Notes

Introduction

1.Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves; J. Scott, The Politics of the Veil; Winter, Hijab and the Republic; Alissa Rubin, “Fighting for the ‘Soul of France,’ More Towns Ban a Bathing Suit: The Burkini,” New York Times, August 17, 2016.

2.See, for example, the documentary film Lee Groberg produced for PBS in 2012, First Freedom.

3.This perspective dominates, for example, the discussion of religious liberty in the annual reports issued by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act passed by Congress in 1998. The 2016 report is available at http://www.uscirf.gov/reports-briefs/annual-report/2016-annual-report. Other works that emphasize the relationship between religious communities and the state include Hertzke, The Future of Religious Freedom; Gill, The Political Origins of Religious Liberty; J. Anderson, Religious Liberty in Transitional Societies; Kalanges, Religious Liberty in Western and Islamic Law. Kalanges, however, does take up the issue of conversion in Islam, 62–63, 93–96. For historical essays that emphasize religious liberty as the right of religious communities to practice without state interference, see Helmstadter, Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century; Liedtke and Wendehorst, The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews and Protestants. McGreevy emphasizes the collective dimension of religious liberty as crucial in American Catholicism in Catholicism and American Freedom. For recent overviews of debates about religious liberty in France and the United States, see Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves; S. Smith, The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom.

4.In approaching this issue through a series of linked biographical studies I have been influenced by Seigel, Between Cultures; Curtis, Civilizing Habits; Berenson, Heroes of Empire; Hempton, Evangelical Disenchantment; Depkat, “The Challenges of Biography.” Hollinger, Postethnic America, 120–121, offers a good example of how easy it is to take this “right of exit” for granted in an American context, when he uses the “widely accepted” freedom to change a religious identity as a model that might be adopted by ethno-racial communities. A survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2007 found that 28 percent of Americans have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion—or no religion at all. See “Faith in Flux,” revised February 2011, http://www.pewforum.org/2009/04/27/faith-in-flux/. The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, acknowledges this right as the starting point of its Article 18 on religious liberty: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” For suggestive remarks on individual and collective models of religious liberty, see B. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 239–245.

5.Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.

6.The phrase “turbulent souls” comes from Stephen Dubner’s memoir about the conversion of his parents from Judaism to Catholicism in the 1940s, and his own rediscovery of Judaism, Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family. Carrère, Le royaume, combines an account of his conversion to Catholicism in the 1990s, and his subsequent loss of faith, with a novelist’s interpretation of the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. For other examples of recent conversion stories, see McNight and Ondrey, Finding Faith, Losing Faith; Assouline, Les nouveaux convertis. For a study of a convert to Islam that touches on current anxieties about such choices, see Baker, The Convert.

7.James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; Nock, Conversion.

8.Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 4. A similar approach is taken by Segal, Paul the Convert, and Seigel, Between Cultures.

9.Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion; Jindra, A New Model of Religious Conversion; Rambo and Farhadian, The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, provides a comprehensive and cross-cultural review of the current scholarship on conversion.

10.Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 13–14. For similar typologies, see Hervieu-Léger, Le pèlerin et le converti, 120–125; and Baer, “History and Religious Conversion.”

11.For an overview of the issue in the history of the United States, see Waldman, Founding Faith; for a perspective that emphasizes the contested nature of the concept in early America, see Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Miller argues for the significance of Protestant doctrine in The Religious Roots of the First Amendment. For Catholic emancipation in Great Britain, see Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation.

12.Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self; Kroen, Politics and Theater; Brejon de Lavergnée and Tort, L’union du trône et de l’autel?; Bertier de Sauvigny, The Bourbon Restoration.

13.Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”; Harvey, Paris.

14.Martin-Fugier, Les romantiques, 1820–1848; Marrinan, Romantic Paris; Seigel, Bohemian Paris; Kramer, Threshold of a New World; Manuel, The Prophets of Paris.

15.Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, identifies seven discrete stages in his model: context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and consequences. While these categories are suggestive, as with Rambo’s typology of conversion, in the historical cases I study these stages often overlap and move backward as well as forward in time.

16.Cate, George Sand, 365.

17.Gagarine, Journal, 198–200.

18.Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 249. For a similar approach, see Hanlon, Confession and Community.

19.Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 123. Reddy defines an “emotive” as “a type of speech act . . . which both describes . . . and changes . . . the world, because emotional expression has an exploratory and self-altering effect on the activated thought material of emotion” (128).

20.Morrison, Understanding Conversion, 2.

21.Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 4; Hindmarsh, “Religious Conversion as Narrative and Autobiography.”

22.Morrison, Understanding Conversion, 14.

23.Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion, 3.

24.B. Kaplan, Divided by Faith; Luria, Sacred Boundaries.

25.Garrisson, L’ édit de Nantes; Strayer, Huguenots and Camisards.

26.Hindmarsh, “Religious Conversion as Narrative and Autobiography.”

27.Hempton, Evangelical Disenchantment.

28.For a recent example of how a study of converts can illuminate both individual religious choices and broader patterns of religious, political, and national identity, see Baer, “Muslim Encounters with Nazism and the Holocaust.” For France, Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France, explores the connections between converts and contexts. This theme was the organizing principle for academic conferences held at the University of Lyon II and the University of Bordeaux in December 2014 and March 2015, “Les convertis: Parcours religieux, parcours politiques (XVIe–XXIe siècles)”; the papers presented will be published by the Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux.

29.Kselman, “State and Religion.”

30.Aston, Religion and Revolution in France; Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture; Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution.

31.Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture.

1. From Toleration to Liberty

1.L’Ancien Moniteur, no. 46 (August 23–26, 1789): 377. The editors of a modern compilation of debates over the Declaration of the Rights of Man share the judgment of the Moniteur about the “violence of the debates” on this issue; Baecque, Schmale, and Vovelle, L’an I, 164–181, quotation from 171. Fauchois refers to the debates over Article 10 as “les plus conflictuels lors de l’élaboration de le Déclaration”; “La difficulté d’être libre,” 73. For a discussion that places Article 10 in the context of the broader debate over the declaration, see Birn, “Religious Toleration.” For the comparable but much less fraught consideration of religious liberty as defined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, see Munoz, “The Original Meaning of the Free Exercise Clause.”

2.Baecque, Schmale, and Vovelle, L’an I, 165.

3.Ibid., 164.

4.Ibid., 169.

5.Ibid., 181.

6.Ibid., 166–167.

7.Ibid., 176. Thomas Paine, defending the French constitution adopted by the Assembly in 1791, expressed the same point in The Rights of Man (1791): “Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance but the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.” Qtd. in Hampsher-Monk, The Impact of the French Revolution, 149.

8.For a review of the recent literature see Collins, “Redeeming the Enlightenment.” Collins identifies a split in the historiography on religious liberty between scholars who have emphasized the significance of philosophical and theological developments and those who more recently have focused on the practices of religious communities, which sought ways to accommodate each other. The more traditional approach is represented in Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West; and Kamen, The Rise of Toleration. Zagorin acknowledges the distinction between “liberty” and “tolerance” but argues that the two terms are nonetheless closely related historically and interpreted in similar ways in contemporary discourse. This leads him to use “religious toleration as also implying religious freedom in some measure” (7). Similarly, Kamen conflates the two terms in his opening sentence: “In the broadest sense, toleration can be understood to mean the concession of liberty to those who dissent in religion.” For my purposes maintaining a sharper distinction between the two concepts is preferable, because it will allow the subtle shifts in the meaning of religious liberty to emerge more clearly. In taking this position I follow the lead of Plongeron, “De la Réforme aux Lumières.” Plongeron targets in particular the argument of his teacher, the Jesuit historian and theologian Joseph Lecler, in Histoire de la tolérance, which aimed at linking the “toleration” that emerged during the Reformation with the “liberty” of the Enlightenment. Plongeron sees Lecler’s project as influenced by the ecumenical impulses that led to the Second Vatican Council. Treatments that emphasize practice over theory include Garrioch, The Huguenots of Paris; B. Kaplan, Divided by Faith; Luria, Sacred Boundaries; Hanlon, Confession and Community. For a comparative perspective, see Grell and Porter, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe. For essays on the medieval origins of toleration, see Laursen and Nederman, Beyond the Persecuting Society.

9.There is a vast literature on the history of religion during the French Revolution. For a recent overview, see Aston, Religion and Revolution in France; for a brief survey and bibliography, see Tackett, “The French Revolution and Religion to 1794.”

10.Plongeron, “De la Réforme aux Lumières”; Lecler, “Liberté de conscience”; Guggisberg, Lestringant, and Margolin, La liberté de conscience.

11.Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross; Holt, The French Wars of Religion.

12.Frame, Montaigne, 266–288.

13.Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 759–763. All quotations are drawn from this edition, checked against Montaigne, Les essais. M. Smith, Montaigne and Religious Liberty, 103–105, emphasizes the importance of this passage, noting that tolérance and liberté were both used “to designate the same policy: permission of the Reformed cult.” But Smith also argues that there was “a crucial difference between the two terms,” even while acknowledging that “there are problems with this distinction” because defenders of the reformed church were not always clear about the basis of their argument for religious liberty (35–36). In my view Smith reads back into the sixteenth century a distinction between these two terms that was not clear at the time and was still emerging during the debates of the revolution. Smith’s work is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the debates over religious liberty in the sixteenth century.

14.Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 759–760.

15.Ibid., 763.

16.Screech, in ibid., 759.

17.Ibid., 490.

18.Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:250; Lecler, “Liberté de conscience,” 383–394; M. Smith, Montaigne and Religious Liberty, 33–50.

19.B. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 142, quoting Henri IV’s adviser Pierre de Beloy defending the edict in the face of skepticism in the Paris Parlement.

20.Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:241–254. For the absence of a modern sense of toleration as cultural pluralism in the sixteenth century, see Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 344–350.

21.Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 721.

22.Rosen, “The Genius of Montaigne,” 51.

23.The conversion of Henri IV to Catholicism in 1593 offers a case study of these issues; see Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV; Rosa emphasizes the rational appeal of Catholic proselytism and the concern for individual salvation alongside more practical and political considerations in “The Conversion to Catholicism of the Prince de Tarente,” and “Il était possible aussi que cette conversion fût sincère.” See also Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, “La liberté de conscience.”

24.Article 6 of the edict also refers to the rights of conscience, declaring that Protestants will not be “compelled to do anything in religion contrary to their conscience” (astreints à faire chose pour le fait de la religion contre leur conscience). Elsewhere in the edict “liberté” refers to privileges granted by the king (Articles 3, 72) and to the liberation of prisoners held because of their beliefs (Article 73). For a full text of the edict, see Cottret, L’édit de Nantes, 361–384.

25.Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, x; Benedict, The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots, 282–283; Labrousse, Conscience et conviction, 243, 284; Bergin, The Politics of Religion, 27. Negroni, Intolérances, 44–50, calls attention to an anonymous pamphlet from 1599 that offers a positive interpretation of liberté de conscience, but this text seems to be an exception in the earlier period. Henri’s conversion back to Catholicism in 1593 provoked responses that both favored and condemned “freedom of conscience.” See Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV, 60–61, 142–143.

26.McManners, Church and Society, 2:565–588; Bergin, The Politics of Religion, 259–262; Strayer, Huguenots and Camisards, 193–194; Monahan, Let God Arise; Joutard, Les Camisards.

27.Luria, Sacred Boundaries; Hanlon, Confession and Community; Borello, “Entre tolérance et intolérance.”

28.Labrousse, Conscience et conviction, 148; Tannenbaum, Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary, 205–217.

29.For understanding Bayle’s thought I have profited especially from Labrousse, Pierre Bayle; Tannenbaum, Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary; Rex, “The Structure of the Commentaire philosophique”; Labrousse, Conscience et conviction, 148–208; Gros, Introduction, 7–44; Negroni, Intolérances, 136–168.

30.Bayle, Philosophical Commentary, 77. I have slightly amended quotes drawn from this translation for the sake of stylistic uniformity.

31.Ibid., 83.

32.Ibid., 196; Bayle, De la tolérance, 251–252.

33.Negroni, Intolérances, 140.

34.Israel, Enlightenment Contested.

35.Bayle, Philosophical Commentary, 243.

36.Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 151.

37.For a similar argument, see Galenkamp, “Locke and Bayle.”

38.Bayle’s ties to traditional ways of thinking show up as well in his commitment to monarchy and his failure to provide any recourse for those denied “freedom of conscience” other than an appeal to the king. See Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2:352.

39.Linton, “Citizenship and Religious Toleration,” 157–174.

40.Quoted in Strayer, Huguenots and Camisards, 96.

41.Benedict, The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots, 283.

42.Burson, “Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier.”

43.Bergier, “Liberté de Conscience.”

44.Bergier, “Tolérance, intolérance,” quote from 130. The editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française that appeared in the eighteenth century continued to attach pejorative connotations to their definitions of tolérance; see Merrick, Desacralization of the French Monarchy, 135.

45.Monahan, Let God Arise; Joutard, Les Camisards.

46.Bergeal, Protestantisme et tolérance, 65.

47.Ibid., 91–96.

48.Montesquieu defended a policy of tolérance in Lettres persanes (1721) and De l’esprit des lois (1748) but in the latter was careful to point out that “there is a great difference between tolerating and approving a religion.” Montesquieu’s understanding of the close relationship between religion and social order led him to propose that “when the state has the capacity to accept or not to accept a new religion, it ought not to establish it, but when it is established, it ought to tolerate it.” Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, 306–307. Adams (Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 61–73) sees Montesquieu as a “conservative” defender of minority rights who saw Catholicism as suited to the French monarchical state but who opposed violent repression and state coercion.

49.Garrioch, The Huguenots of Paris; Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion; McManners, Church and Society, 2:644–657.

50.Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance, 24. I have altered Harvey’s translation slightly, substituting “freedom of conscience” for his “freedom of thought” as a better rendering of liberté de conscience, the phrase used in the French text.

51.Bien, The Calas Affair; Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs; Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 211–228.

52.Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance, 3–13.

53.Neidleman notes the scarcity of Anglophone commentary on Rousseau’s religious writings in “Par le bon usage de ma liberté.” Scholars concerned with political theory have explored the paradoxical relationship between individual freedom and collective authority through an analysis of Rousseau’s “general will,” but the similar tension between individual religious liberty and civil religion has not drawn the same attention. For example, Cranston, The Noble Savage, 302–313; Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 342–354; Dent, Rousseau, 107–116, 134–152.

