 In the United States converts to Catholicism were moved by a desire for salvation, but also by their opposition to the individualism and materialism they saw as dominant values in the majority culture of Protestantism.7 France saw a wave of conversions to Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including prominent figures such as Charles Péguy and Jacques and Raissa Maritain.8 The same period also saw movement away from Catholicism, when the modernists Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell were excommunicated for challenging orthodox positions on scripture and theology.9 In the twentieth century Catholic proselytism directed at Jews provoked intense controversy at times. In the “Finaly affair,” two young Jewish boys, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were returned to their Jewish family in 1953 only after being hidden by Catholic zealots for several years.10 Jewish conversion to Catholicism provoked a more recent controversy as well, when Cardinal Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, identified himself as both a Jew and a Christian during a trip to Israel in 1995. Lustiger converted at the age of thirteen, in August 1940, while hiding with a Catholic family in Orléans; his mother later died in Auschwitz. Yisrael Meir Lau, the chief rabbi of Israel, dismissed Lustiger’s claims to be Jewish and condemned his conversion as a betrayal of his people and his faith.11 More generous responses, such as that of Michael Wyschogrod, challenged Lustiger’s Judaism but also expressed respect for his freedom of conscience.12 Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the Holocaust Jewish conversion remains a fraught issue, most recently addressed by the statement of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, which called for a halt to Catholic proselytism directed at Jews.13
Conversion retains its power to fascinate authors and audiences in the contemporary world, to judge by two recent works by French writers that were quickly translated into English. Michel Houellebecq’s controversial novel Submission (Soumission, 2015) opens with an epigraph from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s autobiographical En route (1895), which recounts the conversion of its central character, Durtal. In the passage, a desperate and confused Durtal finds his way to the church of Saint-Sulpice and describes his experience with words that recall George Sand’s visit to the church in 1835. Durtal is “haunted by Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and candle wax. I hover on its outskirts, moved to tears by its prayers, touched to the very marrow by its psalms and chants.”14 François, the central character in Submission, is a Sorbonne professor and a specialist in Huysmans, drawn to the spiritual struggle that led to his conversion to Catholicism in the late nineteenth century. Huysmans and Durtal seem to offer models for François, who escapes from the turmoil of Paris just after an election in 2022 that produces an Islamic president. He travels south and spends several days at the shrine of Notre-Dame de Rocamadour in southern France. Although an atheist, François visits every day the chapel that holds the Black Virgin, the medieval statue of Mary and Jesus that has drawn pilgrims since the Middle Ages. During his final visit François has something close to a visionary experience. “I was in a strange state. It seemed the Virgin was rising from her pedestal and growing in the air. The baby Jesus seemed ready to detach himself from her, and it seemed to me that all he had to do was raise his right hand and the pagans and idolators would be destroyed, and the keys to the world restored to him.” But immediately after this apparent epiphany, which recalls the apparition of the Virgin to Alphonse Ratisbonne in Rome in 1842, François pulls back and reduces his spiritual experience to a physical reaction: “Or maybe I was just hungry.”15 Back in Paris, François is offered an elevated position at the Sorbonne, but only on the condition that he convert to Islam. He listens politely to the proselytizing conversation of Robert Rediger, the president of the university and himself a convert, but without any genuine religious interest. Presented with Rediger’s brief work describing Islam, he passes over the chapters on religious duties and fasting to get quickly to the one on polygamy. The possibility of a generous appointment, and of three wives, convinces François to convert to Islam, but it is exclusively a practical decision, a shallow commitment with no religious depth. Houellebecq’s novel concludes with a conversion that flattens the experience of religious liberty, a decision motivated exclusively by egotistical considerations. But François’s entire journey, his fascination with Huysmans, and his visit to Rocamadour remind us of another possibility, of a vibrant, soul-altering conversion that he longs for but fails to achieve, and that we have observed in the converts of post-revolutionary France.
We can observe precisely such a conversion in Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom (Le royaume, 2014), where the author recalls his decision to embrace a devout Christianity in the 1990s.16 Carrère’s work combines a memoir in which he tries to explain to himself and his readers the sources of his religious transformation with an extended reflection on the history of early Christianity, of the conversion of Jews and Gentiles as reported in the New Testament. From 1990 to 1993 Carrère was “touched by grace,” attending daily mass, receiving the sacraments regularly, and filling eighteen notebooks with reflections on the Gospel of John. Looking back on these pages twenty years later, Carrère struggles to understand his conversion, his commitment to a “mad belief: that Truth with a capital ‘T’ took on the flesh of man in Galilee two thousand years ago. You’re proud of this madness, because it’s not natural, because in adopting it you surprise and surrender yourself, because no one around you shares it.”17 When confronted with doubt Carrère seeks relief in spiritual writers who insist that “doubts are our best assurance.”18 Despite such efforts, however, Carrère comes to believe that “the mystics’ advice seems like brainwashing, and true courage appears to be turning away from them to confront reality.”19
Carrère’s loss of faith, however, is deeply ambiguous, a point he continually acknowledges as he weaves his way through an interpretation of the Epistles of Paul, the Gospel of Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles. When he confronts the question he imagines readers will ask—“Okay but really, are you a Christian or aren’t you?”—his answer moves from a forthright negative to an equivocation: “No, I don’t believe that Jesus was resurrected. I don’t believe that a man came back from the dead. But the fact that people do believe it—and that I believed it myself—intrigues, fascinates, troubles, and moves me. . . . I’m writing this book to avoid thinking that now that I no longer believe, I know better than those that do, and better than my former self when I believed. I’m writing this book to avoid coming down too firmly in my favor.”20 This combination of disbelief and regret for his loss of faith recalls the position of Ernest Renan, who is unsurprisingly one of Carrère’s intellectual heroes. It resonates more generally with the spiritual anxiety that all of the converts I have studied experienced as they confronted the religious liberty newly available to them in the early nineteenth century. Houellebecq’s account of François’s conversion, compared with that of Durtal/Huysmans, suggests that religious choices that were formerly authentic must now be regarded with sarcasm and irony. Carrère’s work holds out the possibility that conversion and disenchantment might still be the work of a troubled but sincere conscience.