Although those of us who live in western democracies argue passionately about the meaning of religious liberty, it is a right we take for granted. Of course, some of the current debates in the United States express alarm about threats to religious liberty coming from state regulation or, conversely, the overreach of religious communities that seek to impose their views on the broader society. In Europe the growing numbers of Muslims have made religious liberty a controversial issue, particularly in France, where the policy of laïcité, built on the restriction of religion to the private sphere, has led to laws restraining the display of religious identity in schools, on the street, and most recently, on beaches.1 Although participants in these debates differ widely in their particular understanding of religious liberty, the vast majority of them accept it as a fundamental right. This book tells one part of the story about how we became accustomed to living in a world where we can believe in and practice a religion of our own choice. It is beyond my capacity, and the capacity of any one person, to tell the whole story, but I propose that exploring religious liberty in France, and especially in Paris, in the aftermath of the French Revolution can illuminate some of the central dilemmas that individuals and societies face as they struggle to understand and apply what has been referred to as the “first freedom.”2
Debates about religious liberty often turn on the expression of religious beliefs in the public sphere, set against the limits that the state imposes to maintain public order. Do religious communities have the right to open churches for public worship, and to establish schools to educate their children within their religious traditions? Can symbols of religious identity be displayed on buildings, or on bodies, when these are in the public sphere? Conceived in this manner, freedom of religion is primarily a matter of the relationship between religious communities and the state.3 The issue of church-state relations is of central importance for any study of religious liberty in the modern world and will come up frequently in my account. But focusing on religious liberty as situated primarily within religious communities can veil another dimension of this right, as it plays out in the lives of individuals who decide to convert, to cross a religious boundary, to change their religious identities.4 Approaching religious liberty from the perspective of converts and conversions can bring more sharply into focus what Charles Taylor has defined as the essential characteristic of our secular age. Taylor rejects any simple sense of the modern era as one of religious decline and instead sees it as taking us “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”5
Religious conversions have long drawn the interest of memoirists, novelists, and scholars fascinated by the personal dramas of “turbulent souls,” from Paul and Augustine through contemporary tales of religious exploration and choice, such as those of Stephen Dubner and Emmanuel Carrère.6 An older tradition of conversion studies, represented by William James and Arthur Nock, emphasizes sudden turns and complete transformations in the lives of converts.7 Recent approaches suggest a more ambiguous process, as in Gauri Viswanathan’s argument that “interweaving and disentangling are the metaphors that most accurately describe the conversion experience, which meshes two worlds, two cultures, and two religions, only to unravel their various strands and cast upon each strand the estranged light of unfamiliarity.”8 From my perspective these approaches are not mutually exclusive, for the converts I study struggled with varying degrees of success to reconcile the clear choices presented to them by families and religious institutions with their own complex religious identities. As Lewis Rambo has proposed, conversion is best understood as a process rather than a single event, a move that needs to be understood from a variety of perspectives—psychological, social, and religious.9 Rambo has made some useful distinctions in his typology of conversions, which he breaks down according to the categories of apostasy (“the repudiation of a religious tradition”), intensification (“revitalized commitment to a faith”), affiliation (“the movement of an individual or group from no or minimal religious commitment to full involvement”), institutional transition (“change of an individual or group from one community to another within a major tradition”), and tradition transition (“movement of an individual or group from one major religious tradition to another”).10 We will observe all of these kinds of changes in the converts who will take up most of this book, and often we will see a single individual embodying several of these experiences, moving first within and then departing from a particular religious tradition. I would add that the converts I study end up in a more ambiguous position than typologies such as Rambo’s might suggest, an unsurprising result for a historical approach concerned with individuals in a particular time and place.