54.Mme de Warens had herself left Calvinism for Catholicism, apparently as a means of escaping from an unhappy marriage; Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 70–74. In 1754 Rousseau again formally changed his religion, reconverting to Protestantism in order to live in Geneva; see Rousseau, Confessions, 366–367; Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 246–247.

55.Rousseau, Confessions, 65–74.

56.Ibid., 67.

57.Rousseau, Emile, 156–157.

58.Ibid., 264–265.

59.Ibid., 267, 318–322.

60.Ibid., 266.

61.Ibid., 267.

62.In Confessions (92, 118) Rousseau identifies the “Savoyard Vicar” as a character derived from two priests he met after leaving the hostel in Turin, Fathers Gaime and Gatier. See also Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 342.

63.Rousseau, Emile, 269.

64.Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 358–359; Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 147–162; Cranston, The Noble Savage, 352–362.

65.Rousseau, Emile, 304.

66.Ibid., 312.

67.Ibid., 323.

68.Ibid., 326.

69.Ibid., 265–266.

70.Ibid., 326.

71.Ibid., 328.

72.Ibid., 329–330. Rousseau defended his positions on religious liberty against the attack of Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, in “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva, to Christophe de Beaumont” (1763).

73.Quotes are drawn from the translation in Rousseau, Rousseau’s Political Writings, 84–173.

74.Ibid., 169.

75.Ibid., 169–172.

76.Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 147–162.

77.Rousseau, cited in Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 356.

78.It might be possible to resolve this contradiction if we assume that the local religions the vicar advocates and the civil religions of The Social Contract were to be valued only in some reformed state, in which they would reflect the purity and simplicity of natural religion. In this reading they would be an idealized version of religious diversity, and not at all a description of the intolerant religions that Rousseau had personally experienced. Rousseau, while affirming the right of societies and families to provide a traditional religious education, never overtly disavows the right of the individual to convert. With some imagination, therefore, it is possible to see how Rousseau might have reconciled a position that advocated at the same time the religious freedom of the individual conscience, the right of fathers to raise children in their religions, and the right of the state to prescribe forms of public worship and punish those who refused to conform. Neidleman acknowledges this tension in “Par le bon usage de ma liberté,” 152–153, but sees it mitigated, though not eliminated, in his reading of Emile and The Social Contract, in which he sees Rousseau as “de-emphasizing religious doctrine and emphasizing personal piety.” From my perspective, the tensions in his thought illuminate the historical context that informed discussions of religion and liberty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

79.Jaucourt, “Liberté de conscience”; Romilly, “Tolérance.” For Jaucourt, a Protestant coeditor of the Encyclopédie, see Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 182–183; and Torrey, The Censoring of Diderot’s “Encyclopédie,” 96–106. Liberté de religion occurs only once in the Encyclopédie, referred to as a source of prosperity in the state of “Mariland.” Liberté religieuse occurs once as well, a policy that leads to population growth in the article “Population.”

80.“Conscience,” Encyclopédie.

81.Rousseau, Emile, 304.

82.McManners, Church and Society, 2:651–657; Strayer, Huguenots and Camisards, 441–502; Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 295–306; Malesherbes, Mémoire sur le mariage des protestans (1785); Malesherbes, Second mémoire sur le mariage des protestans (1786).

83.Van Kley, Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 154–155, 164–165, 341–343; Merrick, Desacralization of the French Monarchy, 135–164; O’Brien, “The Jansenist Campaign for Toleration.” The General Assembly of the Clergy opposed the edict as a contradiction of long-standing French policy and an endorsement of heresy; see Strayer, Huguenots and Camisards, 489–493.

84.Fauchois, “La difficulté d’être libre,” 71–72.

85.Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture, 19–20, 210–218; Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 263–272.

86.Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 172–193, 220–243; Vovelle, Religion et révolution. For the varying responses of the clergy to the revolution, see Byrnes, Priests of the French Revolution; and Cage, Unnatural Frenchmen.

87.Collard, Libertés publiques, 258–259. Desan has shown how ordinary French Catholics were able to call on their constitutional rights to defend their churches against revolutionary repression in Reclaiming the Sacred.

88.Décret sur la tolérance religieuse (1791); Raynal, Opinion d’un citoyen français sur la liberté religieuse (1792); Thorillon, Idées ou bases d’une nouvelle déclaration des droits de l’homme (1793). According to Timothy Tackett (Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture, 275–277) the law of May 7, 1791, was an attempt by the Constituent Assembly “to apply the principle of religious freedom to those supporting the refractory clergy,” a policy that would soon be abandoned under the pressure of war and the fears of a successful counterrevolution. For the debate over the decree of May 7, see Fauchois, “La difficulté d’être libre,” 94–99.

89.Histoire apologétique du comité ecclésiastique (1791), 349–350.

90.Amusemens de la toilette, 82.

91.An advanced search on Google Books (June 16, 2015) yielded the following numbers of occurrences for the specified terms Liberté religieuse/liberté de religion: 1750–1759 (415); 1760–1769 (1,579); 1770–1779 (1,922); 1780–1789 (3,230); 1790–1799 (2,360); Liberté des cultes/liberté du culte: 1750–1759 (101); 1760–1769 (92); 1770–1779 (120); 1780–1789 (505); 1790–1799 (8,050).

92.Grégoire, “Discours sur la liberté des cultes” (1795).

93.Boissy d’Anglas, Rapport sur la liberté des cultes (1795); Lalouette, La séparation des églises et de l’état, 47–50.

94.“Constitution du 5 Fructidor, An III.”

95.Hufton, “The Reconstruction of a Church, 1796–1801”; Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred; Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 279–295.

96.Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, 137.

97.Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, 1:408.

98.Recueil général des lois, décrets, ordonnances, 10:241. Napoleon also introduced the liberté des cultes as Article 62 in the constitution he promulgated during the “hundred days” of his return to France in 1815.

99.Le Concordat de 1801.

100.Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 321–330; Boudon, Napoléon et les cultes, 59–70, 195–198.

101.Code pénal de 1810.

102.Kroen, Politics and Theater; Brejon de Lavergnée and Tort, L’union du trône et de l’autel?; Rosenblatt, Liberal Values.

103.Rosanvallon, La monarchie impossible.

104.Pius VI, Quod aliquantum; Basile, Le droit à la liberté religieuse, 195–199. For clerical opposition to the declaration, see Fauchois, “La difficulté d’être libre,” 88–90.

105.Bonald, “ Réflexions philosophiques sur la tolérance des opinions”; McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 131–132.

106.Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 132–133.

107.Kroen, Politics and Theater, 110–116; Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 171–172.

108.Lalouette, La séparation des églises et de l’état, 102–108.

109.McCoy, “Unauthorized Religious Groups in France.”

110.See the dossier “Loire—Association formée à St. Etienne, sous le nom de Quaker,” and similar files in AN F7 6696.

111.For example, in February 2015 President François Hollande met publicly to mediate a dispute between the leaders of Jewish and Muslim communities. “Relations judéo-musulmanes, la mediation républicaine.”

112.Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 140; Dickey, “Constant and Religion.”

113.Constant, Ecrits politiques, 461.

114.Ibid., 479; Garsten, “Constant on the Religious Spirit of Liberalism.”

115.Constant, Ecrits politiques, 592–619.

116.Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 168–191; Constant, “Sur le projet de loi relative du sacrilège.”

117.See the print “La politique sous le joug religieux,” in Brejon de Lavergnée and Tort, L’union du trône et de l’autel?, between 86 and 87.

118.Lalouette, La séparation des églises et de l’état, 111–118; Koehler, “Modeling the Civic Nation.”

119.Vinet, Mémoire en faveur de la liberté des cultes (1826).

120.Ibid., 12. Subsequent writers who proposed this organic relationship between conscience and culte include Nachet, De la liberté religieuse en France (1830); Vervoort, De la liberté religieuse sous la Charte (1830); Simon, La liberté de conscience (1859). Bailleul made a similar point in a speech of 1826 to the National Assembly, Liberté des cultes (1826).

121.For the development of human rights during the Enlightenment and French Revolution, see Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. Hunt focuses on how the “inner logic” of arguments in favor of human rights led to their expansion. If Protestants deserved rights, for example, why not Jews, or women? From my perspective, the “inner logic” of rights involved not only extending their scope to additional groups but developing a closer and more intimate relationship between an individual and collective understanding of religious liberty.

122.Benke, Beyond Toleration, traces a similar process in North America in the late eighteenth century.

123.Ford, “Private Lives and Public Order”; Ford, Divided Houses.

124.Triomphe, “Repenser les limites du politique.”

125.Rohbacher, Tableau général des principales conversions; Bayssiere, Lettre à mes enfants au sujet de ma conversion; Pouget, Lettre d’un curé catholique. Pouget’s letter sparked a local controversy that pushed George Sand to articulate her ideas about religious liberty; see chapter 6.

126.Catholics also celebrated the conversion of Charles Louis de Haller, a minister from Berne whose writings in the first years of the nineteenth century addressed the need for a spiritual and political renewal in post-revolutionary Europe. By 1820 Haller had become convinced that the source of trouble in Europe was the Reformation, which, “in its principle, its methods, and its results, is image and precursor of the political revolution in our time; and my aversion for the latter has made me disgusted with the former.” In articulating this position, however, Haller defended the individual’s right to choose, without which Christianity would never have gained adherents in the first place. This right extended to his own children, free to choose their religion, and who might well find salvation as Protestants, as long as they acted in “good faith.” Haller, Lettre de M. Charles-Louis de Haller.

127.Rosanvallon, La monarchie impossible, 105–121; Lalouette, La séparation des églises et de l’état, 129–133. Jewish rabbis were made salaried officials by a law promulgated in February 1831; Lalouette, La séparation des églises et de l’état, 135–138.

128.Duverne, Plaidoyer de Me. Duverne; Mermilliod, Cour royale de Paris; Nachet, Liberté du mariage des prêtres; Lalouette, La séparation des églises et de l’état, 109–111. The dossier on “mariage des prêtres” in AN F19 5508 includes several similar cases indicating that the state would allow the marriage of those who had been ordained only if they were no longer active as priests after the Concordat of 1801. Arguments over the case of Dumonteil echo those from the Old Regime and the revolutionary era; see Cage, Unnatural Frenchmen.

129.M. Gronland, peintre-artiste, to minister of justice and cults, AN F 19 5505.

130.Dossiers on the monitoring and repression of “dissidentes et sectes diverses” can be found in AN F19 10926–10927; Delaborde, “Doctrine des juifs sur la haine des chrétiens.” Delaborde’s book includes nine mémoires judiciaires first published as pamphlets to defend the rights of Protestants in court cases.

131.“The Trials of the Saint-Simonians,” in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 179; Charléty, Histoire du Saint-Simonisme, 175–185.

132.Delaborde, “Affaire de Senneville,” 86–108; Lalouette, La séparation des églises de l’état, 149–152.

133.Petitions in favor of these churches and police surveillance of them can be found in the files on “Police des Cultes” for the July Monarchy, AN F 19 5744, 5745.

134.“Rapport fait à la Société Orientale sur le projet d’établissement d’un collège, d’une Mosqué et d’un cimetière Musulman,” May 22, 1846, in AN F19 10934.

135.Minister of foreign affairs to minister of justice and cults, January 28, 1847, AN F19 10934. Coller, Arab France, 54–55, notes the request for a “Harem-hospice” in Marseille during the Napoleonic regime, which was turned down, but makes no reference to any other proposal for a mosque in France.

136.“Observations de Mgr. l’archevêque de Paris sur un projet d’un nouveau règlement concernant l’exercice du culte dans les hôpitaux,” February 1845, Archives Historiques, Diocèse de Paris, 4rF7, vol. 1.

137.“Instructions—Tentatives de prosélytisme dans les hospices et hôpitaux,” Ministère de l’Intérieur (1846), Archives Départementales du Bas-Rhin, X 654. Other examples of state concern over proselytism are documented in AN F19 10096, 100101. Critics such as Jules Michelet also objected to pressure exerted by the Catholic clergy at the deathbeds of individuals in private homes; Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 100–101.

138.Portalis, La liberté de conscience, xiii–xiv.

139.Ibid., xxiii.

2. Religious Wandering in French Romantic Culture

1.Maguet, “Le développement du thème du Juif Errant,” 97. For a selection of broadsides, see “Le grand essor de l’image du Juif Errant en France,” in Sigal-Klagsbald, Le Juif Errant, 178–186; Nisard, Histoire des livres populaires, 1:553–578; Prioron-Pinelli, Le Juif Errant, 1:368–384.

2.Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 7.

3.Kriegel, “Le lancement de la légende.”

4.G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 16–21; Schmitt, “La genèse médiévale.”

5.G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 128–160; Knecht, “Le Juif Errant.”

6.G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 165–166; for examples, see Maguet, “Le développement du thème du Juif Errant,” 90–104.

7.See two versions of “Le vrai portrait du Juif Errant” from 1814 to 1816 and 1837 reproduced in Maguet, “Le développement du thème du Juif Errant,” 102–103.

8.Lewis, Le Jacobin espagnol; the online catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale lists five translations in 1797. For stage adaptations, see G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 178–180; Rouart, Le mythe du Juif Errant, 49–52; Prioron-Pinelli, Le Juif Errant, 1:379–381.

9.Knecht, Le mythe du Juif Errant, 137.

10.Caigniez, Le Juif Errant (1812); G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 201; Rouart, Le mythe du Juif Errant, 169–171.

11.Merville and de Mallian, Le Juif Errant (1834); Knecht, Le mythe du Juif Errant, 192–197; Rouart, Le mythe du Juif Errant, 171–174.

12.GSC, 2:824.

13.Hoog, “L’ami du peuple.”

14.G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 201–207; Rouart, Le mythe du Juif Errant, 219–220, 235–244. For a thorough discussion of the public reception and commercial success of the novel, see Adamowicz-Hariasz, Le Juif Errant.

15.Sue, Wandering Jew, 845–847.

16.Hoog, “L’ami du peuple”; Adamowicz-Hariasz, Le Juif Errant.

17.Quinet and Michelet, Les Jésuites (1843). Anti-Jesuitism as a central theme in French literature and politics is discussed in Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth; Leroy, Le mythe jésuite.

