Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France 9780300235647

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Conscience and Conversion

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Conscience and Conversion Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France

Thomas Kselman

new haven and london

Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Fournier type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947665 ISBN 978-0-300-22613-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Claudia

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Contents Preface Introduction

ix 1

1. From Toleration to Liberty: Religious Freedom as Concept and Constitutional Right

13

2. Religious Wandering in French Romantic Culture

49

3. Prodigal Sons and Daughters? Jewish Converts and Catholic Proselytism

80

4. Family, Nation, and Freedom: Ivan Gagarin, the Swetchine Circle, and the Orthodox Road to Rome

122

5. God and Liberty? Lamennais, Catholicism, and Freedom of Conscience

157

6. Mysticism, Despair, and Progress: George Sand’s Pursuit of Religious Liberty

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7. Philology and Freedom: Ernest Renan’s Struggle with Catholicism

234

Conclusion

267

viii c o n t e n t s

List of Abbreviations

277

Notes

279

Bibliography

335

Index

369

Preface When I began this book several years ago, I thought it would be about the history of Jewish-Christian relations in modern France. Some of the research based on this original idea shows up in chapters 2 and 3, but in pursuing this topic I became fascinated with Jewish converts to Catholicism, as they struggled with themselves, their families, and their communities in the borderlands between two religions. The stories of these converts opened up a broader question, about how and why people make religious choices, and the contexts that both allow and constrain these decisions. As often happens with historical research, I did not plan the journey I ended up taking, as I moved from Jewish-Christian relations, to conversions, and eventually to religious liberty as my subject. The freedom to choose a religious identity is for me a personal as well as a scholarly concern. Family bonds tie me to both Catholicism and Judaism, but I stand at the margins of both traditions, regarding them with a combination of affection, respect, and skepticism. Writing this book has allowed me to study a time and a place where the religious liberty available to me and others in the West emerged in ways that continue to resonate in the modern world. I hope that the story I tell here will add to our knowledge of French history, but also to our understanding of the complex ways in which religious liberty in the modern world challenges individuals, families, and communities to adopt tolerant and open-hearted approaches toward religious differences. Many people have helped me along the way. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the colleagues who have participated in the modern European reading group of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame. Over the past several years members of the group have read and commented on all of the chapters, providing insight from a variety of disciplines and, perhaps ix

x p r e fa c e

just as important, setting deadlines for circulating texts that I might otherwise still be revising. Thanks to Julia Douthwaite, who founded and led us for many years, and to Tobias Boes, John Deak, Robert Fishman, Lauren Holland, Alex Martin, Ian Newman, Pierpaolo Polinzetti, Yasmin Solomenescu, and Lesley Walker. I have also benefited from the support of colleagues in the history department, who have listened to me talk about this project in departmental seminars, but also in friendly conversations in Decio Hall. I especially thank my department chairs, John McGreevy, Tom Noble, and Pat Griffin, who were generous, confident, and patient as they waited for me to finish a book that kept changing shape over the last several years. The seminars sponsored by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, led by Timothy Matovina and now by Kathleen Cummings, have been a stimulating forum for me and other scholars to discuss broad issues relating to the place of religion in the modern world. From outside Notre Dame a number of colleagues offered comments on chapters that took me into their own areas of expertise: Dominque Avon, Tatyana Bakhmetyeva, Sarah Cramsey, Rob Priest, Ron Schechter, and David Troyansky. I have profited from the opportunity to present material from this book to panels at the American Historical Association, the American Catholic Historical Association, and the Western Society for French History. In conversations at conferences and dinners I have learned much from Guillaume Cuchet, Sarah Curtis, Jean-Dominique Durand, Frédéric Gugelot, Ray Jonas, Jacqueline Lalouette, Claude Langlois, John Merriman, Florian Michel, Jean-Pierre Moisset, Jason Neidleman, and Tim Tackett. My former students Sean Phillips and Sheila Nowinski did some valuable digging for me on the history of toleration and religious liberty in Old Regime France. Thanks are due as well to the universities where I’ve given talks that allowed me to develop many of the stories and ideas that evolved into this book: the University of Bordeaux, the University of Chicago, Holy Cross University, the University of Louvain, Texas Tech University, and Yale University. In the final stages I was fortunate to have responses from two anonymous readers for Yale University Press who combined enthusiasm for the project with some trenchant suggestions for improving it. Some of the material in chapter 3 appeared in a different form in “The Bautain Circle and Catholic-Jewish Relations in Modern France,” Catholic Historical Review 92 (2006): 177–196, and “Turbulent Souls in Modern France: Jewish Conversion and the Terquem Affair,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32 (2006): 83–104.

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A number of institutions provided crucial financial support for this project. In the earliest stages of the research the Lucius Littauer Foundation provided a grant that got me started on Jewish-Christian relations. The Nanovic Institute at Notre Dame, led by Jim McAdams and Anthony Monta, never turned down a request on my part for funds to support work in France during the summer months. The Department of History provided sabbatical leaves and travel funds on several occasions. A grant from Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts covered the costs of the index. I am grateful to Phil Nord and Jan Goldstein, for supporting my application for a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and to the Endowment, which provided a grant that allowed me to spend a year of research and writing in 2008–2009. All of the staff I encountered at the archives where I worked were friendly, professional, and efficient, but I want to single out Father Robert Bonfils, S.J., the archivist at the Jesuit archives in Vanves, and his successor, Barbara Baudry, for helping me with the sources on Alphonse Ratisbonne and Ivan Gagarin. Céline Hirsch Poynard, the archivist for the Sisters of Notre-Dame de Sion, went out of her way to help me find conversion narratives from the members of the congregation and caught some mistakes in my chapter on the Ratisbonne brothers. Thanks are also due to Marie-Claude Sabouret, who directs the archive at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, for her help in identifying valuable sources, and for stimulating conversations about Ernest Renan. I have never met Louis Le Guillou, Jean Balcou, or Georges Lubin, but this book could not have been written without their monumental achievements, multivolume editions of the correspondence of Félicité Lamennais, Ernest Renan, and George Sand. Over the past few months I have enjoyed working with Heather Gold, my editor at Yale University Press, a model of friendly efficiency in finding readers and moving the manuscript along through the publication process. On a personal level, my time in Paris has been enriched by the friendship and hospitality of Claude and Ann Langlois and of Florian Michel and Séverine Blenner-Michel. Over the last few years I have been subjected to some goodhumored teasing from my family about this book, which seemed always just one more year away. Behind the jokes I always felt their love and support, so thanks to my children, Dan, Joseph, and Julie, and to their spouses, Clara, Cristeen, and Conor. Claudia Kselman has read Conscience and Conversion in all its versions and responded thoughtfully and patiently when our conversation turned to converts, religious identity, and religious liberty. This book is dedicated to Claudia, who has meant everything to me for over forty years.

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Conscience and Conversion

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Introduction

Although those of us who live in western democracies argue passionately about the meaning of religious liberty, it is a right we take for granted. Of course, some of the current debates in the United States express alarm about threats to religious liberty coming from state regulation or, conversely, the overreach of religious communities that seek to impose their views on the broader society. In Europe the growing numbers of Muslims have made religious liberty a controversial issue, particularly in France, where the policy of laïcité, built on the restriction of religion to the private sphere, has led to laws restraining the display of religious identity in schools, on the street, and most recently, on beaches.1 Although participants in these debates differ widely in their particular understanding of religious liberty, the vast majority of them accept it as a fundamental right. This book tells one part of the story about how we became accustomed to living in a world where we can believe in and practice a religion of our own choice. It is beyond my capacity, and the capacity of any one person, to tell the whole story, but I propose that exploring religious liberty in France, and especially in Paris, in the aftermath of the French Revolution can illuminate some of the central dilemmas that individuals and societies face as they struggle to understand and apply what has been referred to as the “first freedom.”2 Debates about religious liberty often turn on the expression of religious beliefs in the public sphere, set against the limits that the state imposes to maintain public order. Do religious communities have the right to open churches for public worship, and to establish schools to educate their children within their religious traditions? Can symbols of religious identity be 1

2 introduction

displayed on buildings, or on bodies, when these are in the public sphere? Conceived in this manner, freedom of religion is primarily a matter of the relationship between religious communities and the state.3 The issue of church-state relations is of central importance for any study of religious liberty in the modern world and will come up frequently in my account. But focusing on religious liberty as situated primarily within religious communities can veil another dimension of this right, as it plays out in the lives of individuals who decide to convert, to cross a religious boundary, to change their religious identities.4 Approaching religious liberty from the perspective of converts and conversions can bring more sharply into focus what Charles Taylor has defined as the essential characteristic of our secular age. Taylor rejects any simple sense of the modern era as one of religious decline and instead sees it as taking us “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”5 Religious conversions have long drawn the interest of memoirists, novelists, and scholars fascinated by the personal dramas of “turbulent souls,” from Paul and Augustine through contemporary tales of religious exploration and choice, such as those of Stephen Dubner and Emmanuel Carrère.6 An older tradition of conversion studies, represented by William James and Arthur Nock, emphasizes sudden turns and complete transformations in the lives of converts.7 Recent approaches suggest a more ambiguous process, as in Gauri Viswanathan’s argument that “interweaving and disentangling are the metaphors that most accurately describe the conversion experience, which meshes two worlds, two cultures, and two religions, only to unravel their various strands and cast upon each strand the estranged light of unfamiliarity.”8 From my perspective these approaches are not mutually exclusive, for the converts I study struggled with varying degrees of success to reconcile the clear choices presented to them by families and religious institutions with their own complex religious identities. As Lewis Rambo has proposed, conversion is best understood as a process rather than a single event, a move that needs to be understood from a variety of perspectives— psychological, social, and religious.9 Rambo has made some useful distinctions in his typology of conversions, which he breaks down according to the categories of apostasy (“the repudiation of a religious tradition”), intensification (“revitalized commitment to a faith”), affiliation (“the movement of an individual or group from no or minimal religious commitment to full

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involvement”), institutional transition (“change of an individual or group from one community to another within a major tradition”), and tradition transition (“movement of an individual or group from one major religious tradition to another”).10 We will observe all of these kinds of changes in the converts who will take up most of this book, and often we will see a single individual embodying several of these experiences, moving first within and then departing from a particular religious tradition. I would add that the converts I study end up in a more ambiguous position than typologies such as Rambo’s might suggest, an unsurprising result for a historical approach concerned with individuals in a particular time and place. France is an especially interesting site for observing religious liberty as manifested in the lives of converts. After more than two decades of political and religious turmoil, France in 1814 adopted a constitutional system that endorsed religious liberty, which opened up new possibilities for individual religious choice. Religious liberty was also advancing elsewhere in this period: in the United States, where it was enshrined in state constitutions and the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights (1791), and in Great Britain, where the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 revoked the penal laws that restricted the property rights of Catholics and denied them the right to sit in Parliament.11 The Bourbon kings who returned in 1814 were thus part of a larger movement when they endorsed religious liberty, but at the same time they declared Catholicism the official state religion and supported a vigorous religious revival in which the Catholic Church sought to recover its position of religious primacy. This combination of Catholic revival and religious liberty produced heated debates about the relationship of church and state in this period, but it also raised perplexing questions for individuals who were struggling to achieve a coherent religious and social identity, searching for what Jan Goldstein refers to as a “post-revolutionary self.”12 The converts whose lives form the basis of this book include some well-known figures, such as Félicité Lamennais, George Sand, and Ernest Renan, as well as several who have left less of an impression in the contemporary world—the brothers Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne and the Russian diplomat Ivan Gagarin—though they achieved a certain notoriety in their day. All of them, however, left behind a rich store of materials that allow us to observe them as they made religious decisions that they and their contemporaries understood to be momentous. They were cosmopolitan figures, traveling widely and passionately engaged in the shifting relationships

4 introduction

between religion, politics, and society not only in France but in Europe. None of the converts were native Parisians, but it is not coincidental that they often found themselves in the French capital, where they found the freedom to explore their religious choices. Paris has been awarded its titles of “capital of the nineteenth century” and “capital of modernity” for its innovations in urban design and living and for its turbulent social history.13 But it was also a center for religious experimentation, where writers, musicians, political revolutionaries, socialists, and bohemians argued about art, life, and politics, and also about religion.14 To borrow again from Rambo’s vocabulary on conversion, Paris provided an unusually open context within which individuals faced religious crises and pursued quests that would satisfy their desire for lives that had some form of transcendent meaning.15 Unsurprisingly, the converts I have studied sometimes crossed paths, and even those who did not run into each other directly may have passed each other in the streets around the church of Saint-Sulpice, in the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Saint-Sulpice was where George Sand sought relief from a religious crisis, and where Ernest Renan preached his first sermon, just next door to the seminary where he first entertained his serious doubts about Catholic orthodoxy. During his time at the seminary Renan looked forward to a visit from the recently converted Alphonse Ratisbonne, which never materialized. Not far away to the west, on the rue Saint-Dominique, Madame Swetchine hosted at times the Ratisbonne brothers, Ivan Gagarin, and two close associates of Lamennais, Henri Lacordaire and the Count de Montalembert. She also assisted at some of the baptisms in the orphanage for Jewish girls established by Théodore Ratisbonne on the rue de Regard, a short walk from Saint-Sulpice and from her apartment. Lamennais, after he broke with Lacordaire and Montalembert, lived for a time nearby on the rue de Vaugirard. Dinner parties sometimes brought together these and other individuals from a variety of religious traditions in a convivial atmosphere that allowed for the free expression of their ideas. At a dinner given by Franz Liszt in 1835 the guest list included Félicité Lamennais, George Sand, the Baron d’Eckstein (a Protestant from a Jewish family who converted to Catholicism), the Saint-Simonian Emile Barrault, the poet Heinrich Heine (a German Jew who converted to Protestantism and who was sympathetic to Saint-Simonianism), the Catholic philosopher Pierre Ballanche, and Hermann Cohen, a fourteen-year-old Jewish piano prodigy who was later to convert to Catholicism.16 Ivan Gagarin, in a journal

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entry from 1838, described with enthusiasm a long conversation with Lamennais at a dinner hosted by the Baron d’Eckstein. Gagarin, soon to convert to Catholicism, was deeply impressed with Lamennais, who had recently left the church, admiring his “impartiality” and “spiritual irony” and his “lively sympathy for all the questions that face humanity.”17 With religious liberty, as with so many other issues, Paris plays a role of capital importance because it channeled concerns that affected all of Europe in the wake of the French Revolution. Scholars who study conversions in other times and places offer both warnings and guidance over how we might interpret the testimony that comes in the form of narratives intended both as self-justification and as public statements designed to influence the religious choices of others. Keith Luria, in an astute examination of conversions in early modern France, argues skeptically that “we cannot assume that [conversion accounts] give us direct access to the personal experience of conversion.”18 In telling their stories Luria’s converts were following models that tell us more about the desire of Protestant and Catholic communities to distinguish themselves from each other than they do about an intimate spiritual transformation. Accepting the doctrines of a church as true, and submitting to its discipline, were at the center of these accounts. Doctrine and church authority continued to be burning issues for converts in the nineteenth century, but their stories emphasize as well the emotional struggles of the individual conscience, drawing on the romantic culture of self-exposure in the tradition of Rousseau’s Confessions. But the problem identified by Luria remains, for a heightened emotional atmosphere in a conversion narrative does not necessarily mean we are closer to a transparent reflection of religious transformation. In the case of my subjects we have a great deal of evidence beyond narratives intended for public consumption, including personal correspondence and private diaries, not to mention accounts by friends, family members, and journalists, but a similar hermeneutic suspicion might be directed at these texts, which can be seen as designed to construct, or reconstruct, a religious decision that seems always somehow out of reach. Rather than despair at this problem of the fraught relationship between narrative and experience, I will approach the words of my subjects, and their colleagues, as indications of deeply felt but imperfectly grasped religious feelings and beliefs that they struggled to express. Their narratives might be understood as “emotives,” to borrow a term from William Reddy’s history

6 introduction

of the emotions, a means for navigating the turbulent passage from one religious identity to another, expressing their freedom “not to make rational choices, but to undergo conversion experiences and life-course changes involving numerous contrasting, often incommensurable factors.”19 I am committed, along with my subjects, to using their words to try to get to their primordial religious experiences, knowing that the effort can never fully succeed. Karl Morrison makes this point nicely when he writes that “the challenge and reward of studying the idea of conversion and its history lie in the obscurity and incommunicability of the experience known metaphorically as conversion.”20 In taking this approach I hope, like Bruce Hindmarsh in his study of English evangelical conversion narratives, to balance trust and suspicion, to reject both a naïve reading of texts and a critique that would prevent us from seeing in their words the human beings who wrote them.21 As the work of Luria, Hindmarsh, and others suggests, the meaning of conversion shifts over time, reflecting the different religious, political, and social contexts that shape religious choice and identity. In the Middle Ages, for example, Karl Morrison has argued that “conversion” came to mean a long process “identified with penitential asceticism, suffering, and martyrdom,” practices institutionalized in monasticism and not necessarily associated with a dramatic moment of transformation, such as Paul experienced on the road to Damascus.22 In the early years of the Reformation, as sharp confessional differences emerged on matters of doctrine and ritual, Protestant converts made painful individual choices that “ended friendships, caused division between neighbors and kin, damaged relations with parents beyond repair, sometimes even caused rejection by a spouse or children.”23 We will observe similar scenes in the lives of the nineteenth-century converts I study, but played out against a very different political and religious background. Although the seeds of religious liberty were planted during the Reformation, Catholics and reformers generally looked toward a period when religious unity would be restored, when there would be no further need to choose. This was the principle established in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the basis for settling the religious wars in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which famously embraced the model of “cuius regio, eius religio” (whose realm, his religion), imagining a Europe in which kings would determine the religious identities of their subjects. We know in practice that religious minorities continued to exist in many states, including France, where a Huguenot minority was granted limited rights to practice by the Edict of Nantes

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(1598).24 We know as well that this apparent violation of “cuius regio” and its corollary of “one king, one law, one faith” was rectified, from the perspective of Catholics, by the revocation of Nantes in 1685, and the subsequent persecution of Protestants for much of the eighteenth century.25 In this context conversions to the state religion of Catholicism were sometimes encouraged, sometimes coerced, and it was difficult if not impossible to imagine a move away from the established church. As we will see, converts struggled painfully over their religious identity in the nineteenth century, and in France the pull of the Catholic Church remained powerful. But they struggled in a context that gave them legal space for religious choices that did not previously exist, and in a cultural climate that encouraged them to reflect anew on what they believed, on how their religious values and commitments shaped their personal identities, family relations, and political loyalties. Conversion narratives thus offer us privileged access to the interplay between individuals and the world they both inhabit and interpret. I accept Hindmarsh’s argument that these accounts are particularly valuable because they reveal the “the explanatory potential of religious conversion and belief for our understanding of the human person as inveterate storyteller and self-biographer,” but with an important amendment.26 Religious motives work powerfully in all of the converts I study, but in some cases doubt wins out, a conclusion that does not seem to emerge from the narratives studied by Luria and Hindmarsh for early modern France and England, nor does it seem to be envisioned by the stages enumerated by Rambo. But if we extend “conversion narrative” to include “disenchantment narrative,” to borrow a term from David Hempton, it becomes capacious enough to cover my subjects, and the complex back-and-forth moves they made in the increasingly liberated religious atmosphere of the nineteenth century.27 Finally, I want to emphasize that although the converts I study were in many ways exceptional individuals, their stories fascinated and troubled both friends who corresponded with them in private and readers who learned about them in a variety of published texts. Some of this interest came from the dramatic or even melodramatic quality of their lives, which I hope will come through in my accounts of their conversions. But contemporaries were also drawn to these converts because their stories revealed an expanding range of religious choices and the ways in which these were linked to the ideologies and institutions that were being reconstructed in the aftermath of the

8 introduction

French Revolution. In a sense, my interest in converts parallels that of their contemporaries, for like them I approach my subjects with a specific concern for the ways in which they played along and moved across religious borders.28 Conversions allow us to observe the shifting and problematic contours of religious life marked by pluralism, voluntarism, and experimentation that were on display in post-revolutionary France, and which continue to define our modern religious landscape.29

Chapter Outline I open my book with two chapters that present the broad intellectual, political, and cultural contexts within which converts explored their religious choices. In chapter 1 I place the heated debate over the language of religious liberty employed in Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man within the history of this concept going back to the religious wars of the sixteenth century. Toleration and freedom of conscience were the terms most commonly used to defend the rights of religious minorities in early modern France, deployed against a state preoccupied with what it saw as the threat dissenters posed to domestic and international peace. During the eighteenth century discussion of this issue led beyond arguments about whether or not the monarchy should “tolerate” such worship to assertions that religious liberty was a fundamental right rather than a grant from a generous monarch. But even as the terms of the debate were expanded, religious liberty was still understood primarily as a communal right to worship, as seen in some of the major works of Montaigne, Bayle, Rousseau, and Voltaire. During the French Revolution conflict over religious liberty focused on the status of the Catholic Church, which faced both brutal repression when it was perceived to be an enemy of the new regime and competition from state-sponsored alternative liturgies.30 Individuals were sometimes faced with difficult choices, such as the clergy who had to decide whether or not to take an oath to accept the new constitutional arrangement between church and state.31 But the battle between the Catholic Church and the revolution meant that once again religious liberty was approached primarily as a collective rather than an individual right. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of the status of religious liberty within the constitutional system introduced by the charter granted by the Bourbons in 1814. Although church-state relations continued to be politically controversial, and the cultural authority of the Catholic Church was

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still an important force in French society, the charter as it was applied during the Restoration and July Monarchy provided a setting that allowed individuals to contemplate with increased self-consciousness and intensity the right to change a religious identity. In chapter 2 I move from philosophical texts and constitutional structures to the world of literature and theater, and in particular to the revival of interest in the “wandering Jew,” a figure I take to be emblematic of the cultural anxiety that accompanied the enhanced understanding of religious liberty as an individual right. Eugène Sue ’s enormously popular novel The Wandering Jew (Le Juif Errant, 1844–1845) is the most noteworthy example of the cultural resonance of Ahasvérus, forced to wander the world until Christ comes again, but he turns up as well in broadsheets, in plays, and on the operatic stage. I see the “wandering Jew” as set in a broader context of cultural anxiety over religious choice and identity, on display in the works of some of the most prominent authors and artists of the first half of the nineteenth century. The most popular opera on the Paris stage in the nineteenth century, Fromental Halévy’s La juive, concludes with the tragic death of a Jewish father and daughter who accept death rather than convert to Christianity. Taken together, this evidence suggests a cultural environment in which readers and audiences were fascinated by stories in which individuals made difficult choices about their religious identities, which brought them into painful conflicts with their families and communities, and with themselves. In chapter 3 I begin considering the ways in which individuals confronted the possibilities for religious choice that they found in the constitutional and cultural setting of post-revolutionary France. I open with an account of the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne, a story that rivals La juive in its melodrama and fantastic plotline. In January 1842 Alphonse Ratisbonne, a young Jewish banker from Strasbourg, engaged to be married and known to dislike Christianity, was converted suddenly by what he claimed was a Marian apparition in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in Rome. Alphonse ’s sudden conversion led to a family crisis and religious controversy, both of them centered in Paris. Following his conversion Alphonse collaborated with his brother Father Théodore Ratisbonne, whose own conversion in the 1820s had also created a public uproar, in founding the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion in 1844. The congregation, dedicated to the conversion of Jews, was at the center of a number of dramatic confrontations over conversions in Paris in the 1840s that drew the attention of the

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French public. Many of these converts were young girls from Jewish families unable to care for them. Their stories reveal the ways in which poverty and gender shaped the ways in which individuals confronted religious choices and constrained their experience of religious liberty. The story of the Ratisbonne brothers and the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion shows us both the personal struggles that accompanied decisions to cross a religious boundary and the public fascination with them, confirming the significance of the “wandering Jew” as a symbol for the cultural anxiety that accompanied the arrival of religious freedom. In chapter 4 I turn to the circle of Catholics who gathered in the home of the Russian exile Madame Sophie Swetchine in the 1830s and 1840s on the rue Saint-Dominique, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Madame Swetchine was herself a convert, influenced as a young woman by Joseph de Maistre when he served in St. Petersburg as the Savoyard ambassador to Russia (1803– 1817). After settling in Paris in the 1820s, she established herself as an important salonnière, serving as a bridge between French Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy. One of her guests, Ivan Gagarin, was a prominent Russian aristocrat and diplomat, preoccupied with the political and spiritual condition of Russia, and an important figure in the debates between the “Slavophiles” and “Westerners” that defined this period in Russian intellectual history. Gagarin’s conversion, finalized in the chapel of Madame Swetchine’s apartment in April 1842, was accompanied by a very difficult period of separation from his family and his career, a liminal state that came to an end with his entry into the Jesuits in August 1843. Deeply attached to Russia and bound by a sense of filial affection and obligation to his family, Gagarin was at the same time critical of the autocracy of Nicholas I (1825–1855) and alienated from the orthodox piety of his parents. In many ways the conversion of Ivan Gagarin resembles that of the Ratisbonne brothers, as he struggled to resolve competing claims of religious belief, family feeling, and national identity. But Gagarin’s conversion suggests more clearly the intellectual appeal Roman Catholicism could exercise in the post-revolutionary age, seen by him as a way of reconciling freedom and authority, Russia and the West. Gagarin found in Madame Swetchine’s salon a place of open-minded religious and political discussions in which tolerance for the opinions of non-Catholics was combined with a profound commitment to the authority of the Roman Church. Catholicism could exert a powerful appeal in this period, but it could also drive people away, a process in which believers came first of all to doubt

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their faith and their allegiance to the church and then to make the painful choice to leave it and embrace a new set of principles. The decision to abandon Catholicism was another form of conversion, another way of taking advantage of newly available religious liberty. To consider this dimension my study will take up the lives and works of three prominent intellectuals, Félicité Lamennais (1782–1854), George Sand (1804–1876), and Ernest Renan (1823–1892). All of these figures left extensive accounts of their lives, memoirs that look back on their decisions, but also correspondence that allows us to observe them in the act of making their choices in relationship with families and friends and in dialogue with the social and religious issues of the day. Félicité Lamennais is known for a career that brought him from a position defending Catholicism as the only possible source of legitimacy and order in the post-revolutionary world, to one in which he advocated the marriage of “God and Liberty” under the leadership of the pope, and finally to a violent attack on the church as an enemy of freedom, which led to an excommunication that riveted public attention in the 1830s. In chapter 5 I focus in particular on the crisis that developed following the condemnation of his ideas in the encyclical Mirari vos (1832). For the next five years Lamennais struggled to reconcile his Catholic faith and institutional commitment with his growing sense that the church had abandoned its historical role as he had discerned it—to stand for democratic rights in the face of political tyranny and social injustice. Although Lamennais at times wavered in the face of papal pressure, in 1834 and 1835 he moved toward and finally reached an unequivocal position in which his personal conscience trumped papal authority. In discussing Lamennais’s career I highlight his extensive correspondence with the Count Montalembert, a colleague who struggled with the same issues but who came to an opposite conclusion and ended by accepting church authority. In the end Lamennais came to understand religious liberty as a matter of individual conscience, while Montalembert embraced a definition that emphasized the collective rights of the Catholic community. George Sand is known primarily as a novelist whose life and work make her an iconic figure for the history of feminism. But Sand was also one of the many in France drawn to Lamennais in support of his battle with the Catholic Church and his prophetic call for social justice based on religious principles. Using Sand’s novels, memoir, and correspondence I follow the story of her development from an agnostic upbringing by her unorthodox grandmother to a Catholic schoolgirl whose mystical experience in the

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college chapel led her to contemplate a religious vocation. As an adult Sand began pulling away from Catholicism at the same time as her marital troubles began, suggesting the connection between religious liberty and female emancipation. Sand’s choices, like those of Madame Swetchine, suggest how women as well as men were able to take advantage of individual religious liberty. But their decisions were made possible in part by their elite status, and in both cases they were guided at times by authoritative male religious figures. In leaving behind orthodox Catholicism Sand was drawn at first to the ideas and person of Lamennais but became even more enamored of the mystical religiosity of Pierre Leroux, who believed in the successive reincarnation of souls, constantly evolving toward spiritual and social perfection. Sand’s religious views coalesced in the 1830s around a belief in a God who calls for justice, a rejection of Catholicism and of religious institutions generally, a denial of an afterlife that would allow for eternal hellfire, and a conviction that all souls are on a path of spiritual progress. Ernest Renan, one of the most prominent French intellectuals of the nineteenth century, is known primarily for his controversial The Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus), in which he denied the miracles of Christ and expressed a general skepticism about the supernatural. In my chapter on Renan I ponder the question of how a pious young man from Brittany, the most devout region in France, raised in a fervent Catholic family and treated with generosity and solicitude by his clerical mentors, could, in the 1840s, abandon a priestly vocation and, within three years, reject not only the dogmas of the church but belief in the supernatural. Like other converts I study, Renan’s religious choices involved family drama, as he struggled with guilt for disappointing his devout mother. But Renan’s “disenchantment narrative,” contained in his correspondence and critical writings from the period as well as in his memoir, emphasizes how religious choice might be based on a critical scrutiny of the Bible, and on a philosophical commitment to rational inquiry that rejected any appeal to the authority of the Catholic Church. Even while he moved away from Catholicism, however, Renan retained a deep affection for the clergy who were his first teachers and combined his rejection of church doctrine and authority with a profound regret for the Catholic world he had lost. By closing with his story, I bring back into the picture the sustained appeal of Catholicism and suggest the ambiguous quality of religious belief in an age of religious liberty.

1. From Toleration to Liberty Religious Freedom as Concept and Constitutional Right

No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law. (Nul ne doit être inquiété pour ses opinions, même religieuses, pourvu que leur manifestation ne trouble pas l’ordre public établi par la loi.) —Article 10, Declaration of the Rights of Man

Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man can be read today as a straightforward affirmation of the freedom of thought, and in particular of the freedom of religion. But the debates that led to Article 10 were anything but serene. Just over a month after the storming of the Bastille had ensured the survival of the National Assembly, representatives were struggling to draft a document laying out the basic human rights that would undergird the constitution they would write. Of all the heated debates that accompanied this process, those that occurred on August 22 and 23 dealing with religious liberty were the most contentious. The editor of the Gazette Nationale/Moniteur Universel wrote in despair that it was impossible to describe accurately the session of August 23 at which “the most remarkable disorder dominated, where partiality was in control. . . . The motion of M. de Castellane was amended, sub-amended, divided, tortured, twisted in a hundred ways. One heard on all sides: I propose an amendment. . . . I demand to speak.”1

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At one level the passion that had representatives shouting at each other in the Assembly is easy to grasp. These men were staking out positions on the appropriate role of religion in the reformed French state, a tendentious issue that bedeviled French regimes throughout the revolutionary era and beyond. The Count de Castellane ’s motion, which became the basis for the final version of the article, established a position that maximized individual freedom, asserting that “no one ought to be disturbed for his religious opinions, nor troubled in the exercise of his religion.”2 From Castellane’s perspective, shared by the Count de Mirabeau, the leading voice for reform in the Assembly, Catholics and non-Catholics had equal rights to believe and practice the religion of their choice, and the state had no role to play in policing how this religious freedom was exercised. Castellane ’s motion provoked controversy because it replaced drafts of three articles that looked back to the Old Regime in declaring that a stateendorsed religion was essential for the public order. Article 18 of this earlier proposal included an explicit reference to an established religion as a legitimate constraint on individual religious liberty: “No citizen who does not trouble the established cult should be disturbed.”3 Castellane’s attempt to discard language supporting a public cult and a regulatory role for the state provoked heated responses from defenders of Catholic interests in the Assembly, most notably the abbé d’Eymar. As the debate drew to an end, Eymar proposed to substitute for Castellane’s motion Article 16 of the earlier proposal: “Law, being unable to control secret crimes, needs the support of religion. It is thereby essential and indispensable for the good order of society, that religion be maintained, conserved, and respected.”4 Mirabeau and the Protestant pastor Jean-Paul Rabaut de Saint-Etienne fought back hard against this assertion of the state ’s interest in maintaining religion, pushing the Assembly to reject Eymar’s motion and vote on Castellane’s instead. But it was at this point that the chaos described by the Moniteur broke out, and at the last minute the motion was amended to add the clause that preserved a tutelary role for the state. In the final wording Article 10, following Castellane, affirmed that no person would be troubled for his religious opinions, but only if “their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by law.”5 Although it substituted “public order” for “established cult” as the basis for warranting limits on religious liberty, this last-minute amendment amounted to a concession to those Catholics who wished the state to retain the right to monitor and control the public expression of religion. It also

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opened the door for all future regimes to intervene in religious matters based on shifting interpretations of what constituted a threat to “public order.” Looking back on the debates over Article 10 it is easy to see the relationship between church and state, Catholicism and the emerging regime, as the central point of contention. But in stating their positions on this question the representatives in the National Assembly also reformulated the terms used for understanding religious liberty, and their relationship to each other. This shift was dramatically emphasized in the speeches of François JeanJoseph de Laborde and Mirabeau on August 22. Laborde began by calling on the delegates to embrace the idea of tolerance, and to remember all the blood shed by intolerance over the past two centuries. He referred as well to the “freedom of conscience” and the “freedom of religion,” but he used these phrases, along with “tolerance,” indiscriminately. No one could doubt that Laborde favored Castellane ’s proposal, but his language suggests a fuzzy conceptualization of the basic terms used to define and defend religious liberty. Mirabeau’s speech, which followed Laborde’s, suffers from no such confusion. Mirabeau publicly rebuked his colleague, not because they disagreed on the need to defend religious liberty but because of the terms he employed to defend this right. Mirabeau proclaimed that “I do not come to preach tolerance. The most unlimited freedom of religion is in my eyes a right so sacred that the word tolerance, which attempts to express it, appears to me itself tyrannical, since the existence of the authority that has the power to tolerate undermines the liberty of thought, for that which it tolerates, it might choose not to tolerate.”6 The following day Rabaut de Saint-Etienne came back to this point forcefully: “But Gentlemen, it is not even tolerance that I demand; it is liberty. . . . Tolerance! I ask that it be banned in turn, and it will be, this unjust word, which presents us as citizens worthy to be pitied, criminals to be pardoned.”7 This assault on “tolerance” might seem surprising, given how proponents of reform had previously used the term to criticize official persecution of religious minorities. Toleration developed as a practice and also as an idea throughout the eighteenth century, culminating in a series of measures in France, Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, the Dutch Republic, and Great Britain that granted religious minorities limited civil rights.8 In France the revolutionary decade of the 1790s produced a paradoxical situation in which the religious liberty affirmed in Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of

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Man was compromised by the intermittent and sometimes violent repression of organized religious practice.9 This gap between theory and practice contributed to a further elaboration of the terms used to define religious liberty, a development that was passed on to the constitutional regimes of Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration, and the July Monarchy. The experience of religious liberty in the post-revolutionary era took place in a historical context shaped by philosophical debates and state policies that evolved over the three centuries that began with the Reformation. It is beyond the scope of this book to trace in detail the history of religious liberty during this period, but an overview of how its definition and practice evolved from the Reformation through the early nineteenth century can suggest the complicated political and spiritual landscape within which the converts I study lived and moved. In this chapter I will review the evolution of religious liberty in some major texts and in state policy from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Starting in the sixteenth century French writers such as Montaigne, concerned with the violence and disorder that followed from the Protestant Reformation, developed an evolving set of concepts that form an important part of the history of religious liberty. These concepts, in particular liberté de conscience and tolérance, were not always clearly distinguished from each other, nor was their relationship fully articulated, an ambiguity that helps explain the confusion in the debates of 1789.10 But they played a major role in the philosophical discussions and state policies of the period and laid the groundwork for an expanding language of religious liberty enunciated during the French Revolution and embedded in the liberal political systems that emerged in the nineteenth century. Laying out the history of these terms is complicated, in part because of the shifting and fluid ways in which they were used and in part because they become entangled with the overarching concept of religious liberty, which concerns me here. In order to be clear, I will generally retain the French (tolérance, liberté de conscience, liberté religieuse, liberté des cultes), or place the specific English term in quotation marks, but will use “religious liberty” without emphasis to indicate the general category within which they operate. The language and policies that define the history of religious liberty in the Old Regime troubled and engaged writers from Montaigne through Benjamin Constant on a personal as well as a theoretical level. As with the individuals whose religious choices will take up much of this book, religious liberty in the Old Regime was not only a philosophical issue involving state

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policy but a question of personal identity with profound existential resonance. Converts in the post-revolutionary decades made their decisions within a religious culture shaped by language and memory inherited from the Old Regime. My goal here is to examine this culture so we can better grasp the individual and collective dimensions of religious liberty that the Ratisbonne brothers, Ivan Gagarin, Félicité Lamennais, George Sand, and Ernest Renan grappled with and reformulated, thereby helping to define the modern experience of this fundamental right.