France is an especially interesting site for observing religious liberty as manifested in the lives of converts. After more than two decades of political and religious turmoil, France in 1814 adopted a constitutional system that endorsed religious liberty, which opened up new possibilities for individual religious choice. Religious liberty was also advancing elsewhere in this period: in the United States, where it was enshrined in state constitutions and the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights (1791), and in Great Britain, where the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 revoked the penal laws that restricted the property rights of Catholics and denied them the right to sit in Parliament.11 The Bourbon kings who returned in 1814 were thus part of a larger movement when they endorsed religious liberty, but at the same time they declared Catholicism the official state religion and supported a vigorous religious revival in which the Catholic Church sought to recover its position of religious primacy. This combination of Catholic revival and religious liberty produced heated debates about the relationship of church and state in this period, but it also raised perplexing questions for individuals who were struggling to achieve a coherent religious and social identity, searching for what Jan Goldstein refers to as a “post-revolutionary self.”12
The converts whose lives form the basis of this book include some well-known figures, such as Félicité Lamennais, George Sand, and Ernest Renan, as well as several who have left less of an impression in the contemporary world—the brothers Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne and the Russian diplomat Ivan Gagarin—though they achieved a certain notoriety in their day. All of them, however, left behind a rich store of materials that allow us to observe them as they made religious decisions that they and their contemporaries understood to be momentous. They were cosmopolitan figures, traveling widely and passionately engaged in the shifting relationships between religion, politics, and society not only in France but in Europe. None of the converts were native Parisians, but it is not coincidental that they often found themselves in the French capital, where they found the freedom to explore their religious choices.
Paris has been awarded its titles of “capital of the nineteenth century” and “capital of modernity” for its innovations in urban design and living and for its turbulent social history.13 But it was also a center for religious experimentation, where writers, musicians, political revolutionaries, socialists, and bohemians argued about art, life, and politics, and also about religion.14 To borrow again from Rambo’s vocabulary on conversion, Paris provided an unusually open context within which individuals faced religious crises and pursued quests that would satisfy their desire for lives that had some form of transcendent meaning.15 Unsurprisingly, the converts I have studied sometimes crossed paths, and even those who did not run into each other directly may have passed each other in the streets around the church of Saint-Sulpice, in the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Saint-Sulpice was where George Sand sought relief from a religious crisis, and where Ernest Renan preached his first sermon, just next door to the seminary where he first entertained his serious doubts about Catholic orthodoxy. During his time at the seminary Renan looked forward to a visit from the recently converted Alphonse Ratisbonne, which never materialized. Not far away to the west, on the rue Saint-Dominique, Madame Swetchine hosted at times the Ratisbonne brothers, Ivan Gagarin, and two close associates of Lamennais, Henri Lacordaire and the Count de Montalembert. She also assisted at some of the baptisms in the orphanage for Jewish girls established by Théodore Ratisbonne on the rue de Regard, a short walk from Saint-Sulpice and from her apartment. Lamennais, after he broke with Lacordaire and Montalembert, lived for a time nearby on the rue de Vaugirard. Dinner parties sometimes brought together these and other individuals from a variety of religious traditions in a convivial atmosphere that allowed for the free expression of their ideas. At a dinner given by Franz Liszt in 1835 the guest list included Félicité Lamennais, George Sand, the Baron d’Eckstein (a Protestant from a Jewish family who converted to Catholicism), the Saint-Simonian Emile Barrault, the poet Heinrich Heine (a German Jew who converted to Protestantism and who was sympathetic to Saint-Simonianism), the Catholic philosopher Pierre Ballanche, and Hermann Cohen, a fourteen-year-old Jewish piano prodigy who was later to convert to Catholicism.16 Ivan Gagarin, in a journal entry from 1838, described with enthusiasm a long conversation with Lamennais at a dinner hosted by the Baron d’Eckstein. Gagarin, soon to convert to Catholicism, was deeply impressed with Lamennais, who had recently left the church, admiring his “impartiality” and “spiritual irony” and his “lively sympathy for all the questions that face humanity.”17 With religious liberty, as with so many other issues, Paris plays a role of capital importance because it channeled concerns that affected all of Europe in the wake of the French Revolution.