18.G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 231–235, 238–239; Knecht, Le mythe du Juif Errant, 237–253; Hoog, “L’ami du peuple.”

19.Sue, Wandering Jew, 190–192. Sue’s comment may have been based on a more pious atmosphere in the salons of Paris that emerged in the 1840s, as described in chapter 4.

20.Sue, Wandering Jew, 748, 754.

21.Ibid., 629–630.

22.Béranger, “Le Juif Errant.” The song is still performed, most often in a setting by Charles Gounod of 1861, as in the performance of Maurizio Guerra, Le Juif Errant.

23.G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 200–201, 228–231; Knecht, Le mythe du Juif Errant, 237–259.

24.Collin de Plancy, La légende du Juif Errant (1847); Charmon-Deutsch, “Visions of Hate,” 150–151.

25.Extracts of the poem appeared in Revue des Deux Mondes, October 1, 1833. For the full poem, see the facsimile of the 1834 edition published by Slatkine: Quinet, Ahasvérus.

26.Quinet, “Les tablettes du Juif Errant.” This first effort was influenced by Voltaire’s Candide in its satirical style and plot built around a journey. Vabre-Pradal, La dimension historique de l’homme, 13–30.

27.Magnin, “Ahasvérus et de la nature du génie poétique.”

28.G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 201–206; Crossley, Edgar Quinet, 29–32; Powers, Edgar Quinet, 73–77; Bénichou, Le temps des prophètes, 462–464. Sue, Wandering Jew, 83, acknowledged the influence of Quinet on his version of Ahasvérus.

29.Lèbre, “La génie des religions de M. Edgar Quinet,” 201.

30.Letter to the editor, Revue du Progrès Social, June 1834, 618, cited in Crossley, Edgar Quinet, 30.

31.Quinet, Ahasvérus, 337.

32.Ibid., 385. Shortly after this scene a character called “the lion” announces “the death of God,” anticipating Nietzsche’s announcement from later in the century. Ibid., 394.

33.Ibid., 507–527. Quinet’s suggestion that Ahasvérus might continue to live on in other worlds beyond this one resonates with the development of ideas about metempsychosis in this period. See Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 143–159; Sharp, Secular Spirituality.

34.Fromentin and Bataillard, Etude sur “l’Ahasvérus”; Wright, Eugène Fromentin, 67–76.

35.Fromentin and Bataillard, Etude sur “l’Ahasvérus,” 102–103.

36.Ibid., 147; Crossley, “Histoire et épopée romantique;” Ceri Crossley, preface to Quinet, Ahasvérus, i–xvi.

37.Quinet, Ahasvérus, 132–148.

38.Ibid., 503–504.

39.AN AJ 208 Opéra, “Le Juif Errant.” For a comprehensive study of the production and reception, see Prioron-Pinelli, Le Juif Errant.

40.Letellier, Meyerbeer Studies, 147; G. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 259; Conway, Jewry in Music, 221.

41.Scribe and de Saint Georges, Le Juif Errant (1853); the Wandering Jew continued to find others to represent him successfully, as in Gustave Doré’s famous set of prints, which appeared in 1856. Doré and Dupont, La légende du Juif Errant (1856). Doré’s images were published as illustrations of Dupont’s poem.

42.Jordan, Fromental Halévy, 62; Hallman, Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism.

43.Letellier, Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots.”

44.Fulcher, The Nation’s Image.

45.Conway, Jewry in Music, 216–217. For the significance of Scribe, see Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 244–246.

46.Espagne, Les juifs allemands, 85.

47.Bara, “La juive de Scribe et Halévy”; Moindrot, “Le geste et l’idéologie dans le grand opéra.” For full reports on the opera from eighteen Paris journals, see Leich-Galland, “La juive” (1835).

48.Conway, Jewry in Music, 211–222, 248–256; Hallman, Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism; Letellier, Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots.”

49.For recent productions, see, for New York, “La juive,” Metropolitan Opera Archives; for Paris, “La juive à l’Opéra Bastille,” Concert Classic; for Vienna, “Halévy’s La juive,” Vienna Opera Review. In all of these the role of Eléazar was played by Neil Shicoff, the son of a Brooklyn cantor who established a special relationship with the opera. Hallman, Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism, interprets La juive as an example of Voltairean anticlericalism; Lerner, “Jewish Identity and French Opera,” sees La juive as an attempt to reconcile individual rights with a collective Jewish identity. Some Catholic reviewers were critical of the treatment of the church, but it was in general a critical as well as a popular success; Leich-Galland, “La juive” (1835).

50.Halévy, La juive, includes the full libretto.

51.For a performance by Neil Shicoff, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wUP07DVq9E.

52.Portalis, La liberté de conscience et le statut religieux, xvii.

53.Gregory XVI, Summo iugiter studio; Gregory XVI, Quas vetros. For press clippings and correspondence critical of the papal prohibitions, see the dossier on mariages mixtes in AN F19 5505.

54.Thureau-Dangin, Histoire de la monarchie de juillet, 3:189–204; Price, The Perilous Crown, 272.

55.Pfalz, A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King, 5–6, 71, 88, 120, 161; Van der Cruysse, Madame Palatine, 123–134.

56.Letessier, introduction, xxix–xxx; Berchet, Chateaubriand, 332; Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre tombe, 1:767–772; Guégan, “De Chateaubriand à Girodet.” Chateaubriand wrote Atala, René, and La génie du christianisme after his own conversion to Catholicism following his attachment to the Enlightenment, a move also made by Jean-François de La Harpe, who exerted substantial influence on his younger colleague; see Fumaroli, Chateaubriand, 367–371.

57.Lyons, “Audience for Romanticism.” Ivanhoe would also have been included in the eight editions of Scott’s complete works that appeared in France during this period.

58.W. Scott, Ivanhoe, 466.

59.Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 37–73; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 102–116.

60.Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 46.

61.Foa, La juive (1835), 1:41. In a later story, “Billette,” published in 1845, Foa pursues the theme of religious difference between Christians and Jews by having her heroine, a young woman of the thirteenth century, convert and marry a Christian in order to save her father from a death sentence. But this tale does not end happily either, as Billette’s father is executed despite her conversion, the result of duplicitous Christians who covet his wealth. Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 69–71. Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 109, writes that although Foa draws on anti-Jewish stereotypes in the novel, she also “depicts Judaism as a rich culture with beautiful and virtuous religious practices and beliefs.”

62.Eugénie Foa to Théodore Ratisbonne, 1845, ANDS, 2A1.

63.Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 45.

64.Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 106.

65.“Chronique Dramatique”; Dandrey, “Polyeucte à la scène.”

66.Corneille, Polyeucte, 85.

67.Ibid., 111–120 (act 4, scenes 3–5); 127–136 (act 5, scenes 2–3).

68.Ibid., 138. For translations I have relied on Corneille, Chief Plays of Corneille, 219–274, quote from 271.

69.Corneille, Polyeucte, 140; Corneille, Chief Plays of Corneille, 273.

70.Racine, Esther, 269. For translations I have used Racine, The Complete Plays of Racine, 2:303–370; quote from 323.

71.Brownstein, Tragic Muse; Hamache, “Les juifs dans les arts dramatiques”; Hoog, Rachel; Hoog, “La marge, l’exemple et l’exception”; Dandrey, “Polyeucte à la scène,” 166. According to Dandrey, Polyeucte had been ignored for more than two decades before its performance in 1840. Polyeucte was also the basis for Donizetti’s opera Les martyres, which had its Paris premiere in 1840.

72.Brownstein, Tragic Muse, 135. Jules Janin, the leading critic of the day, and generally a promoter of Rachel’s career, wrote that her Jewish identity made her an inappropriate instrument for Esther, a play written for Catholic schoolgirls of the seventeenth century. Delphine de Girardin, whose “lettres parisiennes” were a popular feature in the widely read and influential paper La Presse, saw Rachel’s success as reflecting the values of national solidarity across religious lines. See Lerner, “Jewish Identity and French Opera,” 276–277.

73.Brownstein, Tragic Muse, 25, 51, 75, 87, 129. In 1843 Rachel played another Jewish heroine in Delphine de Girardin’s Judith, in which the heroine beheads the Babylonian general Holophernes. Girardin’s play is critical of Phédyme, a captured princess who accepts the Babylonian gods rather than those of her own people; see Lerner, “Jewish Identity and French Opera,” 276–278.

74.Hoog, “La marge, l’exemple et l’exception,” 96; Rachel also publicly criticized the conversion to Catholicism of the Jewish writer Eugène Guinot; see Hamache, “Les juifs dans les arts dramatiques,” 130.

75.Maczka, “La ‘belle juive’”; Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 92–99, 113–120.

76.From a letter of Heine to Rahel Varnhagen, cited in Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 155.

77.Sasson, “The Dying Poet: Scenarios of a Christianized Heine,” 316.

78.For biographical details I have drawn on Sammons, Heinrich Heine; Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy; Kramer, Threshold of a New World, 58–119. For a discussion of Heine’s shifting religious identities, see Joskowicz, “Heinrich Heine’s Transparent Masks.” For Heine’s references to the “Wandering Jew,” see Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 161–162, 207, 574, 576.

79.Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 108.

80.Elon, The Pity of It All, 65–101, quote from 82; Hertz, How Jews Became Germans.

81.Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy; Holub, “Heine’s Conversion”; Holub, “Troubled Apostate”; Joskowicz, “Heinrich Heine’s Transparent Masks.” Prior converts in Germany were similarly troubled, according to Carlebach, Divided Souls, 88–123.

82.Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 15; Holub, “Heine’s Conversion,” 286.

83.Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 14–16.

84.Heine, “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” 150. This essay was published along with “The Romantic School” as De l’Allemagne (1836). Joskowicz, “Heinrich Heine’s Transparent Masks,” argues that Heine used Protestantism as a basis for attacking Catholicism as politically and socially retrograde without ever accepting its doctrinal claims.

85.Heine, “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” 146–147.

86.Kramer, Threshold of a New World, 87–91; Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 164; Espagne, Les juifs allemands, 111–116; Graetz, Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 110–142; Davies, Emile and Isaac Pereire; Ratcliffe, “Saint-Simonism and Messianism.”

87.Heine, “The Romantic School,” 35; see also Heine, “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” 153.

88.I borrow this characterization from Joskowicz, “Heinrich Heine’s Transparent Masks.”

89.Heine, Ludwig Börne, 9–10; Elon, The Pity of It All, 101–148.

90.Heine, “Gods in Exile.” This essay, some of it drafted in 1836, was first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1853.

91.Heine, “The Romantic School,” 23, 71–75.

92.Heine, Ludwig Börne, 21–22.

93.An early indication of Heine’s return to Judaism might be seen in his response to the Damascus affair of 1840, when he defended Jews against the false charge of murdering Christians to use their blood for Jewish rituals. Florence, Blood Libel. The Damascus affair was also the occasion for Heine’s return to a story he had begun in the 1820s, “The Rabbi of Bacharach,” published in 1840, which recounts a murderous antisemitic episode from medieval Germany and includes sympathetic portraits of Jewish life and ritual as well as parodic material that satirizes Jews; Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 383–401.

94.Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 305–310; Pawel, The Poet Dying; Holub, “Hei-ne’s Conversion.”

95.Heine, postscript to Romanzero, in Heine, Heinrich Heine, 424–426.

96.Heine, “Jehuda ben Halevy”; for extended analyses of the poem, see Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 561–591; Goetschel, “Rhyming History.”

97.The character of the “schlemiel” first emerged in the Yiddish theater in the 1790s; see Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 107–138.

98.Heine, “Jehuda ben Halevy,” 105–107.

99.Heine, “Disputation,” cited in Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 598.

100.“Testament,” in Heine, The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, 497–501. The Jewish community welcomed the news of Heine’s return, to judge by the response in the Alliance Israélite, November 1854, 126–127.

101.Heine, “Les aveux d’un poète,” 1169–1170. For analyses of this text, see Holub, “Heine’s Conversion”; Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 613–629. Neither Holub nor Prawer deals with Heine’s fantasy of a conversion to Catholicism.

102.Heine, “Les aveux d’un poète,” 1185.

103.Ibid., 1195–1196.

104.Ibid., 1202–1204.

105.Holub, “Heine’s Conversion,” 283, 291.

3. Prodigal Sons and Daughters?

1.This account is drawn primarily from letters published by Théodore de Bussières and Alphonse de Ratisbonne in early 1842: Bussières, Relation de la conversion de M. A-M. Ratisbonne. Ratisbonne’s letter also appeared separately as M. Ratisbonne, Conversion de M. Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne. The two letters were printed frequently, with editions in at least fourteen cities in the years immediately following the conversion; see volume 10 of the Catalogue de l’histoire de France, ln. 27, nos. 17008–17025, 171. They appeared as well in Aladel, Notice historique, which was reprinted several times throughout the century. For a modern edition of these texts, see Guitton, La conversion de Ratisbonne. The published accounts, however, leave out some details that can be found in the official investigation of the miracle conducted by Roman Church officials in February and March 1842. A typescript of these interviews can be found in ANDS, 2A3. Alphonse Ratisbonne’s conversion was treated extensively in one of the best-selling works of the nineteenth century, Craven, Le récit d’une soeur, 2: 307–309; see Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 160. For a recent scholarly account, see Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 54–63. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 181–83, cites the case of Alphonse Ratisbonne as “the most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am acquainted.” For an approach that sees the conversions of both Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne from a psychological perspective that emphasizes Jewish self-hatred, see Isser and Schwartz, The History of Conversion and Contemporary Cults.

2.Jews in Rome had been forced back into the ghetto following the restoration of the Papal States in 1814 and were subjected to intense proselytism and in some cases forced baptisms during this period. Ratisbonne’s conversion occurred in a period when “baptisms of Jews were a major feature of one of Rome’s most sacred annual ceremonies, the celebration of the eve of Easter Sunday in the Pope’s cathedral as bishop of Rome, St. John Lateran.” Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews, 42.

3.Dupanloup figures as well in the conversion of Ernest Renan; see chapter 7.

4.Dufriche-Desgenettes, Annales de l’Archconfrérie, 52; T. Ratisbonne, Memoirs, 86.

5.Harris, Lourdes; Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies; Blackbourn, Marpingen.

6.Laurentin, Alphonse Ratisbonne, vie authentique, 129–130.

7.M. Ratisbonne, Conversion de M. Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, 30.