“Freedom of Conscience” in Montaigne Montaigne ’s Essays provide an invaluable starting point for probing the complicated ways in which religious liberty was understood in the crisis of the religious wars of sixteenth-century France (1562–1598) and in the aftermath of the horrors of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, when Catholic mobs in Paris slaughtered several thousand Protestants.11 Questions of religious identity and liberty were a preoccupation if not an obsession in this period, as Protestants and Catholics struggled against each other and sought to construct a political and religious regime that would restore peace and order in France. It is well known that Montaigne played a significant diplomatic role in mediating between Henri III, the Catholic League, and the Protestant forces led by Henri de Navarre.12 These efforts at reconciliation align with some of his reflections in the Essays, but this work reveals as well the ambiguity and tension built into debates over religious liberty. As sensitive and sympathetic as he is in confronting individual uncertainty and volatility, Montaigne gives serious weight also to the obligation of an individual to accept the religion of the state as essential for a well-ordered society. Montaigne takes up directly the issue of freedom of conscience (liberté de conscience) in an essay of that title, which focuses primarily on the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate and his religious policies with regard to Christians.13 The essay opens, however, with a direct comment on the French civil wars. Although Montaigne approves of those “upholding the religion and constitution of our country,” he condemns those who reject a policy of moderation in favor of “decisions which are unjust, violent, and rash.” Shifting quickly from contemporary France to the Roman Empire, Montaigne claims that Julian was “harsh . . . but not cruel” in his treatment of Christians and in the end adopted a policy of liberté de conscience, hoping that this would create

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religious divisions that would weaken any potential resistance to his reign.14 The concluding passage of this essay is characteristic of Montaigne’s thought, with its subtle appreciation of the different strategic uses made of liberté de conscience and its ironic description of royal policy. “It is worth considering that, in order to stir up the flames of civil strife, the Emperor Julian exploited the self-same remedy of freedom of conscience which our kings now employ to stifle them. On the one side you could say that to slacken the reins and allow the parties to hold on to their opinions is the way to sow dissension broadcast: it is all but equivalent to lending a hand to increase it, since there is no obstacle to bar its course and no legal constraint to rein it back. For the other side you could say that to slacken the reins and allow the parties to hold on to their opinions is to soften and weaken them by ease and laxity; it blunts the goad, whereas rareness, novelty and difficulty sharpen it. Yet for the honor and piety of our kings I prefer to believe that, since they could not do what they wished, they pretended to wish to do what they could.”15 What are we to make of this curious and complex passage? As M. A. Screech notes, Montaigne’s concept of liberté de conscience in this essay can be taken to mean “freedom of worship granted to a rival sect of Christians,” that is to say, a policy of state toleration directed at a dissident religious minority. Although the term “conscience” carries with it a sense of individual right, compatible with Montaigne’s sympathetic consideration of the subjective self, in the context of the murderous religious wars of this period liberté de conscience was understood to refer primarily to the right of public worship.16 Furthermore, despite the positive tone in describing Julian’s policy, Montaigne’s conclusion emphasizes the different motives that led to arguments favoring this liberty, and the uncertain consequences that might follow from allowing it. Julian expected that a policy of liberté de conscience would lead to religious pluralism, shoring up his regime by dividing potential enemies into competing sects. For French kings (presumably Charles IX, Henri III, and Henri IV), however, liberté de conscience and pluralism would lead to social peace, as communities would be grateful for the chance to worship openly, free from persecution. Montaigne’s closing jab suggests that the Valois kings had chosen to accept the principle of liberté de conscience because they had no choice. Montaigne ’s concern with following his thoughts wherever they might lead produces an ambivalent posture that is both sympathetic and critical toward “freedom of conscience,” interpreted primarily from the perspective of rulers considering how best to maintain peace and harmony in their

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domains. Montaigne has thought his way into the royal policy that he supported, a process that results in a profound but telling paradox. Since enforcing the ideal of religious uniformity has generated civil war, he argues, kings (and their advisers?) have taken the less attractive but prudent alternative of allowing different cults to practice within their states. But in the course of making this move, kings (and their advisers?) turn pragmatic policy into principle. This subtle move may be an act, a pretense, but it nonetheless shifts the basis for defending “freedom of conscience” from practical necessity to social ideal. The open-ended quality of Montaigne ’s position on liberté de conscience is in sharp contrast to comments made elsewhere in the Essays. As Quentin Skinner and others have observed, Montaigne combines skepticism about absolute claims of religious truth with an insistence on the value of religious uniformity. This principle is affirmed at the outset of “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” where Montaigne argues that the “novelties of Luther . . . would soon degenerate into loathsome atheism.” But the consequences of admitting religious difference would be social and political as well as religious: “Once you have put into [the hands of ordinary people] the foolhardiness of despising and criticizing opinions which they used to hold in the highest awe (such as those which concern their salvation), and once you have thrown into the balance of doubt and uncertainty any articles of their religion, they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty. They had no more authority for them, no more foundation, than for those you have just undermined; and so, as though it were the yoke of a tyrant, they shake off all those other concepts which had been impressed upon them by the authority of Law and the awesomeness of ancient custom.”17 Here Montaigne establishes religious uniformity as an ideal, even while his efforts at reconciling the warring factions in 1588, and his opposition to all forms of cruelty and violence, align him with the alternative policy of the politiques. This group was central to the eventual resolution of the religious wars, but their advocacy of toleration was prudential, based on the need to establish social peace. Given the terrible costs of the war, the politiques advocated a policy of tolerance as a lesser of two evils, an unfortunate concession made necessary in order to avoid the destruction of the commonwealth, “the only alternative to endemic civil strife.”18 Montaigne ’s position was part of a powerful tradition that helps explain the qualified nature of the Edict of Nantes (1598), in which Henri IV

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allowed Protestants to worship within clearly specified geographical limits, looking ahead to a time when they would be “better instructed, or convinced in their consciences by the Holy Spirit of their error and heresy.”19 Not all those who argued in favor of “freedom of conscience” during the sixteenth century looked forward to the restoration of religious uniformity. But Sebastian Castellio, Guillaume Postel, and Jean Bodin, like Montaigne, nevertheless regarded religious pluralism with a heavy sense of regret.20 Defenders of “freedom of conscience” in the sixteenth century did not celebrate religious liberty as a source of healthy pluralism; they viewed it as a regrettable concession to the flawed human condition. Montaigne ’s skepticism led him to a qualified and complex defense of “freedom of conscience.” It led him as well to a paradoxical position critical of dissent, and an argument that individuals should accept the reigning religious system. Montaigne ’s defense of religious uniformity is hard to reconcile with the profound exploration of the individual that is the dominant characteristic of the Essays. Montaigne comes back repeatedly and often to reflections that show him to be unsure of his position and open-minded about alternatives, a posture already on display in the conclusion of his essay on “freedom of conscience.” In “On Presumption” he writes that “philosophy never seems to have a better hand to play than when she battles against our presumption and our vanity; when in good faith she acknowledges her weakness, her ignorance, and her inability to reach conclusions.”21 Passages such as this make it easy to understand Charles Rosen’s comment that “fundamental to Montaigne is the conclusion that casts doubt upon itself, and thus reveals him at his most profound.”22 Taking Montaigne at his word, he manages to combine a fascination with the individual self, understood in all its volatility and uncertainty, with a sincere attachment to Catholicism, based on his respect for social convention and religious authority. In the Essays Montaigne captures the origins of the tense and ambiguous relationship between individuals, religious communities, and states whose evolution we will follow throughout this book.23 The Edict of Nantes, proclaimed by Henri IV in 1598 in order to settle over thirty years of intermittent violence and civil war, employs language similar to Montaigne ’s in allowing for the protection of Protestant “freedom of conscience” that had been under assault during the wars of religion.24 Although the edict allowed Protestants limited rights of public worship and representation in courts, it looked forward to a future when God would be

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worshiped in the same form by everyone, thus replicating the ambiguous posture of Montaigne regarding religious minorities. Although it is often referred to as the “Edict of Toleration,” the document makes no use of tolérance, a term that had only recently been introduced to describe a state policy of permitting more than one religion, adopted out of necessity.25 By the end of the sixteenth century, in the Edict of Nantes, “freedom of conscience” had emerged as a principle concept for defending religious liberty, but at this stage it was laden with a sense of regret and constraint and referred ambiguously to both individuals and religious communities.

Bayle, Bergier, and Bourbon Policy in the Eighteenth Century The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, enacted by the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685), was a catastrophic political mistake on the part of Louis XIV and his advisers. As a result, as many as two hundred thousand Protestants who had contributed to the prosperity of the kingdom fled the country, contributing to a wave of negative public opinion that fueled the international coalition that would oppose France over the next thirty years. Apart from such tactical considerations, it is difficult not to be shocked and disgusted by the repressive policies that led up to and followed the revocation. Bribes and harassment were designed to coerce conversions, practices that seem mild compared to the billeting of troops with Protestant families, which led thousands to convert in the early 1680s. I will not rehearse here the details of the repression that led up to and followed the revocation and that produced a major rebellion in the early seventeenth century.26 It is worth remembering that in several places local communities maintained peaceful relations for much of the seventeenth century, in the face of increasing royal pressure for religious uniformity.27 But the Edict of Fontainebleau was a landmark event, forcing Protestants to flee, convert, or go underground and provoking an intellectual response that led to a new stage in the history of religious liberty. To grasp this change no figure is more important than Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Bayle’s approach to religious freedom was not just an academic matter for him, for his life was marked by several movements across religious boundaries and a personal tragedy that resulted from the repression of the 1680s. The son of a Calvinist minster, Bayle converted to Catholicism as a young man before returning to the faith of his father and becoming a professor at the Protestant Academy in Sedan. In the face of the intensified persecution

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that began in 1681 Bayle fled to the Dutch Republic, where he published a series of works that helped establish the foundation for the Enlightenment, including the Lettre sur la comète (1682) and the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696). Because officials could not prosecute Bayle for heresy, they arrested his brother Jacob, who died in prison in 1685, adding a personal dimension to Bayle’s assault on intolerance.28 The revocation of the Edict of Nantes provided the immediate context for Bayle’s groundbreaking defense of religious liberty in his Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, ‘Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full ’ (Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ: Contrains-les d’entrer) (1686).29 Bayle ’s work is an extended refutation of the Catholic interpretation of the passage from the Gospel of Luke (14:23) where Jesus instructs his listeners with the parable of the wedding feast to which the invited guests refuse to come. After the host has replaced those on the guest list with the poor, lame, and blind there are still places left at the table, which leads Jesus to order his servant to “go into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.” Catholic apologists, starting with Augustine, had used this passage to defend the state repression of heresy and the enforcement of religious uniformity, an argument renewed in the wake of the Edict of Fontainebleau. Bayle ’s attack against this position is based first of all on its failure to meet a basic standard of reason that must be applied to religious claims. Bayle is careful to identify reason as a God-given ability, not an attribute derived solely from human nature, though such a claim was not enough to protect him from charges of atheism. But for Bayle coerced acts have no religious value, for the nature of religion requires first of all “a certain persuasion in the soul with regard to God,” which would then manifest itself in “outward signs.” But if “these outward signs exist without that interior state of the soul which answers to them, or with such an inward state as is contrary to them, they are acts of hypocrisy and falsehood, or impiety and revolt against conscience.”30 From this perspective a state policy of intolerance and repression forces a division between the conscience and outward behavior, an unreasonable posture and therefore an inappropriate interpretation of Luke. Bayle draws as well directly from biblical texts and insists that any reasonable interpretation of the New Testament would conclude that the “principal character of Jesus Christ . . . the reigning qualities of his soul, were humility, meekness, and patience,” attributes that clearly contradict any policy of force carried out in his name.31

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Bayle does not deny that clergy and statesmen had the right to make efforts to convince dissenters that they were mistaken, but no such arguments could rely on force. In taking this position Bayle uses the term “freedom of conscience” as an individual right as the basis for a state policy he refers to as “tolerance.” “That it is the duty of superiors to use their utmost endeavors, by lively and solid remonstrances, to undeceive those who are in error; yet to leave them the full liberty of declaring for their opinions, and serving God according to the dictates of their conscience, if they have not the good fortune to convince them: neither laying before them any snare or temptation of worldly punishment in case they persist, nor reward if they abjure. Here we find the fixed indivisible point of true liberty of conscience [liberté de conscience]; and so far as any one swerves more or less from this Point, so far he more or less reduces tolerance [tolérance].”32 Bayle’s Commentary is a passionate defense of “freedom of conscience” as the basis for a policy of “toleration” of religious minorities and represents a major shift in the ways in which these terms had been deployed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unlike Montaigne, Bayle uses both terms in his work, and again unlike Montaigne, he defends them without the irony of the Essays. Barbara de Negroni sees Bayle ’s work as a “Copernican revolution” in the history of religious liberty, insofar as “tolerance is no longer based on objective criteria, but on the position of the subject; it derives not from revealed dogmas, but from the rights of conscience.”33 On the basis of his robust argument for “freedom of conscience” and “toleration” Bayle perhaps merits Jonathan Israel’s judgment that he was a key figure in a “radical Enlightenment” characterized by rationalism, religious skepticism, and political principles that form the basis for modern liberal and democratic societies.34 But Bayle at one point does pull back from a “radical” position and asserts, as does John Locke, a “moderate” in Israel’s terms, that atheists should not share in the “freedom of conscience” granted to Christians.35 This position does not fit well with the overall argument in his Commentary, nor with Bayle ’s other writings that defend the possibility of the “virtuous atheist.” Based on such inconsistencies, Israel dismisses Bayle’s comment on atheism as “de rigueur,” suggesting that his position was not meant to be taken seriously, since it is so deeply incompatible with his otherwise unequivocal defense of freedom of conscience.36 Perhaps this is so, but it is also possible that Bayle meant what he wrote, a position that would put him more in line with Locke, and with a prior tradition in which defenders of toleration made a

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point to exclude atheists, seen as incapable of participating in the civil order.37 However we interpret this passage, it is telling that Bayle was still willing to make at least some concession to the right of the state to enforce a certain level of religious belief.38 Nonetheless, Bayle’s powerful endorsement of “freedom of conscience” and “tolerance” formed the basis for subsequent defenses of religious liberty, while the persecution of the Huguenots that was renewed in 1685 kept the focus of such discussions on the issue of state policy toward the public worship of religious minorities. “Freedom of conscience” was an individual right, but its exercise was understood to take place in specific communities whose “toleration” by the state was the principal concern.39 The arguments in favor of “freedom of conscience” and “tolerance” did not go unchallenged. At the General Assembly of the Clergy in 1651 the bishop of Comminges called on the young Louis XIV “to banish from his kingdom this unfortunate liberty of conscience, which destroys the true liberty of God’s children.”40 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “semantic associations of tolérance were largely negative, so the strongest traditions that French political culture inherited from its medieval past were profoundly antithetical to the acceptance of religious division within the kingdom.”41 This tradition of hostility to a policy of toleration endured throughout the eighteenth century, as illustrated in the Dictionnaire de théologie of the abbé Bergier (1718–1790), a standard manual well into the nineteenth century as well. Bergier’s position is particularly significant because it came from a writer identified with the “Catholic Enlightenment,” known for his engagement with the philosophes and their discussions of reason and nature as the basis for knowledge.42 Bergier subjected Bayle’s concept of “freedom of conscience” to what he understood to be a withering attack, arguing that to accept the position that we are obligated to follow our conscience wherever it leads opens the door to heresy, crime, and disorder. Conscience can claim its rights over us only when it has been properly instructed in the truths of the Catholic faith. “It is not true that in forcing [Protestants] to allow themselves to be instructed, one obliges them to act against their conscience; they are constrained only to be enlightened and reformed; when they refuse it is not because of their sensitivity to their conscience, but the result of pure obstinacy.” For Bergier, claims made on the basis of “freedom of conscience” were a mere pretext for Protestants who “wanted to profess their religion publicly, to exercise with the greatest possible display a religion

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different from the dominant religion, to take possession of churches, banish Catholics, hunt down and exterminate priests, as they have done in those places where they became masters.”43 As for “tolerance,” Bergier regarded as “an absurdity” the idea that “all religions ought to be equally permitted, none ought to be dominant or favored over another, and every individual ought to decide for himself whether or not to have one.”44 Bergier clearly grasped the principles of “freedom of conscience” and “tolerance” and just as clearly dismissed them as incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy. Although Protestants had certainly acted with intolerance and violence during the wars of religion, by the middle of the eighteenth century Bergier’s description of them much more aptly described recent practices of the French state. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was celebrated by the Catholic clergy as a triumph of truth over heresy, and when Protestant communities in the Cévennes mountains in southern France resisted they were brutally repressed in a bloody civil war.45 The death of Louis XIV in 1715 led to a brief respite, but when Louis XV came of age one of the first acts of his reign was to reaffirm the absolute prohibition of any religion other than Catholicism in a decree of 1724: “It is our will that the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Religion alone be practiced in our Kingdom, and all the lands under our authority; we forbid to all of our subjects of any estate, quality, and condition to exercise in any way a religion other than Catholicism, and to gather for such a purpose in any place under any pretext, under pain of being sentenced for life to the galleys, for men, and to be shaved and imprisoned for life, for the women.”46 Despite these prohibitions and threats, Protestant communities managed to survive in what became known as the “church of the desert,” but without any legal protection they were dependent on the forbearance of local officials. A crackdown occurred, for example, in Bordeaux in 1749, where the courts sentenced nine men to life terms in the galleys, and their wives to be shaved and imprisoned, for having been married in a Protestant ceremony.47 In the second half of the eighteenth century such persecution was still possible, as evident in the famous Calas affair, discussed later in this chapter. But after 1750 what had been formerly regarded as orthodox doctrine and standard state policy in support of “one King, one law, one faith” came increasingly to be regarded as unreasonable, cruel, and counterproductive. But even as “freedom of conscience” and “tolerance” became more acceptable, they continued to evoke complex attitudes and unresolved tensions about the meaning of religious liberty.

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Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopédie: Tolérance and Conscience in the Enlightenment For the philosophes religious liberty was a central concern, evident in three key texts that all appeared within the two-year period of 1762–1763: JeanJacques Rousseau’s Emile and The Social Contract, first published in 1762, and Voltaire ’s Treatise on Tolerance, which appeared in 1763.48 Voltaire and Rousseau were writing in a context in which intolerance was still state policy, with the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685) officially in effect. But in the second half of the eighteenth century, Protestant communities began to profit from a policy of benign neglect.49 When this de facto toleration was abandoned it was shocking and offensive in part because open persecution had become unusual. This emerging experience of religious liberty was nonetheless fragile because it could still be and was at times violated by an intolerant state. The philosophes regarded Bayle with enormous respect, and their defense of “freedom of conscience” and its link to “toleration” follows closely his reasoning. But Bayle also devoted hundreds of pages to a close reading of the church fathers, understood as authorities who could help provide the proper interpretation of Luke 14:23. For Voltaire and Rousseau, scriptural texts and church fathers were irrelevant in considering religious liberty, which derived from a natural right inherent in each individual. But in their aggressive and rationalistic defense of religious liberty Voltaire and Rousseau still struggled to articulate clearly the nature of an individual right to freedom of conscience in its relationship to the duties to family, community, and state. Voltaire, in his Treatise on Tolerance, condemns in the most forthright manner the persecution of the Protestant religious minority in France. In doing so he relies on the concepts of liberté de conscience and tolérance inherited from Bayle, but he does not distinguish these with the same clarity as his predecessor, and he uses them interchangeably, in a manner similar to some of the speeches in the National Assembly of 1789. In chapter 5, for example, when he proposes that Germany demonstrates how tolerance produces social harmony, he refers to liberté de conscience, even though the context suggests he is concerned with communal and not individual rights. For Voltaire, Germany would be “a desert covered with the bones of Catholics, Evangelicals, Reformers, and Anabaptists, all massacred by each other, were it not for the Peace of Westphalia which eventually established in the country the right to freedom of conscience.”50

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Voltaire may have been sympathetic to the freedom of individual religious choice, but in the Treatise on Tolerance he tends to look aside from this issue to focus instead on Catholic persecution of the Protestant community. As with Bayle, he saw freedom of conscience as inextricably bound to the issue of state toleration of religious dissidents, which remained in the foreground of his thinking. This tendency to look first of all at the state in considering religious liberty can be seen in Voltaire’s interpretation of the treatment of the Calas family by the French judicial system, the cause célèbre that prompted Voltaire to write the Treatise.51 In his essay Voltaire reviews the tragic story, in which a mentally disturbed son in a Protestant family who had perhaps been considering conversion to Catholicism committed suicide. The Parlement of Toulouse subsequently found the father guilty of murder on flimsy evidence, which led to his execution and the persecution of the entire family. For Voltaire and his enlightened colleagues, the Calas affair became a symbol of official Catholic intolerance toward a minority community. But Voltaire spends no time in his essay explicitly defending liberté de conscience from the perspective of individual choice, despite the pivotal role this played in the affair. For Voltaire, religious liberty centered on the right of Protestants to worship publicly and to be protected against state violence, with individual freedom of conscience a prior but unexamined assumption. Voltaire condemns the Catholic judges of Toulouse for intolerance directed at the Calas family and the Protestant community. But he never probes the basis for their unreasonable decision, the conviction on the part of Catholics that families would regard with murderous hatred a member who chose to leave the family’s religion. The Catholic judges of Toulouse could not imagine that Protestants might accept such an act of communal disloyalty based on the rights of individual conscience. Voltaire did not bother constructing an argument against such an assumption, which would have distracted him from his main goal of advocating for a policy of state tolerance.52 Voltaire ’s passionate defense of toleration is echoed in Laborde’s speech in the debate over Article 10, but in that debate as well the communal dimension of religious liberty, not the freedom of the individual conscience, remains the principal focus. The freedom of the individual is very much in the foreground of JeanJacques Rousseau’s reflections on religious liberty, but his writings on this topic further illuminate the tension inherent in this issue as it was understood in the eighteenth century.53 Rousseau’s struggle to make sense of religious

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liberty comes as no surprise given the complicated religious journey he took in his own life, as described in his Confessions. Rousseau abandoned his Calvinism in 1728 as a young man of sixteen, converted not by any change in his religious convictions but because of the charm of a young woman, Mme de Warens, who later became his mistress.54 After their initial, brief meeting, Mme de Warens, herself a convert supported by the king of Savoy because of her success as a proselytizer, sent Rousseau off to a hospice for converts in Turin. There he would be instructed and accepted into the Catholic faith, but the completion of his conversion was a painful process in which a supposedly free choice of a new religion was compromised, even coerced, by the circumstances in which he found himself. In the Confessions Rousseau describes a horrific institution whose ignorant teachers failed to convince him of the truths of Catholicism, and which was a haven for pederasts, one of whom attempted to seduce him.55 Impoverished and alone in the world, Rousseau nonetheless went through with the charade of a conversion that was fundamentally insincere. Reflecting on his decision to convert in the Confessions, Rousseau takes a position that belies his own experience: “It is clear, I think, that for a child, and even for a man, to have a religion means to follow the one in which he is born.”56 While it is easy to see why Rousseau would take such a position given the troubled transition that he lived through at Turin, affirming the value of religious constancy, of fidelity to the faith of one ’s fathers, nonetheless runs counter to Rousseau’s commitment to independence and liberty in matters of religion, a tension that is developed in more detail in Emile and The Social Contract. In Emile Rousseau’s struggle with religious liberty takes center stage in book 4, which includes the famous “Creed of a Savoyard Vicar.” In scrutinizing this text from the perspective of religious liberty we should recall Rousseau’s general principle that individuals who have reached adolescence, at twelve or thirteen, should learn through a process of independent discovery. As articulated in book 3, Rousseau applies this principle to the study of nature, but the language suggests as well an underlying commitment to intellectual independence: “Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. . . . If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts.”57 As we shall see, Rousseau struggles to reconcile this principle, which might lead to a defense of the absolute liberty of conscience in religious matters,

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with the right of the father to raise his children in the religion he chooses and the need for an overarching set of religious values embraced by all members of a society. In Emile Rousseau’s pupil has been raised to be a student of nature, which he discovers on his own, though with the help of the guiding and at times intrusive hand of a tutor. But while the tutor subtly assists and shapes the education of Emile, he adamantly refuses to present him with doctrines that do not arise from personal experience. Consequently, the regime advocated by Rousseau includes no formal religious education, a point that Rousseau acknowledges might surprise his readers: “At fifteen he will not even know that he has a soul, at eighteen even he may not be ready to learn about it.” Such ignorance is an advantage compared to the “heart-breaking stupidity” that comes from the mindless memorization of the catechism. For Rousseau, a child “understands so little of what he is made to repeat that if you tell him to say just the opposite he will be quite ready to do it. . . . When a child says he believes in God, it is not God he believes in, but Peter or James who told him that there is something called God.”58 Not only are religious ideas mindlessly parroted, they vary widely from place to place; faith is, according to Rousseau, a matter of geography.59 This variability of religious ideas carries with it an insidious consequence, for children are instructed to disparage the religions of other people and thereby form ideas of God that are “mean, grotesque, harmful, and unworthy.” This religious formation lasts throughout their lives, so that “as men they understand no more of God than they did as children.”60 Rousseau’s ideal education, in which children would not receive any religious instruction, raised a difficult question. If the religions fathers teach to children, based on the accidental circumstances of their place of birth, are to be rejected, what should take their place? In what religion should Emile be raised? At first Rousseau’s answer seems clear: “What religion shall we give him, to what sect shall this child of nature belong? The answer strikes me as quite easy. We will not attach him to any sect, but we will give him the means to choose for himself according to the right use of his own reason.”61 It is precisely at this point in Emile that Rousseau breaks away from a style in which he directly addresses the reader and passes the word to the famous “Savoyard Vicar,” a text in which Rousseau recalls (and reinvents) his own experience in Turin and the help he received from a sympathetic and heterodox Catholic clergyman.62 In Emile Rousseau passes over the fact that he

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actually went through with his conversion and instead emphasizes his skepticism and despair as a young man who had come to see religion as “a mask for selfishness, . . . its holy services but a screen for hypocrisy.”63 The “creed of the Savoyard Vicar” has become one of the most famous of Rousseau’s texts, a powerful argument for a religion that rejects the divisive dogmas of established churches in favor of a belief shaped by the feeling individual’s communing with a harmonious natural order. Rousseau’s theological speculations, which he intended as a refutation of atheism, earned him the condemnation of the Paris Parlement, which reacted against his explicit critique of ritual and revelation.64 Forced to flee to Switzerland to avoid prosecution, Rousseau paid a personal price for embodying his insistence in Emile that the heart of all authentic religious experience is the individual human conscience, the point where the divine and the human meet: “Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God!”65 The Savoyard’s theological emphasis on the divinized individual conscience leads him inevitably back to an affirmation of the absolute right of the individual to choose his religion: “Let us therefore seek honestly after truth; let us yield nothing to the claims of birth, to the authority of parents and pastors, but let us summon to the bar of conscience and reason all that they have taught us from our childhood.”66 Unlike Voltaire, in Emile Rousseau approaches religious liberty through a concentrated exploration of the individual conscience. This prescription for the pursuit of religious truth apart from “parents and pastors” seems clear enough, but the Savoyard Vicar soon confronts an obstacle that leads him to an entirely different place from where he (and Rousseau) began. The vicar describes his long investigation into the arguments in favor of the different religions, which depend on competing claims of absolute truth. But despite his most strenuous efforts, he is unable to come to any certain conclusion. And if the vicar, with his education and intelligence, is unable to decide, what of the common workman? In language that recalls the anxiety of Montaigne about religious pluralism, Rousseau writes that if people were to indulge themselves in a quest for certain religious truth, the result would be a social catastrophe: “Then farewell to the trades, the arts, the sciences of mankind, farewell to all the peaceful occupations; there can be no study but that of religion, even the strongest, the most industrious, the most intelligent, the oldest, will hardly be able in his last years to know where he is;

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and it will be a wonder if he manages to find out what religion he ought to live by, before the hour of his death.”67 Religious freedom if taken seriously and pursued as a duty thus leads to social chaos, not to mention personal despair. Here, as with Montaigne, an appreciation of the value of the individual conscience runs up against the need for harmony and social order. The Savoyard Vicar’s own solution after his failed religious quest is to accept an “unwilling scepticism” that is “in no way painful to me, for it does not extend to matters of practice.”68 Speaking more generally, the vicar takes a position that is surprising, even shocking, when compared with his earlier castigation of the “heart-breaking stupidity” of priests who teach children their catechism lessons, which might contain ideas about God that are “mean, grotesque, harmful, and unworthy.”69 For the vicar now states that “I regard all individual religions as so many wholesome institutions which prescribe a uniform method by which each country may do honor to God in public worship; institutions which may each have its reason in the country, the government, the genius of the people, or in other local causes which make one preferable to another in a given time or place. I think them all good alike, when God is served in a fitting manner.”70 Moreover, since all religions are “wholesome” and “good alike” there is no reason for people to change from the one in which they were born. In fact, “to ask anyone to abandon the religion in which he was born is, I consider, to ask him to do wrong, therefore to do wrong oneself. While we await further knowledge, let us respect public order; in every country let us respect the laws, let us not disturb the form of worship prescribed by law; let us not lead its citizens into disobedience; for we have no certain knowledge that it is good for them to abandon their own opinions for others, and on the other hand we are quite certain that it is a bad thing to disobey the law.”71 As he nears the conclusion of their conversation, the vicar advises Rousseau to “go back to the religion of your fathers, and follow it in sincerity of heart, and never forsake it. . . . In our present state of uncertainty, it is an inexcusable presumption to profess any faith but that we are born into, while it is treachery not to practice honestly the faith we profess.”72 Over the course of his analysis of religious liberty in Emile Rousseau has thus come to a position that contradicts his earlier embrace of the absolute authority of the individual conscience. Religious liberty is also evoked in powerful but ambiguous terms in The Social Contract, the other famous text that Rousseau published in 1762.73 In the closing pages of the Contract Rousseau discusses in a more schematic

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fashion the tension between individual conscience and public cult that he explored in depth in Emile. In his chapter on “Civil Religion” he draws a sharp contrast between “the religion of man and the religion of the citizen.” The first, “without temples, altars, or rites, [is] limited to the purely inward worship of the supreme God and to the eternal duties of morality.” The religion of the citizen, on the contrary, “has its dogmas, its rites, its outward form of worship prescribed by law.” Rousseau also describes a third form of religion, exemplified in Roman Christianity, in which both the state and the church claim the authority to prescribe laws. Rousseau dismisses this hybrid as “obviously bad” because it “breaks down social unity. . . . All institutions that place man in contradiction with himself are worthless.”74 In developing his thoughts on the religion of the state Rousseau repeats ideas found in Emile, but in sharper language that adds a punitive dimension that the Savoyard Vicar avoided. The articles of this civil religion are to be determined by the sovereign, and all are obliged to follow them, for otherwise “it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject.” Citizens who refuse to accept the civil religion are liable to banishment and death. But the passage in which Rousseau establishes the right of the sovereign to punish religious dissent is a telling illustration of the curious and convoluted way in which Rousseau thought about religious liberty: “Without being able to obligate anyone to believe [the articles of a civil religion], the sovereign can banish from the state anyone who does not believe them; it can banish him not for being impious but for being unsociable.” Despite his attempt to preserve the right of the individual conscience, Rousseau condemns citizens who at one time accepted the civil religion and then rejected it. In granting the state such coercive power, Rousseau seems to contradict prior statements that condemned state religions for making people “bloodthirsty and intolerant” and for believing that “[the state] performs a holy act in killing anyone who does not accept its gods.”75 In The Social Contract, as in Emile, Rousseau fails to reconcile his commitment to the rights of the individual conscience with those of the state, and as in Emile he ends up in a paradoxical position in which the individual can be seen as torn by a choice between faithfulness to his conscience or to his state. Rousseau’s convoluted reasoning on religious liberty, and his deference to the power of the family and the state to impose and regulate religious belief, helps explain his lack of interest in participating in the defense of toleration along the lines of Bayle or Voltaire. He took no great interest in the Calas affair and on one occasion refused the appeal of the