Scholars who study conversions in other times and places offer both warnings and guidance over how we might interpret the testimony that comes in the form of narratives intended both as self-justification and as public statements designed to influence the religious choices of others. Keith Luria, in an astute examination of conversions in early modern France, argues skeptically that “we cannot assume that [conversion accounts] give us direct access to the personal experience of conversion.”18 In telling their stories Luria’s converts were following models that tell us more about the desire of Protestant and Catholic communities to distinguish themselves from each other than they do about an intimate spiritual transformation. Accepting the doctrines of a church as true, and submitting to its discipline, were at the center of these accounts. Doctrine and church authority continued to be burning issues for converts in the nineteenth century, but their stories emphasize as well the emotional struggles of the individual conscience, drawing on the romantic culture of self-exposure in the tradition of Rousseau’s Confessions. But the problem identified by Luria remains, for a heightened emotional atmosphere in a conversion narrative does not necessarily mean we are closer to a transparent reflection of religious transformation. In the case of my subjects we have a great deal of evidence beyond narratives intended for public consumption, including personal correspondence and private diaries, not to mention accounts by friends, family members, and journalists, but a similar hermeneutic suspicion might be directed at these texts, which can be seen as designed to construct, or reconstruct, a religious decision that seems always somehow out of reach.
Rather than despair at this problem of the fraught relationship between narrative and experience, I will approach the words of my subjects, and their colleagues, as indications of deeply felt but imperfectly grasped religious feelings and beliefs that they struggled to express. Their narratives might be understood as “emotives,” to borrow a term from William Reddy’s history of the emotions, a means for navigating the turbulent passage from one religious identity to another, expressing their freedom “not to make rational choices, but to undergo conversion experiences and life-course changes involving numerous contrasting, often incommensurable factors.”19 I am committed, along with my subjects, to using their words to try to get to their primordial religious experiences, knowing that the effort can never fully succeed. Karl Morrison makes this point nicely when he writes that “the challenge and reward of studying the idea of conversion and its history lie in the obscurity and incommunicability of the experience known metaphorically as conversion.”20 In taking this approach I hope, like Bruce Hindmarsh in his study of English evangelical conversion narratives, to balance trust and suspicion, to reject both a naïve reading of texts and a critique that would prevent us from seeing in their words the human beings who wrote them.21
As the work of Luria, Hindmarsh, and others suggests, the meaning of conversion shifts over time, reflecting the different religious, political, and social contexts that shape religious choice and identity. In the Middle Ages, for example, Karl Morrison has argued that “conversion” came to mean a long process “identified with penitential asceticism, suffering, and martyrdom,” practices institutionalized in monasticism and not necessarily associated with a dramatic moment of transformation, such as Paul experienced on the road to Damascus.22 In the early years of the Reformation, as sharp confessional differences emerged on matters of doctrine and ritual, Protestant converts made painful individual choices that “ended friendships, caused division between neighbors and kin, damaged relations with parents beyond repair, sometimes even caused rejection by a spouse or children.”23 We will observe similar scenes in the lives of the nineteenth-century converts I study, but played out against a very different political and religious background. Although the seeds of religious liberty were planted during the Reformation, Catholics and reformers generally looked toward a period when religious unity would be restored, when there would be no further need to choose. This was the principle established in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the basis for settling the religious wars in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which famously embraced the model of “cuius regio, eius religio” (whose realm, his religion), imagining a Europe in which kings would determine the religious identities of their subjects. We know in practice that religious minorities continued to exist in many states, including France, where a Huguenot minority was granted limited rights to practice by the Edict of Nantes (1598).24 We know as well that this apparent violation of “cuius regio” and its corollary of “one king, one law, one faith” was rectified, from the perspective of Catholics, by the revocation of Nantes in 1685, and the subsequent persecution of Protestants for much of the eighteenth century.25 In this context conversions to the state religion of Catholicism were sometimes encouraged, sometimes coerced, and it was difficult if not impossible to imagine a move away from the established church.