8.Other prominent Jewish converts to Catholicism include François Libermann (1802–1852), the son of an Alsatian rabbi who became a Catholic priest and founded a religious order dedicated to the conversion of former slaves in the French colonies, and Hermann Cohen (1821–1871), a piano prodigy who moved from Hamburg to Paris in 1834, where he was a student of Franz Liszt and became acquainted with Lamennais and George Sand. Baptized in the Chapel of our Lady of Sion in 1847, Cohen later joined the Carmelites and preached throughout Europe in the 1850s and 1860s. See Coulon and Brasseur, Libermann, 1802–1852; Sylvain, Vie du R. P. Hermann.

9.Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 122–130.

10.About forty thousand Jews lived in France at the time of the French Revolution. There was also a very small community of Jews in Paris, which would become the center of the Jewish population in the course of the nineteenth century. See Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 1–15; Sjakowski, “The Demographic Aspects of Jewish Emancipation in France.”

11.Clermont-Tonnerre, “Debate on the Eligibility of Jews for Citizenship”; Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 24–35; Graetz, Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 20–29; Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 161–165.

12.Berkovitz, Rites and Passages, 144–157; Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire, 56–77.

13.Ayoun, Les juifs de France, 165.

14.Ibid., 166; Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 42; Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, 79–80.

15.Birnbaum, L’aigle et la synagogue, 110–152; Schechter, “A Festival of the Law”; Berkovitz, Rites and Passages, 121–137; Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, 77–84; Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 201–205, 220–226; Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 41–44; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 30–39; Graetz, Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 30–39. For the historiographical debate over Napoleonic policy toward the Jews, see Birnbaum, L’aigle et la synagogue, 24–46, 157–159.

16.Ayoun, Les juifs de France, 207–209.

17.Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry; Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 44–46; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 56–70; Ayoun, Les juifs de France, 203–207; Birnbaum, L’aigle et la synagogue, 154–157.

18.Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 51–56.

19.Bonald, “Sur les juifs.” On Bonald, see Birnbaum, L’aigle et la synagogue, 99–104; Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 27–31.

20.Amson, Adolphe Crémieux; Ferguson, The House of Rothschild; Graetz, Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 41–78; Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 53–76.

21.Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 79–84, 112–114.

22.Haus, Challenges of Equality.

23.Simon-Nahum, La cité investée, 73–78, 87–90; Espagne, Les juifs allemands, 36–37, 207–208.

24.Espagne, Les juifs allemands, 29–33, 193–196; Simon-Nahum, La cité investée, 50–51, 56–60, 91–99. In a letter to his brother-in-law in 1832 reflecting on his professional opportunities, Munk claimed that “in France religion makes no difference,” an exaggeration that nonetheless reveals his sense of the relative freedom of Jews in France. See Simon-Nahum, La cité investée, 56.

25.Graetz, Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 80–83; Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 128–154.

26.Florence, Blood Libel; Frankel, The Damascus Affair; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 120–126; Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 99–113.

27.“Doctrine des juifs sur la haine des chrétiens,” L’Univers. For similar reactions in both the Catholic and secular press, see Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 102–107.

28.Todorov, On Human Diversity.

29.Maistre, “Lettre à une dame protestante.” For other editions, see Saquin, “Les conversions protestantes.”

30.Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:64.

31.Reddy, The Invisible Code, 7. According to Corbin, “Backstage,” 566, nineteenth-century bourgeois families closed ranks in order to hide any skeletons in the closet: “To compensate for the absolute ban on leaks to outsiders, the family endlessly ruminated upon its own misfortunes; this interminable private discussion reduced the temptation of public avowal.”

32.L’Ami de la Religion, March 29, 1823, 218; April 2, 1823, 229–230; August 6, 1825, 399–400; Chevé, Dictionnaire des conversions, 1135–1156.

33.Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 29–53. Drach repeats much of the autobiographical material from this early work in De l’harmonie, 1:33–71; see also Chevé, Dictionnaire des conversions, 495–515; Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 49–52. For an extended treatment, see Catrice, L’harmonie. Catrice must be read with caution, however, insofar as he accepts Drach’s own explanation and adapts in general a positive view of his life and work. See also Kalman, “The Unyielding Wall.” For a critical account of Drach’s conversion from a Jewish perspective, see Klein, “Mauvais juif, mauvais chrétien.” For a more generous view of Drach from a Jewish perspective, see Landau, “David Paul Drach.”

34.Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 34, Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:42.

35.Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 50.

36.Drach and Sacy were frequent correspondents on scholarly issues in the 1830s, when Drach was in Rome. Archivio Storico “de Propaganda Fide,” Rome, Miscelleanea Drach.

37.Catrice, L’harmonie, 108, 147.

38.Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 13–26. For Drach’s use of the Talmud, see Drach, Deuxième lettre d’un rabbin converti, 2.

39.Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 28.

40.Ibid., 36–37; Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:47–50.

41.Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:66–70.

42.Meyer, Response to Modernity, 164–171; Berkovitz, Rites and Passages, 174–203.

43.Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, 128–149.

44.Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 51–52.

45.Ibid., 46.

46.Landau, “David Paul Drach.”

47.Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 118–122, offers useful comments on how “emotives” (which from my perspective include conversion narratives) are used as a way of coordinating goals that come into conflict with each other.

48.For the most detailed account of these events, see Catrice, L’harmonie, 202–239.

49.For the help given to Drach by the French government, see AN, F7 9430, dossier 14314.

50.AN, F7 9430, 14314, letters of minister of interior to prefect of police, December 4, 1824, March 24, 1825.

51.For Drach’s description of these events, see Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 1–53.

52.Catrice, “L’orientaliste Paul Drach.”

53.Drach, Relation de la conversion de M. Hyacinthe Deutz, 10.

54.Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 75–85; Landau, “Le cas étrange de Simon Deutz.”

55.For the text of Hugo’s poem, see Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 197–199.

56.“Lettre adressée à divers journaux de Paris par le chevalier P.L.B. Drach au sujet de Simon Deutz,” L’Ami de la Religion, December 13, 1832, 302–304. In one of the first reports of Deutz’s betrayal L’Ami de la Religion confused Deutz with Drach, who was identified as the culprit. See Catrice, L’harmonie, 443–444.

57.Drach addressed his three letters to the Israélites of 1825, 1827, and 1833 to his “dear brothers.” The phrase “teaching of contempt” comes from the work of Jules Isaac on the Christian roots of antisemitism. Isaac, L’enseignement du mépris.

58.Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:27; see also Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 49–50.

59.Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:79. For Drach’s collaboration with one of the creators of modern French antisemitism, Henri de Gougenot des Mousseaux, see Catrice, L’harmonie, 562–577.

60.See, for example, the ode Drach wrote for the elevation of Gregory XVI to the papacy, Psaume de David.

61.Drach, De l’harmonie. For Drach’s letters seeking honors, see the Archivio Storico “de Propaganda Fide,” Rome, Miscelleanea Drach, 250, 258, 512, 611, 603, 607, 613, 615, 616.

62.Archivio Storico “de Propaganda Fide,” Rome, Miscelleanea Drach, 55.

63.Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:1–3. The insistence that in converting to Catholicism they were not abandoning the religion of his families was a theme also developed by Protestant converts to Catholicism in the 1820s. Sacquin, “Les conversions protestantes.”

64.Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:67.

65.Boys, “Sisters of Sion”; Delpech, Sur les juifs, 341–348.

66.Poupard, L’abbé Louis Bautain, 179–181.

67.Ratisbonne narrates his conversion in a “Notice” that appeared as an introduction to Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1: xxxiii–lxii. Isidore Goeschler and Jules Lewel, who were also converted to Catholicism by the teaching of Bautain, published their conversion accounts in the same volume, 1:lxiii–cxviii. These texts appeared also in Chevé, Dictionnaire des conversions, 692–710, 856–868, 1117–1135.

68.For Bautain and Ratisbonne, see Kselman, “The Bautain Circle”; Poupard, L’abbé Louis Bautain (Paris: Desclée, 1961), 72, 86–97, 179–181; Fliche, Mlle Louise Humann. Isser and Schwartz have interpreted Théodore Ratisbonne’s conversion as a result of his struggle for “ego identity” and his “repressed anger” at the role chosen for him by his family. See their essay “Charismatic Leadership.” Bautain’s circle included Alphonse Gratry, who reestablished the Congregation of the Oratory in France, and Henri Bonnechose, who subsequently became the cardinal archbishop of Rouen; Laplanche, Dictionnaire du monde religieux, 81–82, 296–297; Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 191–203.

69.T. Ratisbonne, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:xxxix–xl. In his memoirs, dictated to the superior of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, Mère Benedicta, in 1882–1883, Ratisbonne repeats much of what he had written in his “Notice” of 1835 about the effect of Bautain’s teaching. But in the memoirs he goes on to describe the subsequent break with his master, whom he describes as an unfeeling authoritarian; Ratisbonne makes no effort to reconcile these different views of Bautain. T. Ratisbonne, Memoirs. I thank Sr. Audrey Doetz for making this volume available to me.

70.Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:43.

71.Ibid., 1:44–46.

72.Ibid., 1:16.

73.T. Ratisbonne, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:xliii.

74.Ibid., liii–liv. Isidore Goeschler describes similar family scenes. At one point his mother surprised him in his room at the seminary at Molsheim and reproached him: “You’ve left me Isidore! Isidore, I have no more son! Isidore, why aren’t you still my son?” Goeschler insists in his narrative that “I was still her son” and concludes the passage by praying that she might “find her son again in the heart of the One who every day asks for your salvation and happiness.” Goeschler, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:lxxiv–lxxvi.

75.T. Ratisbonne, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:lii.

76.Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 127. Although Bautain’s work differs in important ways from the religious writings of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, and Maistre, his approach to Christianity was nonetheless part of a vigorous revival in Catholic thinking during the Restoration; Reardon goes so far as to refer to Bautain as a “a French Newman.” Lamennais, however, was critical of the Bautain circle in 1830 because he suspected it was influenced by the Gallicanism of Bishop Le Pappe de Trévern. Lamennais was willing to invoke the Jewish background of Bautain’s followers in making his attack. See Leuillot, L’Alsace au début du XIXe siècle, 3:88–89.

77.Bautain’s Philosophie du christianisme was criticized at length in L’Ami de la Religion, the semiofficial voice of the French episcopacy. See L’Ami de la Religion, February 27, 1835, 785–789; March 12, 1835, 141–143; March 14, 1835, 173–178.

78.For the controversy over Bautain’s theology, see Poupard, L’abbé Louis Bautain, 171–226. This suspicion of the authenticity of Jewish conversion was common as well in medieval Europe. See Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 142–144.

79.Curé Schir to bishop, October 9, 1834, Archives Départementales du Bas Rhin, I V 433 (Affaire Bautain). The clergy from the parish of Haguenau, which included a substantial population of Jews, responded by condemning the “fideism” of Bautain but arguing at great length that the Talmud could be used as part of a rational argument in favor of Christianity, a position that seems likely to have been influenced by a reading of the work of David Drach; clergy of Haguenau to bishop, October 29, 1834, Archives Départementales du Bas Rhin, I V 433 (Affaire Bautain). The “unyielding wall” was a metaphor commonly used by Catholics to describe the relationship between Christians and Jews; see Kalman, “The Unyielding Wall.”

80.T. Ratisbonne, Eclaircissements sur l’enseignement de M. Bautain, 50. Jules Lewel, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:cxvii, also refers to himself and his friends as “descendants of Abraham, father of believers.”

81.Cited in Poupard, L’abbé Louis Bautain, 187.

82.T. Ratisbonne, Essai sur l’éducation morale.

83.T. Ratisbonne, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:lx.

84.Laurentin, Alphonse Ratisbonne, vie authentique, 122. Laurentin cites these letters extensively on 111–114, 119–123; Alphonse expressed his concern for his family, and his hope for their conversion, in letters to Théodore of February 4 and February 15, 1842, in ANDS, 2A3.

85.Laurentin, Alphonse Ratisbonne, vie authentique, 129.

86.Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 59. A manuscript copy of Flore’s letter of February 14 can be found in ANDS, 2A3.

87.Alphonse-Marie Ratisbonne to Père de Ravignan, June 14, 1842, AJPF, dossier Ratisbonne. The substitution of a “spiritual” family for the “natural” family is a central theme in the wave of conversions that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as studied by Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France.

88.Laurentin, Alphonse Ratisbonne, vie authentique, 121.

89.Kselman, “Social Reform and Religious Conversion in French Judaism.”

90.Laurentin, Alphonse Ratisbonne, vie authentique, 179.

91.Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 89.

92.“Lettre collective adressée à la communauté des Dames de l’œuvre du Catéchumenat,” Correspondance de Théodore Ratisbonne, April 30, 1845, ANDS.

93.“Souvenirs des instructions de M. l’abbé Ratisbonne à St. Philippe du Roule, Carême 1847,” Archives Historiques, Diocèse de Paris, 2C. For the shifting views about the possibility of salvation, see Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, 84–88.

94.Ratisbonne, Prières pour la conversion des juifs. See also the devotional material in ANDS, 1L1–2.

95.[Mère Bénédicta], Le très révérend Marie-Théodore Ratisbonne, 2:275–291.

96.Ibid., 1:335–355.

97.For a more detailed treatment, see Kselman, “Turbulent Souls in Modern France.” See also Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 71–75; Joskowicz, “The Priest, the Woman, and the Jewish Family,” 442–447.

98.Archives Israélites 6 (1845): 453–463; Le National, February 23, 1845; Le Constitutionnel, February 24, 1845; L’Univers, March 4, 1845.

99.Archives Israélites 6 (1845): 310.

100.Ibid., 456.

101.Ibid., 309.

102.Ibid., 467.

103.Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, 467.

104.Terquem, Huitième lettre, 13.

105.Savart, “Pour une sociologie de la ferveur religieuse: L’Archconfrérie de Notre-Dame-des-Victoires,” 823–844; Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France, 166–169.

106.[Mère Bénédicta], Le très révérend Marie-Théodore Ratisbonne, 1:230–231.

107.Ibid., 1:277–278.

108.“Baptêmes conférés dans la Chapelle de la Providence,” ANDS, 2A1. The early history of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion is narrated in “Aux Origines de Sion,” ANDS, 2A1.

109.“Baptêmes conférés dans la Chapelle de la Providence,” ANDS, 2A1.