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Protestant community to intervene in favor of the pastor Rochette, imprisoned for leading clandestine services and eventually hanged.76 In responding to this appeal Rousseau opposed freeing any prisoner of the state “even if he has been wrongly detained.” Any such attempt “is a . . . rebellion that cannot be justified, and those in power always have the right to punish it.”77 Emile and The Social Contract are puzzling texts in their consideration of religious liberty. On the one hand Rousseau unequivocally affirms the absolute right of the individual conscience to make a free choice of religion, advises readers that in an ideal world children should not be given a religious education, and ridicules the grotesque diversity of religious beliefs. On the other hand he insists that children ought to be raised in the different religions of the countries where they are born, stay faithful to the religions prescribed by law, and face banishment or death for becoming religious dissenters.78 Rousseau’s contending positions expose the enduring tension between individual conscience and the claims of family, church, and state. This conflict surfaces again in the confusing exchanges between Mirabeau and Rabaut de Saint-Etienne on the one hand and the abbé d’Eymar and his supporters on the other in the debates of August 22–23. The public chaos in the National Assembly over how to understand religious liberty echoes as a public manifestation of the contradictions of Rousseau. It seems inevitable that conscience and tolérance would be taken up in the Encyclopédie, the central text of the Enlightenment, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, that began appearing in 1751. Louis de Jaucourt’s article on liberté de conscience and Jean-Edme Romilly’s on tolérance defend the rights of individual judgment and religious minorities in terms that recall arguments drawn from Bayle, whose work is cited favorably by Romilly.79 Conscience earns two entries, one by Jaucourt under the rubrics Philosophie, Logique, Métaphysique, which defines the term as the equivalent of the English “consciousness” and restricts it to the self-awareness of one’s perceptions. The second entry, by an anonymous author under the rubrics Droit naturel, Morale, defines conscience as “the judgement that each person makes with regard to his own actions, compared with the ideas that he has of the law that binds him.” But this faculty is also responsible for establishing the standard it will apply in the first place, which explains why this “interior forum” is not a stable entity, for it might at different times be “decisive, doubtful, correct, bad, probable, erroneous, irresolute, scrupulous, etc.” Individual reason is accorded an important role in the operation of conscience but is also

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potentially limited by the value attached to external sources of authority. It is once again conscience that establishes how to balance these forces. Conscience is thus a fundamental source of moral judgment and personal identity but also observed by the individual who possesses it, and so is separated from as well as identified with the self.80 All of the converts I study struggled with their consciences, understood as both a source of their religious freedom and a constraint on it. In reflecting on this dilemma they were working within the rich conceptual vein inherited from the Enlightenment, trying to understand how a conscience could be, as Rousseau put it, “a sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free.”81

From Tolérance to Liberté des Cultes In the years just before the revolution royal policy finally made a small but significant concession to the rights of religious minorities in the Edict of Versailles, issued in November 1787. Influenced by public officials, including his minister Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Louis XVI declared that Protestants would now be able to register their marriages legally without going through the subterfuge of a Catholic ceremony.82 The edict, however, was narrowly conceived as a way of granting Protestants the right to pass property to their heirs and made no reference to either “freedom of conscience” or “tolerance.” Public worship by Protestants was still banned, Protestant communities were not recognized as having any legal standing, and ministers could not dress in any way to distinguish themselves. In its first article the decree reaffirmed that “the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion will continue to enjoy alone, in our kingdom, the right to public worship.” This policy of civil but not religious tolerance had been proposed by Jansenist writers beginning in the 1760s but by the end of the eighteenth century no longer satisfied Protestants such as Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, who defended “freedom” as an alternative to “toleration” in his speech to the National Assembly on August 23, 1789.83 The debate over Article 10 with which this chapter began testifies to the central importance of religious liberty for revolutionaries and their opponents from the outset of the French Revolution. Jacques-Louis David’s famous design for a monumental painting of the Tennis Court Oath, presented at the Salon of 1791, offers melodramatic confirmation of the revolutionary concern for religious liberty and the tension between public pressure to conform and the rights of the individual conscience. David celebrates the pivotal

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Figure 1. Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Tennis Court. Château de Versailles et de Trianon. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

moment on June 20, 1789, when the mayor of Paris, Bailly, led the delegates of the National Assembly in swearing an oath to write a constitution for France. In the foreground just below Bailly we see the Protestant minister Rabaut de Saint-Etienne embracing two Catholic clergymen, the Dominican monk Dom Gerle and the abbé Grégoire. For David, religious reconciliation shares the stage with popular sovereignty as a major aspiration of the French Revolution. But on the far right of the work a small scene unfolds that reveals a troubled atmosphere in which individual liberty is challenged by the pressure to conform. As the delegate Martin sits with his arms folded, refusing to join in the oath, the deputy Camus, a leading specialist on religious questions, grabs his arm in an apparent attempt to coerce his taking of the oath. But Camus is at the same time restrained by another delegate, willing to tolerate Martin’s dissent. David here illuminates the contested boundary between public adherence to the revolution and the right of individual dissent, an issue linked to the desire for religious reconciliation on display in the center of the work.84 By 1791 the challenge to unity that David confined to a corner had taken center stage, fueled first of all by conflicts over the status of the Catholic

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Church. An attempt by Dom Gerle to have Catholicism named as the state religion failed to win a majority in the National Assembly in April 1790, leading to a tumultuous session that recalled the debate over Article 10 of the previous year. The “Dom Gerle affair” set the stage for the stormy debate over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790), in which the French state asserted its authority over the church by redrawing diocesan boundaries to reflect the new system of departments and mandating that bishops and priests be elected rather than named by ecclesiastical authorities. This political debate produced a social and religious crisis when the National Assembly demanded that the clergy swear an oath to uphold a reform that many rejected as unwarranted state interference with the church. By 1791 France was moving toward a period of religious repression and civil war rather than religious liberty and reconciliation.85 The combination of resistance by “refractory” clergy who refused to swear the oath to the new constitution and the outbreak of war in April 1792 produced a toxic atmosphere in which many revolutionaries became convinced that Catholic dissidents posed an existential threat to the new regime. The repression that followed led to the abolition of religious orders, the exile and execution of thousands of clergy, the closing of churches, and an active campaign of dechristianization.86 All of these policies were carried out by regimes that continued to embrace the principle of religious liberty, perhaps an unsurprising but nonetheless a disheartening irony. In the Constitutions of 1791, 1793, and 1795, and in a series of laws passed during the regimes of the Convention (1792–1795) and the Directory (1795–1799), religious liberty was repeatedly affirmed in principle even while it was often compromised by repressive measures.87 The turbulent and often violent conflicts over religion during this period contributed to the further articulation of language used to define religious freedom. Although its origins as a phrase can be dated at least to the 1770s, “religious liberty” (liberté religieuse) emerged as an important category in the 1780s and 1790s, a shift reflected dramatically in the debates over Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (figure 2). This phrase had the advantage of establishing the freedom of religious practice as a fundamental human right and not as a gift granted by an authoritarian regime. At the same time it brought together both the individual and collective dimensions of religious liberty, linking external practice to personal belief. This conflation is evident in the controversies of the 1790s on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the drafting of

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Figure 2. Ngram of terms referring to religious liberty, 1750–1800. The percentages on the left are based on the total number of two- and three-word phrases in the entire corpus of French works available on Google Books for this period. Search conducted in June 2016.

new constitutions. In a report on religious tolerance to the National Assembly of 1791, for example, the ex-bishop of Autun Talleyrand called for a decree that would give Catholic clergy who had refused to take the oath to the constitution the right to say Mass in parish churches, providing that they did not trouble the public order by opposing the constitution: “We reject this hypocritical toleration which would allow freedom of thought but not its expression in public acts. Let men no longer be obligated to lie to themselves.” In accepting Talleyrand’s report the assembly passed a law drafted by the abbé Sièyes allowing refractory clergy to hold public religious services and announcing that “the principles of religious liberty . . . are identical with those that have been recognized and proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.”88 Within a few months the Legislative Assembly would reject this irenic posture in favor of harsher treatment of the refractory clergy, a repressive policy that could nonetheless be defended on the basis of the limiting final clause of Article 10. As the delegate Pierre-Toussaint Durand de Maillane insisted, “No particular right must prevail over the right of an entire Nation to tranquility and public order, to which even the freedom of religious opinions has been subjected to in the Declaration of Rights.”89 The ambiguous character of “religious liberty” helps explain the emergence of another linguistic innovation, the “liberty of cults” (liberté des cultes), which referred specifically to the public manifestation of religion. This phrase made an appearance in the 1750s in a text published in The Hague,

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praising the city because its liberté des cultes allowed two young people from different religions to marry.90 But it came into common use in French publications only in the 1780s, when it was used by Rabaut de Saint-Etienne and Condorcet, among others, to argue for the rights of Protestants in France. In the 1790s liberté des cultes surpassed liberté religieuse as the common term used to specify the right to worship publicly according to one’s beliefs (figure 2).91 Constitutions adopted this language, as in the “premier titre” of the Constitution of 1791, which guaranteed “the freedom of everyone to practice the religious cult to which he belongs.” Subsequent decrees and constitutions affirmed the liberté des cultes even while they placed severe restrictions on public practice. After the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror, the abbé Grégoire boldly defended the liberté des cultes in a speech to the National Convention in which he claimed that such freedom currently did not exist in France and that religious persecution was the primary explanation for counterrevolutionary activity.92 Boissy d’Anglas’s Rapport sur les libertés des cultes, presented to the Convention in February 1795, declared that “no practice of any cult can be prohibited” and condemned attacks against Catholics during the recently concluded Terror, which he compared to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. But his report also called for the prohibition of any religious ceremony in public spaces.93 The constitution establishing the Directory failed to include freedom of religion as one of the fundamental rights, although it did announce in Article 354, as one of its “general dispositions,” that “no one can be prevented from exercising, in conformity with the laws, the cult he has chosen. No one can be forced to contribute to the expenses of a cult. The Republic provides no funds for them.”94 This language suggests the continuing suspicion leaders of the republic directed at the Catholic Church, now effectively separated from the state. Despite such efforts, Catholicism experienced a revival after 1795, taking advantage of a widening space for religious freedom that was increasingly defined in the language of liberté des cultes.95 As Suzanne Desan demonstrates in her groundbreaking work on religion during the revolution, ordinary citizens referred explicitly to the liberté des cultes in claiming the right to public worship in the 1790s.96 Even fervent counterrevolutionaries such as the abbé de Barruel invoked this newly defined freedom as an instrument for attacking the revolutionary regime when it sought to repress Catholic practice.97 Barruel stopped far short of defending liberté des cultes as a worthwhile concept on its own terms. He was interested only in pointing out

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the hypocrisy of the Jacobins, not in defending religious liberty. But his backhanded endorsement of liberté des cultes nonetheless suggests the seductive appeal of a right that was increasingly accepted even while its meaning and application remained ambiguous. Napoleon adopted this new term as his own in swearing to defend the liberté des cultes in his coronation oath of 1804: “I swear to maintain the territorial integrity of the Republic and to respect and preserve the laws of the Concordat and the liberty of cults.”98 The prominent position of liberté des cultes in the oath attests to its importance as a principle, but Napoleonic practice in fact placed severe limits on the churches. As first consul (1799–1804) Napoleon recognized both the Catholic revival and the importance of religious peace for the stability of the new regime of the Consulate (1799–1804) and so negotiated the Concordat of 1801, which would govern relations between the French state and the Catholic Church until their separation in 1905. The first article asserts that “the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion will be freely exercised in France” but immediately adds a caveat almost identical to the one that qualified Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: “Its cult will be public, conforming to the police regulations that the Government judges necessary for public tranquility.” The concordat pointedly did not make Catholicism the official religion of the state, declaring only that it was the “religion of the great majority of French citizens.”99 Although the treaty with Rome granted freedom of religious exercise to Catholics following a decade when their right to public worship had been periodically denied, this liberté du culte was at the same time compromised by the tutelary power awarded to the state. Catholic priests would be paid officials, as financial compensation for the seizure of church lands, a measure that made the clergy liable to control by the state. Bishops would be nominated by the head of state, with the pope investing them with their spiritual authority. The Organic Articles, attached to the concordat before it was officially promulgated in 1802, further enhanced state power, restricting meetings between bishops and their communication with Rome. Official relationships were established as well with Calvinist and Lutheran churches, two other “recognized” religions, and, in 1808, with Judaism.100 In addition to monitoring closely these established religions the Napoleonic criminal code enacted in 1810 prohibited the meeting of any unauthorized religious groups on the basis of Articles 291–294.101 As was the case during the revolutionary era, the Napoleonic regime combined official endorsement of religious liberty with policies that

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constrained religious practice, a tension that would continue to generate conflicts over the meaning and application of this new and ambiguous human right. When the Catholic Bourbons were restored to France following the defeat of Napoleon’s armies in 1814 they faced the challenge of renewing the connections between throne and altar of the Old Regime, while making concessions to the religious freedom that had been endorsed and at times practiced during the previous twenty-five years.102 The Charter of 1814 defined what Pierre Rosanvallon termed an “impossible monarchy,” a phrase that nicely captures the paradoxical status of religion in the regime, for while Article 5 affirms religious liberty (“everyone professes his religion with an equal liberty, and obtains for his cult the same protection”), Article 6 establishes Catholicism as the official religion of the state (“however the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the State”).103 This tension provoked anxiety and resistance from both Catholic conservatives, who embraced an ideal of religious uniformity as the only possible basis for social order, and liberals, who feared that a state religion would necessarily compromise religious liberty. In official teaching and political theory, Catholic insistence on church authority as an appropriate limit to freedom of conscience and freedom of practice continued to exert influence throughout the Restoration, and beyond. Conservative theorists could look back to Pius VI’s papal brief of 1791, Quod aliquantum, as a foundation for their position. Condemning both the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Pius asserted that the “license to think, say, write and even print with impunity anything that the most dissolute imagination might suggest” was a “monstrous right,” a form of madness.104 Louis de Bonald, one of the principal advocates of a Catholic restoration, both before and after the return of the Bourbons, condemned the principle of tolérance as a mask for religious indifference and a program aimed at the destruction of all religion.105 Speaking in the Chamber of Deputies in 1815, Bonald called on representatives to replace “the rights of man” with the “rights of God.”106 As we will see in chapter 5, Félicité Lamennais during the Restoration won praise from conservative Catholics for his impassioned assault on the religious liberty established by the French charter, before reversing himself in a move that shocked contemporaries. In practice as well as theory religious liberty seemed at times threatened by the government of the Restoration. Although Catholic conservatives were disappointed with the regime, a series

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of laws passed in the first two years of the Restoration showed the influence of the clerical party. Divorce was abolished, church control over education was enhanced, work was banned on Sundays and religious holidays, and in 1825 the notorious “Sacrilege Law” made it a capital crime to desecrate a consecrated host.107 On an individual level those who refused to decorate their churches in honor of the Fête-Dieu or to take off their hats to honor the Eucharist in processions could be prosecuted, leading to court cases that drew national attention to the issue.108 Collectively the state at times cracked down on religious groups that fell outside the “recognized” cults of Catholicism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Judaism, using the penal code against evangelical preachers from England and mystic missionaries such as Mme de Krüdener, who was active in Alsace from 1808 to 1817.109 On other occasions officials were content to keep track of illegal religious meetings, such as those organized by Quakers, and not provoke a scene by intervening, thereby helping the sect in its recruitment.110 But the principle of careful state observation and regulation of religion was never questioned; it was applied throughout the period, lasting until the separation of church and state in 1905, and still echoes in the present.111 This restriction of freedom in the religious marketplace was a particular target of Benjamin Constant, who played a central role in both the theoretical and political debates over religious liberty throughout the Restoration (1814–1830). Like other major theoreticians of religious liberty, Constant drew on personal experience as well as philosophical reflection in developing his ideas. Over the course of his early years Constant moved from a deeply skeptical attitude to one respectful of religious sentiment, mediated by a period of engagement with a mystical circle in 1807.112 Constant’s views, first developed while in exile from the Napoleonic empire, combined a hostility toward Catholicism, a religion that could not be reconciled with liberty, with an appreciation of Protestantism as derived from individual religious experience. In chapter 17 of Principles of Politics (1815) Constant ridicules the attempt by Rousseau to reconcile religious liberty with a coercive civil religion. Such “civil intolerance” was a pretext for tyranny, and an absurd contradiction in a philosopher who presented himself as a defender of freedom. For Constant, “the only reasonable idea regarding religion” was the “freedom of cults without restriction, without privilege, without obliging individuals, as long as they obey the law, to declare their attachment to any particular cult.”113 Responding to the fear that such freedom without limits would

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produce a constantly expanding number of sects, Constant accepted the premise that such a situation would emerge and embraced it as a positive development. Competition between sects would create a virtuous circle, with each new addition pushing the others to moral improvement. Underlying such a dynamic was the principle of freedom of inquiry (libre examen), the right of an individual to choose without regard to any external authority.114 Constant is best known for the striking contrast he drew between ancient and modern liberty in the speech he made at the Athénée Royale in 1819, where he painted a picture of the ancient Greek city-states as governed by an active citizenry capable of making public decisions but severely constrained in their private lives.115 In the ancient world liberty was thus an attribute of the collectivity, whereas in the modern world it was claimed as an individual right. In his speech at the Athénée Constant focused in particular on the political and commercial dimensions of liberty, but his reflections in Principles of Politics establish the same contrast between ancient and modern, collective and individual liberty in the religious sphere. Constant was a prominent defender of religious liberty throughout the Restoration, defending the principle both in his writings and in the National Assembly.116 He was not alone, of course, with fears of excessive state control of religion and a return to Catholic predominance finding expression in the popular press. Charles X in particular became an object of caricature, presented as a tool of the Catholic clergy, crushing all other religions.117 On an intellectual level Constant found important support in the Society for Christian Morals, a group organized in 1821 that brought together Protestants and liberal Catholics to promote Christian morality, a task they would pursue without engaging in dogmatic or theological disputes. The society took a special interest in the subject of religious liberty, which was the topic of two essay competitions it sponsored in 1825 and 1827. In the first, which drew more responses than the second, authors were asked “to determine with precision the meaning of the words liberty of cults.”118 The prize committee was unanimous in choosing as the winner Alexandre Vinet’s essay, which was published the following year.119 The enthusiasm for Vinet’s work was based on the remarkable clarity with which it defined and linked the terminology on religious liberty that had evolved since the sixteenth century. Vinet identified two aspects of “freedom of conscience,” one involving the capacity for each individual to make moral judgments and the other to choose what kind of relationship, if any, to have with divinity. The social nature of

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Figure 3. Ngram of terms referring to religious liberty, 1801–1850. Search conducted on Google Books in June 2016.

mankind, however, meant that this last sense of conscience would flow naturally into a particular form, a “cult.” These two freedoms were thus distinct, one adhering in individuals and the other in communities, but they were also organically related and taken together constituted “religious liberty.” “I believe myself authorized to state that freedom of conscience and freedom of cults are one thing, which I call religious liberty.”120 Vinet’s essay can be used to mark a conceptual break involving the terms used to define religious liberty in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although the distinction he made can be glimpsed in the theoretical work of previous writers, and in the speeches at the National Assembly in 1789, it had never been so sharply articulated. During the Restoration and after, “freedom of cults” as a principle replaced “toleration” as the term used to define a state policy that allowed for the public practice of religion by members of minority churches. This terminological shift implied that public religious practice was no longer a privilege granted by a sovereign authority, but a fundamental human right that derived immediately from “freedom of conscience.” The emergence of “freedom of cults” had as a consequence the relative strengthening of the arguments for the right of public worship, but it also allowed the previously affirmed right of the individual conscience to emerge more clearly in the debates on religious liberty. The intense sensitivity to the freedom of individual conscience displayed in Rousseau’s writings was married to the vigorous defense of religious minorities whose collective existence was no longer to be tolerated but rather to be enjoyed as a second right, engendered by the first, flowing from the human person and not from

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the state.121 The shift from “toleration” to “liberty” marks an important stage in the history of religious liberty in France (figure 3).122 The language of toleration, even while it could be used to defend religious minorities, still implied a deference to the state as itself having the right to define who could and who could not practice their religion openly. Those arguing for “liberty” as the term of choice believed the right to worship in public flowed so directly from the right of the individual conscience that it should be unchallengeable in the same sense. We have seen how Catholic conservatives fought hard against the evolving principle of religious liberty, but they also found themselves drawn to this principle when defending the right of Protestants to convert to Catholicism. As Caroline Ford has shown, this internal tension was particularly clear in the case of Emily Loveday, a young Protestant woman who converted to Catholicism in 1821 against the will of her father.123 When Douglas Loveday petitioned the French government to support his effort to recover his daughter it set off an affair that involved heated parliamentary debates and a pamphlet war that drew public attention in both France and England. In the course of the debates Louis de Bonald defended Emily Loveday’s conversion, even though it required him to accept the right to freedom of conscience. Liberals had their own problems with this case, as Benjamin Constant upheld the claims of her father, contradicting his own position favoring individual liberty. Although precise numbers are not available, Pierre Triomphe estimates that there were several hundred conversions between Protestantism and Catholicism during the Restoration in all of France, with equal numbers moving in opposite directions.124 Conversion narratives broadcasting these decisions were used by both Protestants and Catholics to defend their respective doctrines and religious establishments.125 Both prominent conversion narratives, such as Loveday’s, and the smaller dramas that resonated within towns and regions, while they overtly defended the particular beliefs of Protestants or Catholics, endorsed in practice the religious liberty established by the Charter of 1814, understood as both an individual and a collective right.126 The revolutionaries who brought an end to the Bourbon Restoration in July 1830 retained for the most part the charter that governed the regime. But in addition to choosing Louis-Philippe, the Orléanist cousin of the Bourbons, as their constitutional monarch, the revolutionaries also made important changes to the articles governing religion in France. Article 6, which established Catholicism as the religion of the state, was revoked, while

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Article 5, which defended religious liberty, was retained. Article 7, which called for the payment of salaries to the clergy from recognized religions, was amended to add the phrase first used in the Concordat of 1801, declaring that Catholicism was the “religion of the majority.”127 These adjustments, however, while creating some constitutional space between the Catholic Church and the state, by no means eliminated the regulatory system put in place by the concordat and the Organic Articles, as well as Articles 291–294 of the penal code. All of these remained in effect, allowing the state to continue playing its powerful role as paymaster and religious policeman. Claims by those who hoped for a more expansive understanding of religious liberty were thus often disappointed. The abbé Dumonteil, who had first been refused the right to marry because of his clerical vow of celibacy in 1828, returned to the courts after the July Revolution hoping for a revised decision, but the Cour de Cassation upheld the prohibition. The arguments of Dumonteil’s lawyers based on his freedom of conscience were dismissed in favor of the formal obligation he undertook at the moment of his ordination.128 In a similar vein M. Gronland, a Protestant German living in Paris, appealed to the minister of justice and cults in 1846 when the vicar of Saint-Germain-des-Prés refused to bless his marriage to a Catholic woman unless he signed a vow promising to raise his children as Catholics. In making his case Gronland employed both liberté du culte and liberté de conscience but added as well a reference to tolérance, suggesting both the evolution and fluidity of the language of religious liberty: “I ask you if it is legal that in a country that acknowledges the freedom of cult [liberté du culte] as does France, is it possible to refuse the nuptial blessing if, in order to obtain it, one must renounce his free will to have his children raised in the cult that his conscience advises; if it is legal to demand such a promise of a man of good sense who they know in advance would not be able to keep it. This appears to violate the spirit of tolerance of France, and to be both immoral and completely unjust.”129 As was the case with the abbé Dumonteil, the minister here chose to honor the Catholic position asserting the church’s freedom to impose its own discipline with the sanction of the state, rather than Gronland’s diffuse position that freedom of cult, individual conscience, and tolerance all argued for his right to have a priest bless his wedding with no obligation on his part to raise his children as Catholic. The theoretical elaboration of the language of religious liberty enhanced its status as a fundamental right but could not resolve the ambiguity that arose when its individual and collective dimensions came into conflict.

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On a collective level as well the July Monarchy continued to monitor religious expression, repressing sects such as the Anabaptists, Baptists, and Methodists that tried to use liberté des cultes as the basis for their legitimacy.130 In the well-publicized Parisian trial of the Saint-Simonians in August 1832 the prosecutor dismissed their attempt to defend themselves as a religion protected by Article 5 of the charter, once again invoking the government’s responsibility to protect the social order: “The law is not intended to reach down into private consciences but to protect and facilitate the expression of each individual’s religious sentiments. Yet at the same time the law was not intended to permit associations that take religion as their pretext, that concern themselves with the temporal world and attack society itself.”131 Established cults also faced problems at times, as in the case of the Reform minister Napoléon Roussel, fined for attempting to establish a congregation at Senneville (Seine-et-Oise) without official authorization, a controversy that drew substantial public attention in the 1830s and 1840s.132 The Ministry of Cults acted as well to repress Catholic schisms, such as the abbé Chatel’s effort to establish a “Primitive Catholic Church” and M. Egger’s to found a church of “Christianity totally universal.”133 It is a measure of how far the liberté des cultes might be extended in theory, and also of how the state regulated this right in practice, that it was used as the basis of a request by the Société Orientale in 1846 to construct a Muslim mosque in Paris.134 Although the government agreed in principle that liberté des cultes applied to “musulmans” it concluded that the society did not have standing in the case and that any such appeal must be made by a foreign government, since the request was made for the sake of Muslims who were not French.135 The French state during the July Monarchy acted to control the public expression of religion, but it also sought at times to prevent pressure being exerted on individuals to convert. This was particularly an issue in hospitals, where Catholic clergy might act aggressively to convince Protestants to abjure their religion before they died. The archbishop of Paris defended such behavior in 1845, claiming in a memorandum sent to the minister of the interior that “telling a sick person that his salvation depends on his abjuration is not a violation of the liberty of cults. This liberty remains intact insofar as the priest abstains from all material or moral violence, or any means that would prevent a free and spontaneous decision.”136 Such “proselytism” was forcefully condemned by the minister of the interior in a lengthy instruction sent to prefects in 1846. Such efforts violated the “fundamental laws of the

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State, which guarantee the freedom of conscience and cover all cults recognized by the State.”137 Applying this principle in defense of individual consciences in hospitals, however, involved the state precisely in the regulation of organized practice. Hospitals were now to indicate on their registers the religion of all patients, and to allow access to this to all ministers. If a patient asked to see a minister from a religion different from the one entered on the register, the administrator of the hospital would have to consult with him or her and decide if the request had been made “in full liberty.” Similarly, pious literature could be left with patients, but if someone desired a work from another religion the administrator would have to approve, making sure that “the patient was following a free and spontaneous inspiration.” In the aftermath of the French Revolution “religious liberty” entailed both the “freedom of conscience” and the “liberty of cults,” but these complementary rights could produce tense and ambiguous conflicts involving individuals, religious communities, and the state.

Conclusion Starting with the Reformation, religious liberty evolved conceptually and legally over three centuries to become a central element in the constitutional regimes of the revolutionary era and the nineteenth century. But this history shows as well the constant challenges to religious liberty, even as it became more clearly defined and more widely accepted as a fundamental right. As a result defenders of religious liberty were always anxious, sensitive to the threats against liberté de conscience and liberté des cultes they saw posed by the claims of the state and the Catholic Church. Auguste Portalis (1801–1855), the son of Jean-Etienne-Marie Portalis, the principal negotiator for Napoleon of the Concordat of 1801 and the first minister of cults, expressed this mixture of confidence and concern in La liberté de conscience et le statut religieux, his comprehensive review of religious liberty as it appeared to him in the middle of the 1840s. Portalis had a long-standing interest in the issue and had submitted essays to the two competitions of the Société de morale chrétienne in the 1820s. Looking back over the most recent period Portalis was pleased to observe that “this eternal law of freedom of conscience, for so long misunderstood and cruelly violated, has become in our nineteenth century one of the first rights of man and the citizen, one of the most incontestable and sacred privileges, and the most fundamental guarantee of civilization.” Portalis celebrated regimes,

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including France, that had introduced the “law of tolerance” throughout Europe and established a “truce of God” among believers of different faiths. But in a quick change of direction, Portalis insisted as well on the fragility of religious peace and liberty, which was “incontestable, but for the attentive observer, for the vigilant philosopher, for the intelligent friend of humanity, existed only on the surface of society.”138 Looking around Europe Portalis saw many signs that religious liberty was under attack. Pope Pius VII had declared marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics a violation of divine and natural law, attacks against Jews were common in Germany, and the Swiss Catholic cantons had recently provoked what Portalis termed a “civil war” in their persecution of Protestants. In France, religious congregations and the religious budget were on the rise, a sign in his view of the continuing threat that the clergy posed for religious liberty. Contradicting his earlier expression of confidence, Portalis wrote, “We must conclude that civil war and religious war are profoundly rooted in French society, as much as and perhaps more than in the other countries of Europe.”139 Portalis’s analysis of religious liberty is inconsistent if not incoherent and thereby captures nicely the atmosphere of confidence and anxiety that surrounded this right in the post-revolutionary era. Well-established intellectually and repeatedly enshrined in constitutions and laws, it had a meaning and reach that remained ambiguous, generating debate and conflict, a situation not unlike what we find in our contemporary world. When the converts I study faced their religious choices, they did so against this background and often addressed issues related to religious liberty that were unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable. How far should freedom of conscience extend, and how should this freedom be weighed against the need for public order? What is the proper relationship between church and state, and in particular between the Catholic Church and the French state? How much authority over religious belief and expression should be granted to institutions, including families, churches, and states? The responses to these questions that I will explore will not resolve them but can sharpen our own appreciation of the multiple tensions involved in thinking about and acting upon religious liberty.

2. Religious Wandering in French Romantic Culture

Messieurs, je vous proteste Que j’ai bien du Malheur, Jamais je ne m’arrête, Ni ici, ni ailleurs; Par beau ou mauvais temps, Je marche incessamment. (Gentlemen, I swear to you That I am truly unhappy, For never can I rest, Neither here, nor there; In good or bad weather, I walk and never stop.) —“Le vrai portrait du Juif-Errant”

The Wandering Jew returned to France in the late eighteenth century, but he was not alone. He was accompanied by other religious wanderers, similarly perplexed about their religious identities. The Wandering Jew and his colleagues were prominent in the pages of some of the most important literary and theatrical works in the age of romanticism, testifying to the importance of their stories for French audiences anxious about the religious freedom newly available to them in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The converts we will meet starting in the next chapter lived within a culture that provided them with fictional characters who struggled, like themselves, to reconcile individual belief and romantic yearnings with family and 49

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communal solidarity. Religious liberty was now protected by French law, but how would it be thought about and felt by individuals as they explored recently opened religious borderlands? In this chapter I will probe a series of texts, some of them familiar, some less so, that answer this question through tales of religious wandering that were at the heart of French romanticism. Presented in a variety of genres and directed at diverse audiences, these stories reveal an intense emotional atmosphere and a paradoxical understanding of religious liberty, which is embraced as an individual right but also shown to have tragic consequences for individuals and their families.

The Wandering Jew Returns The Wandering Jew was sighted in Paris in 1773, in Brussels in 1774, and in Avignon in 1784. This, at least, is what we are told on the broadsheets announcing the news, illustrated with an old man, bedraggled, supported by a staff, and surrounded by images of Christ’s passion and a rhymed narrative known as a complainte in which he tells his lamentable story of eighteen hundred years of wandering (figure 4). The return of the Wandering Jew was greeted with an unprecedented outburst of publications, with at least two million and perhaps as many as ten million copies of the broadsheet telling his story in circulation in the early years of the nineteenth century.1 Although he began his career as a ubiquitous figure on a single sheet of paper, the Wandering Jew soon found his way into the pages of novels and poems and onto the stage of the French Grand Opera. During this journey the Wandering Jew encountered contemporary political and social issues that complicated the meaning of his tale, but he remained always a figure doomed to wander in the borderland between Judaism and Christianity. Ron Schechter has argued that the ambiguous social status of Jews in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made them a useful symbol for the French, as they “facilitated the conceptualization and articulation of a number of ideas that were of special importance to their contemporaries.”2 I would build on this insight by suggesting that during this same period and into the nineteenth century the Wandering Jew became a crucial symbol through which the French could contemplate the possibilities and anxieties that accompanied the constitutional right of religious liberty. The Wandering Jew had visited France before, to judge by pamphlets and broadsheets that began circulating in large numbers in the early

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Figure 4. “Le vrai portrait du Juif-Errant.” Bibliothèque nationale de France.

seventeenth century.3 Literary scholars have traced his legend to Latin chronicles of the early thirteenth century, when the Benedictine monk Matthew Paris wrote of a man condemned to roam the earth until the end of time for having insulted Jesus at the time of his passion and death.4 The story evolved over the centuries, adapted by authors, most of them anonymous, for a variety of religious and social purposes. At a fundamental level the tale of the Wandering Jew provided eyewitness testimony to the truths of sacred scripture and an example of God’s justice, but also his mercy, in dealing with those who rejected his son. The tale could also serve as an explanation of the special status of Jews in Christian Europe, perceived as a marginal and rootless people condemned for turning their backs on their promised Messiah.5 These older meanings did not disappear and are clearly imbedded in the complaintes that circulated so widely throughout this period. But as he moved into other literary fields the Wandering Jew acquired psychological depth, a concern for family solidarity, and an interest in contemporary social

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issues, themes we will see echoing in the conversions of the Ratisbonnes, Ivan Gagarin, Félicité Lamennais, George Sand, and Ernest Renan. The most widely distributed complainte from the late eighteenth century was based on a supposed visit of the Wandering Jew to Brussels in 1774.6 Named Isaac Laquedem in this account, he speaks in his own voice for the first time, following a meeting with two bourgeois who offer him a drink and listen to his tale of woe. Laquedem is clearly a man to be pitied, whose great age, long beard, and disheveled clothes suggest a hard existence of poverty and exhaustion. When asked what sin he committed that would warrant his fate, Laquedem acknowledges that it was his own cruelty in refusing to let Jesus stop and rest on his path to Calvary. Jesus, described as “goodness itself,” delivered his sentence with a sigh: “You will march for more than a thousand years. Your torment will end with the Last Judgment.”7 Although the complainte stops short of announcing the redemption of Laquedem, it implies nonetheless that his punishment will be expiatory, that in the end he will be saved. Laquedem has not been baptized and is still a Jew, but he is also someone who has witnessed the Passion of Christ and acknowledges its central role in human history. He is a poor Jew sentenced to wander the earth, but also a Christian missionary, an eyewitness spreading the story of Jesus’s Passion to the world. The Wandering Jew as presented in the complaintes was an object of pity, but he was also guilty and helpless, rightfully condemned to march until the end of time. In the late 1790s his character underwent a major change, becoming more sympathetic and acquiring supernatural powers that he used to protect families and their fortunes from rapacious and satanic figures. This heroic version of the Wandering Jew was first presented in Matthew Lewis’s influential gothic novel The Monk. Published in 1796, The Monk was quickly translated into French and became the basis for a number of dramatizations on the French stage.8 In Lewis’s work the Wandering Jew is an exorcist who saves the young hero Raymond from a vampire-ghost, thus assisting him in his goal of marrying the beautiful Agnes. In stage adaptations of Lewis’s novel playwrights adopted his convention of presenting the Wandering Jew with a cross emblazoned on his forehead, confirming his ambiguous religious status, even while he assumes a role as a potent and self-conscious actor in human affairs. Louis-Charles Caigniez, known as the “Racine of the boulevards” for his appeal to a broad popular audience, had a huge success with Le Juif Errant, produced at the Théâtre de la Gaité in 1812. With Caigniez

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the myth of the Wandering Jew took on “artistic forms particularly valued in France, the popular novel, melodrama, spectacular effects, and vaudeville.”9 Caigniez continued the tradition of Lewis in portraying the Wandering Jew as a protector of families, in this case the Algunars of fifteenth-century Spain, who are saved from a rapacious neighbor, which in turn allows the happy marriages of Theresina and Félix d’Alguna.10 The Wandering Jew’s commitment to family reaches a new level with Le Juif Errant of Pierre Merville and Julien de Mallian, produced at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique in 1834, for in this work the Wandering Jew’s mother and wife assume roles in the story. The play was a huge success based in part on its spectacular sets and special effects, on display from the opening scene of the Crucifixion to the concluding Last Judgment.11 These effects serve a story that opens with Isaac Laquedem, a shoemaker of Jerusalem, living in joy and harmony with his elderly mother, his wife, Noéma, and his daughter Esther. This idyllic life ends with Isaac’s indifference to Jesus’s appeal for help, but in this version his daughter is also condemned to wander. Isaac, however, is granted the power to raise his daughter from the dead, a gift he is forced to use several times over the centuries. In the final act he bargains with the devil for the soul of his daughter, and both are finally saved through the intervention of Michael the Archangel. As the Wandering Jew traveled from broadsheets to the Paris stage, he became a heroic figure, a deus ex machina who overcame impediments to happy marriages and saved family fortunes. He had retained his ambiguous religious status as a Jew whose endless journey testified to the truths of Christianity, but he was now someone to be looked on with awe and gratitude as well as pity, and whose redemption could be more clearly foreseen. These traits explain why George Sand, in the midst of her spiritual crisis that we will explore in chapter 6, cast herself in the role of “wandering Jew” as she pondered her religious identity in 1835.12 The heroic qualities of the Wandering Jew on display in the 1830s were accompanied by a new youthfulness, for he was presented at times as a vigorous man in his thirties rather than a decrepit pilgrim. In Ary Scheffer’s portrait of Ahasvérus (1833–1834), the Wandering Jew takes on Christ-like features as a bearded young man, troubled and thoughtful.13 The sympathetic portrayal of the Wandering Jew reaches its climax with Eugène Sue’s novel The Wandering Jew (Le Juif Errant), first serialized in Le Constitutionnel in 1844–1845.14 This title is somewhat misleading, since this work revolves not around the story of the Wandering Jew but around the machinations of the

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Jesuits to defraud a Protestant family, the Renneponts, of their rightful inheritance. But the figures of the Jew and of his female counterpart and sister, Herodias, the wife of Herod who had asked for the head of John the Baptist, play crucial roles nonetheless. Sue ’s novel builds on the theme of family solidarity already evoked in the earlier adaptations of the tale, but in his version the Wandering Jew also becomes a spokesman for justice and equality, a critic of religious intolerance and rigid orthodoxy, and a defender of religious liberty. Sue opens his novel with a poignant scene that emphasizes the importance of family feeling, as the Wandering Jew and Herodias greet each other across the Bering Strait, allowed only this contact because of their crimes. From this point Sue follows the lives of the seven surviving members of the Rennepont family, whose social origins range from the aristocracy to the working class. Mysterious messages draw the family toward Paris for a meeting on February 13, 1832, when the will of their ancestor, Marius de Rennepont, is to be executed, providing for the equal division of an enormous fortune left to the care of a loyal Jewish family. The Wandering Jew and his sister, distant progenitors of the family, appear miraculously throughout the novel to save their descendants from death and prison, helping them to reach Paris despite the sinister attempts of the Jesuits to stop them. In the end the Jesuits do succeed in arranging for the deaths of six of the family, but they fail to acquire the family wealth when the Jewish banker charged with managing the inheritance burns all the papers associated with it. The Wandering Jew and Herodias, no longer needed by their descendants, age and die, looking forward to a family reunion in a better world.15 Sue ’s Wandering Jew was a publishing blockbuster; avidly followed by readers of Le Constitutionnel for over a year, it pushed subscriptions from thirty-six hundred to twenty thousand and won for Sue the astronomical fee of 100,000 francs.16 The success of The Wandering Jew owes much to its topicality, as Sue ’s assault on the Jesuits echoed the recent work of Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet.17 The novel also confirmed and expanded the popular appeal of feuilletons, serialized novels that ran at the bottom of the first page of newspapers, a form that relied on exotic settings, melodramatic incident, and a moralistic framework in which good and evil were defined with no ambiguity whatsoever. Sue ’s passionate commitment to the working class, derived from the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier, already on display in Les mystères de Paris (1842–43), also helps explain his work’s popular appeal.