As we will see, converts struggled painfully over their religious identity in the nineteenth century, and in France the pull of the Catholic Church remained powerful. But they struggled in a context that gave them legal space for religious choices that did not previously exist, and in a cultural climate that encouraged them to reflect anew on what they believed, on how their religious values and commitments shaped their personal identities, family relations, and political loyalties. Conversion narratives thus offer us privileged access to the interplay between individuals and the world they both inhabit and interpret. I accept Hindmarsh’s argument that these accounts are particularly valuable because they reveal the “the explanatory potential of religious conversion and belief for our understanding of the human person as inveterate storyteller and self-biographer,” but with an important amendment.26 Religious motives work powerfully in all of the converts I study, but in some cases doubt wins out, a conclusion that does not seem to emerge from the narratives studied by Luria and Hindmarsh for early modern France and England, nor does it seem to be envisioned by the stages enumerated by Rambo. But if we extend “conversion narrative” to include “disenchantment narrative,” to borrow a term from David Hempton, it becomes capacious enough to cover my subjects, and the complex back-and-forth moves they made in the increasingly liberated religious atmosphere of the nineteenth century.27
Finally, I want to emphasize that although the converts I study were in many ways exceptional individuals, their stories fascinated and troubled both friends who corresponded with them in private and readers who learned about them in a variety of published texts. Some of this interest came from the dramatic or even melodramatic quality of their lives, which I hope will come through in my accounts of their conversions. But contemporaries were also drawn to these converts because their stories revealed an expanding range of religious choices and the ways in which these were linked to the ideologies and institutions that were being reconstructed in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In a sense, my interest in converts parallels that of their contemporaries, for like them I approach my subjects with a specific concern for the ways in which they played along and moved across religious borders.28 Conversions allow us to observe the shifting and problematic contours of religious life marked by pluralism, voluntarism, and experimentation that were on display in post-revolutionary France, and which continue to define our modern religious landscape.29
Chapter Outline
I open my book with two chapters that present the broad intellectual, political, and cultural contexts within which converts explored their religious choices. In chapter 1 I place the heated debate over the language of religious liberty employed in Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man within the history of this concept going back to the religious wars of the sixteenth century. Toleration and freedom of conscience were the terms most commonly used to defend the rights of religious minorities in early modern France, deployed against a state preoccupied with what it saw as the threat dissenters posed to domestic and international peace. During the eighteenth century discussion of this issue led beyond arguments about whether or not the monarchy should “tolerate” such worship to assertions that religious liberty was a fundamental right rather than a grant from a generous monarch. But even as the terms of the debate were expanded, religious liberty was still understood primarily as a communal right to worship, as seen in some of the major works of Montaigne, Bayle, Rousseau, and Voltaire. During the French Revolution conflict over religious liberty focused on the status of the Catholic Church, which faced both brutal repression when it was perceived to be an enemy of the new regime and competition from state-sponsored alternative liturgies.30 Individuals were sometimes faced with difficult choices, such as the clergy who had to decide whether or not to take an oath to accept the new constitutional arrangement between church and state.31 But the battle between the Catholic Church and the revolution meant that once again religious liberty was approached primarily as a collective rather than an individual right. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of the status of religious liberty within the constitutional system introduced by the charter granted by the Bourbons in 1814. Although church-state relations continued to be politically controversial, and the cultural authority of the Catholic Church was still an important force in French society, the charter as it was applied during the Restoration and July Monarchy provided a setting that allowed individuals to contemplate with increased self-consciousness and intensity the right to change a religious identity.