110.L’Ami de la Religion, July 27, 1843, 182–183; “Les journaux catholiques et le président du Consistoire Central,” Archives Israélites 4 (1843): 465–466.

111.Archives Israélites 6 (1845): 697–698.

112.“Conversion et baptême de Madame Eugénie Foa, née Rodrigues Gradis, le 20 janvier 1846,” ANDS, 2A1.

113.Between 1840 and 1849, 63 of 107 Jewish converts recorded on the register of “abjurations” in the Paris episcopal archives were women. These numbers are drawn from Joskowicz, “The Priest, the Woman, and the Jewish Family,” 89, based on a recent review of the Paris episcopal archives. In my article “Turbulent Souls,” 89, I apparently undercounted the total number of conversions, but the percentage of female conversion that I claimed for this period (55 percent) is close to Joskowicz’s enumeration (59 percent). I am grateful to Professor Joskowicz for alerting me to his more accurate review of the dossier on “abjurations.”

114.ANDS, 2A1. Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews, 43, emphasizes the worldly motives that led Jews to the house of Catechumens in Rome. Jews in Rome lived under a regime that denied them the civil rights they enjoyed in France, and in Paris, further enhancing the positive consequences that would follow from baptism.

115.The power exercised by religious congregations over their female members also created anxiety beyond the Jewish community. See Ford, Divided Houses, 72–93.

116.Files on the Olmer, Worms, and Franck families, ANDS, 2A1.

117.File on Boumsell, ANDS, 2A1.

118.Letters of Sister Véronique to Sister Philomène, ANDS, 3J16.

119.“Lettre addressée à Notre Père par Mère Marie Philomène de Sion et contenant le récit de conversion,” ANDS, 3J12. For similar conversion narratives of deception, flight, and family opposition, see “Relation de l’Entrée au Néophytal de Marie Dionyse Worms (MM. Joseph de Sion),” ANDS, 3J12; dossier on Rosalie Lévy, ANDS, 2A1; Memoir of Sister Mathilde Lincourt, Archives des Dames de Saint-Louis, Juilly, doc. 7A1.5. Mathilde Lincourt and her sister ran away from their home in Strasboug in the 1830s with the help of the abbé Bautain and Théodore Ratisbonne.

120.Archives Israélites 3 (1842): 631.

121.Archives Israélites 4 (1843): 376–377.

122.Also in 1844, Michel Cerfbeer de Médelsheim, a descendant of the Jewish reformer of the late eighteenth century, published a scathing attack on Jews: Ce que sont les juifs de France.

123.“Une loterie de bienfaisance,” Archives Israélites 6 (1845): 394–408. See Joskowicz, “The Priest, the Woman, and the Jewish Family,” 450–451.

124.“Une loterie de bienfaisance,” Archives Israélites 6 (1845): 394–408.

125.Landau, “Se convertir à Paris au XIXe siècle.” For an exchange on this issue, see Helfand, “Passports and Piety,” which sees conversion as a legitimate threat, and the responses of Cohen, “Conversion in Nineteenth-Century France,” and Endelman, “Anti-Semitism and Apostasy in Nineteenth-Century France,” as well as Helfand’s response, “Assessing Apostasy.”

126.Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin.

127.Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 119–121, 253–254. For an earlier episode of a baptized Jew being taken from his family in Rome, see Kertzer, “The Montel Affair.” In this 1840 case French diplomacy won the return of the Jewish child to his French family.

128.Isser, “The Mallet Affair”; Ford, Divided Houses, 131–133. A dossier on the investigation and trial can be found in AN, F19 5799.

129.Cahen, “Etudes sur les conversions,” 372–383, 434–442, 499–507.

130.Ibid., 377.

4. Family, Nation, and Freedom

1.Stern, Mémoires, souvenirs et journaux, 275–276.

2.Ibid., 276.

3.Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 2.

4.“Récit de ma conversion et de ma vocation,” in Gagarine, Journal, 267.

5.“Cahier bibliothèque d’enfant,” AJPF, Ga, 1a.

6.Details on the childhood of Gagarin are drawn from Tempest, “Ivan Gagarin”; Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 24–28; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 1–4.

7.“Curriculum vitae jusqu’en 1857,” AJPF, Ga, 1a.

8.I have consulted both the manuscript of the “Journal” (AJPF, Ga, 1b) and the recent critical edition edited by François Rouleau, Gagarine, Journal. References to the journal will be based on Rouleau’s edition, cited as Gagarine, Journal. Some extracts from the journal were also published in Pierling, Le prince Gagarine, 25–51.

9.Frede, Doubt, Atheism, 17.

10.Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 366–386, has identified sixty-two Russians, many of them from prominent families, who converted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

11.Gagarine, Journal, 65.

12.Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 157–158. The passage cited comes from a student notebook from a course taught by Cousin in 1819–1820, which “captures the core of Cousin’s philosophical message.” Gagarin’s comments also reflect the impulse for “self ownership” that Coleman, in The Virtues of Abandon, sees as taking hold in the post-revolutionary era.

13.Gagarine, Journal, 97.

14.Ibid., 106.

15.“Fragment autobiographique,” AJPF, Ga, 1b. This note seems to refer to Gagarin’s final years in Moscow in the early 1830s, before his arrival in Munich in 1833.

16.Gagarine, Journal, 90–91.

17.Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 244. In an extended analysis of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 351–360, emphasizes the importance of action in the world as the basis for self-formation for Goethe. “In their pursuit of their ends, individuals had to interact with others and with things in the world, but such relations served only to reveal inner natures and destinies, not to form or determine them” (352).

18.“Récit de ma conversion et de ma vocation,” in Gagarine, Journal, 270.

19.Ibid., 102–103.

20.François Rouleau, introduction to ibid., 11.

21.Ibid., 120.

22.Frede, Doubt, Atheism, 8.

23.Bréhier, Schelling, 244.

24.Gagarin may have come into contact with Schelling’s philosophy during his time at Moscow University and through his connections to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the early 1830s. Within these institutions, in which Gagarin participated, a group known as the “Wisdom Lovers” was drawn to Schelling’s philosophy. Frede, Doubt, Atheism, 28–31; Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 64–82.

25.On Schelling I have consulted Bréhier, Schelling; O’Meara, Romantic Idealism; Siegel, The Idea of the Self, 382–390.

26.Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 383.

27.Heinrich Heine painted a sarcastic portrait of Schelling in “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” 237. According to Heine, Schelling “goes cringing about in the antechambers of practical and theoretical absolutism, and he lends a hand in the Jesuits’ den, where fetters for the mind are forged. . . . He has slunk back into the religious kennels of the past; he is now a good Catholic, and preaches an extra-mundane personal God.”

28.Gagarine, Journal, 137.

29.Cited in Pierling, Le prince Gagarine, 138.

30.Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 18–19; Sliwowska, “Le P. Jean-Xavier-Ivan Gagarine SJ,” 34–37.

31.Chaadaev, “Letters on the Philosophy of History,” quote from 167–168.

32.Alexander Herzen, quoted in Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 103.

33.Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 91; Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 83–117.

34.Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 15, 19; Tempest, “Ivan Gagarin.”

35.Gagarin was responsible for the first French publication of Chaadaev’s “First Letter,” in Gagarine, “Tendances catholiques dans la société russe” (1860), and for a collection of Chaadaev’s writings, Gagarine, Œuvres choisies de Pierre Tchadaief (1862); Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 85.

36.“Note sur mon histoire,” AJPF, Ga, 1b.

37.Letter dated St. Petersburg, January 14/26, 1836, AJPF, Ga, Ib.

38.Madame Swetchine’s sister was married to Ivan’s uncle Gregorii Gagarin, the ambassador to Munich, who died in 1837. For the life and career of Madame Swetchine, see Bakhmetyeva, “Madame Swetchine”; Rouet de Journel, Une Russe Catholique; Rouet de Journel, “Madame Swetchine et les conversions”; Falloux, Vie de Madame Swetchine.

39.Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries; Ghervas, Réinventer la tradition; Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 366–386.

40.“Journal de ma conversion,” in Swetchine, Méditations et prières, 3–63.

41.Rouet de Journel, Une Russe Catholique, 133.

42.Ibid., 136–137.

43.“Note sur mon histoire,” AJPF, Ga, 1b.

44.Gagarine, Journal, 177.

45.“Note sur la conversion de Mme Swetchine,” AJPF, Ga, 1b.

46.Ibid.

47.Goodman, Republic of Letters, 101.

48.Kale, French Salons, 3; Goodman, Republic of Letters.

49.Kselman, “The Bautain Circle”; Goodman, Republic of Letters, 8–10.

50.Gough, Paris and Rome.

51.Letter to Armand de Melun, November 18, 1838, in Swetchine, Lettres, 2:200–201.

52.The controversy surrounding Lamennais will be taken up in chapter 5.

53.Bakhmetyeva, “Madame Swetchine,” focuses particularly on the role of Swetchine in mediating the differences between Lacordaire, Montalembert, and the official church.

54.Swetchine, Méditations et prières, 85.

55.See the long and intimate correspondence between Madame Swetchine and the Comtesse Edling, which touched frequently on religious matters but never broached the subject of conversion. Swetchine, Lettres, 1:1–227. Madame Swetchine’s husband died as a communicant of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1850, despite a long series of prayers and novenas by his wife and their friends.

56.Swetchine, Lettres, 2:296.

57.Gagarin to Samarin, April 2, 1840, in Rouleau and Galievsky, I. S. Gagarine, 107.

58.Bakhmetyeva, “Madame Swetchine,” 200–258.

59.Milbach, Les chaires ennemies.

60.Rouleau, introduction to Rouleau and Galievsky, I. S. Gagarine, 15–16; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 225n40.

61.Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 29–39. Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 89, takes a similar position.

62.Schouvaloff, Ma conversion, 88–99, 155–156.

63.Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 84, notes that Moehler, although he wrote from a Catholic perspective, represented fairly religious differences, thus contributing to Gagarin’s “test for controversy conducted in charity.”

64.Schouvaloff, Ma conversion, 284–286.

65.Gagarine, Journal, 262, entry for February 10, 1842; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 36.

66.Schouvaloff, Ma conversion, 292, 295–299.

67.Rouleau and Galievsky, I. S. Gagarine, 186–187.

68.Ibid., 189–193.

69.Ibid., 209.

70.Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 300–307.

71.AJPF, Ga, 1b; Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 92–93; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 37–38.

72.Bautain, La religion et la liberté.

73.“Retraite paschale prêchée par l’abbé Bautain à St. Eustache, pendant la semaine de la passion du carême de 1842,” AJPF, Ga, 1b.

74.Ponlevoy, Vie du R. P. Xavier de Ravignan, 1:185–229.

75.“Liste de livres, donnés par l’abbé de Ravignan à J.G., 18 mars 1842,” AJPF, Ga, 1b.

76.Swetchine, Lettres, 2:288.

77.AJPF, Ga, 1b; Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 92–93; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 37–38.

78.“Prière pour les Russes, composée pour le prince Gagarine à son départ pour Petersbourg (Paris, 15 juin 1842),” AJPF, Ga, 1b. The handwriting suggests the prayer was written by Ravignan.

79.Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 39.

80.Gagarin to Ravignan, September 18, 1842, AJPF, Ga, 1b; Chmelewsky, “L’affaire Gagarine,” 109–110.

81.Ravignan to Gagarin, November 15, 1842, AJPF, Ga, 1b.

82.On the importance of a familial context for conversion, see Gugelot, La Conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France, 196–201, 436–439, 442–452.

83.Swetchine to Gagarin, April 16, 1844, in Swetchine, Lettres, 2:318.

84.Ravignan to Gagarin, March 13, 1843, AJPF, Ga, 1b.

85.Swetchine to Gagarin, May 1843, in Swetchine, Lettres, 2:293.

86.Swetchine to Gagarin, May 28, 1844, in ibid., 2:319; Chmelewsky, “L’affaire Gagarine,” 204.

87.Parents to Gagarin, June 9/21, 1843, AJPF, Ga, 3a; Chmelewsky, “L’affaire Gagarine,” 161.

88.Mother to Gagarin, May 21, 1843, AJPF, Ga, 3a; Chmelewsky, “L’affaire Gagarine,” 156–157.

89.Parents to Gagarin, August 10, 1843, AJPF, Ga, 3a.

90.Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 45–47; Sliwowska, “Le P. Jean-Xavier-Ivan Gagarine SJ,” 43–50.

91.See, for example, letters from parents to Gagarin of June 9, 1844, and July 27, 1844, AJPF, Ga, 3a. For an extensive collection of letters from Gagarin’s parents, see Chmelewsky, “L’affaire Gagarine.” In general Mme Gagarin would write a lengthy note with family news followed by a short message from Gagarin’s father.

92.Unnamed correspondent to Gagarin, June 29, no year, AJPF, Ga, 3a.

93.Marie Gagarin to Ivan Gagarin, September 1854, AJPF, Ga, 3a.

94.Retreat notes of Gagarin, August 19, 1843, AJPF, GA, 1a.

95.Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, shows as well that Gagarin, while permitted to pursue his goal, also provoked opposition within the Jesuits, who withheld full support for his mission.

96.Gagarin to Ravignan, July 10, 14, 17, 1843, AJPF, Ga, 1b; Chmelewsky, “L’affaire Gagarine,” 163–168.

97.Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, 121, 125; Sluhovsky, “St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.”

98.Two handwritten lists, starting with one at the time of his abjuration, show Gagarin making yearly retreats through 1857. AJPF, Ga, 1b.

99.Retreat notes, AJPF, Ga, 1b.

100.Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 245.

101.For the numbers of editions of the Spiritual Exercises I consulted the online catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Over ten thousand students were enrolled in Jesuit schools just before the order was expelled in 1880; Padberg, Colleges in Controversy, 243–245, 283–284.

102.Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth, 280–282.

5. God and Liberty?

1.GSOA, 2:366.

2.GSC, 3:186.

3.Winock, Les voix de la liberté, 161.

4.Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant. Renduel, the official publisher, brought out eight editions in the six months following publication; well over forty-five thousand French copies were printed in the period 1835–1837; see Le Hir, “Les éditions,” in Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant, 16–20; Vulliaud, “Les paroles d’un croyant” de Lamennais.