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Frequently reprinted and dramatized, Sue ’s Wandering Jew became the basis for retelling the story of the Wandering Jew throughout the rest of the century.18 Sue ’s novel is a bewildering work, with dozens of characters and subplots, all of them presented within the overarching drama that divides the perfectly malevolent Jesuits, led by the vile Rodin, from the Renneponts and their long-lived Jewish protectors. From my perspective the novel is especially valuable because of its critique of conversion as a violation of family solidarity. In the course of the novel the family feeling that links the Wandering Jew, Herodias, and the Renneponts over eighteen centuries is elevated as a supreme value, challenged by the Jesuits, who repeatedly seek to undermine the family’s love and loyalty toward each other. For Sue, religious conversion that threatens family ties is the result of crass self-interest and insidious manipulation of religious sentiment. Madame de Saint-Dizier, for example, the chief co-conspirator with the Jesuits, is an aristocratic viper who as a young woman lived a life of dissipation and political intrigue, accumulating lovers and working to undermine the Napoleonic empire. Only when her beauty has faded does she adopt an ostentatious but thoroughly hypocritical attachment to Catholicism, which allows her to establish a salon where she can continue her political intrigues.19 François Hardy, a manufacturer who runs his factory according to Fourierist principles and one of the Rennepont survivors, converts to Catholicism only after he has been isolated by the Jesuits in one of their residences. This apartment, which Hardy believes is offered in good faith, is in fact part of a complicated plot that involves destroying his factory and conspiring to end his passionate love affair with a young woman. Constantly surrounded by gloomy religious messages that disparage this world, Hardy is finally convinced by the “deplorable mystic jargon” of the Jesuits to leave Paris and “devote himself to a life of prayer and ascetic austerities.” Hardy’s conversion leads him to cede his portion of the inheritance to the Jesuits before he dies, an example of how the order despoils families.20 The religious principles of Sue ’s Wandering Jew, in the portrayal of the title character and of those who side with the Renneponts, are based on toleration of religious difference and a commitment to human solidarity that transcends class and sectarian divisions. Such values are contrary to attempts to proselytize, a point Sue makes clear in reporting an incident involving Gabriel Rennepont, a family member coerced by the Jesuits into a vocation

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that is repugnant to him. Gabriel is regarded with great suspicion by his Jesuit colleagues, in part because he took into his home a poor Protestant, refused to try to convert him, and then buried him in consecrated ground.21 Such behavior, leaving an individual free to follow his own conscience without undue pressure, made no sense to the Jesuits but is at the heart of Sue’s understanding of religious liberty. In defending this principle Sue was repeating in the form of a popular novel a regard for the rights of individual conscience that can be traced to the philosophical debates and religious conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as we saw in the last chapter. Sue was not the only reform-minded author to cast the Wandering Jew as a tragic figure whose story could be used to support an agenda of progressive social change. Pierre de Béranger, the most popular songwriter of the 1820s and 1830s, narrates the same basic story told in the popular complainte in his adaptation of 1831. But in the last verse the Wandering Jew declares that the sin for which he was punished was his indifference to Christ as a man, not as a divine figure: “It is not his divinity but his humanity that God avenges.”22 Béranger’s song and Sue ’s novel attest to the continuing appeal of the story, even as its meaning shifted to emphasize a humanitarian message. Not all versions of the tale of the Wandering Jew were as high-minded as those of Sue and Béranger; at times his heroic behavior was subject to parody, and his story also offered an occasion for setting off spectacular fireworks on stages, effects designed to accent his supernatural powers.23 In a clear response to Sue, the Catholic apologist and occultist writer Jacques Collin de Plancy presented Isaac Laquedem as a conniving figure attempting to restore the kingdom of Zion, using the Anabaptist rebels of Münster as tactical forces. In his epilogue de Plancy depicts the Jesuits as saviors whose emergence was necessary to counter the plot of the Wandering Jew.24 However he was viewed, the Wandering Jew served always as a symbol of religious difference and its potential consequences, of ambiguous religious identity, and of the isolation and trouble this could cause. And he could serve as well as a symbol of suffering humanity, whose troubled journey might someday lead to salvation. For Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) the redemptive dimension of the Wandering Jew extended beyond a particular character and individual families to include all mankind. Better known today for his critique of the Catholic Church and his support of a republic, Quinet was also a prominent literary

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figure whose presentation of the Wandering Jew in his epic poem Ahasvérus drew substantial attention when parts of it appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1833, followed by its full publication a year later.25 Quinet first learned of the story by hearing the popular complainte being sung on the street, and it was the subject as well for his first publication, Les tablettes du Juif Errant (1822), in which Isaac Laquedem comments critically on the persistence of human folly, especially as manifested in the Middle Ages, so much in fashion with Catholics during the Restoration.26 In the ambitious and confusing epic from the 1830s the Wandering Jew, now with the name Ahasvérus, is at the center of a cosmic drama that traces human history from its origins through the Last Judgment. From the time of its appearance critics expressed both admiration for and reservations about the work. Charles Magnin, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes, praised Quinet’s poem as a work of genius, an epic that might be compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy, but he feared that its obscurity and extravagance would put off critics and readers.27 Magnin’s judgment was correct, and Quinet’s Wandering Jew never achieved the status of masterpiece. But it was noticed at the time, as evident in Magnin’s essay, and in the responses of critics who were baffled by the complexity of its organization and by the hundreds of voices given parts in the drama, including various angels and saints, historical figures, cities, mountains, rivers, the ocean, and several godlike characters: “the Eternal Father,” “Eternity,” and Christ himself.28 Critics in particular targeted the sense of despair that informed human history as observed by Ahasvérus, a point summed up by A. Lebreu in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 1843, where he wrote that in this “strange drama . . . the entire universe is full of despair, and the heavens and the earth, with their fragile gods, all bound by the same fatality, end by disappearing into the voiceless night of nothingness.”29 Lebreu here is referring to the final scene of the epilogue, where Eternity has the final word; after sending Christ back to his tomb, he declares that there is neither being nor nothingness, there is only “MOI.” Quinet defended himself against the charge that this conclusion, along with many details in the poem, represents a view of human history as a meaningless journey. He insisted that he foresaw a redemptive outcome to history, mediated by a Christ who would be “greater, and risen to a level of human intelligence.”30 But there is no mistaking the terrifying doubt that is expressed at several points in the epic. A “Choir of Dead” in the Strasbourg cathedral insist to Ahasvérus that “Christ is not risen; he is no

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longer with us: I say to you one more time: there is no Christ.”31 Early in the fourth and last act, “The Last Judgment,” Ahasvérus surrenders for a time to despair, admitting that “Everything dies, everything disappears. Stars and heavens, all is undone; islands, capes, distant seas, all disappear, except for the moan in my chest, the tear in my eyes.”32 Religious doubt and despair are central to the character of Sue’s Ahasvérus, themes that recur in the journeys of all the converts in this study. But like Ahasvérus they find in their wandering a sense of personal fulfillment and social progress. Quinet responded to critics by insisting on the hopeful message of his version of the Wandering Jew, displayed when Ahasvérus, with a fallen angel Rachel at his side, faces Christ on Judgment Day. After announcing that he has achieved his task of gathering up all the pain of the world Ahasvérus is asked if he would like to return to his home. He refuses this offer of domestic security and instead asks “for life, not for rest,” and to be allowed to continue to voyage upward, through the stars, accompanied by Rachel. Pushed on by his hopes and desires, he aspires to go “further, always further.” Impressed by his determination, “the Eternal Father” announces to Jesus that Ahasvérus is the “eternal man” and that the time has come to create other, newer, and better worlds. Judgment Day then concludes with an extended hymn celebrating harmony and reconciliation, summed up by the “Lyre”: “Alleluia! Alleluia! No more death! No more war! No more tears! All suffering is consoled.”33 For all its excess and obscurity, Quinet’s Ahasvérus has earned a place as an important effort to imagine a new religion emerging in the wake of Christianity, what Paul Bénichou has termed the “religion of humanitarianism.” This attempt was appreciated by Magnin in his essay in the Revue des Deux Mondes and was at the center of an extended analysis written in 1841 by Paul Bataillard (1816–1894) and Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876), young men who were later to become significant literary figures in France.34 Fromentin and Bataillard establish a contrast between Quinet’s poem and the work of Pierre Ballanche, who also proposed a vision of world history in which human progress was achieved by a series of ordeals. But with Ballanche, God’s providential presence determines in the end the upward movement of history, with Christ playing a central and redemptive role; with Quinet, humanity as represented by Ahasvérus is on its own, and his story is one of emancipation from priestly control.35 There are other possible readings of Quinet’s poem, as Fromentin and Bataillard as well as modern commentators

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acknowledge. It could be taken as an exercise in heresy and nihilism, but also as a tribute to human endurance and an affirmation of universal progress. “It shows us beliefs in conflict, and frightening doubts: here an assertion, but then a brutal denial. One is moved by the birth and passion of Christ, struck by the Christian adoration of the Virgin Mary; and then the page turns, the idol is broken, the image evaporates: childish credulity! You were adoring a ghost!”36 In Quinet’s hands the Wandering Jew transcends his folkloric and theatrical representations to become a symbol for religious anguish and uncertainty, feelings common in an age of advancing religious liberty. Even as he took on a heavier symbolic load, the Wandering Jew in Quinet’s epic also retained his human dimension as a member of a family that suffers as a result of his endless journey. In the scene that follows his first meeting with Christ Ahasvérus reflects on his happy home life with his father, sister, and two younger brothers. Nathan, the father, has high hopes for his eldest son and heir; his sister, Marthe, soothes him with her singing; and his two brothers, Elie and Joel, pester Ahasvérus to let them accompany him. To ease the pain of his departure Ahasvérus tells his father he will soon return, before he is driven off forever by Michael the Archangel.37 The family then disappears, showing up again only at the Last Judgment, where they express sorrow that Ahasvérus has been forced to wander alone, without his family.38 For Quinet the family tragedy plays only a small part in the story of the Wandering Jew. For other religious wanderers, on the stages of Paris and in the pages of popular novels, the pain of separation from their families was at the heart of their conversion experience.

To Convert or Not to Convert: Operatic Questionings Given his broad appeal, it is not surprising that the Wandering Jew was able to mount the stage of the Paris Opera. Eugène Scribe and Fromental Halévy worked together to produce Le Juif Errant in 1852, a major effort whose budget ran to more than 80,000 francs to pay for the elaborate sets and the 782 costumes needed for the spectacle.39 Scribe ’s libretto, drawing on Sue’s novel and Quinet’s prose poem, paints Ahasvérus as the savior of his family in twelfth-century Flanders; he intervenes to allow his descendants Irene and Léon to marry and oversees Irene ’s recovery of her rightful position as the Countess of Flanders. In its operatic form Le Juif Errant was not a success. Although Giacomo Meyerbeer thought well enough of it to attend seven

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performances in 1852–53, Le Juif Errant fell from the repertoire after its first production.40 Halévy’s version was not helped by a mediocre score and a bewildering conclusion, in which Ahasvérus seems at first to have won death and redemption, only to have this judgment reversed in the final scene.41 But if it was not hospitable to the Wandering Jew, French opera was nonetheless fascinated by stories about characters who faced agonizing religious choices. When grand opera emerged as a major cultural force in Paris in the 1830s, two of its most auspicious and enduring successes centered on decisions about whether or not to convert. La juive, with a text by Eugène Scribe and music by Fromental Halévy, was a triumph when it was first produced in 1835, and it sustained its appeal, performed over five hundred times in Paris during the nineteenth century.42 A year later Scribe achieved similar success when he collaborated with Meyerbeer to produce Les Huguenots.43 The opera in Paris in the 1830s emerged as an institution where the bourgeoisie and grands notables went to be entertained by elaborate spectacles and huge emotions, conveyed by soaring voices and the lush orchestration of romantic composers.44 The stories told at the opera were extravagant concoctions of conflicting family loyalties, romantic love, and bizarre coincidences. Eugène Scribe, the most popular playwright and librettist of the era, has been criticized by the opera scholar David Conway for creating a “parallel universe, in which colorful historical or geographical milieus display a handful of characters who, as a consequence of some secret maneuverings in their own pasts and coincidences in the present, are forced to face some implausible crisis of choice or conscience, preferably accompanied by a simultaneous natural disaster and violent death (or both).” But as Conway acknowledges, Scribe is also known for his ability to catch the public mood, and to represent it on the stage.45 Readers of the texts of La juive and Les Huguenots are likely to appreciate Conway’s caustic judgment, but they will also find in these operas a searching examination of religious liberty in the crises of choice and conscience that he dismisses so quickly. As Michel Espagne has proposed, for all their extravagance, these operas can be read as “expressing at a precise moment all the aspirations and fears of Parisian society.”46 Although it annoyed some critics for its unlikely plot, and others for its harsh depiction of Catholic intolerance, La juive was nonetheless a major success, a work that helped solidify the appeal of grand opera for the Paris audience.47 Fromental Halévy, the composer of La juive, and the more famous Giacomo Meyerbeer, the composer of Les Huguenots, were both assimilated Jews, well connected to

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the Parisian world they inhabited and enormously successful. But neither of them converted to Christianity, and both maintained a Jewish identity. Both wrote music for the synagogue as well as the stage and were targets of anti-Judaic barbs, most famously in the case of Meyerbeer, assaulted for his commercial instincts by Richard Wagner in his notorious essay Jewry in Music (1850).48 In La juive and Les Huguenots they present musical dramas that focus on the plight of religious minorities, with climactic scenes involving fraught decisions on whether or not to convert to the religion of the majority. These works reflect an acute awareness of religious identity derived from their own situation and the broader context of post-revolutionary France. Paris audiences were drawn to the romance, spectacle, and music of La juive and Les Huguenots, but these were used to tell stories centered on the anguished feelings of individuals and their families making religious choices, embodying on a grand scale the experience of religious liberty. Although it fell out of the standard repertoire for a period early in the twentieth century, La juive has been revived recently, with major productions in Vienna (1999, 2015), New York (2003), and Paris (2007). This interest suggests the contemporary relevance of the themes of tolerance and religious liberty central to the work of Scribe and Halévy. These themes were relevant as well for the audiences that made La juive a triumph in 1835, and one of the most frequently performed operas throughout the nineteenth century.49 Set in Constance in 1414, where a church council was dealing with the Hussite rebellion, La juive centers on a tragic love between Rachel, the Jewish daughter of the jeweler Eléazar, and Prince Léopold, the husband of Princess Eudoxie, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. The final major figure in the opera is Cardinal Brogni, the leading prelate at the council, who is in fact the real father of Rachel. Years earlier, while he was living in Rome and before his ordination and clerical career, Brogni’s wife and daughter had been killed by marauding Lombards, or so he believed. In fact, his daughter had been rescued by Eléazar, who raised her as his own child, as the cardinal learns too late in the tragic closing scene. Through a series of complicated plot developments, Rachel eventually learns that Léopold, who had deceived her by adopting a false identity as a Jewish apprentice named Samuel, is in reality a Catholic prince married to a daughter of the emperor. Driven by jealousy, she denounces him in public for his relationship with her, leading Cardinal Brogni to sentence Léopold/ Samuel, Rachel, and her father, Eléazar, to be boiled alive.

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Decisions about whether or not Jews should convert to Catholicism are at the center of the tragic conclusion to La juive. While awaiting death, Eléazar is approached by Cardinal Brogni and told that by accepting baptism he and Rachel could be saved. He rejects this offer, and then reveals to the cardinal that his daughter still lives, but refuses Brogni’s pleas for any information about her fate. This anguished confrontation sets the stage for act 5, in which an enormous boiling pot dominates the scene. As they contemplate their imminent death Eléazar, moved by the love of his daughter, finally relents and proposes to Rachel that she convert in order to save herself. She refuses, and their last exchange concludes with an acceptance of martyrdom and mutual assertions of confidence in each other and their God: Ele´azar: Their God calls you! Rachel: And ours awaits me! Together: Rachel: It is heaven that inspires me. I choose death! Yes, we embrace our martyrdom. God opens his arms to us. Ele´azar: It is heaven that inspires her. I give you to death! Come, we embrace our martyrdom. God opens his arms to us.50

As Brogni makes one last plea for information about his daughter, Eléazar points to Rachel, shouting “La voilà!” as she is thrown into the pot, and then follows her to his death. La juive is a rich and complex work of art, revived recently to emphasize its critique of antisemitism, clearly a theme intended by Halévy. But La juive can also be read as a tragic depiction of individuals struggling to reconcile feelings of love and loyalty toward their families and their religious communities with competing claims that drew them across traditional boundaries. In the most famous aria of the opera, “Rachel, quand le Seigneur,” Eléazar reflects on his responsibility as a father and a devout Jew and imagines Rachel appealing for her life, an anguished moment that concludes with his declaration “Rachel, you shall not die.”51 But as we have seen, in the final scene Rachel refuses his appeal that she convert, even though it means her death. Both father and daughter here confront the competing demands of their

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religion, family solidarity, and personal desire. In a concluding tragic irony, the patriarch grants his daughter the freedom to convert, but she chooses to exercise this freedom by remaining a Jew. Just a year after the enormous success of La juive Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots raised again the issues of religious intolerance and violence and, like its predecessor, closed with a climactic scene again involving a decision of whether or not to convert. The plot of Les Huguenots is equally far-fetched, pushed along by mysterious visitors and overheard conversations. But the central drama emerges clearly, driven by the love between the Protestant nobleman Raoul and the Catholic noblewoman Valentine, the daughter of the Count of Saint-Bris, a zealous leader of the Catholic League. The scene is Paris in 1572, just before the marriage of the Protestant Henry of Navarre and the Catholic Princess Marguerite of Valois, the brother of the French king Charles IX. Marguerite encourages Raoul and Valentine to marry, hoping that such a union, like her own, will lead to religious reconciliation. But the jealous Raoul refuses, suspecting Valentine of infidelity. She marries instead the Catholic nobleman the Count of Nevers; Raoul, still in love and realizing he was wrong to suspect Valentine, finds his way to her room for a final meeting. When he hears men approaching he hides and overhears plans of the Catholic Leaguers to slaughter the Protestants. Resisting Valentine’s pleas to stay with her and save himself, Raoul rushes off to warn his friends. In the last act Valentine manages to find Raoul, fighting with his friends to defend a Protestant church where women have taken refuge as the Catholic forces approach. Valentine brings with her a white scarf, the symbol of the league, which will save him if he puts it on and agrees to convert. Raoul refuses to dishonor himself and chooses to stay with his dying friend, Marcel. Faced with this situation, Valentine decides to become a Protestant; her Catholic husband Nevers has been killed in the fighting, and Marcel agrees to bless their union as man and wife. The Catholic forces enter the church, demanding that the women who have taken refuge in the church “abjure or die”; Raoul, Valentine, Marcel, and the audience learn of their decision to become martyrs when their singing comes to an end. In the final scene Saint-Bris and his soldiers find the three survivors near the Seine and murder them when Valentine refuses to reveal herself to her father. Like Cardinal Brogni in La juive, Saint-Bris, driven by religious intolerance, has murdered his own daughter. From one perspective the message of Les Huguenots is clear: attempts to force conversions by the use of violence are condemned, and the right of

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religious minorities to believe and practice freely is affirmed. Raoul’s behavior also carries with it a straightforward lesson. Like Rachel in La juive he is tempted to convert to save himself, and like her refusal his exemplifies sincere religious conviction and a commitment to the freedom of conscience, even at the cost of his life. Valentine ’s behavior, however, provides a more complicated perspective on conversion, for she is moved primarily by her love for Raoul. She converts so that she can marry and die with him, not because of any strong commitment to Protestantism. But Valentine’s conversion is by no means a merely practical decision to facilitate her marriage to Raoul, who has been mortally wounded in the preceding battle. In choosing to convert she understands that he will soon die and that her own life will now be at risk as well. As she awaits her death with Raoul and Marcel, Valentine joins them in looking ahead to a heavenly reunion, inspired by the courage of the Protestant women, and listening to a heavenly chorus welcoming them to a better world. Valentine may be indifferent to dogmatic distinctions between Protestantism and Catholicism, which drive men to murderous attacks on each other. But she is a sincere Christian who rejects the significance of confessional differences, especially when they form an impediment to human love. Intermarriage across religious lines was not just an imagined problem in the 1830s. In 1830 Pius VIII issued a papal brief, Litteris acerbo, which declared that mixed marriages were a violation of both divine and natural law.52 Gregory XVI renewed this charge with encyclicals in 1832 and 1841, provoking angry responses from the French liberal press, which viewed the prohibition as an attack on the freedom of conscience and contrary to Article 5’s guarantee of the liberty of cults.53 Negotiating the tension between religious differences and family solidarity was a complex and delicate task on display at the highest level of French society as well. When Louis-Philippe’s eldest son and heir to the throne married the Protestant Duchess Hélène of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, their marriage at the chateau of Fontainebleau was in the end blessed by both a Catholic bishop and a Lutheran minister, with the understanding that any children would be raised as Catholics.54 This mixed marriage involving the heir to the French throne recalls the similar union of the Protestant Elisabeth-Charlotte von der Pfalz, the Princess Palatine, to the Duc d’Orléans, the brother of Louis XIV, in 1671. But Elisabeth-Charlotte had to convert to Catholicism before the marriage could take place, which she agreed to even while she continued to identify with her Protestant family and to express standard criticisms of Catholic belief

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and practice.55 Two centuries later the Duchess Hélène was free to remain a Lutheran, an indication that some degree of personal religious liberty applied within the royal family, a reflection of the new attitudes that accompanied the constitutional changes that followed the French Revolution. But this marriage took place only after long and complex negotiations, reflecting the tension that arose when families and religions exerted their claims over individuals. We have seen these tensions displayed on the operatic stage; they were a central theme as well in some of the most important works published and presented in the early nineteenth century.

Love, Religion, and Liberty in French Romanticism Chateaubriand’s Atala is universally regarded as a seminal text in the history of French romanticism. Published in 1801, the novella went through five editions in its first year and was transformed into plays and parodies, its characters presented in wax dolls and prints. Girodet’s painting of the burial of Atala was one of great successes in the Salon of 1808 and still hangs in the Louvre.56 Chateaubriand’s story appealed to readers on several levels, with an exotic setting, fulsome descriptions of the natural beauty of North America, a melodramatic love story, and an emotionally inflected endorsement of Catholicism. But at a fundamental level Atala tells the story of a religious conversion, and of religious liberty, with a plot driven by a tragic love that forces painful choices on its hero and heroine as they face each other across religious lines. This conflict between romantic yearning and religious commitment, which shaped the operas of Scribe, Halévy, and Meyerbeer, shows up as well in other works, which in some cases rivaled Chateaubriand’s novel, La juive, and Les Huguenots in their ability to draw a public. Taken together these works suggest the central importance of religious liberty for French audiences during the romantic era, fascinated by the tragic confrontation between individual belief and communal solidarity. In Atala Chateaubriand builds his story around the love of the young warrior, the heathen Chactas, and Atala, the Christian daughter of a Muskogee chief. As a young warrior Chactas is captured by the hostile Muskogees and sentenced to death but is saved by the beautiful Atala. But the Christian Atala is prevented from marrying Chactas because he is a pagan, and because her mother swore her to perpetual virginity. This vow was made so that Atala would survive a childhood illness and was renewed and strengthened

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by Atala at her mother’s deathbed. Bound by her faith and maternal loyalty, Atala is torn apart because her vow conflicts with her deep love for Chactas. After she helps him escape, they find refuge in an idealized Catholic mission led by the wise and compassionate Father Aubry, who assures Atala that her oath can be rescinded, allowing Chactas and Atala to marry. But it is too late, for Atala learns of this tolerant form of Catholicism only after she has taken poison in despair. Before she dies, however, she asks of Chactas a promise to convert; he eventually dies as a Christian. Atala’s identity in Chateaubriand’s novella is intimately linked to her faith and family. Loyalty to her mother and her Catholic faith obligate her to resist Chactas, for to give herself to him would violate her oath, made both to God and to her mother. Chateaubriand here establishes a pattern in which family loyalty merges with religious solidarity, values in conflict with the right of individual choice about religion and marriage. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe works a variation on this theme in presenting a dramatic religious choice by the Jewish heroine Rebecca as one of its climactic moments toward the end of the novel, though in this case with no tragic outcome. Scott was an English writer, but Ivanhoe, like his other books, was enormously popular in France, with at least five editions appearing between 1821 and 1830. Considering Scott’s novel here reminds us that the questions about conversion and liberty were not confined to France but resonated throughout Europe.57 In the novel Rebecca is saved by Ivanhoe, who wins in a trial by combat against the evil Bois-Guilbert and thus prevents her from being executed as a sorceress, a false accusation leveled by the Knights Templar. Rowena, who has recently married Ivanhoe, implores Rebecca to stay in England and consider conversion: “O, remain with us; the counsel of holy men will wean you from your erring law, and I will be a sister to you.” Faced with this offer to convert, Rebecca responds unequivocally: “No lady. . . . That may not be. I may not change the faith of my fathers like a garment unsuited to the climate in which I seek to dwell.”58 Rowena’s attempt to convert Rebecca is a well-intentioned effort, not a nefarious plot as in Sue’s Wandering Jew, nor the threat to abjure or die directed at Jews and Protestants in La juive and Les Huguenots. Scott, through Rowena, has left Rebecca free to choose and presents her refusal as an admirable act of religious faith and family solidarity, recalling the values that Halévy emphasized in the conclusion of La juive, without the accompanying tragedy. The popularity of Scott’s Ivanhoe spawned imitators in France, such as Alexandre Dumas, whose historical novels The Three Musketeers (1844) and

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The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) were enormously successful. But Scott’s portrayal of Rebecca, the beautiful and exotic Jewess heroine, also generated a response from Eugénie Foa, the earliest French-Jewish writer to experiment with the novel form. Foa was part of the Jewish elite who settled in Paris in the 1820s, a group that included the composer Fromental Halévy, who married Foa’s sister in 1842.59 As Maurice Samuels has pointed out, Jewish identity was at the center of her stories, “a problem to be struggled with, a series of questions to be answered.”60 In her novel La juive, published in the same year that Halévy’s opera had its premiere, Foa tells a similar story of a Jewish woman, Midiane, who falls in love with a Christian, André de Prezel. Such a relationship was illegal in the eighteenth-century and her patriarchal father, Schaoul, condemns it. Despite the paternal and social prohibition, Midiane and André run off together and have a child. In the end they die isolated and impoverished, but a daughter survives, to be raised by Schaoul’s two sisters, who grant her the right to marry either a Jew or a Christian. In Foa’s novel the barrier raised between Christians and Jews is condemned, with Schaoul as its principal guardian. But as with Eléazar in the opera La juive, the patriarchal Jewish father is not presented in exclusively negative terms. While Schaoul forcefully affirms his Jewish identity, he also acknowledges the value of all religions and concludes that all of them can be reduced to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.61 Schaoul accepts the principle of religious toleration, but not of religious liberty; he refuses to acknowledge that his daughter has the individual right to choose her own religion at the expense of family tradition and communal solidarity. Foa’s interest in conversion was personal as well as professional. In the early 1840s she began writing saints’ lives, and in 1846 she converted to Catholicism under the direction of the abbé Théodore Ratisbonne, a Jewish convert whom we will meet in the next chapter.62 We do not have any direct evidence that Foa’s own decision was accompanied by anguish and conflict, though her brother described their family as “ravaged by idiotic renegades and by shameless apostates.”63 But La juive and her work in general show us an innovative author from within the Jewish community appealing both to her own people and to a broader audience for “personal freedom against the constraints of religious intolerance and patriarchal authority.”64 The psychological and social dilemma of individuals who were aware of their religious freedom but also of their family and communal ties provided material rich with potential for a romantic generation of artists fascinated by

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the tension between individual will and collective pressure to conform. The romantics were not, however, the first to see the dramatic and aesthetic potential in issues of complex religious identity and the lure of conversion. Corneille’s Polyeucte (1643) and Racine’s Esther (1689) both take up these themes, though in different registers, and both were revived to great acclaim, in 1839 and 1840, with the Jewish actress Rachel in the leading female roles.65 Corneille’s play revolves around the decision of a Roman official in Armenia to convert to Catholicism in the third century. In the play Polyeucte’s decision leaves his new wife, Pauline, and his father-in-law, Félix, distraught and angry, but he asserts that his duty to God requires him to abandon all other loyalties: “To please God we must neglect wife, property, and rank.”66 In Corneille’s treatment, however, this argument does not go unanswered, as the playwright gives Pauline and Félix several long and forceful speeches in which they try to persuade Polyeucte to reconsider his decision for the sake of his family and his state.67 The situation is aggravated because of the public nature of Polyeucte’s conversion, which led him to destroy the pagan idols in the local temple. In the face of all their pleas Polyeucte is adamant: although he loves and honors his family and community, his first duty is to God, and to his own salvation. He refuses as well the offer to feign attachment to the pagan gods while remaining a Christian in his inner life. Although tortured by the decision, Félix is compelled by his anger, and by his duty to the empire, to send Polyeucte to his death. This is not the end of the story, however, for Pauline, in witnessing the execution of her husband, is herself suddenly converted to Catholicism and returns to her father to plead that he have her killed as well, so she might join Polyeucte: In death my husband left his light to me. His blood, in which thy executioners bathed me, Hath now unsealed mine eyes and opened them. I see, I know, and I believe.68

Félix responds by acknowledging Christianity in turn, converted like his daughter through his act of martyrdom, though he cannot fully understand what has happened to him: I made of him a martyr. His death has made of me a Christian. I ushered him to his bliss; he now seeks mine.69

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The conclusion of Polyeucte is surprising if we keep in mind the earlier scenes, when Pauline and Félix were so determined in their opposition to Polyeucte’s conversion, and so hostile to the religion that drew him away from his family and his community. But the closing scene, while implausible, manages to reconcile Polyeucte’s stubborn commitment to his new religion, the forceful act of an individual will, with the value of family solidarity. The surprising conversions of Pauline and Félix reunite the family as converted Christians, reflecting the quest for religious unity in the seventeenth century, when Protestants challenged the hegemony of orthodox Catholicism. Corneille’s reconciliation of individual will and family solidarity resonated with audiences in nineteenth-century Paris, but as we have seen in considering Scott’s Ivanhoe and Halévy’s La juive, in the nineteenth century it had become possible to imagine such loyalty within a Jewish as well as a Christian family. In Esther Racine tells the story of the queen of Persia who becomes the savior of her people when she finally admits openly to her husband that she is a Jew. Esther makes this decision after learning from her uncle and protector, Mordecai, that King Ahasvérus, deceived by the evil Aman, is about to have all the Jews of his empire murdered for disloyalty. Esther at first hesitates to declare herself a Jew, fearing for her own life, but Mordecai angrily insists that she put the welfare of her people over her own self-interest: What! When you see your people perishing, Esther, you hold your life to some account! God speaks; and yet you fear the wrath of man! What am I saying? Is your life your own? Is it not due to them from whom you’ve sprung? Did He not destine you to save His people?70

Esther, persuaded by Mordecai, reveals her Jewish identity to Ahasvérus and proves to him the Jewish people have always been loyal subjects. In the closing scenes he sends Aman to his death, grants to the Jews the same rights as all Persians, and allows them to rebuild their temple. Esther does not revolve around a conversion, but it does confront the issue of religious liberty, of the right of individuals to acknowledge and practice their faith even if they are in the minority. Racine had in mind the relationship of Protestants and Catholics, with Ahasvérus acting in a manner that recalls Henri IV’s granting of rights to Protestants in the Edict of Nantes. The revival of Esther in 1840 shows how this message embracing both tolerance and

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religious solidarity resonated in the nineteenth century, with an added dimension based on the starring role of the Jewish actress Rachel. Although critical reaction was not unanimous, the productions of both Esther and Polyeucte were popular with audiences, part of the broader revival of French classical theater in the late 1830s, a development closely associated with the career of Rachel.71 With Esther and Polyeucte audiences were engaging with characters who were exploring the same tension between individual religious identity and familial and communal solidarity that I see as a general preoccupation in French culture during this period. The starring roles of the Jewish actress Rachel in these plays underlines this conflict, which emerged explicitly in the responses to her performances, and to her career in general. As Rachel Brownstein has written, “Debate about who Rachel really was, and what she stood for, and whether she had a claim to stand for anything, raged right alongside arguments about the quality of her art.”72 Rachel’s performance in Polyeucte led some to foresee her conversion, and rumors about her attraction to Catholicism circulated throughout her career. But Rachel, born Elisa Félix in 1821, explicitly denied these rumors, and at several points in her career went out of her way to affirm her Jewish identity. Stories circulated that she, the daughter of Jewish peddlers, made her earliest impression on her family as a potential artist by reciting the tale of the Wandering Jew. In assuming her stage name in 1836, Rachel evoked both Jewish history (Rachel was the second wife of Jacob) and the contemporary cultural milieu, echoing the name of the heroine of Halévy’s La juive, whose music was still in the air a year after its premiere. On one occasion, Rachel was asked in the Catholic salon of Madame Récamier to recite the speech in Polyeucte in which Pauline announces her conversion with the assertion “I believe.” Rachel refused and instead chose a text from Esther in which the character affirms her Jewish identity.73 Angered by the rumors that she might convert, Rachel arranged for a formal denial to be published in L’Univers Israélite, which praised her for her “faithfulness to her religion,” making her one of the glorious representatives of the Jewish nation in France.74 When placed in the context of the other works considered here, the successful revivals of Esther and Polyeucte confirm the fascination of Parisian audiences of this period with characters who represented the divided loyalties that could come into play when individuals pondered their religious identity and the possibility of conversion. This theme shows up in a variety of genres, in popular and elite fiction, in the theater and on the opera stage, and it is

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presented from a variety of perspectives, some with melodramatic simplicity, others more attentive to the psychological depth of the characters. While linked by a common theme, these stories produce different outcomes: Chactas converts, but Rebecca does not, nor do the Rachels in Halévy’s and Foa’s different versions of La juive, nor Raoul in Les Huguenots. In Corneille’s play the conversion and martyrdom of Polyeucte lead his wife and father-in-law to the baptismal font, but only after substantial resistance. There is a powerful erotic element in these stories, as men and women find themselves caught between their love for each other and their ties to their families and communities. The Jewish women fall into the broad tradition of la belle juive, the beautiful Jewess whose appeal is due in part to her status as exotic and out of bounds for a Christian man.75 The Wandering Jew, hovering as a cultural backdrop to these stories, endures in an ambiguous status, somewhere between Judaism and Christianity. These stories vary in context and outcome, but all of them use religious difference and conversion as a way to explore the fraught and potentially tragic relationship between an individual and his or her family and religious community. The theme of conversion was clearly well-suited to an age in which romantic artists were preoccupied with individual struggles to define themselves against the constraints of social institutions and conventions. But the romantic evocation of conversion suggests as well that questions about belonging to and wandering from a religious home define a transitional moment in the history of religious liberty.