In chapter 2 I move from philosophical texts and constitutional structures to the world of literature and theater, and in particular to the revival of interest in the “wandering Jew,” a figure I take to be emblematic of the cultural anxiety that accompanied the enhanced understanding of religious liberty as an individual right. Eugène Sue’s enormously popular novel The Wandering Jew (Le Juif Errant, 1844–1845) is the most noteworthy example of the cultural resonance of Ahasvérus, forced to wander the world until Christ comes again, but he turns up as well in broadsheets, in plays, and on the operatic stage. I see the “wandering Jew” as set in a broader context of cultural anxiety over religious choice and identity, on display in the works of some of the most prominent authors and artists of the first half of the nineteenth century. The most popular opera on the Paris stage in the nineteenth century, Fromental Halévy’s La juive, concludes with the tragic death of a Jewish father and daughter who accept death rather than convert to Christianity. Taken together, this evidence suggests a cultural environment in which readers and audiences were fascinated by stories in which individuals made difficult choices about their religious identities, which brought them into painful conflicts with their families and communities, and with themselves.
In chapter 3 I begin considering the ways in which individuals confronted the possibilities for religious choice that they found in the constitutional and cultural setting of post-revolutionary France. I open with an account of the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne, a story that rivals La juive in its melodrama and fantastic plotline. In January 1842 Alphonse Ratisbonne, a young Jewish banker from Strasbourg, engaged to be married and known to dislike Christianity, was converted suddenly by what he claimed was a Marian apparition in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in Rome. Alphonse’s sudden conversion led to a family crisis and religious controversy, both of them centered in Paris. Following his conversion Alphonse collaborated with his brother Father Théodore Ratisbonne, whose own conversion in the 1820s had also created a public uproar, in founding the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion in 1844. The congregation, dedicated to the conversion of Jews, was at the center of a number of dramatic confrontations over conversions in Paris in the 1840s that drew the attention of the French public. Many of these converts were young girls from Jewish families unable to care for them. Their stories reveal the ways in which poverty and gender shaped the ways in which individuals confronted religious choices and constrained their experience of religious liberty. The story of the Ratisbonne brothers and the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion shows us both the personal struggles that accompanied decisions to cross a religious boundary and the public fascination with them, confirming the significance of the “wandering Jew” as a symbol for the cultural anxiety that accompanied the arrival of religious freedom.
In chapter 4 I turn to the circle of Catholics who gathered in the home of the Russian exile Madame Sophie Swetchine in the 1830s and 1840s on the rue Saint-Dominique, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Madame Swetchine was herself a convert, influenced as a young woman by Joseph de Maistre when he served in St. Petersburg as the Savoyard ambassador to Russia (1803–1817). After settling in Paris in the 1820s, she established herself as an important salonnière, serving as a bridge between French Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy. One of her guests, Ivan Gagarin, was a prominent Russian aristocrat and diplomat, preoccupied with the political and spiritual condition of Russia, and an important figure in the debates between the “Slavophiles” and “Westerners” that defined this period in Russian intellectual history. Gagarin’s conversion, finalized in the chapel of Madame Swetchine’s apartment in April 1842, was accompanied by a very difficult period of separation from his family and his career, a liminal state that came to an end with his entry into the Jesuits in August 1843. Deeply attached to Russia and bound by a sense of filial affection and obligation to his family, Gagarin was at the same time critical of the autocracy of Nicholas I (1825–1855) and alienated from the orthodox piety of his parents. In many ways the conversion of Ivan Gagarin resembles that of the Ratisbonne brothers, as he struggled to resolve competing claims of religious belief, family feeling, and national identity. But Gagarin’s conversion suggests more clearly the intellectual appeal Roman Catholicism could exercise in the post-revolutionary age, seen by him as a way of reconciling freedom and authority, Russia and the West. Gagarin found in Madame Swetchine’s salon a place of open-minded religious and political discussions in which tolerance for the opinions of non-Catholics was combined with a profound commitment to the authority of the Roman Church.