5.Scholarly interest in Lamennais has been especially intense during periods when the Catholic Church considered serious reforms. In the 1960s Lamennais was evaluated positively in light of the Second Vatican Council, most importantly in the work of Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse; Le Guillou also directed the definitive edition of Lamennais’s correspondence. Other studies from this period include Derré, Lamennais et ses amis; Stearns, Priest and Revolutionary. A prior wave of interest occurred in the early twentieth century, associated with the crises over theological modernism and the separation of church and state in 1905: Feugère, Lamennais avant l’Essai sur l’indifférence; Roussel, Lamennais à La Chênaie; Dudon, Lamennais et le Saint-Siège; Maréchal, La jeunesse de La Mennais; Boutard, Lamennais. For concise summaries of Lamennais’s writings, see Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 62–112; Le Guillou, Lamennais. The most recent study, Lambert, Théologie de la république, focuses on Lamennais as a political theorist.

6.Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 8, notes that “it is difficult to understand what Lamennais might have learned from his disparate readings that included Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus, Cicero, Montaigne, Pascal, Malebranche, Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, Dryden, Arnauld, Nicole, Bossuet, Voltaire, and Rousseau.” Maréchal, La jeunesse de La Mennais, 9–44, describes how Robert de Saudrais moved from an attachment to the philosophes back to orthodox Christianity; see also Feugère, Lamennais avant l’Essai sur l’indifférence, 115–43.

7.Lamennais’s familiarity with Rousseau is displayed in the first volume of his Essai sur l’indifférence, 126–171, a forceful attack on the philosophe’s understanding of “natural” religion.

8.For analyses of Lamennais’s Réflexions sur l’état de l’église en France pendant le XVIIIe siècle et sur sa situation actuelle (1808) and Tradition de l’églse sur l’institution des évêques (1814), see Feugère, Lamennais avant L’Essai sur l’indifférence, 75–103, 149–175.

9.LCG, 1:38.

10.Minois, Les origines du mal, 137–146; Demorest, “Lamennais, le Nouveau Pascal.”

11.LCG, 1:221,289. For other examples of Lamennais’s self-flagellating language, see LCG, 1:51, 75, 77, 91, 96, 101–102, 115–116, 129–130. Lamennais’s struggles can be compared to those of Maine de Biran; Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 248–268.

12.LCG, 1:48.

13.LCG, 1:107.

14.Lamennais may have met Carron before his trip to London, since he refers to him in a letter of October 1814. LCG, 1:193.

15.LCG, 1:263.

16.LCG, 1:41, 305; see also LCG, 1:39.

17.Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 14. Le Guillou in general opposes the argument of Vallery-Radot, Lamennais, that Lamennais was a “priest in spite of himself” but acknowledges that “too much pressure was used in order to obtain the agreement of a hesitant soul.”

18.Winock, Les voix de la liberté, 161. The influential critic Sainte-Beuve compared Lamennais favorably to these other conservative theorists in “L’abbé de La Mennais, 1832,” 199. This essay first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, February 1, 1832, 359–380.

19.Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion, 48.

20.The catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale, searched on October 12, 2016, lists 496 different editions of Lamennais’s Imitation from its appearance in 1824 through the present. In a letter to the Comte de Senfft of January 1824 Lamennais describes, however, his spiritual frustration as he worked through the translation. “I tell myself, The Imitation is beautiful, ravishing, celestial, but I don’t feel it enough. Sometimes I’m full of confusion and find myself cold and freezing in the midst of these touching truths; and then I think that God wants it this way, that therein lies on his part a kind of miraculous abundance, a holy prodigality from the one whose gifts are countless, and whose dew comes to rest on the dry leaves as well as the green.” LCG, 2:445.

21.Van Engen, Devotio Moderna.

22.Lamennais, L’imitation de Jésus-Christ, 34–35.

23.Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, 1:333.

24.Kroen, Politics and Theater, shows how the alliance did not always work smoothly.

25.Bertier de Sauvigny, “Mgr de Quélen et les incidents de Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois,” 110; Limouzin-Lamothe, Monseigneur Quélen, 2:12–19, 46–49; Latreille and Rémond, Histoire du catholicisme, 277–279.

26.Nisbet, “The Politics of Social Pluralism.” Weill, Histoire du catholicisme libéral, 11–17, dates the history of liberal Catholicism from 1828, when several Catholics, including Lamennais, first used the language of liberty to oppose ordinances of the Martignac ministry that imposed new and severe regulations on Jesuit colleges and the minor seminaries. Lamennais played a central role in this controversy, with the publication of his Des progrès de la Révolution et de la guerre contre l’église (1829).

27.L’Avenir, October 16, 1830, 11. All references to L’Avenir are taken from the critical edition of its articles, L’Avenir: 1830–1831, edited by Guido Verucci.

28.L’Avenir, December 18, 1830, 186–190.

29.Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais, 313–322, 423–430.

30.Procès de L’Avenir, 84. This pamphlet reproduces the speeches made at the trial as well as the articles that led to the prosecution; Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 126–128.

31.LCG, 4:416.

32.L’Avenir, September 21, 1831, 666–687; Lecanuet, Montalembert, 231–251.

33.Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 103–138, shrewdly probes the relationships between Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert, emphasizing especially the fraternal ties between the last two. The correspondence between Lacordaire and Montalembert analyzed by Harrison manifests the same tension between conscience and obedience that divided Montalembert and Lamennais.

34.L’Avenir, February 19, 1831, 339.

35.Lacordaire, “Obsèques de M. Grégoire.”; for the issue of state intervention in funeral rites, see Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 103–106; Kselman, “Funeral Conflicts in Nineteenth-Century France.”

36.Lamennais, “De la séparation de l’église et de l’état.”

37.Lacordaire, “Mouvement d’ascension du catholicisme.”

38.The Catholic rebellion was praised in Lacordaire, “Mouvement d’ascension du catholicisme.” Subsequent articles continued to praise the rebellion but were critical of the diplomatic negotiations that led to the election of the Protestant Leopold of Saxe-Coburg as a constitutional monarch. Coux, “De la Belgique”; Lacordaire, “Entrée du prince Léopold en Belgique.”

39.Montalembert, “Révolution en Pologne.”

40.Lacordaire, “La Pologne.” Even as the Polish rebellion collapsed Lamennais continued to hope that God would somehow intervene on its side. In July 1831 he wrote to Mme la Baronne Cottu, “I tremble for my dear, heroic Poland, and nevertheless I cannot believe that Providence would abandon this miraculous people.” LCG, 1831, 5:18.

41.Lamennais’s opponents recognized this point, as is clear in the responses of the experts consulted by the pope in July 1832. According to Father Rozaven, the superior general of the Jesuits and a leading figure in the anti-Lamennais camp, for Lamennais “religious liberty means the full and entire freedom of all cults; and this in the fullest and most extensive sense.” Rozaven goes on to specify other liberties defended by Lamennais—freedom of education, freedom of press, civil and political freedom—but does not refer to freedom of conscience as part of the program of L’Avenir. See “Votum du R. P. Rozaven,” in Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condamnation de Lamennais, 174–176.

42.L’Avenir, December 7, 1830, 171; Chauvin, Lamennais, 60–61.

43.Lamennais, “La liberté religieuse,” L’Avenir, August 30, 1831, 644.

44.LCG, 5:85–86. See also his letters to Mme la Comtesse de Senfft, Sainte-Beuve, and the abbé Gerbet, LCG, 5:86–93.

45.Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condamnation de Lamennais, 140–146; Derré, Metternich et Lamennais.

46.LCG, March 13, 1832, 5:94–95; Montalembert, Journal intime, 2:298–299. For Lamennais’s intentions to renew the publication of L’Avenir, see his letters to his brother, Jean, and to Charles de Coux. LCG, June 1832, 5:142–144.

47.Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condamnation de Lamennais, 161–240.

48.Ibid., 240–289. Rosenfeld, Common Sense, 200–215, shows how “common sense” was taken up by counterrevolutionary writers Adrien-Quentin and Pierre-Louis Buée in the early 1790s, who opposed the democratic usage of the term (as in Thomas Paine) and instead saw “what is visible, consistent, long believed, and widely accepted without objection” as a basis for challenging revolutionary innovation. There is no evidence that Lamennais was familiar with the work of the Buée brothers, but he did travel to Paris with his father on business around 1795 and may have even published an article in one of the royalist journals of that period. See Maréchal, La jeunesse de La Mennais, 36. Rosenfeld, who does not pursue her study into the nineteenth century, notes the irony of a conservative use of “common sense,” in that a “defense of the self-evidence of hierarchy and established authority necessarily contained from the beginning, an unavoidable concession that those values had become anything but” (214). Rosenfeld’s comment can be usefully applied to Lamennais and may help explain his eventual shift to democracy as a political system more compatible with “common sense.”

49.LCG, 5:143.

50.Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 128–133.

51.Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condamnation de Lamennais, 261–262.

52.LCG, December 15, 1832, 5:245. For similar prophetic comments, see LCG, 5:199, 208–209,

53.LCG, November 15, 1832, 5:220.

54.Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 135–136; Lamennais received a similar letter from Père Orioli and was also informed of papal approval by Monsignor Garibaldi, the papal internuncio at Paris; LCG, 5:204–205, 593. Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais, provides a detailed narrative on the initial papal response.

55.Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condamnation de Lamennais, 277–291.

56.Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 358–375.

57.LCG, 5:292–293. For the importance of the Polish cause, see Chauvin, Lamennais, 87–88; Le Guillou, Lamennais, 35–41. Le Guillou cites a letter of January 1833 from the Belgian chargé d’affaires at Rome in which he quotes the pope as regretting his letter, forced on him by diplomats and cardinals who hid the truth about the Polish situation from him. But as Guillou points out, Lamennais had no way of knowing that the pope regretted his letter, which in any case was not disavowed by Rome. The reference to “Cardinal Gagarin” is ironic, since Gagarin was an Orthodox Christian, the Russian ambassador to the Vatican. He was also the uncle of Ivan Gagarin.

58.Mickiewicz, Livre des pèlerins polonais. For Mickiewicz’s time in Paris and his relations with the Lamennais circle, see Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz, 160–161, 196–201.

59.Montalembert, “Avant-propos,” 21–22.

60.Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 371–373.

61.Ibid., 31–69.

62.Gregory XVI, Mirari vos, Article 14.

63.LCG, 5:446–447.

64.LCG, 5:509–510.

65.LCG, 5:542.

66.LCG, 5:549. A police report to the minister of the interior of December 20 describes “a small two-room apartment that [Lamennais and Gerbet] share. These two rooms are hardly furnished, and the appearance of the these two individuals, especially of the abbé Gerbet, is even more miserable than their furnishings.” AN F19 5601, dossier 1.

67.LCG, 6:14–18.

68.LCG, 6:53–54.

69.Price, The Perilous Crown, 232–240; Harsin, Barricades, 58–59.

70.These phrases come from a letter that Archbishop Quélen drafted and sent to Lamennais on March 28, 1834, for his signature. For their exchange, see LCG, 6:55–56, 574–575.

71.LCG, 6:50.

72.Le Hir, “Les éditions,” in Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant, 16–20.

73.LCG, 6:96.

74.LCG, 6:603. Liszt subsequently spent several weeks with Lamennais at La Chênaie, in September 1834. See his letter to Mme d’Agoult, LCG, 6:281–282.

75.Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condamnation de Lamennais, 458–471.

76.Gregory XVI, Singulari nos.

77.Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant, chapter 13; for the satanic nature of monarchy, see also chapter 35.

78.Ibid., chapter 24. Lamennais’s correspondence from this period is also full of dire predictions of popular rebellions that will bring about a new political order; see Le Hir, “Les éditions,” in Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant, 55–63.

79.Le Hir, “Les éditions,” in Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant, 63–69.

80.In chapter 20 Lamennais defines religious liberty as “a living power that we feel within and around us, the protective genius of the hearth, the guarantee of social rights, and the first of those rights.” But in developing this idea he concentrates on the right to self-government and to the freedom of education and association. Individual religious liberty comes into sharper focus in chapter 28, where he recalls the ancient Christians, persecuted for their faith, who claimed the right “to obey only God, to serve him and worship him according to [their] conscience.” This brief reference, however, does not suggest Lamennais’s intense engagement with the issue of the freedom of conscience as it emerged in his private correspondence during the crisis surrounding his rejection of the church.

81.Montalembert, Journal intime, August 30, 1832, 346–347. For Lamennais’s attempt to reassure Montalembert that in the end their position would emerge triumphant, see LCG, 6:40.

82.LCG, the definitive edition of Lamennais’s correspondence, yields the following numbers: Lamennais to Montalembert: 1833, ten letters; 1834, thirty letters; 1835, twelve letters; 1836, six letters. Montalembert to Lamennais: 1833, twenty-four letters; 1834, eighteen letters; 1835, nine letters; 1836, four letters.

83.Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 115–122.

84.LCG, 5:627.

85.LCG, 5:663. For similar language, see LCG, 5:652.

86.LCG, 6:309.

87.Chapter 51 in Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant, which comes just before the final section, evokes the experience of an exile doomed to wander alone, who speaks in the first person, describing his sadness and isolation in terms that recall the tale of the Wandering Jew, as described in chapter 2. Each passage concludes with the refrain “L’exilé partout est seul” (The exile is everywhere alone). Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant, 270–272.

88.These letters can be read in Le Guillou’s critical edition, LCG, vols. 5–7.

89.LCG, 6:580–581.

90.LCG, 6:633.

91.Ibid.

92.Chapter 10, defending the right of property, appeared in the fourth and subsequent editions. LCG, 5:133; Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant, 124–125.

93.LCG, 6:634–635. Montalembert had expressed similar doubts in March 1834, when he wrote to Lamennais that “my conscience has been shaken and attacked to its very depths. I would have endured persecution and danger from those I regarded as enemies for what I believed to be true, but I was in no way prepared to see this truth itself attacked, as it were, from the rear, to have to battle within my soul, against the religious convictions that I saw as the basis for this truth.” LCG, 6:565. In June Montalembert repeated his adherence to the ideas of Les Paroles d’un croyant when he wrote that with the exception of a reference to Pope Alexander VI, “there is not a line that I would not be willing to sign in my blood.” For Montalembert’s struggle with his conscience, see also LCG, 6:668.

94.Lacordaire pushed Montalembert consistently in this direction throughout 1833 and 1834, arguing that resistance was a sign of stubborn pride out of keeping with the duty of a Catholic, who must “submit himself to the direction of the Holy See, and not desire to direct it himself.” LCG, 5:474.