Heinrich Heine’s Paris Wanderings As Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) prepared to move to Paris in 1831 he imagined himself engaged in a religious quest: “Every night I dream that I am packing my trunk and travelling to Paris to breathe fresh air, to give myself up entirely to the sacred feelings of my new religion, and perhaps to receive the final consecration as a priest of it.”76 Heine relished the freedom he found in Paris, his home for the rest of his life, where he maintained his reputation as the leading German poet of his generation and assumed a “preeminent position in the Parisian press.”77 Through his essays in the Revue des Deux Mondes and in the German press Heine became the most important intermediary of his time between French and German culture. In both his poetry and his journalism Heine dealt frequently with questions of religious difference and identity. A Jewish convert to Protestantism, Heine identified with the

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Wandering Jew, but also for a time with the cult of Saint-Simonianism, before finally settling into a renewed but complex relationship with Judaism.78 Taking advantage of the religious liberty he found in Paris, Heine wrote about the religious choices he faced with a combination of engagement, humor, and irony that resonated with a European audience and that illuminates the spiritual landscape within which he lived. Heine’s religious journey began in his native Düsseldorf, where Jews experienced a taste of liberty when the city was made the capital of Napoleon’s short-lived Duchy of Berg (1805–1813). With the Restoration Berg was attached to the Prussian state, which began “systematically restoring the pattern of discrimination that had been relieved during the time of Napoleon.”79 Acting from prudential reasons rather than religious conviction, Heine converted to Protestantism in June 1825, just after finishing his studies at the University of Berlin. This was a common tactic at the time for German Jews who were anxious “to conform, escape stigma, gain professional rights, bolster social status, win a government or academic post, marry.”80 Heine was anxious to win an appointment in the German university system, but a recent prohibition against hiring Jews in such positions made this impossible. His decision failed to convince the authorities to appoint him and made him subject to attacks for insincerity and duplicity. For the rest of his life, Heine struggled with his Jewish identity, which accompanied him even when he sought to put it aside.81 Heine ’s regret and bitterness about his conversion is evident in “To an Apostate,” a poem written not long after his baptism. In it Heine condemns an unnamed convert as a fickle and spineless hypocrite: “You have humbled yourself before the cross, the very cross that you despised, that only a few short weeks ago you sought to tread into the dust.”82 Although there is clearly an element of self-loathing in “To an Apostate,” the poem may have been targeted at Edward Gans, one of the founders in 1821 of the Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews, which Heine joined in 1822.83 Although short-lived, this institution marked an important stage in Heine’s life, and in the history of Jewish studies. During its brief existence it pursued a serious examination of Jewish history, conducted according to the standards of contemporary academic scholarship. But it was at the same time a project designed to elevate the understanding of and respect for Jewish tradition, to bridge the gap between Jewish and gentile culture, while still preserving a unique Jewish identity. Heine ’s own religious education had been minimal, but his association with the society brought him into contact with scholars

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such as Gans who looked to create a new kind of Judaism that could be reconciled with modern reason. The society collapsed following the abandonment of Judaism by Gans, but Heine remained deeply concerned with the relationship of Jews to a modern society that wavered between policies of toleration and exclusion. Heine ’s engagement with Judaism in the 1820s expanded to a broader interest in religion that he explored on both a personal and philosophical level during his Paris years. Heine was at best a lukewarm Lutheran, but in one of his most famous essays, “The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” which first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1834, Luther is given a generous though critical review as “the poor monk chosen by Providence to destroy the world empire of Rome.”84 For Heine the direction of history was clear: the world moved from a gloomy, “spiritualist,” medieval Catholicism that was intellectually repressive and disdainful of our material selves, through the Reformation, which destroyed Catholic hegemony and promoted the critical spirit, and into a modern age of Enlightenment, in which dogmatic and repressive religions were replaced by a rationalized philosophical outlook that would “vindicate the natural rights of matter against the domination of the spirit.”85 Heine acknowledged the influence of Hegel, one of his teachers at Berlin, in shaping his view of history, but in defending bodily experience and pleasure Heine was also embracing a key idea in the newest religion he found in Paris, Saint-Simonianism. Like a number of other Jews, including Fromental Halévy and his brother Léon, Heine was drawn for a time to this movement, even after its condemnation in 1831; Heine dedicated the French edition of his essays on Germany to Père Enfantin, the leader of the cult.86 Heine admired the affirmation of the physical body in SaintSimonianism and embraced as well its pantheistic and progressive elements, declaring in another of his essays in the Revue des Deux Mondes that “everything is not God, but God is everything. God does not manifest Himself in like manner in all things; on the contrary, He manifests Himself in various degrees in the various things, and each bears within it the urge to attain a higher degree of divinity.”87 As is always the case with Heine’s religious choices, he stopped well short of identifying fully with Saint-Simonianism, which he reported on with sympathy, but from behind a “transparent mask” that both revealed and veiled his religious persona.88 Heine summarized the religious principles he adopted in the 1830s in a brilliant and controversial essay on Ludwig Börne, also a convert from Judaism

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to Protestantism, and also committed to political and social reform. Heine and Börne had been close for a time, especially in the early 1830s, when they were in Paris together. But personal grievances and Börne’s sense that Heine was a dilettante and not enough of a revolutionary drove them apart. Although he continued to admire Börne’s support for movements of liberation, Heine identifies his former friend as a “Nazarene,” his term for a Judeo-Christian position comparable to “spiritualist” in its denigration of the body. On the other side of the religious barrier Heine sees “Hellenes,” “men with a realistic nature, with a cheerful view of life, and proud of evolving.”89 Heine’s appreciation of Saint-Simonian attitudes toward the material body was thus reinforced by an attachment to the exiled gods of the ancient world, driven away by an ascetic Christianity.90 Heine’s conviction that the Roman Church was a dreary and oppressive force crushing both spirit and body helps explain his vituperative response to the circle of Germans who converted to Catholicism, such as Friedrich Schlegel, or returned to the faith after a sojourn in the Enlightenment, such as Joseph Görres and Clemens Brentano. In commenting on German culture for his French audience, Heine condemned all of these men for “crowding back into the old prison of the mind.”91 Heine’s aversion to converts could apply as well to those who chose Protestantism, such as Gans and himself, as seen in “To an Apostate.” In the essay on Börne Heine criticizes his former friend for ridiculing rich Jewish converts as “old lice, who still hail from Egypt, and suddenly imagine they are fleas and hop around as Christians.” Heine does not directly challenge Börne for making this hostile comment, which resounds now as an antisemitic slur, but offers a modest demurral, reflecting on the fact that both of them were also converts: “In the house of the hanged, I interrupted him, one does not talk about ropes, my dear doctor.”92 Heine was critical of conversions that reflected reactionary political views or religious insincerity, though he realized that he was not on the most solid ground in taking this position. But unlike other artists and writers of the time Heine did not raise the issue of paternal authority or family solidarity as arguments against conversion, a reflection of his profound commitment to individual liberty. Heine never abandoned his commitment to radical political and social reform, but his religious ideas changed dramatically in the last years of his life, when he constructed for himself an idiosyncratic Judaism that was far from orthodoxy but also from the Saint-Simonian and Hellenist ideas that he had preached for most of the 1830s and 1840s.93 Heine presented his final

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conversion to an attentive audience through poems and essays that traced the evolution of his religious ideas with passion, humor, and irony. Heine’s account of this last stage of his spiritual journey fascinated his readers at the time, providing them with a unique but telling example of the range of religious choices available to them. For readers then and now it offers a brilliant and exhilarating celebration of religious liberty. Heine ’s return to religion occurred during the last years of his life, when he was struck by a debilitating disease that left him paralyzed, confined to what he called his “mattress-grave” from 1848 to his death in 1856.94 His conversion was a much-discussed topic among his friends and enemies, as he acknowledges in the postscript to Romanzero, his last great collection of poems, published in 1851: “Yes, I have made my peace with the creation, and the Creator, to the great distress of my enlightened friends, who reproached me for this backsliding into the old superstitions, as they preferred to call my return to God.” In defending himself Heine embraced the idea of a personal God, in contrast to the God of the Pantheists, “who stares at you without will and without power. . . . If one desires a God who is able to help—and that after all is the chief thing—one must accept his personality, his transcendence, and his holy attributes, his goodness, his omniscience, his justice, and the like. The immortality of the soul, our persistence after death, is then thrown into the bargain just as the butcher throws some good marrow-bones into the shopper’s basket gratis if he is pleased with his customer.”95 Heine’s closing aside shows that even as he found his way back to Judaism he did not abandon his sense of humor. Some of the poems of Romanzero look back with nostalgia on younger days and romantic conquests, but in a group of poems he labeled “Hebrew Melodies,” Heine celebrates Jewish history and explores the relationship between suffering and belief. In “Jehuda ben Halevy,” the most famous of these poems, Heine reviews the life of a poet who, like himself, lived and wrote in a city dominated by another religion. Jehuda was a Jewish scholar of twelfth-century Toledo who defended Judaism in the Kuzari, The Book of Argument and Truth in Defense of the Despised Faith.96 But Heine admires Jehuda more for being “a great and mighty poet,” a “star and beacon for his age, light and lamp among his people.” “Jehuda ben Halevy” opens with a quotation from Heine ’s favorite Hebrew text, Psalm 137, the song of Jewish exiles in Babylon in which they weep as they remember their lost homeland. Although Jehuda is an exile in Toledo, he is steeped in Jewish culture, a

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student of both the Torah and the Talmud. From these texts he learned both “the science of polemic,” which allowed him to defend his people, and “the art of poesy,” a gift of God, a grace that makes the poet a “monarch in the realm of thought.” Jehuda hears from Jewish pilgrims sad stories of the devastation of Jerusalem that inspire him with love and longing and lead him as an old man to travel there as a pilgrim. In Jerusalem he mourns the city’s destruction with a “wild song of anguish” before being murdered by a Saracen who happens to be passing by. But as he dies Jehuda tranquilly . . . sang his song out To the end, and his last dying Sigh breathed out: Jerusalem!

Jehuda’s pilgrimage and final words can be read as mirroring Heine’s own relationship to Judaism, a homeland for poets but also a site for their tragic deaths. “Jehuda ben Halevy” is a moving historical account of Jehuda’s return to Jerusalem, but in a typical move Heine weaves into his somber reflections on Jewish exile an incident from his own life. Interested to learn the origins of the term “schlemiel,” Heine consults the writer Hitzig, a Jewish convert, who hems and haws, embarrassed about his knowledge of Jewish legends, until an exasperated Heine forces him to explain its history.97 According to Hitzig, “schlemiel” derives from the story of Phineas and Zimri, when the Jews were wandering in the desert after their flight from Egypt. In the biblical account (Numbers 25: 1–16) Phineas followed the orders of Moses in killing Zimri for fornicating with a Canaanite woman. In Heine’s poem, however, Hitzig reports an oral tradition in which Phineas mistakenly murders “Schlemiel ben Zuri-shaddai,” an innocent bystander. Heine sees the Jews of modern Europe as innocent victims, descendants of “Schlemiel the First,” still threatened by the spear of Phineas “ever with us, And we constantly hear it, Swishing round above our heads.”98 In “Jehuda ben Halevy” Heine reverentially invokes the history of Judaism, but he also ridicules contemporary converts and condemns priestly attempts to enforce a religious boundary between Jews and others. In “Disputation,” the third and last of the “Hebrew Melodies,” Heine explicitly takes up the issue of conversion in imagining another scene from medieval Spain, in this case a debate between a Franciscan friar and a Jewish rabbi, with the price of defeat a move to the religion of the winner. In the

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early sections of the poem the rabbi seems to have the better of the argument, employing Voltaire-like logic to ridicule Christian dogma and defending an austere God based on the Old Testament. But the debate descends eventually into a disheartening exchange of insults, and Queen Blanche, designated to judge the results, concludes that “Who is in the right I do not know—but it seems to me . . . I think . . . /that the rabbi and the monk . . . that both of them stink.”99 This anticlerical jab aligns with Heine’s insistence in his last will and testament that no minister of any religion should be present at his burial. But he asserts as well that this position in no way reflects “free-thinking prejudice.” Instead, he renounces “all philosophical pride” and declares that he had “returned to religious ideas and sentiments. I die in the faith of one God, the eternal creator of the world, whose mercy I beseech for my immortal soul.”100 Heine’s return to religion was clearly an arrangement on his own terms, a diverse array of religious thoughts and feelings that range from conventional reverence and belief to a more ambivalent posture that challenges and affirms God at the same time. As his disease continued to weaken him, and as rumors spread about his conversion, Heine decided to explain his religious transformation in the Revue des Deux Mondes. In introducing the Confessions of a Poet (Les aveux d’un poète) the editor called attention to the extraordinary position that Heine had achieved in France. Beyond the particular topics he addressed, Heine’s audience was drawn by the “personality of the poet, whose work is marked by a contrast between satire and sadness, bitter irony and emotion. . . . Placed alongside his firm political commitments, what do his jokes and skepticism mean?” Given this fascination with Heine, his decision to enlighten the public on the course of his ideas invoked “a lively interest.” Now readers would be able to follow the “principal changes in his inner life,” to learn “the secret of his hates and sympathies, joy and anger. . . . M. Heine has told us the story of his entire life.”101 Heine ’s religious journey is at the center of the life he recounts in his Confessions, in which he claims inspiration from both Augustine and Rousseau. After opening with reminiscences of his first days in Paris and his attachment to the heterodox ideas of German idealism Heine turns to his recent years and reports that he has “returned to the cradle of faith, and willingly recognized the omnipotence of a Supreme Being, who rules the destiny of the world.” Heine, however, goes well beyond a commitment to a God who presides over human history from afar, for after five years of being

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confined to his bed, he finds a “great relief in having someone in heaven to whom I can address my moans and lamentations during the night. . . . How terrible to be alone and sick, with no one to bother with the litany of your complaints. How stupid and cruel are those philosophers, those cold dialecticians who insist on denying to those who suffer their divine consolation, the only relief that remains to them.”102 In his Confessions Heine reaffirms the position he took in Romanzero, embracing a personal God who will listen to someone wracked with pain, suffering, and close to death. He leaves open the question of how God responded to his “moans and lamentations.” Heine ’s return to religion was a subject of public conversation, with rumors circulating that he had converted to either Protestantism or Catholicism. In the Confessions he denies any such conversion and affirms that he has “never been taken by any dogma, nor any cult.” Heine mentions Christ briefly, but Moses draws most of his attention, as the “great emancipator, valiant priest of liberty, opponent of all slavery.”103 In addressing the issue of his religious identity Heine acknowledges the source of the rumors that he had converted to Catholicism: his marriage to his wife, Mathilde, in a Catholic ceremony in the church of Saint-Sulpice. But Heine insists that he made this concession only to avoid “troubling a pious soul who wished to stay faithful to the religious traditions of her father.” Heine denies converting to Catholicism but takes a benign view of those who were drawn to this “pious illusion.” Their intentions were honest, he writes, and “whatever reproach one might make to these Catholic zealots, one thing is certain: they aren’t selfish; they’re concerned with their neighbor, unfortunately sometimes a little bit too much so.” Following this train of thought, Heine proceeds to a series of positive comments on the education offered by the church and the clergy, particularly the Jesuits, which leads in turn to his recollection of his secondary education during the French occupation of Düsseldorf. It is at this moment in the Confessions that Heine breaks into one of the surprising humorous turns that fascinated his readers, as he imagines living an entirely different life, which would have brought him to Rome, and not Paris. As a student in the lycée established in Düsseldorf during the French occupation Heine was taught by its rector, a Father Schallmeyer, “who exposed us to Greek thought, including the most dangerous skepticism so thoroughly opposed to the orthodox dogmas of Catholicism. And yet he was a priest of this religion, who said Mass before its altar.” Impressed by his student, Father Schallmeyer approached Heine’s mother to see if she would

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consent to sending him to study in a Roman seminary. Schallmeyer assured Heine ’s mother that with his connections at Rome her son would achieve a prestigious position in the church. Madame Heine refused this offer, though Heine reports that she regretted this decision after she saw the difficulties put in the way of his secular career. But Heine seizes the opportunity of this memory to imagine a leap into a Catholic life. What would have happened, he wonders, had his mother accepted the offer, and had Heine gone to Rome? Heine answers this question by spinning out a fantasy in which he would have risen high in the church, becoming one of those cultivated prelates who serve not only the church but “Apollo and the Muses.” He would have pursued poetry and the arts, flirted with divas at the opera, and made “delicate observations on the anatomy of the models of artists when I visited their studios.” In preaching to the most distinguished congregations of Rome Heine would have combined a preaching of “moral severity” with language that would not be “too austere,” and would not “offend the ears of delicate consciences.” He would have flattered the right women so that he would climb ever higher, and in the end, although insisting that “I am not naturally ambitious,” he admits that he “would not be able to refuse the pontificate, if the conclave were to choose me.” In a climactic moment Heine pictures himself carried in triumph through the arcades of St. Peter’s, and then, “with absolute seriousness, because I can be very serious when it’s absolutely necessary,” he would give to the enormous crowd kneeling before him the urbi et orbi papal blessing.104 Robert Holub is certainly right to describe Heine’s Confessions as an “unusual text . . . a strange performance” that indicates he “had trouble confronting or processing [conversion] mentally.”105 He is right as well to see this late work as “invaluable if we hope to understand the complex workings of Heine ’s mind,” but these points might well be extended beyond Heine to cover a broader French public. From this perspective the image of Pope Heine blessing Rome and the world is a testament to his sense of humor and his wit, but also to the extraordinary range of religious possibilities that could be imagined in Paris in an age of religious liberty.

3. Prodigal Sons and Daughters? Jewish Converts and Catholic Proselytism

In January 1842, Alphonse Ratisbonne, a young Jewish banker from Strasbourg, was visiting Rome, a tourist stop during a visit to the Middle East designed to improve his health. By chance he ran across a school friend, Gustave de Bussières, and through him became acquainted with his brother, Théodore de Bussières, a Lutheran convert to Catholicism. Théodore was intensely devout, and his zeal led him to devote several days to Ratisbonne, showing him the sights of Rome, hoping to convert him. This might have seemed a fool’s errand, for Ratisbonne insisted that he was born and would die as a Jew, and he apparently responded to Bussières’s proselytism with ridicule. But he took up a dare offered by his new friend and agreed to wear the “Miraculous Medal,” with its image of the Virgin with outstretched arms, which had become an enormously popular talisman over the previous ten years. On January 20 Théodore and Alphonse paid a brief visit to the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, so that Théodore could make arrangements for the funeral of the Count de La Ferronays, another French Catholic expatriate in Rome, who had died suddenly two nights before. Leaving Alphonse in the rear of the church, Théodore talked briefly with one of the monks and then returned to seek his new friend. He found Alphonse collapsed in tears and virtually speechless. Here is how Alphonse later described what happened to him: “I saw standing on the altar, clothed in splendor, full of majesty and sweetness, the Virgin Mary, just as she is represented on my medal. An irresistible force drew me towards her; the Virgin made a sign with her hand 80

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Figure 5. The Conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne, January 20, 1842. Archives de Notre-Dame de Sion.

that I should kneel down; and then she seemed to say: That will do! She spoke not a word, but I understood everything.”1 Within a day the story of Alphonse Ratisbonne’s miraculous conversion was circulating in Rome, and he quickly became an object of enormous public attention. Ratisbonne was baptized just eleven days after the apparition, before an overflowing crowd at the Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù, by Cardinal Patrizi, the vicar general of Pope Gregory XVI.2 The sermon welcoming him into the church was preached by Monsignor Dupanloup, a rising star in the French church, who happened to be in Rome at the time.3 By early February Alphonse ’s brother, Théodore Ratisbonne, who had previously converted and been ordained as a Catholic priest, was preaching about the miracle to large crowds at the church of Notre-Dame des-Victoires in Paris.4 In June an investigation ordered by Cardinal Patrizi concluded that the conversion was incontestably miraculous. Over the next few years the apparition and conversion of January 20, 1842, became a central element in the Marian revival that swept through France in the nineteenth century.5 Catholics were delighted by the conversion of Ratisbonne, but his family was deeply distressed, especially because he had been engaged to

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marry his cousin Flore in the near future. Although it is not clear how the family first heard the news, by February Alphonse was engaged in a painful correspondence with his uncle Louis, who accused him of being “the assassin of his fiancée,” who was also Louis’s daughter.6 Alphonse’s conversion was painful for himself as well, for although his first thoughts after the apparition were of his brother Théodore, and filled him with “unspeakable joy,” he then considered the rest of his Jewish family. In thinking of them, “tears of compassion were mingled with my tears of love. Alas, that so many should go quietly down into this yawning abyss with their eyes closed by pride or by indifference! They go down and are swallowed up alive in this horrible darkness! And my family, my fiancée, my poor sisters!!! Oh! Torturing anxiety! My thoughts were of you, my beloved ones! My first prayers were for you!”7 Alphonse avoids referring to hellfire, an indication of either delicacy or denial about this particularly fearful punishment, but he makes it clear nonetheless that conversion meant salvation for Alphonse and that eternal damnation awaited his family, unless they too converted. As we saw in the last chapter, the Wandering Jew and similar figures in French culture offered models with which the French could explore thoughts and feelings about religious liberty. The story of Alphonse Ratisbonne shows us that the pain and stress, relief and consolation displayed in books and on the stage also occurred in drawing rooms, churches, and synagogues. The public controversy that followed Alphonse’s baptism confirms as well the intense interest in conversion stories, and the questions they raised about individual religious liberty and family solidarity. In this chapter I will recount the stories of David Drach, the Ratisbonne brothers, and Olry Terquem, all of them prominent in the Jewish community, whose conversions drew public attention between the 1820s and the 1840s.8 I will also consider the work of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, a community of sisters founded by Théodore Ratisbonne and dedicated to the conversion of Jews, which gained notoriety in the 1840s. The stories of the young girls placed with the congregation provide another perspective on the experience of liberty among French Jews, calling attention to the ways in which age, class, and gender intersected with belief in shaping religious attachments and identities. In telling these stories I do not assume that the accounts of Alphonse Ratisbonne and others are transparent depictions of conversion; many of them suggest the influence of the melodramatic conventions explored in chapter 2; it is easy to imagine an operatic production being built

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around the life of Alphonse Ratisbonne. But the possibility of such influence does not mean that the emotions expressed by him and his family, and by other converts as well, should be deemed inauthentic. Understood as “emotives,” to use William Reddy’s term, the stories told by converts both shaped and expressed the hopes and fears involved in reconciling religious belief, personal liberty, and family loyalty.9 Before entering into the lives of the converts, however, we should have in mind the particular situation of Jews in a France where religious liberty was a declared but not fully realized principle.

Religious Liberty for Jews? As we have seen in chapter 1, religious freedom as a human right expressed in written constitutions emerged in the late eighteenth century, with Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a key text marking this development. Despite the hopes of some Jewish leaders and their Christian supporters of the time, this right was not at first understood as applying to French Jewish communities, which were concentrated in Alsace and Lorraine in the east, in Bordeaux and Saint-Esprit in the southwest, and in Avignon and other cities in the territories of the south ruled by the pope until 1791.10 It was only in January 1790 that the Constituent Assembly agreed to grant those known as “Portuguese” Jews, the relatively assimilated Sephardic community of Bordeaux and Saint-Esprit, equal rights as French citizens. It took another eighteen months before the Assembly, in one of its last acts, accepted all Jews, including the Ashkenazic Jews from the east, as citizens of France. The basis for Jewish emancipation, famously articulated by the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre in his speech to the Assembly in December 1789, was an understanding that rights were granted to the Jews only as individuals. Becoming French citizens equal to all others meant abandoning the corporate structures within which they had previously defined themselves. “To the Jews as a Nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything. They must renounce their judges; they must have none but ours. . . . They must not form a political corps or an Order in the state; they must be citizens individually.”11 The delay in enacting this policy into law suggests the wariness with which many legislators in France regarded the Jewish community, a nation apart, governed internally by its own leaders under the corporate system that characterized Old Regime France.

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In the decades that followed their supposed emancipation French Jews continued to be regarded as a separate and suspect people. Even supporters of Jewish emancipation, such as the abbé Grégoire, saw the need for “regenerating” a community whose manners and morals were condemned as insular and greedy.12 During the Napoleonic era this reform impulse continued to intersect with traditional hostility, in the convocation of a Jewish Assembly of Notables in 1806 and of the Grand Sanhedrin in 1807. Through these assemblies Napoleon hoped to apply pressure to the Jewish elite to acknowledge the legal changes that established the French state as the supreme authority over the lives of individuals and accept a process that would eventually dissolve the Jewish community. The questions he posed to the 1806 Assembly reveal a sharp resentment of communal separation, and a desire to advance a program of assimilation. In question three, which provoked the most controversy among the notables, the emperor asked, “Can a Jewish woman marry a Christian and a Christian man a Jewish woman? Or does the law allow Jews to marry only among themselves?”13 The answer given by the notables, and confirmed by the rabbinic experts of the Sanhedrin, accepted the legality of intermarriage between Christians and Jews, because Christians were not idolaters and both religions adored the same God. But it also distinguished sharply between the civil and religious spheres, accepting that a Jew and a Christian might have a legally binding marriage but asserting that rabbis would not bless such unions, which would therefore have no religious sanction.14 Scholars have scrupulously analyzed the work of the notables and the members of the Sanhedrin, who were engaged in a delicate balancing act in which they struggled to preserve communal integrity while affirming their acceptance of a French national identity.15 From my perspective, the response to question three reveals an ambiguous attitude on the part of the Jewish elite about the relationship between an individual Jew and his or her community that might result from intermarriage. The notables and the members of the Sanhedrin were fighting back against the intent of Napoleon, and of the “regeneration” program in general, to use emancipation as a step toward assimilation and eventually conversion. Their answer discouraged intermarriage, even while it acknowledged its civil legality, thus affirming the right of individual Jews to marry outside of their faith and to retain their Jewish identity. But in trying to balance individual rights with communal integrity Jewish leaders did not and perhaps could not explain how such

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individuals might actually think about themselves, and how they might in fact relate to a Jewish family and community. As a result of the Napoleonic assemblies the empire created a new set of institutions charged with organizing the Jewish communities in France, and with managing their relationship to the state. This system of consistories granted Jews a status similar to that of the other organized religions, Catholicism and Protestantism, but did not result in full equality. The “infamous decree” that was enforced between 1808 and 1818 is the clearest indication of how the state continued to discriminate against Jews, thus denying them the equal rights they had supposedly been granted. This Napoleonic ordinance severely restricted the rights of Jews to lend money and collect debts, required them to obtain a special license to engage in commerce, and prohibited them from moving into the two Alsatian departments in eastern France.16 Although the “infamous decree” was allowed to lapse in 1818, the policy of placing Jews in a special category, subject to particular laws that did not apply to other citizens, continued during the Restoration (1814–1830), despite the fact that the Catholic Bourbons promulgated a charter that affirmed religious liberty.17 While Catholic and Protestant ministers were paid by the state, Jewish rabbis were compensated only in 1831. Jews were also still required to swear a special oath in legal proceedings, the “more judaico,” an obligation that remained in force until 1846.18 The exclusion of Jews from full citizenship expressed in legal terms an animosity that contributed to an enduring social separation. According to the influential writer and political theorist Louis de Bonald, “Jews cannot be, no matter what one does, and never will be citizens in a Christian Europe without becoming Christian.”19 The July Revolution of 1830, which brought Louis-Philippe to the throne of France, seemed to offer Jews the possibility of full equality, as indicated by the state ’s willingness to pay rabbinical salaries. Historians of French Judaism have judged the July Monarchy (1830–1848) as an important stage in the process of Jewish integration. Drawn increasingly to Paris, which was becoming the new center for French Judaism, Jews became prominent in the world of business and law, most notably in the careers of the famous banker Jacques de Rothschild (1792–1868) and the lawyer and politician Adolphe Crémieux (1796–1880), who served as the minister of justice for the Second Republic in 1848.20 An active Jewish press emerged, with the Archives Israélites proposing greater efforts at integration, while L’Univers Israélite adopted a more conservative posture.21

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Schools grew in number and quality, with enhanced support from the state.22 In intellectual circles Adolphe Franck and Salomon Munk began careers that would eventually lead to appointments at the Collège de France. Franck’s thesis on the Kabalistic texts, published in 1843, linked this Jewish mystical tradition to principles of universal reason and established a new level of interest in Jewish religious culture.23 Salomon Munk, an immigrant from Germany, brought to France the scholarly and religious interests of the Berlin Society for Culture and Science of the Jews, the same group that Heinrich Heine joined in 1822. Munk’s scholarly career began when he was made curator of oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in the 1830s, but he maintained throughout his career close ties with the Jewish community, becoming secretary of the Central Consistory in 1844. In 1862 he was called to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, after Ernest Renan was dismissed because of the scandal surrounding his Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus).24 Taken together, these achievements suggest that the Jewish community in the 1830s and 1840s successfully managed to preserve a clear sense of its identity even while it made substantial progress toward integration into the French nation. The success that Jews experienced in France during the July Monarchy generated, as a paradoxical consequence, a reaction in which traditional resentments were recalled and refined to fit the new circumstances of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s the slogan “Rothschild, king of Jews,” became a commonplace among socialist writers such as Alphonse Toussenel, inaugurating a long line of antisemitic attacks directed at the financial and political power of Jewish bankers.25 Even more troubling was the revival of the accusation that Jews murdered Christians in order to use their blood for ritual purposes. This myth was at the center of the Damascus affair of 1840, when an Italian Capucin monk disappeared in that city, resulting in a wave of rioting directed against the local Jewish community, and a campaign of torture against Jewish suspects that resulted in false confessions. The affair drew international attention, with the French consul the Comte de Ratti-Menton in Damascus playing a leading role in fomenting an antisemitic reign of terror.26 In Paris Adolphe Thiers supported Ratti-Menton in the Chamber of Deputies, hoping to capitalize on the incident in order to gain domestic political advantage. In Europe the Jewish communities of England and France mobilized to support their fellow Jews; an international committee headed by Moses Montefiore, Adolphe Crémieux, and Salomon Munk traveled to

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the Middle East and managed to obtain the release of Jewish prisoners and to defuse the crisis. But the incident generated hostility across religious lines, as is evident in the response of the Catholic daily L’Univers, which insisted that the blood libel was plausible based on the Jewish hatred of Christians as documented in the Talmud. According to L’Univers Jewish integration was a sham designed to hide their primary loyalty to the Jewish community: “The adoption by Jews of the political opinions and social customs of nations that have received them in their midst does not at all indicate a complete identity. A people might well adopt new external habits, but as long as it professes a secret religion whose mysteries and beliefs cannot be penetrated, they will remain foreigners who deserve to be regarded with suspicion.”27 In this passage we hear French Catholics doubt that Jews can really become French, even if they appear to have adopted the habits and manners of their fellow citizens. As we will see, a similar suspicion emerged about those Jews who not only acted like French citizens but accepted baptism and became Catholics. Anxiety over the issue of Jewish assimilation was based in part on a developing sense of immutable national differences.28 But individual conversions also challenged the traditional values of family honor and paternal power. As we saw in chapter 1, Emily Loveday, the Protestant convert to Catholicism, posed a problem for Catholic writers committed to the patriarchal family but also interested in promoting the interests of the Catholic Church. The importance of loyalty to family religious tradition was expressed in a popular aphorism which claimed that “an honest man doesn’t change his religion.” Joseph de Maistre addressed this issue directly in a letter published in 1824 in the Mémorial Catholique and then reprinted several times as a pamphlet. Maistre at first questioned this principle, which he acknowledged was widely accepted, as violating the right everyone had to assure his or her own salvation. But he ended by advising his correspondent, a Protestant woman who wished to convert, to be prudent, to delay baptism, and not to disrupt the family with a public break.29 Twenty years later David Drach, whose conversion I will deal with shortly, condemned the same “impious principle that an honest man doesn’t change his religion,” which was used to oppose Catholic proselytism and conversion.30 To judge by the language of Maistre and Drach, the ideal of the “honest man,” characterized by modesty, civility, and moderation, had expanded by the nineteenth century to include as well a sense of loyalty to family religious tradition. “Honesty” can be linked as well

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to what William Reddy has described as “the democratization of honor,” a process at work in the early nineteenth century in which nonaristocratic families became increasingly concerned with “the keeping up of appearances, the avoidance of shame by concealment.”31 Converts were in the shameful position of asserting personal convictions that broke the solidarity of their family, which explains why at times they kept their conversions secret from parents and relatives. Secrecy and shame, belief and belonging, are dominant themes in the stories of Jewish converts that I turn to now. Their decisions, and the ways in which they were communicated to the public, illuminate how Jewish-Christian antagonism was being reshaped in an age of expanding religious liberty and confirm the cultural fascination with this issue. They show as well that decisions to change religion involved real choices, ruptures, and some reconciliations in the lives of Jewish individuals and their families.