Catholicism could exert a powerful appeal in this period, but it could also drive people away, a process in which believers came first of all to doubt their faith and their allegiance to the church and then to make the painful choice to leave it and embrace a new set of principles. The decision to abandon Catholicism was another form of conversion, another way of taking advantage of newly available religious liberty. To consider this dimension my study will take up the lives and works of three prominent intellectuals, Félicité Lamennais (1782–1854), George Sand (1804–1876), and Ernest Renan (1823–1892). All of these figures left extensive accounts of their lives, memoirs that look back on their decisions, but also correspondence that allows us to observe them in the act of making their choices in relationship with families and friends and in dialogue with the social and religious issues of the day.
Félicité Lamennais is known for a career that brought him from a position defending Catholicism as the only possible source of legitimacy and order in the post-revolutionary world, to one in which he advocated the marriage of “God and Liberty” under the leadership of the pope, and finally to a violent attack on the church as an enemy of freedom, which led to an excommunication that riveted public attention in the 1830s. In chapter 5 I focus in particular on the crisis that developed following the condemnation of his ideas in the encyclical Mirari vos (1832). For the next five years Lamennais struggled to reconcile his Catholic faith and institutional commitment with his growing sense that the church had abandoned its historical role as he had discerned it—to stand for democratic rights in the face of political tyranny and social injustice. Although Lamennais at times wavered in the face of papal pressure, in 1834 and 1835 he moved toward and finally reached an unequivocal position in which his personal conscience trumped papal authority. In discussing Lamennais’s career I highlight his extensive correspondence with the Count Montalembert, a colleague who struggled with the same issues but who came to an opposite conclusion and ended by accepting church authority. In the end Lamennais came to understand religious liberty as a matter of individual conscience, while Montalembert embraced a definition that emphasized the collective rights of the Catholic community.
George Sand is known primarily as a novelist whose life and work make her an iconic figure for the history of feminism. But Sand was also one of the many in France drawn to Lamennais in support of his battle with the Catholic Church and his prophetic call for social justice based on religious principles. Using Sand’s novels, memoir, and correspondence I follow the story of her development from an agnostic upbringing by her unorthodox grandmother to a Catholic schoolgirl whose mystical experience in the college chapel led her to contemplate a religious vocation. As an adult Sand began pulling away from Catholicism at the same time as her marital troubles began, suggesting the connection between religious liberty and female emancipation. Sand’s choices, like those of Madame Swetchine, suggest how women as well as men were able to take advantage of individual religious liberty. But their decisions were made possible in part by their elite status, and in both cases they were guided at times by authoritative male religious figures. In leaving behind orthodox Catholicism Sand was drawn at first to the ideas and person of Lamennais but became even more enamored of the mystical religiosity of Pierre Leroux, who believed in the successive reincarnation of souls, constantly evolving toward spiritual and social perfection. Sand’s religious views coalesced in the 1830s around a belief in a God who calls for justice, a rejection of Catholicism and of religious institutions generally, a denial of an afterlife that would allow for eternal hellfire, and a conviction that all souls are on a path of spiritual progress.
Ernest Renan, one of the most prominent French intellectuals of the nineteenth century, is known primarily for his controversial The Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus), in which he denied the miracles of Christ and expressed a general skepticism about the supernatural. In my chapter on Renan I ponder the question of how a pious young man from Brittany, the most devout region in France, raised in a fervent Catholic family and treated with generosity and solicitude by his clerical mentors, could, in the 1840s, abandon a priestly vocation and, within three years, reject not only the dogmas of the church but belief in the supernatural. Like other converts I study, Renan’s religious choices involved family drama, as he struggled with guilt for disappointing his devout mother. But Renan’s “disenchantment narrative,” contained in his correspondence and critical writings from the period as well as in his memoir, emphasizes how religious choice might be based on a critical scrutiny of the Bible, and on a philosophical commitment to rational inquiry that rejected any appeal to the authority of the Catholic Church. Even while he moved away from Catholicism, however, Renan retained a deep affection for the clergy who were his first teachers and combined his rejection of church doctrine and authority with a profound regret for the Catholic world he had lost. By closing with his story, I bring back into the picture the sustained appeal of Catholicism and suggest the ambiguous quality of religious belief in an age of religious liberty.