95.LCG, 6:578.

96.LCG, 6:706.

97.LCG, 6:808.

98.LCG, 6:833.

99.LCG, 6:309.

100.“De l’absolutisme et de la liberté,” Revue des Deux Mondes, August 1834, 298–322.

101.Lamennais, preface to Troisièmes mélanges, iii–ix.

102.Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 16–20.

103.Lamennais to Montalembert, January 1, 1834, LCG, 6:16. Lamennais may have stopped saying Mass in 1833, to judge by a letter from Montalembert to Guizot, dated September 10, 1859. Recalling his visit of the summer of 1833, Montalembert reported that Lamennais had turned down his request to serve him at Mass, as he had done during the trip to Rome. LCG, 5:96. But another correspondent suggests he offered a Mass in November 1833. LCG, 5:849.

104.LCG, 5:23, 6:601.

105.In the Esquisse d’une philosophie (1840), Lamennais retains a Trinitarian view of God, understood as Power, Intelligence, and Love. In Les évangiles, traduction nouvelle (1846), he presents Christ as a divine model for humanity who came to announce a gospel of charity that would inaugurate a period of endless progress. For analyses of these later works, see Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 100–107; Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 296–319, 359–369.

106.Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 319.

107.“Rapport de Mgr Bruté, évêque de Vincennes, sur M. de La Mennais,” LCG, 6:502–507.

108.LCG, 7:546–548.

109.LCG, 7:25–26.

110.LCG, 7:35.

111.“Les derniers moments de Lamennais vus par A. Barbet,” LCG, 8:852–879.

112.LCG, 8:671.

113.Duroselle, Les débuts du catholicisme social en France.

114.Renan, “M. de Lamennais et ses œuvres posthumes,” in Renan: Histoire et parole, 318, 321. The original essay appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, August 15, 1857.

6. Mysticism, Despair, and Progress

1.GSC, 3:185–186.

2.GSC, 3:401.

3.Harlan, George Sand, 145. Naginski, George Sand, 2, provides a catalogue of these commonplaces: “A cigar-smoking woman dressed in men’s clothing. A femme fatale who devoured her lovers, one after the other. A collector of famous men whom she made into lovers, friends, or protégés.”

4.Carter, Creating Catholics; Germain, Parler du salut? For Sand’s religious development, see Hamon, George Sand face aux églises; Moret, Le sentiment religieux chez George Sand; Christophe, George Sand et Jésus.

5.GSA, 787. I have drawn on Jurgrau’s edition of Sand’s autobiography for quotes, checked against the French text in GSOA.

6.For Beaumont’s social life, see GSA, 507–511. Sand published a further account of the abbé’s life in which she describes the pre-revolutionary career of Beaumont, forced into the priesthood by his father but nonetheless a charitable and effective pastor in the Landes. “Mon grand-oncle,” in GSOA, 2:479–496. Sand recalls meeting other priests as well in her early childhood, “men dressed as everyone else and having nothing religious in their behavior nor grave in their manner. . . . I remember one day saying to abbé d’Andrezel, ‘Well, if you’re not a priest, where’s your wife, and if you are a priest, where’s your mass?’ The question was found to be very witty and very insulting.” GSA, 515.

7.Although we need to be cautious in taking Sand’s autobiography as a transparent reflection of her childhood, biographers such as Karénine, George Sand; Maurois, Lélia, 39–48; Cate, George Sand, 56–68; Jack, George Sand, 67–83; and Harlan, George Sand, 72–81, have accepted her descriptions of her religious education and beliefs as generally credible. For a literary approach to the autobiography, see Hiddleston, George Sand and Autobiography. For Hiddleston, Sand wrote the autobiography “to present herself as respectable and worldly-wise” after her turbulent years as a young woman in Paris (10). While she therefore suppressed many of the details, Sand seems to have honored “the autobiographical pact” between writer and reader, “an undertaking to tell the truth, although not necessarily the whole truth, and not always the truth in strict chronological order” (16).

8.Canto 12 of Tasso’s poem tells the story of Clorinda’s death on the battlefield after being taken as a Muslim soldier by Tancred, who engages her in combat. Perhaps Sand’s fascination with Tasso’s poem helps explain her decision to wear men’s clothing at times, though she herself does not make this connection.

9.GSA, 610–610. Corambé continued to play a role in Sand’s imaginative life, though in a diminished form, throughout her adolescent years. In her autobiography she writes that Corambé disappeared only in 1832, while she was writing her first novel, Indiana, because he/she was “too tenuous an essence to bend to the demands of form.” Sand regretted this loss and “hoped in vain to see Corambé reappear, and with him those thousands of beings who lulled me every day as pleasant daydreams, those vague figures, those half-distinct voices that floated around me like paintings brought to life behind transparent veils.” But she also acknowledged that Corambé was now “in his proper place . . . reintegrated into my imagination.” GSA, 925.

10.GSA, 623.

11.Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 12.

12.Cédoz, Un couvent de religieuses anglaises à Paris.

13.The story of her convent years as recounted in Sand’s autobiography corresponds in broad terms with the letter she wrote to Sister Eliza Anster, a convent friend, in 1836. GSC, 3:294–297. Sand describes her friendship with Anster while at the convent in GSA, 714–717. For the reliability of the autobiography, see Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 15.

14.GSA, 641.

15.Maurois, Lélia, 40. Sand herself wrote that she “was more comfortable in the convent than with my own family.” GSA, 660.

16.GSA, 652–657.

17.GSA, 657.

18.Sand identifies in particular the novel Château des Pyrénées, which she misidentifies as the work of Anne Radcliffe. GSA, 654. For the tradition of “claustral” literature in France, see Ford, Divided Houses, 79–82.

19.GSA, 680.

20.Courcelle and Courcelle, “ Le ‘Tolle Lege’ de Georges Sand.”

21.GSA, 694–695.

22.In her autobiography Sand attributes the painting of Jesus to Titian, which is doubtful. The painting of Augustine, by an unknown Spanish artist of the seventeenth century, was found in an Augustinian priory in the 1960s. Courcelle and Courcelle, “Le ‘Tolle Lege’ de Georges Sand.”

23.GSA, 696–698. Georges Lubin notes that Sand wrote about this mystical experience in similar terms in two texts from 1831, Rose et Blanche, the novel she coauthored with Jules Sandeau, and Une lettre d’une femme. See GSOC, 2:1428n1.

24.GSA, 757.

25.GSA, 767.

26.GSA, 770.

27.GSA, 765.

28.GSA, 759, 771.

29.GSA, 845. Georges Lubin, the editor of Sand’s correspondence, notes that there are very few letters from late 1824 and early 1825, a gap he attributes to Sand’s depressed state. Sand’s autobiography is the main source for information on her retreat, and on this period.

30.Sand does not refer to her meeting with Aurélien in the Pyrénées in her autobiography but provides a detailed account of their first days together in her letter to Casimir of November 15, 1825. GSC, 1:262–292.

31.In her autobiography Sand refers to “the absent being, . . . ‘the invisible man’ whom I had made the third term in the premise of my existence, God, myself, and him [Aurélien].” GSA, 880.

32.GSC, 1:224.

33.GSC, 1:244.

34.GSC, 1:306–313.

35.Pouget, Lettre d’un curé catholique. Pouget’s letter was also published in Nîmes in 1826. Joel Audebez, a Protestant pastor from Agen, responded with Lettre à Mélanie.

36.GSC, 1:312.

37.Georges Lubin, the editor of Sand’s correspondence, writes that he is “personally convinced that Solange was the daughter of Stéphane, without being able to provide formal evidence.” GSC, 1:997.

38.Sand described the moment in a letter to her friend, and the tutor of Maurice, Jules Boucoiran. GSC, 1:735.

39.Seigel, Bohemian Paris.

40.GSC, 2:18–19.

41.GSA, 905.

42.J. Sand, Rose et Blanche. For Sand’s views on the novel, see Delpont’s “Postface,” in ibid., 461–476.

43.For a list of the reviews published in May and June 1832, see GSC, 2:115–116n1.

44.G. Sand, Indiana, 76, 171–172.

45.Ibid., 190–191.

46.G. Sand, Valentine.

47.GSC, 2:102–105.

48.Quotes from Lélia are drawn from the English translation by Maria Espinosa. For an account of the composition of Lélia and its themes, see Pierre Reboul’s introduction to G. Sand, Lélia, ed. Reboul, i–lxvii. Naginski, George Sand, 107–114, emphasizes the importance of Lélia in the history of literary form as a “novel of the invisible” in which external events would matter much less than a consideration of the intellectual and moral struggles of the characters. Sand indicated this new direction herself in a critical essay, “Obermann par E. P. de Senancour,” Revue des Deux Mondes, June 15,1833, reprinted in G. Sand, George Sand Critique, 5–15.

49.Cited in Reboul, introduction to G. Sand, Lélia, ed. Reboul, viii.

50.GSA, 949.

51.G. Sand, Lélia, trans. Espinosa, 43.

52.Ibid., 26.

53.Ibid., 45. Lélia also describes herself as “torn between faith and atheism” following a period when she sought proof of God’s existence and goodness in nature (116).

54.Ibid., 37.

55.Sainte-Beuve, Le National, September 19, 1833, reproduced in G. Sand, Lélia, ed. Reboul, 590–594. For similar contemporary responses, see ibid., 585–589.

56.GSC, 2:741.

57.GSC, 2:339–340.

58.Sand’s biographers have dealt with their relationship in detail: Maurois, Lélia, 179–223; Cate, George Sand, 256–351; Harlan, George Sand, 172–190; Jack, George Sand, 228–248.

59.GSC, 2:596–597. For other passages in which Sand evokes her religious beliefs in the context of her love for Musset, see GSC, 2:588–589, 624–625, 780.

60.Sand expresses similar sentiments in the first of her “lettres d’un voyageur,” published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, May 15, 1834. Writing to an unnamed recipient, clearly Musset, the “voyageur” affirms that “the only power in which I believe is that of a just or paternal God: the power that inflicted suffering on every human and which, in return, revealed to mankind the hope of everlasting life. It is a Providence you have often underrated but to which you return in your hour of greatest joy or distress.” G. Sand, Lettres d’un voyageur, 50. For a full discussion of the composition and publication of the letters, see Esquier, “Présentation.”

61.GSOA, 2:599.

62.GSOA, 2:955.

63.Musset, “Confessions of a Child of the Century,” 104.

64.Sand describes the scene in detail in a “Mémoire” she sent to Michel de Bourges on October 22. GSC, 3:74–90. For a brief account, see Cate, George Sand, 370–374.

65.Price, The Perilous Crown, 232–254.

66.G. Sand, Lettres d’un voyageur, 151.

67.GSC, 2:824.

68.GSC, 2:854.

69.GSC, 2:871.

70.GSA, 1027.

71.GSC, 1:707; see also GSC, 1:723–726. The reference to “social atheism” comes from the sixth lettre d’un voyageur, addressed to Michel. G. Sand, Lettres d’un voyageur, 158.

72.GSA, 1027.

73.Michel, unhappy with its sentimental tone, toughened the language and thereby lost the support of some moderate republicans. GSA, 1040.

74.G. Sand, Lettres d’un voyageur, 153–154.

75.Ibid., 183. For Sand’s concerns about violence, see also GSA, 1030–1034.

76.GSC, 3:644. For similar comments, see Sand’s journal entry for June 22, 1837, GSOA, 2:997.

77.GSC, 3:745.

78.GSA, 1045.

79.G. Sand, Lettres d’un voyageur, 97. The letter first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, September 15, 1834. For the identification of the island and further details on the letter, see G. Sand, Œuvres complètes, 330–331.

In another letter, published a month later, Sand again referred to Lamennais and imagined the angels responding to his work by pleading, “Do not abandon the world yet, O merciful God! For a ray of light emerges from time to time that could rekindle the sun in its darkened firmament.” Lettres d’un voyageur, 218.

80.GSC, 3:185–186. For Sand’s aborted trip to La Chênaie, see GSA, 1056–1057. Sand used Michel de Bourges and Lamennais as models for the lawyer Simon Féline and his uncle, the abbé Féline, in her novel Simon, published in 1836. In this novel Simon’s mother had hoped he would become a priest, like her brother, but accepted his decision to study law. Simon becomes a religious skeptic, but out of respect for his mother hides this from her. G. Sand, Simon, in Œuvres complètes. For details on the composition of Simon, see Catherine Mariette-Clot, “Présentation” in ibid., 9–25.

81.LCG, 7:13–14.

82.Mlle de Lucinière to Jean La Mennais, October 13, 1836, cited in Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 381.

83.GSC, 3:296. In the same letter Sand insists that “I have not at all lost God, at least I hope his paternal goodness has not turned away from me, and my heart has lost neither the love nor the unlimited confidence of which He is worthy.” Ibid., 3:295.

84.GSC, 3:713–714. For the break with Lamennais, see also Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 41–44.

85.GSA, 1045–1046.

86.GSA, 597.

87.Sand to Mme Marliani, March 8, 1839, GSC, 4:590–591.

88.Leroux, “Conscience,” cited in Leroux and Sand, Histoire d’une amitié, 28–29.

89.Leroux and Sand, Histoire d’une amitié, 100–101. For similar passages, see pages 128–129, 152–153.

90.Ibid., 144. For Leroux’s ideas on the role of art, see Bénichou, Le temps des prophètes, 338–344.

91.Cited in Cate, George Sand, 494.

92.Naginski, George Sand, 12, 144–146, 172–174.

93.Charlton, Secular Religions in France, 83.

94.Cate, George Sand, 412.

95.Mauprat (1837), The Companion of the “Tour de France” (1840), Horace (1841), The Miller of Angibault (1845). During this same period Sand became a promoter of the literature produced by a number of working-class poets. G. Sand, “Les poètes populaires,” in George Sand Critique, 163–181.

96.G. Sand, “The Unknown God,” in The Devil’s Pond and Other Stories, 53–66.

97.G. Sand, Spiridion. The reprint edition used here is based on the 1842 edition, which differed slightly from the work’s first appearance in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 1838–1839, and as a book in 1839. For a full discussion of the differences, see Pommier, George Sand et le rêve monastique, 84–92. I share Naginski’s view that Spiridion “marks a crucial moment in the evolution of Sand’s thought.” George Sand, 167.

98.G. Sand, Spiridion, 64–69.

99.Ibid., 71.