David Drach: A Rabbi Converts The baptism of David Drach (1791–1865) on Holy Saturday of 1823 in a dramatic public ceremony conducted by the archbishop of Paris at the cathedral of Notre Dame shocked the Jewish community of Paris and delighted Catholics.32 Drach, the founding director of the first school for Jewish children in Paris, was the son of an Alsatian rabbi and the son-in-law of Emmanuel Deutz, the grand rabbi of France. In his own account of his conversion, first published in 1825, Drach described himself as a model rabbinical student who nonetheless was drawn to Christianity.33 Although Drach clearly tailored his story to his own advantage, the details of his early contacts with Christians are plausible: conversations with a Catholic servant as a child and with a Catholic priest at the age of seventeen, when he was serving as a tutor for a Jewish family in Ribeauville. This last connection took place, according to Drach, in the mayor’s home, and he praised this “estimable family [that] had the charitable discretion to keep their silence about my interest, which they no doubt attributed to my youth.”34 In this same period Drach decided to teach himself Latin and Greek, perhaps another indication of his early inclination to explore the borderland between Judaism and Christianity. This interest apparently upset his father, but he pursued his study of languages nonetheless, establishing an important base for his subsequent conversion and scholarly career. Drach’s sudden resignation and

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baptism in 1823 took the Jewish community by surprise, and we have only his own testimony about when and where his journey began. But there is no particular reason to doubt his narrative, and however we judge the veracity of its details it is clear that for several years prior to his baptism he was drawn to Christianity, an inclination he kept secret from his family and community. Like many other Jews in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and like ambitious young men in general, Drach was drawn to Paris, which was emerging as the new center for French Judaism, a place where Jews could hope to forge connections with a gentile world that was offering them limited but real opportunities for advancement and assimilation. In the decade after his arrival in the capital in 1813 Drach managed to combine a promising career within the Jewish community with an active pursuit of contacts with French institutions and individuals. He became a private tutor for an elite Jewish family and the secretary to the Central Consistory and published several religious texts in French, for families who preferred to worship in the language of the nation that had recently granted them the right of citizenship. But he also earned a baccalaureate degree and a teaching credential from the Ecole normale for elementary education and taught classical languages for a time at the Institut des langues étrangères.35 Drach’s interest in scholarship and religious reform drew him in the early 1820s to the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek made in the third century BCE, a text he hoped to translate back into Hebrew as the basis for a new and purer version of sacred scripture than the one currently used by French Jews. This project brought him into contact with Silvestre de Sacy, the most distinguished orientalist of the period as well as a devout Catholic.36 With Sacy’s support Drach, along with Michel Berr, was one of two Jews nominated for membership in the newly organized Asiatic Society, where he found support for his program of translation and Jewish reform.37 Drach’s fascination with the Septuagint is at the heart of his own account of his conversion, where he claims that reading this purer version of Jewish scripture proved to him that Christ’s coming had been foretold by the prophets. This was, of course, a standard argument used by Christians to justify their belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah, but Drach pursued it with a combination of unusual linguistic skills and a passion for a microscopic examination of the Bible. Drach’s knowledge of Hebrew also led him beyond the Hebrew Bible to the other sacred texts of Judaism, the Talmud and the Kaballah, for signs of their correspondence with Christianity.38

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Drach emphasized the importance of a detailed examination of sacred texts as the basis for his conversion, but in choosing Paul for his Christian name he pointed as well to God’s grace as the compelling force pushing him to abandon Judaism. “Just like Saint Paul, my blessed patron, I was raised at the feet of the doctors of Israel; like him I was converted by the voice of God, without the cooperation of any man; like him my conversion earned me the hatred and persecution of the Jews, my brothers.”39 Drach’s description of his conversion as a result of his own will, but also of God’s intervention, as based on personal study, but also divine grace, leaves open the question of how one might ultimately account for his decision. In its insistence on the role of long years of personal study as well as the infusion of grace Drach’s story mirrors Augustine ’s account of his conversion in the Confessions, a case that might better fit Drach’s than Paul’s sudden illumination on the road to Damascus. And like Augustine’s account, Drach’s narrative also allows for the important role of personal connections, although in the case of Drach these involved a rupture with his family and not the reconciliation that brought Augustine and his mother, Monica, together as Christians. Soon after his arrival in Paris Drach was taken on as a tutor in the home of Baruch Weil, who was on friendly terms with his Christian neighbors, Louis and Adèle Mertian, Catholics from Strasbourg. Drach soon began teaching Latin to the Mertian children as well as Weil’s and later described himself as “electrified by the edifying examples of a tender piety which I had the happiness to witness every day, for several years,” an experience that reawakened his earlier interest in Christianity.40 Through the Mertians Drach was introduced to the abbé Burnier-Fontanel, the dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne, who provided him with religious instruction prior to his baptism, and who also initiated Drach into the Catholic liturgy. Sometime between his arrival in Paris and his conversion Drach assisted at a Catholic Mass on Palm Sunday at the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont and later recalled being deeply moved by a theatrical presentation of the Passion story, read by several voices during the ceremony. Although Drach’s own testimony cannot always be taken at face value, we have no particular reason to doubt an emotional reaction to such a dramatic representation of the death of Christ, which evoked a powerful aversion to the Jews who, according to the Gospel account, called for Christ’s crucifixion. It is telling, however, that in expressing this sentiment Drach shifts from the first to the second person,

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perhaps as a way of distancing himself from a growing resentment directed against his fellow Jews. In describing his response to the Passion, Drach writes, “You become indignant with the persecutors, you develop a great compassion for the victim abandoned without defense to their fury; a dark sadness takes hold of you. You suffer with the man.” Thinking back to this moment, Drach concludes that “the religion that generates such emotions, could it not be divine?”41 Drach’s narrative here reaches beyond itself to incorporate Catholic ritual as another powerful “emotive” used to navigate in the borderlands between religions. Drach’s scholarly interests and contacts aroused some concern, but his Jewish colleagues apparently did not suspect the depth of his attraction to Christianity. Perhaps this was because his agenda seemed to fit with an emerging though controversial trend in Parisian Judaism to reform traditional practices and prayers, using French instead of Hebrew, and in general bringing Judaism in line with Christianity.42 The vast majority of reformers did not convert, but Drach’s spirit of innovation and his desire for connection with the Christian world would not have surprised or disturbed them, for it fit with their own sense of the need for change and accommodation to a Christian world.43 One final factor that Drach considered only to dismiss in explaining his conversion was professional and material self-interest. Hostile responses from the Jewish community spoke of substantial bribes, of offers for a lucrative position.44 From Drach’s perspective, such attacks were ludicrous, given the enormous personal price he paid and the opportunities that seemed to await him within the Jewish community, including the reasonable expectation that he would replace his father-in-law as the grand rabbi of France.45 But if we dismiss the cruder attacks that drew on the traditional caricature of the venal Jew, it is still plausible to see in Drach’s choice at least some element of personal ambition. He had been disappointed with some decisions of the Central Consistory, which refused to publish one of his works, and his school was constantly in dire financial straits. His contacts with Catholic friends and colleagues presumably gave him some hope that he could find success in their world, an aspiration that led eventually to a modestly successful but by no means brilliant career.46 Drach’s case raises the question of how to measure the different factors that help us understand his conversion, a problem that is common to all of the stories in this chapter, and throughout this book. Judgments about

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whether religious, or social, or selfish reasons were predominant can too easily be made using a template that reflects our own views and preferences. Rather than engage in such an exercise, I prefer to think about Drach’s decision as a complex, deeply personal but also socially mediated process, which by virtue of its complexity opens up to us the world of religious choice within which he lived.47 In the case of Drach and other Jewish converts, it is the rupture with the family that repeatedly comes back to the center of their stories. However we judge the motives that led Drach to convert, his decision produced an enormous rift with his family and community. Following the advice of his Catholic friends, Drach at first continued to live with his wife, Sara, for several weeks, urging her to convert. Tearful scenes with Sara and angry exchanges with his father-in-law ensued. After three weeks of family strife, Sara fled with her three children, ending up in London, where she was hidden by a sympathetic Jewish community.48 Drach spent eighteen months trying to track his family down, a quest that led him from Paris to Metz before he finally succeeded, with the help of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in tracing them to London.49 There he made contact with his family and, with the collusion of a disloyal nursemaid and the local French community, including the ambassador, kidnapped his children and brought them back to Paris. Even then Drach’s conflict with the Jewish community continued, drawing the attention of the minister of the interior, who wrote to the prefect of police in Paris that Drach’s brother-in-law Simon Deutz and his friend, a M. Neymann, who worked for the Rothschild family, had threatened the former rabbi, made inquiries about the Mertian family, and might even attempt to kidnap the children again.50 No such attempt occurred, however, and under Drach’s care the children were raised as Catholics; the two girls eventually became nuns, while his son became a priest.51 For the rest of his life Drach pursued a career as a bibliographer and scholar in Paris and Rome, working first as the librarian for the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne and for the Duc de Bordeaux. The July Revolution of 1830, which reduced the power of Drach’s ecclesiastical and political connections, led him to Rome, where he worked for twelve years (1830– 1842) as librarian for the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Drach returned to Paris in 1842, where he was associated with the publishing house of the abbé Migne, editing works of the church fathers.52 Drach’s

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scholarly work won him an honorable but modest place in French intellectual life, but he won more public attention for his role as a missionary to his former community, publishing a series of works explaining his own conversion and insisting on the “harmony” between Judaism and Christianity. In a series of letters addressed to the Jewish community that began in 1825 Drach expressed the hope that his example, and the evidence he adduced from sacred scripture, would lead to a wave of Jewish conversions, even to the disappearance of Judaism as an autonomous religious community. The most promising but ultimately the most disappointing example of this movement that Drach claimed to see was the conversion of his brother-in-law Simon, baptized at Rome as Hyacinthe in 1828. This was the same Deutz, the son of the grand rabbi of France, who had reacted so violently to Drach’s conversion in 1823. In his effusive account of Deutz’s conversion Drach admitted that it was not yet possible to reveal the names of all those who had converted, out of respect for those who wished to keep their decisions private. But he insisted that the Jews who had been “regenerated in Our Lord Jesus Christ” in the past few years outnumbered all of those baptized over several centuries.53 Just four years later, however, Drach was forced to disavow Deutz, who became a universally detested figure after he was bribed into betraying the hiding place of the Duchesse de Berry during her hopeless attempt to regain the throne for the main line of the Bourbons in 1832.54 French newspapers were full of accounts that identified Deutz as a Jew, even though he had been baptized, and interpreted his betrayal as in keeping with the character of his people. Victor Hugo, already an established star in the literary world, wrote a poem condemning in the most vitriolic terms this new Judas who wandered the earth, another juif errant, who should suffer for his perfidious behavior.55 Drach was quick to disassociate himself from Deutz in an open letter published in L’Ami de la Religion in which he recalled that the family of his brother-in-law had “separated itself from me several years ago, breaking all the ties of nature, because it detests the principles of the Gospel.”56 There are complicated psychological dynamics lurking in the relationships of Drach and Deutz with their families and communities. Drach condemned Deutz for “breaking all the ties of nature,” but didn’t he act in a similar fashion when he broke with his family’s religious tradition? And was it “natural” for Drach, who had recently celebrated the conversion of this family member, to abandon him so quickly and to adopt so willingly the

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“teaching of contempt” directed at people that he also addressed as his “dear brothers”?57 Drach’s tortured attempts to formulate a coherent relationship with his former community come through clearly in his autobiographical writings, where he moves quickly from condemning his persecutors to forgiving them, as a good Christian must. “Very often the object of your persecution [converts], forgive the evil you do them, or which you try to do. If you disavow your relatives, they are happy to retain their ties to you; if you curse them, they continue to pray for you; if you slander them, they cover your wrongs with a veil of charity.”58 Perhaps the most shocking example of Drach’s hostility toward Jews was his public endorsement of the outlandish claims of Jewish ritual murder in the Damascus affair.59 Drach’s troubled relationship with Jews, and with Judaism, is palpable in his writings, in which he zealously embraces the beliefs and institutions of his new religion, and in particular the militant ultramontanism of the nineteenth century that invested absolute authority in the Catholic Church as represented by the pope in Rome.60 But there are suggestions as well in his private correspondence of shadows cast over his life as a Catholic because of his Jewish origins. During his time in Rome Drach was relentless in his pursuit of honors, writing constantly to add to the list that appeared prominently on the title page of L’harmonie entre l’église et la synagogue, which scrupulously listed his credentials: “Doctor of Philosophy of the Pontifical Academy, Member of the Asiatic Society, of the Faith and Light Society of Nancy, etc.; Member of the Legion of Honor of Saint Gregory the Great, of Saint Louis, Civil Order of Lucque, second class, of Saint-Sylvestre, etc.”61 Not all of Drach’s efforts, however, were successful, for in 1841 the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in France wrote him that it could not award him the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazare, which he had requested. In his response to Drach the minister wrote that “the person who aspires to receive this decoration must not only belong to the Catholic and apostolic religion, but also descend from Catholic ancestors. And as there has never been an exception to this rule established by ancient tradition, for persons having belonged to the Jewish religion, or who descended from parents who professed it, the King cannot violate it in this case, and regrets to find himself in the position of the impossibility of adhering to your request.”62 Behind its façade of bureaucratic politesse, this letter makes clear that Drach’s Jewish past kept him from full acceptance as a Catholic. As we will see with other converts as well, Jews were unable to escape their religious past, which provided them with a

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form of celebrity but also created barriers to their full assimilation to the Catholic world they aspired to join. The dramatic events surrounding David Drach’s conversion caused enormous pain to his family and put him in the middle of a complicated conflict in which the stakes involved eternal salvation, free will, paternal authority, family solidarity, and communal loyalty. Drach struggled to resolve these issues in his personal life, but he dealt with them as well in his theological writings, which were collected in the massive volumes he published in 1844 that attempted to reconcile Judaism and Christianity. In this work, which expands on the material published in his earlier letters to his “dear brothers,” he both affirms and denies the differences between Judaism and Catholicism, a confused intellectual effort that nonetheless makes emotional and psychological sense given his personal situation. In the preface to L’harmonie entre l’église et la synagogue Drach insists on the identity of the “faith preached by the Messiah Jesus with the beliefs of our fathers.” In converting, Drach insists, he had not abandoned Judaism but had returned to “the true religion of Israel.” Converts were not so much changing their religion as “coming back to the paternal roof.”63 Drach thus embraced the values of family solidarity and filiopietism, despite the fact that he had left the religion of his father, a rabbi from Alsace, and of his father-in-law, the chief rabbi of France. This obvious incongruity perhaps explains why Drach combined an argument for conversion based on recovering a lost family solidarity with a contrary position that affirmed the absolute right of individual choice. To make his case Drach drew on the Gospel of Luke (14:26) where Christ calls on his followers to abandon their families: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”64 In his autobiographical comments designed to bring other Jews to Christianity Drach struggled to reconcile two narratives of his conversion, one that stressed fidelity to the religion of father and family and another that affirmed the obligation to follow God’s call and leave them behind. In Drach’s France religious liberty had become a constitutionally protected individual right, but Jewish converts who wandered from their original home faced suspicious and sometimes hostile reactions in both the Jewish and Catholic communities. Their complicated positions fueled controversy throughout this period that reveals the personal and communal anxieties that accompanied the arrival of religious liberty.

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Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne: Divergent Roads to Rome We have already met Alphonse Ratisbonne, converted by a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary in Rome in January 1842. Alphonse’s conversion provoked a family crisis all the more serious because it followed that of his brother Théodore, who became a Catholic in 1827 and was ordained a priest in 1830. Unlike the Drach family, religiously devout and with modest resources, the Ratisbonnes were an affluent banking family that had distanced itself from orthodox religious practice. Nonetheless, Théodore Ratisbonne’s story parallels in many ways that of David Drach. For both of them conversion followed an extended period of study, a time during which they were leading members of the Jewish community while secretly engaged to Catholicism. In both cases this ambiguous stage, straddling two religious communities, was based on an effort to reconcile the competing truth claims of the two religions and to avoid a devastating family conflict. In the end both Drach and Théodore Ratisbonne ended this liminal period by publicly accepting baptism, causing scandal in the Jewish community, celebrations among Catholics, and bitter tears and violent arguments with their families. Both spent much of the rest of their lives devoted to persuading other Jews to convert, proselytizing campaigns that had only modest success but that provoked substantial antagonism between the two communities. Théodore Ratisbonne’s approach to proselytism was, however, quite different from the meticulous arguments of Drach, presented as irrefutable proof texts. Instead, Ratisbonne pursued an aggressive campaign of preaching and outreach through a new religious order founded in the aftermath of Alphonse’s conversion in 1842. The Congregation of Our Lady of Sion still exists today, but in the context of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s it redefined its mission from converting Jews to encouraging interfaith understanding.65 But in the 1840s the congregation played a prominent role in aggressively pursuing Jewish converts, an initiative with consequences for Jewish-Catholic relations, and for the ways in which religious freedom was understood and experienced. As we will see, the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne in 1842, the contested conversion of Lazare Terquem, and the work of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion show how in the 1840s the border between Catholicism and Judaism was being more closely guarded on the Jewish side, and more aggressively attacked by the Catholics. This process, accompanied by family conflicts similar to those in the Drach family, also involved a heightened confessional awareness that seeped into public

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opinion and constrained individual choices, even while religious liberty remained a constitutional right. Théodore Ratisbonne ’s journey away from Judaism toward Catholicism began when he was a young man from an elite Strasbourg family. Like other Jewish families from this milieu, the Ratisbonnes retained a Jewish identity and were in fact leaders in the community, but without adhering to orthodox practice. As an adolescent Théodore tried his hand at business in Paris, where he was associated with the Fould bank, run by family friends. Unhappy with this work, alienated, and feeling alone, Ratisbonne returned to Strasbourg in 1823, where he enrolled in courses in the law faculty of the university. But it was a series of private courses starting in 1823 with the young philosophy professor Louis Bautain that transformed Théodore’s life. Bautain had himself just come through a major intellectual and religious crisis. A brilliant student of Victor Cousin, Bautain had been appointed to the Collège Royal of Strasbourg in 1816 when only twenty years old, and to the university the following year. Bautain’s charismatic teaching quickly made him a hero among the youth of Strasbourg, but by 1820 he had become disillusioned with the eclecticism of Cousin and had begun to move toward Catholicism. By 1822 Bautain’s public lectures had become a matter of public controversy; accused of both political liberalism and proselytism directed at Protestant theological students, he was suspended from teaching.66 But he continued to meet students privately, in the home of Marie-Louise Humann, a devout woman from a prominent family who had played an important role in Bautain’s conversion. Bautain’s course in moral theology that began in May 1823 included two Jews, Théodore Ratisbonne and his friend Jules Lewel.67 Over the next few years Bautain’s circle expanded both in size and influence, drawing in other young Jews from Strasbourg as well as a number of figures who would go on to play leading roles in nineteenthcentury Catholicism.68 Théodore Ratisbonne was overwhelmed by the charismatic teaching of Bautain, and by the sense of fellowship he found in his courses. “This was no ordinary teaching,” he wrote in a conversion narrative published in 1835, “but a veritable initiation into the mysteries of man and nature. We listened with surprise, with admiration, to the developments of this universal truth which the master took from its living source in the Sacred Scriptures, from which he drew strength, virtue, and power.”69 The sociability that brought together Jews and non-Jews in the Bautain circle was based on an explicit

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acceptance of the religious and moral value of Judaism, and an avoidance of the kind of disputation in which the claims of the two religions were compared and judged on the basis of some universal rational standard. At least in the early stages of the conversion process, it seemed possible for Théodore to contemplate a status in which he would be able to combine Catholic and Jewish identities, to live “as a Christian inside, as a Jew in my family, and as a deist in society.”70 Bautain did not, however, conclude his appreciation of Judaism by claiming it was equivalent in value to Christianity. Like David Drach, he combined his positive assessment with the traditional anti-Judaic position which held that blindness had prevented Jews from accepting Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophecies, and that their dispersal and abject condition was a justified punishment and a testimony to the truth of Jesus’s messianic role.71 According to Bautain the dogmas of Christianity are “the development, the accomplishment of the truths announced by Judaism.”72 Bautain’s teaching led Ratisbonne to a deep appreciation of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms, but also to hostility toward the Talmud, seen as a corrupting influence that prevented the regeneration of contemporary Jews. Even while he was drawn to Christianity Théodore Ratisbonne remained attached to his Jewish community and lived a dual identity for at least four years, accepting baptism only in 1827. From 1823 through 1827, Ratisbonne followed the advice of Bautain and became one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Strasbourg. The educational and charitable work undertaken by Ratisbonne and his friends made them key figures in the program of Jewish regeneration that drew in David Drach in Paris. With the support of his father, who was then the president of the Central Consistory, Théodore was named head of the new Jewish elementary school and was a founder as well of the Société d’encouragement du travail, a charitable group that helped young Jews acquire skills and jobs. He and his fellow disciples of Bautain, Isidore Goeschler and Jules Lewel, were actively involved in instruction, and their Saturday lessons drew a crowd of adults along with the children. Looking back on these days ten years later Ratisbonne was enthusiastic in describing how “the parents as well as the children, seemed to be entering a new era.”73 Théodore Ratisbonne ’s desire to retain a Jewish identity was clearly related to a sense of family and community loyalty, a point that emerges from his descriptions of the tearful scenes in which he admitted to his father

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and his uncle that he was a Christian. Théodore recalled trying to reassure his father by affirming that “I am Christian, but I adore the same God as my fathers, the God three times holy, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” But he could not resist adding at the end of this litany that “I recognize Jesus Christ as the messiah, the redeemer of Israel.” His father tried to dissuade him by referring tearfully to the memory of his dead mother, and then shouting at him, which led Théodore to flee the room. But when Théodore wrote an affectionate note promising that he would not make a public show of himself, his father called him back for a reconciliation in which “the sentiments of his heart carried the day over the scruples of his conscience.”74 By the time of these conversations, however, public rumors had spread about Théodore ’s conversion, and many congregants angrily accused him of using his role as teacher to proselytize Jewish children. In one stormy public meeting Théodore was able briefly to win public support by turning aside the question of his religious commitments and asking the congregation to focus instead on the good works that he had accomplished.75 Public pressure, and Théodore ’s own discomfort with his ambiguous situation, finally led him to announce his Christianity at a meeting of the elders of the community. He then left home, was admitted to the newly founded school for advanced studies established by the bishop of Strasbourg at Molsheim, and was ordained a Catholic priest two years later, in December 1830, the same path followed by his two Jewish friends, Lewel and Goeschler. Together they formed a core group for a new religious congregation founded by Bautain, the priests of Saint-Louis, and for a time were given privileged treatment by Bishop Le Pappe de Trévern, who put them in charge of his minor seminary. The baptism and ordination of Ratisbonne might be understood as resolving definitively the period of ambivalence that he had lived through in the middle years of the decade. But as with David Drach these steps could not efface Ratisbonne ’s Jewish identity, which followed him throughout his career. In the early 1830s Ratisbonne and his fellow Jewish converts were regarded with suspicion as less than fully committed Catholics during a controversy over their teaching in the minor seminary. The Bautain circle was vulnerable because the philosophical position they defended throughout the 1820s and 1830s broke sharply with the “dry and unimaginative schooldoctrine that was all that the ecclesiastical establishment seemed capable of offering.”76 By the early 1830s Bautain and his followers were being publicly accused of “fideism,” of basing their Catholicism on God’s grace as it acts

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on the human heart and will rather than on rational demonstrations that would yield a firm intellectual commitment to the church and to Catholic doctrine.77 As a result of this accusation Bautain and his followers, including Ratisbonne, were expelled from the minor seminary in 1834, lived several years on the margins of the church, and were subjected to a lengthy investigation both locally and in Rome.78 In the midst of the controversy over Bautain’s philosophy and the faith of the new converts, over eighty parish clergy responded with letters to an episcopal warning about the Bautain circle ’s doctrines. Most responses were critical, condemning Bautain’s teachings and expressing deep reservations about Ratisbonne, Lewel, and Goeschler. Curé Schir of the canton of Benfeld was especially pointed in his comments: “Do we need men whose antecedents are more than questionable, whose improvised conversion inspires only a mediocre confidence, who slipped into the sanctuary without submitting to any of the tests prescribed by the holy canons?” He would have been happy to work with these priests, Schir claimed, “if they had not themselves raised a wall of separation between them and us, affecting an insulting contempt for anyone who was not part of their coterie.”79 From Schir’s perspective, Ratisbonne and his colleagues remained arrogant and insular, convinced of their own truths and scornful of all others. They had not, and perhaps could not, break through the wall separating Jews and Christians. Théodore Ratisbonne was not an idle observer in the conflict involving the Bautain circle in the 1830s. He contributed a pamphlet justifying himself and his fellow Jewish converts, whose conversions had been questioned by Bautain’s critics as the result of “sentiment, taste, enthusiasm, fanaticism! Why? Because these conversions have not been achieved through syllogisms. . . . We accept, we the descendants of Abraham, and today priests of Jesus Christ, that our conversion and that of many others don’t have this basis; they are the result neither of dialectic, nor of syllogism. Are they therefore less profound, less solid? Time will tell, and it has already done so. Let [the critics] cite a single one of these conversions that has been withdrawn over the past ten years! And this despite, we must say it, very difficult circumstances. It is no thanks to our adversaries that our faith has not been scandalized, our zeal discouraged, our charity dulled.”80 The rapid rise of Bautain and his disciples to positions of authority in the diocese had produced a wave of jealousy and resentment from the majority of the clergy. Accusations directed against the Bautain circle echoed traditional attacks

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targeting the stubbornness and pride of Jews. “We were accused,” wrote Bautain,” of being proud, of wanting to distinguish ourselves.”81 In the face of this hostility built on the Jewish origins of Bautain’s disciples, Ratisbonne identified himself and his friends as “descendants of Abraham,” a label that recalls the earlier efforts of the Bautain circle to reach out toward Judaism. Conversion and ordination had not been sufficient fully to efface Ratisbonne ’s Jewish identity, which emerged in the context of a debate involving the status of reason in Catholicism and the persistence of Jewish traits even after baptism. Ratisbonne was also deeply resented by many Jews, and his family apparently suffered insults as a result of his conversion. But despite the pain he caused his family, and in the face of proselytizing behavior that they found insulting, Théodore Ratisbonne still managed to maintain ties with his relatives. His father apparently set the stage for this sustained relationship by refusing to disown him, which led Théodore to thank him publicly for “his noble and truly paternal conduct” in a letter published just after the public controversy over his baptism in 1828.82 Théodore was able to visit his father on his deathbed, a meeting that produced a painful confrontation when some relatives accused him of pressuring Auguste Ratisbonne to convert.83 Théodore was present again at the death of one of his nephews in 1840 and once again angered his family, particularly his brother Alphonse, when he expressed a desire to baptize the child. But as we saw at the start of this chapter, Alphonse ’s antagonism toward Théodore and Catholicism in general changed dramatically in January 1842, at the church of Sant’Andrea della Fratte in Rome. Alphonse Ratisbonne ’s “conversion” took his family entirely by surprise, and in the weeks following this event his Jewish relatives reacted with a combination of disbelief and horror as they mobilized their efforts to dissuade him. Within two days of his conversion Alphonse wrote directly to his fiancée, Flore, as well as to his uncle Louis, describing his miraculous conversion and proposing that Flore join him as a Catholic so that their marriage might take place as planned. If she refused, Alphonse felt obliged to withdraw from the proposed union and announced that in such a case he would join a monastery and live a life of contemplation and prayer. In his letters Alphonse insisted that he was not insane and that he continued to love Flore and his family: “As for the affections of my heart, my love for Flore, who could doubt them? What young man has, more than I, lived so much with

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his family? Which of them has caused fewer concerns? Who is the beloved son, the favored nephew, the dearest uncle?”84 Ratisbonne here insisted on his family connection, even while affirming his new religious identity, but the gap between family and religion was clearly painful for everyone involved in this family crisis. Louis Ratisbonne, Alphonse’s uncle, took the lead in the family’s response to the shocking news, insisting that his nephew leave Rome for Paris, where it was believed he would recover his senses, and his Jewish identity.85 In February Flore joined the battle over Alphonse’s religious identity with an impassioned letter to him in which she tried to shame him into returning to his Jewish family: “You’ve left the humble and the weak to go over to the proud and the powerful! What could have led you to such a sudden and unconsidered decision? Weren’t you happy in the religion of your fathers? And although a Jew, wasn’t the esteem of everyone compensation for your noble conduct?”86 The family tried cajolery as well to win Alphonse back and emphasized the pain he was causing to those he loved. All of these efforts failed, for when Alphonse traveled to Paris in early March he was welcomed by his brother Théodore into an intensely devout Catholic milieu and spent little time with his sister Pauline and her family, who were hoping to lead him back to the Jewish side of the family. During this period he became particularly attached to the prominent Jesuit preacher Father Xavier de Ravignan, to whom he wrote letters that included intensely emotional and familial language: “Pray for your son; son through the ties of the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and son through the unalterable tenderness and affection that his completely broken heart will hold for you forever.”87 By the end of the year Alphonse was in Toulouse, where he had enlisted as a novice in the Jesuits. Alphonse claimed to have found a new father, but his reference to a broken heart (coeur tout déchiré) indicates that his family ties were still affecting him. Like his brother Théodore, Alphonse was unable to leave his family behind as he crossed the religious boundary between Judaism and Catholicism. He acknowledged the pain he caused his family and, as we saw at the opening of this chapter, he described the moments after his apparition as a terrible combination of joy in his own salvation and deep anxiety about the ultimate fate of his family. But Alphonse ’s letters to his family in January also include a harder edge, combining professions of love with an aggressive, threatening tone: “Laugh, laugh, impious ones, but for each of you will come a solemn hour, where you will no longer laugh, where you will think

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seriously about what I tell you today.”88 Alphonse’s choice of words here is telling, for no one in the Ratisbonne family was laughing. But he seems to have found it easier to face his own decision to remain a Catholic by articulating a standard critique of the disdainful Jew who resists the obvious religious truth of Catholicism, an idea that may have been lurking somewhere in his mind well before the dramatic events at Rome. Both Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne were intimately involved with both their Jewish family and the increasingly organized Jewish community. Théodore Ratisbonne was a founder of one of the principal Jewish charitable organizations in Strasbourg, the same group to which Alphonse became devoted in the 1830s.89 Both were inspired by a sense of family honor as well, expressing pride in their ancestors for their role in advocating Jewish rights, and in their relatives for their commitment to the family and the community. Théodore Ratisbonne ’s long struggle in the 1820s, when he sought to live as “a Christian on the inside, a Jew in my family” was a religious crisis, but at the same time an attempt to avoid the dishonor that struck both him and his family when he announced his conversion. Théodore was caught in a web of competing and inconsistent value systems. His Jewish family, and Catholics generally, emphasized family religious identity as the basis of moral life and social harmony. But both Jews and Catholics also appreciated the value of religious liberty, which freed Jews from the political and civil disabilities of the Old Regime, and gave Catholics a means for approving an individual choice to leave family behind and convert. All of these tensions were still in play in 1842, when Alphonse Ratisbonne converted, but by then both Jews and Catholics had become increasingly self-conscious of the consequences of religious liberty, an individual right they accepted in principle even while they feared its potential for disrupting families. With this tension in mind, if we look again at the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne, we can see how the miraculous apparition that overwhelmed him also managed to address and resolve this dilemma. On the one hand, Alphonse Ratisbonne was clearly an agent in his own conversion: he chose to go to Rome, to wear the “Miraculous Medal,” and to say the “Memorare,” and after Mary appeared to him he resisted the appeals of his uncle and his fiancée to return to his former life. It is worth noting that Théodore de Bussières also introduced Ratisbonne to two Jesuits in the days just before his conversion. Fathers Villefort and Rozaven joined the effort of Bussières to convert Ratisbonne, a detail that was suppressed in the publicity

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on the conversions, presumably to further emphasize its miraculous instantaneity. Nonetheless, Alphonse was not converted, like David Drach and his brother Théodore, as a result of an extended religious quest based on study and prayer; he was struck down, like Paul on the road to Damascus, and insisted that fifteen minutes before his conversion he had not the slightest impulse to become a Catholic. From our contemporary perspective, this claim might seem disingenuous, but for Alphonse Ratisbonne and his Catholic readers, a miraculous conversion avoided the extended preparations, apparent duplicity, and willful betrayal that a more gradual and intentional conversion entailed, as exemplified in the conversions of Théodore Ratisbonne and David Drach. The sudden blast of God’s grace, manifested in an apparition of Mary, that converted Alphonse Ratisbonne still left him with a complicated family negotiation, but through it all he was able to insist that in the end he had no choice in the matter, that it was God’s will and not his own that led him to Catholicism. The Jewish members of the Ratisbonne family were, like Alphonse himself, torn between their anger, their continued affection, and their desire to see family harmony somehow maintained. With Alphonse, as with Théodore fifteen years earlier, conversion did not mark an absolute and permanent rupture in the family as it did with the Drachs. By early March Flore and the other Ratisbonnes conceded defeat, forgave Alphonse, and vowed to continue loving him as a family member. Flore’s letter of March 6 bluntly refused any possibility of her conversion and accepted that the marriage would not take place but insisted that she would still love her uncle and former fiancé as a brother: “You can’t marry unless I become a Catholic. Well, Alphonse, you must renounce me, because it is something that will never happen. Our union seems to me all the more impossible as I am sure that my mother in heaven would not bless it. Henceforth, I regard you and love you as a brother. Be happy, a Jewess knows how to forgive.”90 Flore kept her word, and despite his eventual ordination and work to convert Jews, Alphonse remained in touch with her and his family. Following Flore’s marriage to Alexandre Singer in 1846, he was a frequent and welcome visitor to her home in Paris in the 1850s and 1860s.91 Théodore Ratisbonne also struggled to reconcile his love for his family with his new faith, which divided them in the here and now, and more seriously from his perspective, in the afterlife as well. During a preaching tour that brought him to Strasbourg in 1845, he was apprehensive that his family

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would be hostile, but despite some tension he was able to meet on friendly terms with his brother Achille and a nephew.92 Théodore’s difficulty in accepting the possibility of eternal separation shows up clearly in sermons he delivered at the church of St. Philippe de Roule in 1847. In preaching on the theme of Catholic unity Ratisbonne took up the traditional doctrine that “out of the Church there is no salvation.” Ratisbonne struggled with this idea, which led him to equivocate, as he first affirmed it as dogma and then asked his audience to reserve judgment about the ultimate fate of nonbelievers: “And if God, in his infinite goodness, wishes to revive them in eternal life, by ways unknown to us, is it not natural to assume that they might live outside the ordinary conditions for salvation in this world?” Ratisbonne was unable to imagine the eternal condemnation of people, some of them his own relations, whom he knew to be “noble and beautiful souls, magnificent minds, superior spirits.”93 The complicated feelings of Théodore Ratisbonne toward the Jews he left behind can be seen as well in his attachment to the words spoken by Christ on the cross, just before he died: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). This appeal is a central element in the prayers Ratisbonne wrote for the sisters of Notre Dame de Sion and their students, whose recitation of it affirmed the traditional accusation of deicide directed against the Jews.94 But it also opened up the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. The Ratisbonne brothers were deeply committed Catholics who became key figures in the church’s efforts to convert Jews, but they also tried, with some success, to maintain their relations with their Jewish families, to reach out across a border they could not efface. The supposed conversion of Lazare Terquem in 1845 demonstrates how difficult it could be to negotiate family relations across this religious border.

Our Lady of Sion and the Terquem Affair Alphonse Ratisbonne ’s conversion was the immediate incentive for the foundation of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, which established itself at the center of the Catholic campaign to convert Jews in the 1840s, an initiative favored by Rome and supported by Catholic elites in Paris and Strasbourg. Inspired by his brother’s miraculous conversion, Théodore Ratisbonne traveled to Rome in June 1842 with the abbé Dufriche-Desgenettes, the curé of the parish of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, to seek approval to lead a mission to convert the Jews. Encouraged by Pope Gregory XVI and his

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secretary of state, Cardinal Lambruschini, Théodore returned to Paris and took up his work with passion, and considerable success. Théodore’s description of the early days of this new mission suggests a climate of emotional and spiritual fervor, with Catholic aristocratic women gathering at an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity, to fuss over and celebrate the Jewish neophytes.95 By 1843 Théodore, with the help of Sophie Stouhlen, a pious woman from Strasbourg, had organized a small group of women into the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, who were caring for eleven Jewish orphan girls by the end of the year. By 1845 the congregation had grown enough to purchase its own building on the rue du Regard, where it established a school that brought together the daughters of a Catholic elite and Jewish orphans.96 The self-confidence and aggressive proselytism of the congregation were publicly on display at the bedside of Dr. Lazare Terquem, and in the papers that reported on his death in February 1845. Terquem was a wellrespected Jewish physician, originally from Metz, known for his efforts to reform the rite of circumcision in order to make it less painful, and for his work on the governing board of the rabbinic school at Metz.97 Although Terquem’s prosperity and success might have earned him a peaceful end, his final days were in fact deeply troubled, as family members battled over his religious identity in a dispute that drew the attention of the French press and eventually involved the grand rabbi of France, the archbishop of Paris, and the minister of justice. We have to struggle to hear Lazare’s own voice amid the arguments in his apartment, in the newspapers, and in the offices of religious and government officials, but in making this effort we can probe more deeply into the paradoxical situation of the post-revolutionary era, in which religious liberty was both increasingly affirmed in law and constrained by the tightening of confessional boundaries. Catholic and Jewish relatives of Lazare Terquem disagreed sharply about what happened in his apartment on February 15, 1845, but some basic facts were accepted by everyone. On that Saturday Olry Terquem came to his brother’s house concerned about Lazare’s illness, and about the pressure his Catholic wife and daughters might exert on him as he neared death. There he found several family members gathered, including Lazare’s wife, two of their four daughters, their only son, a brother-in-law, and two sisters-in-law. The family members were equally divided between Catholic converts (the wife, the daughters, and the brother-in-law) and those who remained Jews

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(Olry, the son, and two sisters-in-law). The family was not alone, however, as it faced the death of Dr. Terquem. Also present at the invitation of his wife were Dr. Récamier, a Catholic physician, Father Théodore Ratisbonne, and several Catholic women, including Sophie Stahlen, the superior of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion. This cast of characters was clearly weighted in favor of the Catholics, but Olry Terquem was determined that his brother not be pressured to convert in his dying moments. Fearing just this, Olry talked with Ratisbonne and thought he took from this conversation a promise that his brother would be left to die in peace. But sometime during this same morning Ratisbonne entered the bedroom and, in the presence of eight Catholic women, including Lazare ’s wife, baptized the moribund physician. Two days later, when the grand rabbi of France, Marchand Ennery, came to the apartment to take possession of the body and provide a Jewish funeral service, he was turned away by Terquem’s brother-in-law. Despite the grand rabbi’s protests, Lazare Terquem was buried as a Catholic. In the days following Terquem’s death and burial Paris newspapers presented very different versions of these events. Drawing on the testimony of Olry Terquem, Le National, Le Constitutionnel, and the Archives Israélites insisted that Lazare Terquem was unconscious and therefore unable to make a reasoned choice about his baptism. In these accounts, Ratisbonne had behaved dishonestly and dishonorably, lying to Olry Terquem and violating the conscience of a dying man. The leading Catholic paper, Louis Veuillot’s L’Univers, responded that Ratisbonne ’s promise to let Lazare die in peace was given after the baptism had already occurred, a promise that was kept.98 Despite these different versions of the events, I do not assume that either Théodore Ratisbonne or Olry Terquem was dishonest in their claims and counterclaims about what happened in Lazare ’s home. It is easy to imagine both using selective recall and emphasizing some comments and gestures over others in order to justify their respective positions. Nor do I assume that we can know with any certainty what was going on in the mind of Lazare Terquem, whether or not as he faced death he chose Christianity, and if so, what his motives might have been. Perhaps he chose to make his death and funeral an easy matter for his wife and daughters; perhaps he was finally persuaded that his salvation was at stake. And perhaps his brother was right to claim he never recovered consciousness sufficiently to make anything like an informed decision. It is precisely the uncertainty of his religious identity and

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the profound anxieties this provoked in those around him that make his case worth pondering. As with David Drach and Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne, the story of Lazare Terquem shows us religious communities responding to conversion with mutual hostility, even while nervously accepting the conditions of liberal society that valued individual choice. But the Terquem affair illuminates as well the inner turbulence of troubled people undecided about their religious commitments and caught between communities that insisted on their exclusive claims over their identities. As he faced death in February 1845 did Lazare Terquem wish to become a Christian, or did he retain a Jewish identity? This was the question at the heart of the dispute between Olry Terquem and Théodore Ratisbonne, and their allies. But as in the case of Théodore Ratisbonne, putting the question so bluntly oversimplifies the confusing and complex religious identities available in a French society in which people were experimenting with their newly won religious liberty. To judge by the testimony of Ratisbonne and Terquem, Lazare was deeply conflicted, drawn simultaneously to the Judaism of his family and community and to the Christianity adopted by his wife. Olry insisted, for example, that his brother expressed to him on several occasions his “lively attachment to the dogma of Israel, and a great antipathy against the dogmas, ceremonies, and liturgy of the Catholics.”99 As was the case with many Jews from the upper class in this period, Lazare no longer followed Jewish law with any rigor, but he attended services at Yom Kippur and always recited the kaddish on the anniversary of the death of his parents.100 Ratisbonne countered that Terquem “had several conversations with me in which he told me of his profound aversion to modern Judaism.”101 Both Ratisbonne and Olry Terquem assumed that the other was lying, but it seems equally plausible to take both men at their word, and to see Lazare as wavering and undecided about his religious beliefs and commitments. The behavior of Lazare Terquem at the Catholic wedding of his daughter reveals him as conflicted in his religious identity but also opens up the question of Olry’s attitude toward Catholicism, which was similarly complex. Olry Terquem first raised the issue of the wedding when he reported in his letter to the Central Consistory, subsequently published in the Archives Israélites, that Lazare had not walked his daughter down the aisle to the altar on the day of her Catholic wedding because he refused to present himself before the crucifix. But Ratisbonne responded that both Lazare and Olry were present at the ceremony in the parish of Saint-Sulpice, where he

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observed the two of them on their knees. In the ongoing public exchange Olry then acknowledged that his brother was at the church but distinguished this from leading his daughter to the altar, and thus overtly participating in a Catholic ritual. But to make the situation even more complicated, Olry also acknowledged that he himself had in fact escorted Mlle Terquem to the altar, where she was married by none other than Théodore Ratisbonne. Olry claimed that he was able to present himself before the altar, and the crucifix, because he had a “profound indifference for signs,” but he insisted at the same time, and paradoxically, that he had never, at the wedding or at any other time, knelt before any image.102 The wedding of Terquem’s daughter at Saint-Sulpice, like the deathbed scene in the Terquem apartment, allows us to observe closely the painful negotiations Jews and Catholics were engaged in during this period when social integration, conversions, and mixed marriages were increasingly troublesome. Lazare would go to his daughter’s wedding but not lead her down the aisle; Olry was willing to do both but insisted that he would never kneel before a crucifix. These gestures reveal numerous and subtly different levels of cooperation in a Catholic ceremony, as the Terquem brothers sought to participate while still retaining some distance and insisting that such participation was compatible with Jewish identity. In the course of the exchange between Théodore Ratisbonne and Olry Terquem the latter’s complicated relationship with Catholicism became increasingly evident, for Ratisbonne revealed that Olry’s wife had also converted, and that his children were being raised as Catholics. Olry’s ambiguous position is evident as well in the pamphlets he wrote during this period, when he was a leading advocate for radical reform in the Jewish community and called for the coordination of the Catholic and Jewish calendars and practices that would result in a “fusion” of the two religions.103 In a pamphlet published in 1836 Terquem asked a question that clearly reflected his own personal situation. What should a father of a Jewish family do, he wondered, if he judged that “in the course of centuries, the old cult, poorly understood, has become false, antirational, antinational, antisocial, if he sees that the religious destiny of his community is confided to men who are ignorant, presumptuous, selfish, frivolous, epicurean, impious. . . . If then such a father of the family exists, wouldn’t he show himself eminently religious, an excellent Israelite, in having his children baptized?” It is worth noting that Terquem was careful to make his point conditionally, another case in which a linguistic

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device is employed to create at least some distance from a forthright appeal for conversion. There is no such hesitancy in the response of the Jewish patriarch who is asked this question, and who responds cynically, “Abomination of abominations! Our children must persevere in the religion of our fathers, in which however I do not believe.”104 To judge by his pamphlet of 1836 it might be argued that Olry Terquem was not in a good position to oppose the conversion of his brother, as he did with such ferocity. But a close reading of this passage reveals a deeply conflicted attitude of someone who struggled to reach a coherent position on the proper relationship between individuals, families, and communities. Although the reform-minded father in the pamphlet chooses to baptize his children, he himself decides to remain a Jew. In a sense he is close to the position of the patriarch he attacks, insofar as both seem determined to remain Jews despite their distance from orthodoxy, a point ignored or perhaps not even perceived by Terquem. Olry Terquem struggles as well to reconcile the right of individual conscience with patriarchal authority. The father in the pamphlet considers the issue of conversion fully conscious of what he is doing, weighing carefully the religious and social situation that he faces, after which he will make his choice. But here again his position circles back to resemble the one he overtly opposes, for like the patriarch he criticizes, the father assumes responsibility for the religious identity of his children, thus compromising the right of an individual to choose. Given Olry Terquem’s ambivalent attitudes about contemporary Judaism, why did he come to the defense of his brother’s Jewish identity with such ferocity? Perhaps it was precisely his own fragile Jewish identity that drove Olry to fight so hard, for in doing so he could demonstrate to himself and his fellow Jews that, despite his own position in favor of “fusion,” he was nonetheless still a Jew. The complex identity of Olry Terquem on display in the 1830s and early 1840s comes very close to the positions of Théodore Ratisbonne and David Drach before they finally converted. And like Ratisbonne and Drach his position was resolved in the wake of a controversial conversion, or in this case the supposed conversion of his brother, after which he no longer engaged in shrill public criticism of Judaism. All of these men wavered for extended periods between Judaism and Christianity. But in the end they felt compelled to choose identities that hardened on different sides of the religious boundary, which they defended vigorously, reacting against their own past, when they were not always certain on which side they belonged.

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Converting Jewish Girls: The Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion Alphonse Ratisbonne ’s conversion was first announced in France by his brother Théodore, at a sermon delivered from the pulpit of Notre-Damedes-Victoires in early February 1842. This was an auspicious place for such a report, for this parish church had recently become a center for a Catholic revival in Paris, based on the work of its entrepreneurial pastor, the abbé Dufriche-Desgenettes. Under his leadership the Archconfraternity of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception grew rapidly, with over one hundred thousand members throughout France by 1840, whose prayers were directed at bringing indifferent and hostile Catholics back to the church.105 Success stories were preached from the pulpit but also spread through the Annales of the confraternity, which gave prominent space to the miraculous conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne. Théodore Ratisbonne became the associate director of the confraternity as well as a chaplain of an orphanage run by the Daughters of Charity when he arrived in Paris in 1840, escaping from the hostile atmosphere of Strasbourg. The conversion of Alphonse marked a dramatic change in the life of Théodore, whose reputation as a preacher grew throughout the 1840s, based in part on his association with the miraculous events of 1842. In his first sermon on Alphonse ’s conversion at Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Théodore saved for the end of his account the announcement that “this convert, it is my brother,” which he claimed produced “an electric shock” on the congregation, followed by an emotional singing of the “Magnificat.”106 Events moved quickly in the following months. Alphonse was granted a special dispensation that allowed him to join the Jesuits in June 1842, the same month in which Théodore and Dufriche-Desgenettes traveled to Rome to seek approval for a new mission dedicated to the conversion of Jews. Gregory XVI was enthusiastic, but on his return to Paris Théodore found that the abbé Bautain, his mentor from Strasbourg and the director of the community of “priests of Saint-Louis” of which he was a member, opposed this initiative. Bautain believed that Ratisbonne ’s plan was tainted by a millennialist conviction that the conversion of the Jews was imminent and would accompany the Second Coming of Jesus. In his memoirs dictated in the 1880s Théodore recalled that in the face of this resistance he asked for a sign from Mary, that “a Jewish child be presented to me, and that I would be able to baptize her with the approval of her parents.”107 He recalled as well that the evening of

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the same day, August 8, 1842, he received a note from Père Aladel, also a chaplain for the Daughters of Charity, who wrote of two young Jewish girls, Elise and Celestine Wurmser, whose dying mother was desperate to find a place for her daughters. Her husband, who was frequently out of the house, also agreed to hand the girls over to Ratisbonne, who arranged for them to be placed in “la Providence,” the orphanage of the Daughters of Charity. Mme Wurmser also agreed to take religious instruction herself and, despite the objections of her husband, was baptized in her apartment on November 7, with David Drach serving as her godfather. Her daughters appear first on the list of seven “Baptisms conferred in the Chapel of the Providence,” a ceremony conducted by Monsignor Affre, the archbishop of Paris, on May 1, 1843.108 Over the next two years la Providence became the first home for the work of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, dedicated to the conversion of Jews. Ratisbonne was assisted in his project by Sophie Stouhlen and Louise Weywada, two women from Strasbourg for whom he had served as spiritual director for several years. Within six months of its foundation there were ten Jewish girls receiving religious instruction in the catéchuménat. The congregation also opened a boarding school for Catholic girls, whose friendships with the Jewish students were a powerful influence in the formation of a Catholic identity. The first baptisms of May 1843 were followed by eight more on January 20, 1844, the second anniversary of Alphonse Ratisbonne’s conversion, with the archbishop of Bordeaux officiating at the ceremony. The congregation continued to grow over the next several years, one of the many cases of a successful foundation of a new female congregation in nineteenth-century France. By 1853 there were 57 sisters working in several schools, a number that reached 600 in 1885 and 983 in 1897. In the early years of the congregation its members focused most of their attention on the conversion of Jews, as was evident in the presence of Théodore Ratisbonne and Sophie Stouhlen at the bedside of Lazare Terquem, three of whose daughters were baptized at la Providence in May 1844, just a few months before their father’s death.109 The Terquem girls were from an affluent family, as were a number of other prominent Jewish women who converted in the 1840s. Mlle de Haber, the granddaughter of M. Worms de Romilly, the president of the Central Consistory, was baptized just prior to her marriage in 1843, creating a public controversy that anticipated the Terquem affair, and leading her grandfather to resign his position.110 Just two years later Adolphe Crémieux, the next president of the Central Consistory,

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also felt obliged to resign when his wife and children were baptized.111 When the Jewish writer Eugénie Foa converted in 1846 her baptism at the chapel of Our Lady of Sion drew a large and prominent crowd of Catholic elites, including Madame Swetchine, the Russian convert whose salon will be discussed in the next chapter.112 Although the number of women converts was limited, they generated anxiety for the Jewish community in France during the 1840s, for their apostasy violated the enhanced role that women were expected to play in the cultivation of religious feeling within the domestic sphere, a “feminization of Judaism” that echoed the “feminization of Catholicism.”113 Jewish women were expected to be pious, but within the familial and patriarchal traditions displayed in Halévy’s La juive and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The proselytism of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion provoked anxiety not only because of its work with families like the Terquems. The examples of the Wurmser girls and a number of others taken in by the congregation indicate how Ratisbonne and the sisters of Sion saw opportunities among impoverished Jewish families concerned to find a place where their children could be cared for and educated. The records of “neophytes” in the congregation’s archives offer poignant evidence of the stressful conditions that might lead parents to give up their children.114 “The Jew Haussmann,” for example (his first name is never mentioned in the records) was in prison in 1847, unable to support his eight children, including five girls, but it took over a year of pleading before he finally agreed to allow his daughters to move to the school on the rue de Regard, where the congregation had moved in 1845. Clara (age thirteen), Marianne (twelve), and Flore (ten) Lippendal arrived three months after their mother died, with no one else committed to helping them. Louise Pollet (ten) was left in 1846 by her mother, an itinerant performer who made her living by singing throughout France. But Louise ’s story suggests that even a desperate mother might have second thoughts about giving up her child. Regretting her decision, Louise’s mother had to be talked out of reclaiming her daughter during several trips to Paris, finally carrying through on this plan in 1848, when Louise joined her in a life that the sisters described as “going from town to town, barely making enough to survive.” After four years of traveling, however, in 1852 Louise found her way back to the Paris home of the congregation, but this time as a novice, despite her mother’s continuing objections. In the end, the religious life was not a good fit for Louise, and after four more years she was sent away in 1856

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for unspecified “faults,” leaving with the same “thoughtlessness” that had characterized her time with the congregation. Louise Pollet can be said to have exercised her religious liberty in pushing away from her mother to join a religious order and in resisting the constraints of religious life. Louise did not make her religious decisions on the basis of long and careful study, like Théodore Ratisbonne and David Drach, nor by following a blast of grace, like Alphonse Ratisbonne. Her choices were shaped by a religious education from the Sisters of Sion but also by poverty, childhood impressionability, and family quarrels. This is not to say that Louise was deprived of her freedom of religion by these circumstances, but it was certainly constrained as exercised by this poor, young, and vulnerable woman.115 The Wurmser family provided a more edifying story for the congregation than that of Louise Pollet, with the daughters bringing their mother to baptism and salvation just before her death. There were other cases as well in which a chain of conversions occurred within a family, comparable to the linkages in the Wurmser family and between Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne.116 But also comparable to the Ratisbonne family’s situation were the numerous conflicts that accompanied conversion, or attempts to convert. According to notes taken on students to record their progress, Claudine Boumsell (age eleven) entered the school as a boarding student in 1849, but at the time she was filled “with anti-Christian sentiments,” which the congregation did not try overtly to overturn. “We adopted with her the same policy as with all the others; we required no religious exercise, and left her complete liberty in this regard.” Within a year, however, Claudine had changed her mind and desired baptism, particularly because she was anxious to join her friends in receiving their first Holy Communion. Her parents, however, opposed her baptism and withdrew her from the school. It is easy to understand the parental judgment that at the age of eleven Claudine was in no position to make a responsible decision about her religious identity.117 She was a child who had been influenced by her Catholic friends, and by a devout atmosphere that sought to convert Jewish children even if no formal pressure was invoked. Taking these factors into account, her parents withdrew her, underlining the power of parents over the religious lives of their children, at least until they were twenty-one. But Claudine Boumsell’s relationship with the congregation of Notre Dame de Sion did not end with her return to her family. The dramatic events of Claudine Boumsell’s conversion are recorded in a narrative written by her in 1879 under her religious name, Sister

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Philomène, while stationed in the convent of Montana, not far from Jerusalem. At the request of Théodore Ratisbonne, Sister Philomène told her story at length, in thirty pages of beautiful handwriting that recount the long and painful battle she fought with her family to fulfill her vocation. We need, of course, to be suspicious of the pious intent behind all such narratives, designed to edify their readers, and perhaps to reinforce the commitment of the authors. Sister Philomène ’s story reads as a polished account, one that had likely been rehearsed in conversations with her fellow sisters over the years. But there is no reason to doubt the fundamental chronology nor the depth of feeling involved in the conflict with her family. Sister Philomène recalls her parents sending her to the congregation’s boarding school when she eleven, in 1849, so that she might receive a good education, which they otherwise could not afford. On first entering the school she made an effort to retain her Jewish identity, reading from a book of Jewish prayers during the daily Mass and never genuflecting in the chapel. More than fifty years later a former fellow student, who later joined the congregation as Sister Véronique, wrote to her old friend to confirm this memory, recalling how she was struck by the girl Claudine Boumsell reading from her Hebrew prayer book.118 Within a year of her entering the school, however, Claudine was drawn to Catholicism, recalling how she fell to her knees spontaneously at the baptism of a Jewish friend. She and Sister Suzanne, to whom she confessed her desire to convert, along with Théodore Ratisbonne, decided to keep her decision a secret for a time, since her father was sure to object. Trying to console her, Ratisbonne assured Claudine that were she to die she would be saved through the “baptism of desire.” During her visit home during the Easter vacation of 1849 Claudine surprised her family by explaining some of the meaning behind the Passover meal, learned from a homily of Father Théodore’s, but she never told them of her aspiration for baptism. She continued this secret life for two years but was exposed when a family friend on business in the convent saw her making the sign of the cross, along with her friends. Her father immediately withdrew her from the school, hoping that with time and separation from her Catholic friends Sister Philomène would forget her desire to convert. Over the next seven years Sister Philomène recalled being a loyal daughter, living at home with her parents, and gaining enough of their confidence that they allowed her to visit her old school on the rue de Regard two or three times a year. Throughout this period, however, she never gave up

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her hope to convert and decided as well that she had a vocation to join the congregation, secret desires she kept from her family. Using visits to a Protestant friend as a cover, in 1857 Sister Philomène conspired with Father Ratisbonne and the sisters to run away from her parental home as soon as she was twenty-one. She carried out this plan on February 13, 1858, just after her birthday, and spent several weeks at the congregation’s boarding school at Grandbourg, just outside of Paris. When Father Ratisbonne ignored his appeal for information about Philomène ’s whereabouts her father had her flight announced in the papers and asked for help in recovering his daughter. Ratisbonne was questioned about the case by the police, “unjust interrogations,” according to Sister Philomène, “since I was legally an adult, and thus no one had any right over me!” Despite this family resistance Sister Philomène was baptized by Father Ratisbonne at the chapel of the congregation on February 24 and received her First Communion the following day. At the end of March she donned the bonnet of the congregation, officially becoming a postulant, the first step toward taking vows. Sister Philomène ’s story of a double life recalls how David Drach and Théodore Ratisbonne hid their attachment to Catholicism for years, and how their families responded with bitter hostility to what they saw as duplicity and betrayal. As a young woman, however, Sister Philomène was subjected to further tests, even though she was an adult. Hoping to make peace with her family she invited them to visit her, leading to a meeting with her father and sister-in-law on Easter Sunday of 1858. Her mother was too distraught to come, however, so Philomène agreed to ask for permission for a home visit. The following Tuesday she went to her home and found her mother close to hysteria: “She wept, laughed, struck her hands, all the while looking at and embracing me.” After calming her mother they spent two hours together, but when Philomène and the pious woman who accompanied her tried to leave her father pushed the friend out the door and with the help of some neighbors forced his daughter back into the house. Other family members now gathered around her, joining her parents and siblings in entreating Philomène to abandon the religious life. Her father even conceded her the freedom to practice Catholicism, as long as she withdrew from the congregation, and tried to bribe her with the possibility of travel to Germany and England to visit family members. When this failed he fell on his knees, “begging me to have pity on his white hair, and to stay with the family at least until he and my mother had died.” None of this apparently

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changed Philomène ’s resolution to return to Sion, but with darkness descending and rain falling, she finally announced, “I’ll stay.” The next morning she managed to escape when the front door did not fully close after her brother left. She rushed through the streets, frightened to be alone, but found a coach that took her back to the rue de Regard. After this dramatic scene Philomène tried to renew contacts with her family, but only her oldest sister, Mathilde, responded with a visit from her home in Havre. When Philomène refused to budge from her commitment Mathilde tore off her bonnet and veil and shouted that “Catholicism had made my heart as hard as marble, since I never shed a tear at the thought of abandoning my family.” Philomène never again communicated with her sister, or any family member.119 How should we interpret Sister Philomène’s story? To take the position of her own narrative, she was a bold and independent young woman, following her conscience, even though it led to being ostracized from her family. Although she never explicitly defended religious liberty in an abstract dimension, her life and language embodied this principle. In taking this step Philomène was also choosing a life that could open the way for further education, and a career as a teacher. The sisters of Our Lady of Sion, like many other female congregations founded in the nineteenth century, provided opportunities for women not easily available elsewhere, as nurses, teachers, administrators. Looking back on her conversion twenty-one years after the dramatic events of 1858, Sister Philomène remained proud of her youthful audacity and firmness in her religious commitments. A different view emerges, of course, if we take the perspective of her sister, her father, and her mother, who saw her decision as selfish, cruel, and duplicitous. However we judge the persuasiveness of these arguments, taken together they reveal the intense pressures that might be placed on a young woman as she made her religious choices.

The Promise and the Threat of Religious Liberty In 1842 the editors of the Archives Israélites were relatively sanguine, if not smug, in comparing the pressure of proselytism in Germany with what they observed in France, where “the danger is less great,” because of the civil liberties granted by the French charter.120 But in 1843 the tone began to change in response to the assault by Catholics, with the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion becoming a particularly ominous threat, both to the individual

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conscience and to the Jewish community. In announcing a new policy, the editors proposed that in the future “it would be good if for each announcement of a conversion in an ultramontane newspaper there were an explanation of this conversion in another journal. We will fulfill this task, as much as it is in our power to do so.”121 The new pressure felt by the editors of the Archives Israélites did not let up over the next few years. In 1844 David Drach published his massive analysis of Jewish-Catholic “harmony,” and we have seen how Théodore Ratisbonne ’s new congregation could claim some disturbing results, from the perspective of the Jewish community, as conversions forced two successive presidents of the Central Consistory to resign their positions. The Damascus affair and the publication of Toussenel’s assault on the Rothschilds contributed as well to an atmosphere that can explain why Jewish leaders felt a growing need to defend their community.122 Given its predominant role in proselytization, the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion was singled out for attack on the pages of the Archives Israélites with “Une loterie de bienfaisance,” a play published in 1845.123 The play praises the recent work of Jewish women in assisting the poor of their community, with illustrations showing a poor Jewish widow being badgered by a Catholic woman to give up her daughter to the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion. She refuses, confident that she will be helped by the newly established Jewish charity. The play shows as well a hospitalized Jewish man refusing to convert despite the pressure of a Catholic priest, presented as a malevolent character interested only in adding to the list of converts won over by Ratisbonne and his coworkers.124 Historians who have studied Jewish conversion have generally affirmed that the numbers, while not insignificant, nonetheless did not pose a threat to the community.125 This might be clear to historians today, but from the perspective of the 1840s Catholic proselytism gave Catholics some reason to hope for substantial numbers of converts and Jews some reason to fear the impact of apostasy. These hopes and fears proved illusory, however, for after peaking in the middle years of the nineteenth century the number of Jewish converts dropped dramatically. The Congregation of Our Lady of Sion did not officially abandon its mission of conversion until the 1960s, but it gradually shifted the focus of its work to the education of Catholic girls, participating in one of the standard tasks taken up by the female religious congregations that expanded so dramatically in the nineteenth century.126 There are several possible reasons for this decline. As the novelty of the mission wore off

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Catholic attention was drawn elsewhere. Moreover, a number of scandals made both Jewish and Catholic public opinion wary of baptisms that were blatantly insincere or coerced. In what became known as the Mortara affair, the Jewish child Edgardo Mortara was taken from his family in Bologna in 1858 and raised as a Catholic because it was suspected he had been baptized as an infant. His story was covered extensively in the French press and fueled the anticlericalism that was becoming more pronounced in the late 1850s.127 Striking close to home, Father Ratisbonne had to defend the congregation in the Mallet affair, a scandal involving both sexual misconduct and kidnapping. Anna Bluth, converted by Ratisbonne in 1847, became the mistress of the abbé Mallet in Cambrai in the 1850s and was involved in the effort to convert the rest of her family. Mallet was condemned to six years in prison in 1861 for kidnapping three of Anna’s younger sisters who had been baptized before they were twenty-one and then hidden from their parents.128 These scandals enhanced the sharpened sense of a confessional boundary dividing Jews from Catholics that emerged in the 1840s, generated in part by the controversy over conversions. Catholics might still desire the conversion of Jews, but they were forced to recognize that hopes for thousands of converts, and even for the collapse of the Jewish community, were mistaken and even naïve. On the other side of the border, Jewish communal life was strengthened by the development of its consistorial institutions, a vigorous press, and significant educational reforms. As a result of these internal developments French Jews over the second half of the nineteenth century carved out an identity that preserved a sense of ethnic and religious solidarity, which they combined with a deep commitment to the French ideal of citizenship based on human rights, including the right of religious liberty. Religious liberty was welcomed by French Jews, but as we have seen, it carried with it serious costs as well. Jewish institutions were now free to operate openly and legally in the public sphere, but the right of individual religious choice could pose agonizing questions to Jewish families, and to the Jewish community. Friendly personal connections with Catholics, serious religious reflection, overt proselytism, and material self-interest could all work to draw Jews to Catholicism. Family loyalty, improved religious education, and a sense that conversion was shameful worked in the opposite direction. These forces can all be observed in the conversions I have described and became especially worrisome, or promising, depending on the religious perspective of the observer, in the 1840s.

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The dramatic tales of converts drew the attention of both the Catholic and the Jewish press, where their motives were debated, praised, and condemned. But conversions also raised the larger question of how the Jewish community should define itself in a liberal regime that accepted freedom of conscience as well as the right of public worship. Isidore Cahen, the son of the founding editor of the Archives Israélites, and himself the editor from 1860 until his death in 1902, provides an illuminating answer to this question in a series of essays on the meaning of conversion for the Jewish community published in the journal in 1854.129 Cahen opens by dismissing as beneath contempt those who convert for material reasons, “who sell their conscience for a few pennies,” and then defines what he sees as the three major categories of converts: artists, financiers, and scholars. At the outset Cahen poses his central questions: “In converting, do true and intimate conviction, mature deliberation, and a discussion of the merits and disadvantages of each religion play the role that they should in such decisions? Are these decisions absolutely disinterested, even if money is not a motive? Finally, do converts move away from us based on strengthened consciences and healthy reasoning?”130 The bar is set high here and remains so throughout Cahen’s analysis. Conversion is certainly a religious right, but it is an act to be taken only with the utmost seriousness. As he moves through each of his categories, Cahen tries to give the converts in question the benefit of the doubt, showing how their particular situations lead them to accept baptism. But in each case he concludes as well that converts act out of motives that are in some sense disreputable. Artists are swept away by passion. Financiers convert out of a desire to ingratiate themselves with Christian friends and advance their careers. Scholars choose baptism because their achievements are not sufficiently recognized by an intellectually backward community, and because excessive study can lead to religious indifference. Cahen makes distinctions in judging converts and allows that their decisions are based in part on a faulty education from their families, who failed to give them a full sense of the beauty and value of Judaism. But converts are still held responsible for their decisions, and criticized for making them. Cahen accepts the principle of individual liberty of religion in theory, but he finds it impossible to defend in practice. At the conclusion of his treatment of financiers, he states his position clearly: “It would be best if each person would keep to his own religion, letting himself be penetrated by its spirit and morale, and develop from it generous inspiration; it would be

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better if the spirit of proselytism would work not from the outside of a religion, but on the inside, where the field is no less vast and the work more honorable; but if such migrations must take place, it is good, for the very honor of religious feeling, that they not be dictated by passion or vanity.” With this closing caveat Cahen circles back to a position in favor of freedom of religious choice, an affirmation that is belied by an analysis in which he hammers consistently on the fact (from his perspective) that it is precisely passion and vanity that drive conversions. In Cahen’s essay we observe the continuing tension between two senses of religious liberty, one stressing the right to protect a collective identity, the other the right to freedom of individual choice. But following the controversies of the 1840s, in which the religious border between Catholics and Jews was for a time under assault, it was the communal dimension of religious liberty that Cahen chose to emphasize. Individuals retain their right to choose, but nonetheless they should be educated by their families in their religious traditions and remain in their religious communities. This point of view recalls the values affirmed in Halévy’s La juive, and it helped shape the construction of a French-Jewish community in the course of the nineteenth century. The formation of this collective religious identity passed through an important stage in the 1840s, when Catholic missionaries engaged in a proselytizing campaign that shows us Jewish individuals and their families confronted with painful religious choices. In making their decisions, both on and off the stage, individuals were expected to choose, to resolve the dilemma, to affirm a clear religious identity. The in-between status that Théodore Ratisbonne, David Drach, Lazare and Olry Terquem, and Sister Philomène lived with for a time was in the end psychologically unbearable and socially unacceptable.