100.Ibid., 76.

101.Ibid., 215–216.

102.Ibid., 270.

103.Sand scholars have debated the meaning of the changes she introduced into this new version. See Naginski, George Sand, 151–153; Pommier, George Sand et le rêve monastique, 111–116; Moret, Le sentiment religieux chez George Sand, 167–169.

104.G. Sand, “Préface de 1839,” in Pommier, George Sand et le rêve monastique, 349–355. The anonymous author of the preface to the selection that appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, September, 15, 1839, 849, makes the same point succinctly: “Spiridion is the complement of Lélia, and proves that despair is not, in the eyes of the author, her final conclusion.”

105.Bowman, “George Sand, le Christ, et le royaume”; Bowman, Le Christ des barricades; Manuel, The Prophets of Paris; Bénichou, Le temps des prophètes, 165–168, 362–364, 439–445, 449–551, 461–465, 520–523, 553–555; Charlton, Secular Religions in France, 66–70, 79–86; Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 35–50.

106.Leroux, De l’humanité; Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 146–147; Sharp, Secular Spirituality; Underwood, “Historical Difference as Immortality,” 445–458.

107.G. Sand, Consuelo; G. Sand, The Countess of Rudolstadt.

108.For a detailed analysis of the gothic elements in the novels, see Naginski, George Sand, 190–202.

109.Sand also published a pamphlet on Zizka while she was writing the two Consuelo novels: Jean Ziska: Episode de la guerre des Hussites.

110.G. Sand, The Countess of Rudolstadt, 223.

111.Ibid., 231.

112.Ibid., 233.

113.Ibid., 353–356.

114.Ibid., 362.

115.Ibid., 364.

116.Sand to Charles Poncy, November 25, 1845, GSC, 7:194–196. The erosion of the Sand-Leroux friendship can be traced in their letters of 1844–1845, in Leroux and Sand, Histoire d’une amitié, 185–234. Their correspondence was renewed in the early 1850s, when Sand sent funds to Leroux while he was in exile in London. Ibid., 250–262.

117.GSA, 1116.

118.G. Sand, “Le culte de la France,” in Politiques et polémiques, 462–466. In her autobiography Sand writes that “the need for organized religion is still not a completely settled thing for me and . . . I see as many good reasons to accept it as to reject it. However, if we recognize, along with all the schools of modern philosophy, that governments are bound to the principle of absolute religious tolerance, I find I am perfectly within my rights to refuse to follow rituals which do not satisfy me.” She refers as well to “a serious moral question for the legislator. Will man be better by adoring God and in his own way or by accepting established rules?” GSA, 880.

119.G. Sand, “Après la mort de Jeanne Clésinger 1855,” in GSOA, 2:1227–1233; GSC, 4:36–37. For the belief in reincarnation, see Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 143–161; Sharp, Secular Spirituality.

120.G. Sand, Mademoiselle La Quintinie. Sand’s novel, which first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, was a response to the journal’s recent publication of Octave Feuillet’s novel Histoire de Sibylle, which told of a young woman plagued by religious doubts returning to Catholicism. On this point and for a full discussion of Sand’s anticlericalism in this period, see Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 181–209.

121.GSC, 18:288; Sand to Maurice and Lina Dudevant-Sand, March 1, 1864, GSC, 18:266; Cate, George Sand, 675; Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 214–216.

122.Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 209.

123.GSC, 17:416–417; Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 248.

124.GSC, 24:510.

7. Philology and Freedom

1.Lemoine, “Les échos contemporains des conférences (1835–1836).”

2.Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, 237–271; Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 198–206.

3.Renan, Souvenirs, 96–98; unless otherwise noted, all page references to Souvenirs are to the Pommier edition. For a detailed account of Talleyrand’s conversion, see Lagrange, Mgr. Dupanloup, 222–257. The leading Catholic paper of the period provided extensive coverage of the conversion of Talleyrand. L’Ami de la Religion 97 (1838): 324–325, 328–329, 337–339, 356–359, 362–363, 379–380, 394–395, 513–516.

4.Cited in Gough, Paris and Rome, 94.

5.Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, 487–517.

6.Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale, 549–553.

7.Renan, Souvenirs, 2.

8.RCG; Renan, Travaux de jeunesse, 1843–1844; Renan, Travaux et jours d’un séminariste; Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:14–439. For a detailed view of Renan’s development in 1843–1845, see Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale; for a theologically informed study, see Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse. The best biography is by the editor of Renan’s correspondence, Jean Balcou, Ernest Renan; Balcou is particularly astute in his comments on the sources for studying Renan (76–77). Also useful is Van Deth, Ernest Renan. For an excellent account of the controversy surrounding La vie de Jésus, see Priest, The Gospel According to Renan, some of which appears in Priest, “Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France.”

9.An older brother, Alain, also played a role in raising Renan; Van Deth, Ernest Renan, 20–21.

10.The sense of honor that drove Henriette, Alain, and Ernest Renan to pay off their father’s debts reflects the broader cultural concern of families that sought to secure a firm place among the bourgeoisie. See Reddy, The Invisible Code.

11.Renan was already contemplating the significance of this story in 1845; see “Cahiers de Jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:106.

12.Renan, Souvenirs, 1.

13.Ibid., 19.

14.Ibid., 87.

15.RCG, 1:31. Henriette made similar comments in letters of September 1836 and January 1837; RCG, 1:28, 37.

16.Lagrange, Mgr. Dupanloup, 99–102.

17.Renan, Souvenirs, 99–100.

18.Ibid., 103.

19.RCG, 1:139, 151, 154–155, 220.

20.RCG, 1:93. For descriptions of other ceremonies, see RCG, 1:126, 134.

21.RCG, 1:100–101.

22.RCG, 1:95–96.

23.RCG, 1:211. Jean Balcou, the editor of Renan’s correspondence, calls attention to this “crucial letter” in RCG, 1:211. See Balcou, Ernest Renan, 52; Van Deth, Ernest Renan, 33.

24.Renan, Souvenirs, 117. The street name changes again, to rue du Général Leclerc, before passing in front of the seminary.

25.Ibid., 115–116.

26.Ibid., 133.

27.RCG, 1:253.

28.RCG, 1:254, 258.

29.RCG, 1:286.

30.Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse, 24–25.

31.RCG, 1:271–272.

32.RCG, 1:279–280.

33.Petit, “La formation de l’esprit scientifique d’Ernest Renan.”

34.RCG, 1:295–296.

35.RCG, 1:356.

36.Renan, Souvenirs, 140–143.

37.Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 251–268.

38.Renan, Souvenirs, 135.

39.Renan, Souvenirs, 140; RCG, 1:274.

40.RCG, 1:311.

41.Renan, Souvenirs, ed. Balcou, 240–241.

42.Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 264. Goldstein sees this struggle as taking place between 1843 and 1846 and emphasizes the role of Cousin in Renan’s intellectual development.

43.RCG, 1:263.

44.Renan, Souvenirs, 143.

45.Ibid., 150.

46.RCG, 1:377–378.

47.RCG, 1:380. Renan had earlier made a similar comment about his confidence in Gosselin in a letter to Liart: “How difficult it is to make such consequential decisions, how happy one is to find men who take them for you and don’t leave you languishing in doubt! . . . [Gosselin] has led me in all of this with an admirable clarity and simplicity.” RCG, 1:342.

48.Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale, 233–243.

49.RCG, 1:325.

50.For Ernest’s letters to Henriette, see RCG, 1:323–327, 353–357, 394–399; for Henriette to Renan, see RCG, 1:334–338, 362–367; for Ernest to Liart, see RCG, 1:400–405.

51.RCG, 1:364.

52.RCG, 1:365.

53.RCG, 1: 335.

54.RCG, 1:397–398.

55.Renan, Souvenirs, 149.

56.RCG, 1:425–428, 432–437, 439–444, 447–455.

57.RCG, 1:443.

58.RCG, 1:453–454.

59.RCG, 1:462. Renan made similar comments in a letter to Liart later that year; RCG, 1:476–477.

60.“Principes de Conduite,” ROC, 9:1480–1492.

61.RCG, 1:488.

62.RCG, 1:476–482.

63.RCG, 1:435; see also Renan’s letter to Liart, RCG, 1:442–443.

64.“Homélie pour le deuxième dimanche de l’Avent,” in Renan, Travaux de jeunesse, 10. For an extensive commentary on Renan’s work as a catechist, see Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale, 125–134.

65.“Homélie sur la Sainte Enfance de N.S.J.C.,” in Renan, Travaux de jeunesse, 17.

66.Renan, Souvenirs, 149, 170.

67.Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale, 63–80.

68.Ibid., 72, 103, 398–399, 403–404, 599.

69.Ibid., 74. On Garnier, see Laplanche, “Deux maîtres sulpiciens dans la mémoire de Renan”; Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale, 66–80, 87–94; Laplanche, La Bible en France, 127–147. Renan also read the work of David Strauss sometime in 1845, to judge by an entry in his “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:244.

70.Renan, Souvenirs, 164. At Saint-Sulpice, Renan’s linguistic skills earned him a position as the instructor in the introductory course on Hebrew grammar in 1844–1845.

71.Ibid., 169.

72.Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:12–13nn4,5, 9:66n38. For a thorough discussion of these and other problems of interpretation as presented in the teaching of Garnier and Le Hir, see Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale, 451–521.

73.Priest, The Gospel According to Renan, 23.

74.Ibid., 38.

75.Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:66n38.

76.Ibid., 9:69n41.

77.RCG, 1:593. For the influence of German philosophy and literature on Renan, see Pommier, “L’initiation de Renan aux lettres allemandes”; Werner, “Renan et l’Allemagne.”

78.Renan, “Etudes de littérature allemande.” In Souvenirs, 177, Renan recalls that Herder “was the German writer I knew the best.”

79.RCG, 1:622–622. For other reflections on Germany, see Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:66n38, 193n151.

80.Renan, Souvenirs, 177. According to Jean Baubérot, “Renan’s principal regret is not to be able to conduct himself with regard to Catholicism as Protestant intellectuals do with regard to Protestantism: a movement of internal contestation without rupture”; “Renan et le protestantisme,” 436.

81.RCG, 1:579.

82.RCG, 1:571. Liart, already very ill, died before he was able to read this last letter.

83.RCG, 1:616; for their previous exchanges on his plans, see RCG, 1:590–594, 603–610.

84.RCG, 1:613.

85.RCG, 1:620. Renan used similar language in his letter to his spiritual adviser, the abbé Baudier (RCG, 1:629) and in a letter to Henriette (RCG, 2:33–34).

86.RCG, 1:632.

87.RCG, 2:36.

88.Renan provided a full account of the details of this climactic week in his letter to Henriette; RCG, 2:57–64.

89.Balcou, Ernest Renan, 77–78. Jules Simon describes Renan visiting him in his cassock just after he left Saint-Sulpice and claims to have helped him purchase his first secular outfit. Simon, Quatre portraits, 216.

90.RCG, 2:58. It is not clear exactly when Renan abandoned orthodox religious practice; he may have confessed to Le Hir in October, during a visit just after his departure from the seminary. Renan remained in touch with Le Hir throughout the 1850s, mostly regarding philological questions. Le Hir’s increasing concern that Renan was lost forever can be traced in his letters to his former student in the Renan Archives of the Musée de la Vie Romantique, fonds 22, letters 3–10.

91.RCG, 2:372–374.

92.Rétat uses this phrase to categorize Renan’s early writings in the collection of texts he edited, Renan, Renan: Histoire et parole.

93.Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:33n49. Renan makes a similarly unequivocal assertion in L’avenir de la science, ROC, 3:765.

94.ROC, 3:982.

95.ROC, 3:1074–1075.

96.Renan argues for philology as the basis for intellectual and moral progress in ROC, 3:889–1017. For an overview of the history of philology, see J. Turner, Philology.

97.Renan, L’avenir de la science, ROC, 3:805.

98.Ibid., 3:757.

99.Renan, “Les historiens critiques de Jésus,” 166.

100.Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:242–245; Balcou, Ernest Renan, 75–84.

101.RCG, 3:44–48, 108–109.

102.Renan, Voyages, 16.

103.Renan, “Patrice,” in Renan: Histoire et parole, 27; Balcou, Ernest Renan, 122–125.

104.Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse, 51–66.

105.RCG 2:264.

106.Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:397.

107.Renan, L’avenir de la science, ROC, 3:1071.

108.Ibid., 3:1013–1017.

109.Ibid., 3:716–728.

110.RCG, 1:625.

111.RCG, 2:272,

112.Renan, “Patrice,” in Renan: Histoire et parole, 226.

113.Priest, The Gospel According to Renan.

114.Renan, “Examen de conscience philosophique,” ROC, 2:1162.

Conclusion

1.Chevé, Dictionnaire des conversions, 89–90. On Migne, see Bloch, God’s Plagiarist; Langlois and Laplanche, La science catholique.

2.Chevé, Dictionnaire des conversions, 92–93.

3.Harrison, Romantic Catholics.

4.Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self; Seigel, The Idea of the Self; Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon.

5.Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon, 3–4.

6.There is an enormous literature on Newman. Religious and intellectual considerations are the focus in O’Connell, The Oxford Conspirators; for an analysis that emphasizes social and familial contexts, see F. Turner, John Henry Newman.

7.Franchot, Roads to Rome.

8.Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France.

9.Poulat, Histoire, dogme, et critique dans la crise moderniste; O’Connell, Critics on Trial; Colin, L’audace et le soupçon.

10.J. Kaplan, L’affaire Finaly; Latour, Les deux orphelins; Block, In the Shadow of Vichy.

11.Goldman, Jewish-Christian Difference and Modern Jewish Identity, 45–72.

12.“Symposium on ‘Jewish-Christians and the Torah’” offers a series of articles on Wyschogrod’s response to Lustiger.

13.Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, “The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable.” The document was released on the fiftieth anniversary of “Nostra aetate,” the Vatican II document that repudiated the charge that the Jewish people were responsible for the death of Christ. For the evolution of the Catholic understanding of Judaism, see Connelly, From Enemy to Brother.

14.Houellebecq, Soumission, front matter; I draw quotes from the English translation by Lorin Stein.

15.Ibid., 133–137.

16.Carrère, Le royaume. I draw quotes from the English translation by John Lambert.

17.Ibid., 62.

18.Ibid., 74.

19.Ibid., 82.

20.Ibid., 213.