4. Family, Nation, and Freedom Ivan Gagarin, the Swetchine Circle, and the Orthodox Road to Rome

The Countess d’Agoult, a prominent figure on the Paris social scene in the early 1830s, created a scandal when she left France in 1835 as the mistress of the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. For the next five years the couple traveled throughout France, Switzerland, and Italy, finally returning to the capital in 1840. Still connected to the aristocratic social circles that she frequented before her affair with Liszt, the countess was struck by a new religious tone she observed in the salons of Paris. While salonnières had earlier been satisfied to practice Catholicism without affectation, they now made a show of their devotion. “In the antechambers servants no longer said ‘Madame has gone out,’ but ‘Madame is at Vespers; Madame is at the sermon of Father such-and-such.’ ” For the countess, all this show of piety was a game played by young men and women who used their meetings at the fashionable churches of Saint-Roch and Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin as an occasion for romance with a religious twist. “Sighs and repentances, rosaries and scapulars: all of it a Catholicism of the bedroom, all of it angelic gibberish that would have made our mothers laugh.”1 Countess d’Agoult’s sarcasm extended to the salon of Sophie Swetchine, a Russian aristocrat who had lived in Paris since 1826 and maintained a salon in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain that drew in the Catholic social and intellectual elite. According to the Countess d’Agoult, “Nourished by the sap of the flowers of the worldly paradise of Madame Swetchine, a 122

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whole swarm of converted converters spread into the world and filled it with a pious buzz.”2 The countess may have taken a jaundiced view of the fashionable piety of the day, but her remarks confirm the growing public interest in conversions during the July Monarchy, on display in literature and the theater, and in the work of Théodore Ratisbonne and the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion. Madame Swetchine was in fact a supporter of the congregation, assisting at the baptism of Eugénie Foa at the school on the rue de Regard, not far from her apartment on the rue Saint Dominique. In this chapter I will focus on Ivan Gagarin, the most prominent of the “converted converters” who emerged from the Swetchine circle. As with all the converts in this book, Gagarin’s religious choices involved long and painful struggles with himself, and with his family and friends. But his conversion brings into sharper focus the broader historical and international context within which religious liberty was being exercised in the post-revolutionary world. Gagarin’s intense relationship with Madame Swetchine highlights as well the role that women frequently played in mediating conversions, and the ways in which gender could shape the experience of religious liberty. Gagarin’s conversion parallels in many ways the story of the Ratisbonne brothers. Like them, Gagarin embraced the right of the individual conscience to decide on the path that would lead to personal salvation. For Ivan Gagarin, as with Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne, baptism was a traumatic family event that led relatives to accuse him of abandoning them, despite his efforts to reassure them of his continuing love. Like the Ratisbonnes’, Gagarin’s conversion was based in part on a critical assessment of the religion of his family and nation, which led him to a career aimed at their conversion and salvation. For Gagarin, however, choosing Catholicism was also a political decision arising from his critique of the autocracy of Nicholas I (1825–1855). From the perspective of this Russian diplomat, concerned with the future of his country, the Roman Catholic Church as he came to know it in Paris in the 1840s was not a repressive bastion of conservatism but an institution that managed to reconcile freedom and authority, individual and community, innovation and tradition. Gagarin fits nicely into the category of “romantic Catholics,” described by Carol Harrison as seeking “a Catholicism that would be expansive, dynamic, and glorious.”3 As we will see in the following chapters, Félicité Lamennais, George Sand, and Ernest Renan shared some of these hopes but came to different conclusions, rejecting Catholicism as incompatible with human freedom. Gagarin’s conversion

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shows us an alternative vision of Catholicism, which the Swetchine circle embraced as the best hope for both personal salvation and the reconciliation of liberty and order in the post-revolutionary world. Following Gagarin on his road to Rome, which ran through Paris in the 1830s, can help us grasp the ambiguity and irony of the Catholic engagement with liberty. Gagarin’s conversion can be traced through three periods in his life, starting in 1833 with his arrival as a young diplomat in Munich, where he first questioned his religious and political commitments. In 1838 Gagarin’s career brought him to Paris, where he was a regular participant in the salon of Madame Swetchine, who played a key role in his Catholic education and whose private chapel was the site of his baptism in April 1842. This dramatic step, however, was not the last one taken by Gagarin, who moved deeper into the Catholic world when he joined the Jesuits in 1843, beginning a third stage in his conversion in which he devoted himself to the reconciliation of Orthodoxy and Catholicism. For Gagarin, the healing of this rupture in Christianity would allow Russia to embrace on a collective level the freedom he had found for himself in the Swetchine circle of Paris.

Posing Questions: 1833–1838

Ivan Gagarin was born in Moscow in 1814 and raised in an atmosphere of privilege and piety. His father, Prince Sergei Ivanovich Gagarin, was a grand master at the Russian court while his mother, Varvara Mikhailovna, came from an old boyar family. Gagarin’s early education was managed by a French tutor, apparently a religious skeptic, but his mother also exerted a great deal of influence. Those who recalled his mother in later years described her as extremely devout, a characterization confirmed in the extensive correspondence she carried on with her son in the 1840s as he struggled with his religious identity. In an autobiographical fragment written after his conversion sometime in the 1850s Gagarin recalled his childhood as marked by “hard work for ten hours a day, and a severe surveillance that kept me from the shameful degradation that comes with vice.”4 There is no way to know if Gagarin was really compelled to work for ten hours a day, but the reading list he carefully maintained in his childish scrawl starting at the age of seven does indicate an environment that emphasized study and moral reflection, a regime that seems to have produced an earnest young man.5 Gagarin’s family routine normally meant winters in Moscow and summers

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Figure 6. Ivan Gagarin in the 1830s. © Compagnie de Jésus—Archives jésuites, Vanves.

on the family estate of Dankovo, home to some of the five thousand serfs that belonged to his father. This pattern was broken for three years in 1820, when his father’s health led the family to western Europe, where they lived for three years in Germany, France, and Italy.6 Although Gagarin briefly attended Moscow University his curriculum vitae and autobiography suggest that it was his departure for Munich in 1833 at the age of eighteen that marked the end of his childhood.7 For the next two years Gagarin worked as a diplomat in Munich, followed by a year in Russia and shorter assignments in Vienna and London. Throughout this period Gagarin struggled to define a purpose for himself that would satisfy both his desire for personal integrity and his quest for some grander mission, a task he carried out in the company of friends and colleagues, many of whom shared his questions even while they moved toward different answers. A few months after arriving in the Bavarian capital, where he worked as a junior diplomat for his uncle Gregorii, the Russian ambassador, Gagarin began keeping a journal that he maintained, with significant gaps, until 1842. The journal, along with surviving correspondence and autobiographical fragments, reveals a young man in search of himself, in many ways a typical member of

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the romantic generation, ambitious but confused, anxious about his place in the world, drawn to poetry but also to politics, a religious skeptic but also a religious seeker.8 Gagarin fits very well into the context of religious doubt described by Victoria Frede as a defining characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia of this period. Gagarin and his colleagues were convinced that “the calling of every person was to identify the deeper meaning that underlies nature and history, the divine essence or purpose behind the world’s infinite diversity.”9 This quest could lead back to Orthodoxy, as in the case of Dostoyevsky, or to atheism, as with Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, principal figures in Frede ’s study. In Gagarin’s case, which was not unique, it led him to Roman Catholicism.10 Gagarin’s sense of inadequacy is apparent in his first journal entry in May 1834, where he challenges himself to “leave the passive state and take an active role. In place of submitting to ideas, think for yourself and produce them.”11 This desire for an actively engaged and internally generated self recurs constantly over the next several years and may reflect the influence of Victor Cousin, whose work he read and who was much discussed by Gagarin and his friends in the 1830s. Cousin preached the importance of “a man who makes himself, a man who has a will, who is his own source of life” and was critical of “moderns” who are “filled with anxiety because they have not made for themselves a self that persists. They are not themselves, they are dispersed in everything that surrounds them.”12 Gagarin was concerned with his passive personality, his apparent weakness of will, but this anxiety was accompanied by another and related fault that he observed when he looked into himself. In order to be a “complete man” he would need to overcome the internal conflicts that divided intelligence from will and left him paralyzed and unable to act: “In a complete man, there is a mysterious unity, whether you call it the goal of his life, the vow of his heart, the appetite of his faculties, his moral thought, his ideal, it is nevertheless true that this unity governs him entirely, and through him rules over nature and society. . . . Knowledge, Will, Action, there is the triangle on which one can build with confidence. To know what one wills, and to do what one wills.”13 In this entry, and in similar passages from 1834, Gagarin adopts the distancing technique of the third person, reflecting on the problems of “man,” but in a long entry of July 1 he brings this analysis to bear precisely and severely on his own life: “Time is flying away. When I stop to look, the future appears to me more and more distant and difficult to

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attain, and the past no longer exists. I am taking a first step, I have only begun to see, and perhaps what I do see deceives me. A need for action devours me like a fever, like a poison. How to explain this inadequate present, this thirst for the future, this unhappiness of the moment, this hope, this faith that reason ought to temper, at least a little? In just one month I will be twenty? And what then? Where am I? What have I done? If I continue down this path, where will I be at the end?”14 Gagarin’s reflections in the spring and summer of 1834 present a passive and divided self, but on at least one occasion he recalls moving beyond such doubts to embrace a nihilistic view about his family relations and religion. “I became an atheist. . . . I acquired ways of looking at things that I would not wish on my cruelest enemy; for example, my manner of viewing relations with parents and women.”15 Gagarin is discreet about the nature of his scornful attitudes, but his comments suggest someone who was not only dissatisfied with himself, but in despair. Gagarin’s unhappiness and anxiety are palpable, but they are balanced by his active engagement in seeking a way out of paralysis and disunity, evident in the very fact of keeping a journal. This sense of hope is evident in Gagarin’s effusive reaction to Goethe ’s two novels that trace the apprenticeship and journeyman years of Wilhelm Meister. “[Goethe] is a sublime hierophant, rather than a mere thinker, a mere individual capable of regulating his activity. In our age Reason has no future unless it has received its baptism, its initiation from you. You the Great All through which all unities must pass in order to be formed and which contains all of them in embryo. I have begun to know you, so take me as your disciple, reveal yourself to me in entirety!”16 Gagarin was drawn to Goethe not as a “mere thinker” but as a writer capable of revealing the sacred mysteries that could lead to the formation of a coherent self. His reference to the sacred here is vague, indicating religious aspirations but no sense of how they might be fulfilled. But Goethe ’s novels, particularly the first of them, offered him hope nonetheless, insofar as they traced the journeys of young men from youth to maturity, in which “error and suffering are justified as indispensable to the self-formation and self-realization of the mature individual.”17 Goethe’s novels, which helped establish the genre of the bildungsroman, thus provided Gagarin with a sense that his current state, as painful as it was, was also a necessary stage in a life that would lead him ultimately to his ideal of becoming a “complete man.”

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Gagarin engaged in an extended introspective analysis in Munich, but he was not merely self-absorbed, for his journal and memoirs for this period include as well reflections about family, religion, and society. From these entries it becomes clear that Gagarin’s self-criticism and quest for personal integration resonated with a critique of the institutions that had shaped his youth, and vague hopes for some better future. Just after the passage in his memoirs where he recalls the “severe surveillance” and ten-hour workdays of his childhood he breaks into an extended meditation on his desire for liberty: “I felt a natural horror for everything that resembled oppression and tyranny, and every time I witnessed or heard anyone talk about such a thing, my heart boiled over with indignation and anger. In the ideal world that I imagined, freedom meant the overthrow of all material and external obstacles to happiness, and I believed that once these were removed, nothing could prevent us from being perfectly happy: a golden age, a paradise would exist on earth. But when it was a question of descending to the real world, I met many obstacles, and had no understanding of what liberty could be.”18 Gagarin’s comment can be read as a reaction to his family life, but also as a muted critique of the autocratic conditions in Russia under Nicholas I. In his journal Gagarin never overtly criticizes Russia, perhaps because he feared it would be read by someone other than himself, a point he makes in one of his entries. But while there is no evidence of revolutionary sentiment, Gagarin was deeply concerned with the political events of the day, and with the major questions that preoccupied political thinkers in the wake of the French Revolution. The basis for political legitimacy, the danger and appeal of democracy, the threat of revolution, and the role of the bourgeoisie were among the issues he pondered, with the help of writers including Tocqueville, Ancillon, and Jouffroy. His comments on legitimacy imply a position critical of the autocracy of Nicholas but not of monarchy, which might well be a legitimate form of government, assuming it was devoted to the rule of law. “A serious, important, and I would say almost mysterious question: the origins of legitimate power. Who is the sovereign? The question seems easy to resolve. The legitimate sovereign is the laws, and whoever is at the head of the government must rule through the laws, which are above him. Power exercised by a single man if this man uses it to govern through law is a thousand times more legitimate than that which arises from the people, when they place themselves above the law.”19 Gagarin’s analysis of politics in this passage indicates his concern that democratic government, as demonstrated

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in the French Revolution, could be as autocratic as the tsarist regime.20 François Rouleau, who edited Gagarin’s journal, characterizes him as a conservative, but I see him more as a liberal in the tradition of the “juste milieu” of Guizot, in which constitutional monarchy, limited suffrage, and representative institutions define an ideal government. Gagarin’s liberalism was combined with a passionate devotion to Russia, a romantic nationalism that offered him a possible solution to his personal crisis. This connection is apparent in his entry of September 1834, where he breaks into a celebration of his fatherland immediately after a moment in which self-doubt seems about to overwhelm him: Why, insensitive to what surrounds me, do I lack the passion to pursue a noble goal, or beautiful and useful ideas, which would let me live every day, every second, with my entire being. O my fatherland! No, my devotion for you is not extinguished. It begins again to warm and enlighten my heart. It is to you, my fatherland, that I dedicate my life and thought. My studies, my labors, my life, all will be consecrated to you. O Russia, the youngest of the sisters of the European family, your future is beautiful, great, worthy to inspire the most noble hearts. . . . Now is the time for you no longer to be looked upon as the youngest of the family, for you to walk equally with the others, for you to leave behind your youth and become an adult, rich, enlightened, and happy.21

The juxtaposition of these sentiments of alienation and patriotism suggests the intimate connection between Gagarin’s personal and political anxieties, tied together by a concern for growth, maturity, enlightenment, and liberty. Here again his concerns match those of his Russian contemporaries, for whom personal religious stances necessarily carried political implications.22 Gagarin’s prayer-like evocation of Russia, with the nation standing in for God as an object worthy of total devotion, illuminates the powerful religious dimension to his quest for personal and political coherence. As he contemplated religious questions, and their links to his personal development and political commitments, Gagarin was influenced by two important figures, Friedrich von Schelling (1775–1854) and Peter Chaadaev (1794–1856). Both were friends of Gagarin, intellectuals known for their personal charisma as well as their expansive philosophical systems. Gagarin was gratified by their attention and esteem, encouragement that gave

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him growing confidence as he continued to grapple with his personal and political doubts. Schelling’s long and distinguished career as a philosopher had led him to the University of Munich in 1827, an appointment that was part of King Ludwig I’s plan to make it a center of German intellectual life. Although it is not clear how carefully Gagarin studied Schelling’s particular version of German idealism, he was an active participant in his circle of friends in 1833 and 1834. Schelling was known as a charismatic teacher, brilliant in conversation and good humored.23 Gagarin came into contact with him at a point in his career when he had turned toward religion, working to reconcile his idealist philosophy with Christianity.24 From Schelling Gagarin learned that history could be understood both as a theogony, in which God’s manifestation of himself through the mythological systems of the world culminated in the New Testament, and a psychogenesis, in which the human spirit came to understand itself.25 This effort to reconcile God’s selfrealization with human consciousness involved what Jerrold Seigel has called “a complex dialectic of determinism and liberty,” which in the end could be brought together only through a kind of “mystical consciousness.”26 Schelling’s speculative vision of movement from alienation to unity, a process fully encompassed in an Absolute that could be identified with the Christian God, provided a broad philosophical and theological framework that resonated with Gagarin’s personal history. In the context of Schelling’s philosophy, Gagarin’s quest to become a “complete man” was more than a personal desire for integrity and coherence and was linked to the history of the universe, and of God’s plan for ultimate unity and reconciliation. Although rumors that Schelling had converted to Catholicism circulated as far as Paris, he in fact remained a Protestant throughout his time in Catholic Bavaria, where he sought to avoid religious controversy by presenting his ideas with a philosophical vocabulary.27 In a similar manner, during this period of his life Gagarin remained nominally within Russian Orthodoxy and kept his distance from either Protestant or Catholic Christianity. In one passage from 1834 he suggests that orthodox religious solutions are not available in the modern age, which must find moral principles through philosophy, which presumably referred to the reflections of Schelling but may have indicated as well his reading of Cousin and Jouffroy, who adopted a similar position. “In the century in which I was born most men unfortunately are no longer attached to serving God. . . . I would seek in vain to find my moral obligation in religion: we have broken with it; its voice is foreign

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to us. But moral law, certainty in our principles, and fixed rules of conduct are the primary needs of man. . . . We cannot hope to find moral law in religion; so let us try to find it in philosophy.”28 Looking back on this period in the 1870s, Gagarin recalled his first two years in Munich as a period when he “became used to the idea of an impersonal God, which was simply another way of professing atheism. The society in which I lived, far from combatting these tendencies, encouraged them. . . . I was never so far from religious ideas than my first two years in Munich.”29 During his first years in Munich Gagarin was drawn at times to German idealism, atheism, and pantheism, without finding in any of these systems answers to his religious quest. Christianity, formerly the source of moral law, was an outmoded religion, but philosophy had yet to offer any substitute that could satisfy the human heart. In 1835 Gagarin was called back to Russia and spent a year in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he combined his work in the Foreign Ministry with intense conversations with the intellectual elite about contemporary literature, philosophy, and religion. At the urging of Schelling Gagarin became involved with the circle surrounding Peter Chaadaev, a key figure in Russian intellectual life, and the person responsible for challenging his new friend to consider the ways in which religion had shaped the trajectory of Russian history.30 In the first of his philosophical letters, published in Moscow in 1836, Chaadaev unequivocally condemns Russia’s entire past as futile and empty, a catastrophic situation resulting from the schism that separated the Orthodox Church from Rome in the eleventh century. “[Providence] seems to have given no thought to our destiny. . . . We are alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have taught it nothing. . . . While Christianity was majestically advancing along the path traced for it by its divine Founder and drawing whole generations after it, we did not move, for all that we called ourselves Christians. While the entire world was rebuilding itself, we constructed nothing, but went on squatting in our thatched huts. Christians though we were, Christianity did not ripen us.”31 Chaadaev’s letter had an electrifying impact on the Russian intelligentsia; Alexander Herzen described it as “a shot that rang out in the dark night.”32 It also provoked a quick reaction from Nicholas I, who immediately shut down the journal where it appeared and had Chaadaev declared insane and placed under house arrest. Gagarin was involved with Chaadaev at the moment when his new friend was at the center of the earliest quarrels between Slavophiles and Westernizers. This debate cast those who believed Russia’s future must be

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shaped by Orthodox Christianity and the peasant commune against those who advocated the rationalism and individualism that emerged from the Enlightenment in western Europe. According to Andrzej Walicki, Chaadaev played a paradoxical as well as seminal role in the origins of this dispute. Although from one perspective he was an ardent Westernizer, Chaadaev took a distinctive position when he idealized the Catholic middle ages rather than the liberalism that attracted most Westernizers. He was instrumental as well in the origins of Slavophilism, whose proponents adopted the terms in which Chaadaev condemned contemporary life but projected them on to the West. “Not Russia, but revolutionary and individualistic Europe, the Slavophiles insisted, was the land of disinherited people, unconnected by any bonds with no traditions to lean on.”33 Gagarin was intimately involved with the controversy around Chaadaev’s letter and defended him forcefully in the literary circles in which he traveled.34 For the rest of his life Gagarin viewed Chaadaev as a key figure in his conversion, for even though the latter never abandoned Orthodoxy, he pushed his younger friend toward a positive evaluation of the Catholic Church.35 But there is no evidence that Gagarin seriously contemplated conversion while in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1835 and 1836. Looking back on this period a few years later Gagarin insisted that at that time “I saw in the Catholic Church only a human institution; indeed, I believed that its time was past; I admired it as a magnificent ruin, I regretted it without thinking that it would have in itself the strength and life to conquer individuals and peoples.”36 Gagarin may have taken a historical and instrumental view of the Catholic Church, but a letter from St. Petersburg dated January 14, 1836, with no named recipient and perhaps never sent, shows that he was still beset by the same personal doubts he felt in Munich. Gagarin here praises the “sublime idea of confession that Catholicism has brought to the world, but which it has also distorted.” Confession is needed at those moments when the soul “falls into a state of passivity” and requires the presence of a kindred spirit. Such moments can arrive even in the midst of a social gathering, when all at once “facts and things appear to you only as dreams and dust, while ideas, abstractions, become the real world . . . a singular state of the soul, which frees itself entirely from the action of the body.” Gagarin imagines a way out of this condition through a confessional relationship with someone who would share his own particular worldview, which he conceptualized through an analogy with the nation. “I think sometimes that in this world

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there are souls, just as in the world of reality and fact, composed of different nations, with languages unintelligible to each other. I believe that through our thoughts we are compatriots of one of these nations. Where is this mysterious fatherland? What are the laws we obey, in what climates do we live and breathe, from where do we come, where do we go, what do we do, who are we?”37 While it would helpful to know the intended recipient, Gagarin’s letter is nonetheless a comment on his psychological and spiritual mood during his time in Russia in 1836–1837. A young man at the start of a promising career, well-connected with the social and intellectual elite of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and fully engaged in the excitement that informed the political and literary discussions of the period, he was also continuing to probe himself, and to explore the ways in which he might connect to a “mysterious fatherland” that would provide him with laws to follow, air to breathe, and a coherent self.

The Salon of Madame Swetchine: 1838–1843

Ivan Gagarin left Russia to return to Munich in the winter of 1837 and over the next year worked briefly in Vienna and London. But in early 1838 he received a more permanent posting to Paris, where he was named the third secretary of the Russian ambassador to France. Very soon after his arrival Gagarin became a regular participant in the salon of his aunt Sophie Swetchine (1782–1857), a Russian aristocrat whose home had become a center for liberal Catholics, and for Orthodox visitors from her homeland.38 Madame Swetchine was one of several Russian aristocrats who converted to Catholicism in the early part of the nineteenth century, a movement linked to the general spirit of religious experimentation and revival that swept through Moscow and St. Petersburg in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.39 But Madame Swetchine’s religious sensibility had diverged from the mysticism that appealed for a time to Tsar Alexander and his social circle, including Swetchine ’s close friend, Roxanne Sturdza. Her conversion in 1815 followed an extended period of independent study of the early church fathers and of ecclesiastical history, focusing on the differences between the Orthodox Church and Roman Catholicism, and on the issue of papal supremacy.40 Her friend and confidant, Joseph de Maistre, ridiculed her for taking such an intellectual approach to her religious identity: “Never, Madame, will you arrive at your goal by the path you have

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Figure 7. Madame Sophie Swetchine. © Compagnie de Jésus—Archives jésuites, Vanves.

chosen. You’ll exhaust yourself, you will moan, but without relief and without consolation. . . . Conversion is the result of a ‘sudden illumination’ according to Bossuet. There are innumerable examples of this, even among superior men most capable of reason.”41 Despite this opposition from her close friend, Madame Swetchine insisted on the value of study, and of the liberty of a well-informed conscience, as the proper ground for conversion. “If one has reflected seriously, tested oneself, and obeys both duty and conscience in moving to another communion at the risk of one ’s interests and personal attachments, one cannot, it seems to me, regret the sacrifice. One might say, with Gibbon, and with more justification than he had in writing the words: For my own part, I am proud of an honest sacrifice of interest to conscience.”42 Madame Swetchine’s conversion, based on the pursuit of ideas by a free conscience, provided a model that would later appeal to Ivan Gagarin.

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Gagarin’s journal in the period after 1838 reveals someone more engaged with his work than he had been in his time at Munich. He read the newspapers and followed both domestic and foreign developments, carefully analyzed in his notes. But he continued as well to pursue the questions that had preoccupied him since 1833: how could he become a “complete” man, and how should such a person respond to the duties imposed by family, fatherland, and God, which might pull him in opposing directions? Perhaps because of his work as a diplomat, Gagarin continued to reflect deeply on the future of Russia and to develop his ideas along the lines he had begun considering in his conversations with Chaadaev. In his autobiography Gagarin recalled making constant comparisons between Europe and Russia and slowly arriving at a scheme that clarified for him the source of their differences. He saw in Europe a constant clash of doctrines, which rather than weakening its peoples was a source of truth and strength. “I loved this dualism which for every question proposed two doctrines, two contradictory opinions; truth seemed to me to flow from this battle. In Europe I found this dualism everywhere: in religion, politics, literature, the sciences, and the arts. Everywhere two opposed principles were a source of fecundity and life; I attributed the intellectual drabness of Russia to the absence of this dualism.” Gagarin’s reading and reflection led him beyond such abstractions to consider particular conflicts: Islam against Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire against the papacy, medieval heresies and Protestantism against Catholicism, Jansenists against Jesuits, the Enlightenment against Christianity. In all of these, Gagarin concluded, one term was constant, “the Catholic Church with its doctrine and hierarchy. From this it appeared evident to me that the Catholic Church was the pivot of European civilization.”43 Gagarin’s commitment to Catholicism in the late 1830s was still primarily intellectual, based on his analysis of religious history, and not connected to his affective life, to his desire to marry intellect and will. As an institution the Catholic Church might have redeemed Russia, but it did not offer a solution for Gagarin’s personal struggles. In the salon of Madame Swetchine he discovered an atmosphere that combined intellectual analysis and religious sensibility, a combination that became the basis for a dramatic choice about who he was that promised to satisfy both his sense of social mission and his search for personal integrity. Madame Swetchine made an immediate impression on Gagarin. Soon after his arrival he became a regular visitor to her home, praising her as

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someone who “takes everything, every question, political, religious, literary, artistic, etc., in order to extract ideas that are elevated, grave, serious.”44 Reflecting on his experience a few years later, Gagarin recalled trying to discern a principle at work that would account for the atmosphere he found in the salon of Madame Swetchine. [I followed] with an attentive ear the conversation in its unpredictable paths, trying to discover the hidden law by virtue of which this conversation, so free, so capricious in appearance, which seemed to obey no rule, always remained appealing and elevated. . . . There was in all of these minds a great deal of liberty, nothing which resembled anarchy or chaos. One felt the invisible presence of a doctrine common to everyone, respected in all of its consequences. This discovery was a revelation to me. I had no idea up until that point that an idea could exercise with such ease and authority its free empire over minds. It was not long before I noticed that this doctrine was the Catholic faith.45

At Madame Swetchine ’s Gagarin had discovered a place where freedom and authority could be reconciled, but how could such a marriage possibly work? In explaining the appeal of Catholicism, Gagarin contrasted the church’s authority with that of an autocrat, presumably with Nicholas I in mind. Catholicism was not experienced by the guests of Madame Swetchine as an external constraint, a crude imposition. Instead, it “penetrated into the will and the conscience,” so that Gagarin saw “for the first time minds that were fully free and diverse, submitting their judgments and opinions voluntarily to a law, a teaching that truly reigned over their souls.”46 Madame Swetchine was just one of several women who maintained salons in the 1830s and 1840s, a period when they were still a vital element in the social and political life of Paris. Gagarin circulated easily among the homes of these women, including the Duchess of Rauzan and the Countess de Circourt. Although each had her own character, all of these salonnières saw themselves as mediators, providing forums for reconciling intellectual and political disputes that would otherwise threaten the authority and solidarity of the French “notables.” Like the salons of the Enlightenment, these institutions provided gathering places where elite women “achieved success by balancing and blending voices into a harmonious whole.”47 By the time Gagarin entered Madame Swetchine’s circle in 1838 she had long experience

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in her role as a woman who presided over polite conversation and intellectual exchange among a select company. Her home was one of the “protected spaces for the reconciliation of differences whose neutrality was governed by the self-effacement and devotion to propriety of the salonnière.”48 In Strasbourg in the 1820s Marie-Louise Humann played a similar role in opening her home to Louis Bautain and his Jewish students, including Théodore Ratisbonne. Both Madame Swetchine and Mlle Humann encouraged the free exchange of ideas and the reconciliation of religious differences. For them this meant a movement into the Catholic Church, but not as a result of polemical arguments that would drive people away. They employed instead patience, prayer, and conversation as the way to touch the consciences of potential converts. The activities of Sophie Swetchine and Marie-Louise Humann suggest how a view of complementary gender roles inherited from the salons of the eighteenth century was adapted by Catholics as a means of negotiating the conditions of religious liberty they faced in the nineteenth century.49 The freedom of the conversation in the salon of Madame Swetchine did not always lead to immediate and perfect harmony, for her visitors had sharply opposed views on a number of matters. French Catholicism in this period was riven by deep quarrels that divided Ultramontanists, devoted to papal authority, from Gallicans, who defended the autonomy of the French church.50 Madame Swetchine struggled at times to preserve the peace between these factions, as when her friend the ultramontane Henri Lacordaire engaged in a six-hour argument with Father Duguerry, the curé of the parish of the Madeleine and “the most extreme Gallican in France.”51 Echoes of the bitter arguments of the early 1830s over the campaign of Lamennais to build an alliance between Catholicism and liberalism also still resonated in the salon of Madame Swetchine.52 Two of Lamennais’s most prominent supporters, Henri Lacordaire and Charles de Montalembert, were her close friends, and their involvement with the salon made it a center for a revised and more moderate form of liberal Catholicism.53 Differences among Catholics were real, but it was precisely the free exchanges between them that he heard at Madame Swetchine ’s that appealed to Gagarin. Beyond encouraging open discussions, Madame Swetchine insisted on the central importance of freedom of conscience. In her view, such freedom was not incompatible with the acceptance of Catholic faith. Madame Swetchine summed up her position in which faith and freedom were reconciled by

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using the analogy of a moral code and the choice to be virtuous, for in both cases an accepted framework was a necessary precondition for individual liberty. “Why wouldn’t faith compel our intelligence, in the same way that morality compels our actions? Do we stop being free when we are virtuous? Why would we stop being free by being believers? Isn’t true liberty always experienced in a particular space? Doesn’t it always require a center that draws it and a base that supports it?”54 In light of this commitment Madame Swetchine was careful in her dealings with non-Catholics, avoiding any direct pressure on her friends and family, including her husband, who remained faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church.55 In a letter to Gagarin in 1843, just as he was deciding on whether or not to become a Jesuit, Madame Swetchine insisted that such matters were between God and the individual soul. “As for me, my dear child, you know that without a specific mission to express an opinion, I would never say what I thought, and would never place myself between God and a soul!”56 As Gagarin moved closer to a Catholic identity, he remained attached to an ideal of liberty, adopting a position similar to Madame Swetchine ’s on the central importance of freedom of conscience. In an impassioned exchange with his close friend George Samarin, Gagarin defended religious liberty as a God-given right: “Never believe that I would think of violating your freedom. My friend, the kingdom of heaven is not like the kingdoms of earth. God never forces anyone to enter against his will. Nemo cogitur, nemo excluditur. [Compel no one, exclude no one.] In order to enter, you must want it, want it with a firm, constant, patient will. ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ (Mark 8, 34) Freedom is the essential condition of man. . . . God, if he were to violate human liberty, would destroy his own work, he would break the foundation on which he has built the world.”57 The Swetchine circle, with its cohort of former Mennaisiens and its openness to the language of liberty, might have provoked some animosity from ecclesiastical officials. But Madame Swetchine and her friends had rallied to the church after the condemnation of Lamennais in 1834 and never publicly challenged an official position.58 They were, moreover, vigorous Ultramontanes, and insofar as they deployed the language of liberty in public forums it was in favor of the liberty of “cults” rather than “conscience,” which meant at the time a vigorous defense of the Catholic right to open secondary schools in competition with the state-run system.59 In the Swetchine circle Gagarin had found a group that rooted the individual freedom he had

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identified as a central value at least since his time in Munich within the Catholic Church, which he saw as a source of European unity and Russian regeneration. In another visit back to Russia in 1839 and early 1840 Gagarin once again became personally involved in the debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers, renewing his acquaintance with Chaadaev and with Samarin. As a result of this trip he would also have learned of the intensification of Nicholas I’s campaign against nonorthodox religions. During his time in Russia the tsar’s campaign against the Catholic Church in Poland was renewed, and an imperial decree deprived Russian apostates of their property and mandated that their children be raised in Orthodoxy regardless of their parents’ preferences.60 For Gagarin, the denial of religious liberty in Orthodox Russia in the early 1840s offered a sharp contrast with the freedom he found in the Catholic salon of Madame Swetchine. Gagarin’s autobiographical notes about his conversion, apparently written in the late 1850s, confirm much of what we find in his correspondence of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and in other evidence as well. In addition to a concern with reconciling freedom and authority, both sets of documents show a deep involvement with the history of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, with the advantage going to Roman Catholicism, which had preserved an unbroken continuity with the church founded by Jesus Christ, mediated by the sovereignty invested first in Peter and then in all the subsequent popes. Doctrinal matters were also crucial, with Gagarin accepting the “filioque” of the Roman Church, whose credo insisted that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both God the Father and Jesus Christ, the Son. Jeffrey Beshoner is certainly right to emphasize the importance of Gagarin’s concern with theological issues in accounting for his conversion.61 But in the early 1840s Gagarin was also involved with men and women who were living intense spiritual lives and who had in the past converted themselves or were in the process of considering such a move. In addition to Madame Swetchine, in the early 1840s Gagarin became particularly close to two men whose religious crises resembled his own, Georges Samarin and Count Grigorii Shuvalov (1805– 1859). These men do not appear in the autobiographical notes written in the 1850s, which in general focus on Gagarin’s historical analysis rather than his personal connections. Composed more than ten years after his conversion, these fragments reflect his preoccupation at that moment with the unification of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, which had led him to found the Jesuit

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journal Etudes in 1855, originally dedicated to this project. The autobiography of Shuvalov and letters exchanged with Samarin give us a more personal view of Gagarin in the early 1840s and suggest that his move toward a Catholic identity was shaped by personal relations as well as a comparative historical analysis of the two churches. Shuvalov and Gagarin met in Paris in October 1841 at a moment when both were close to a final determination to convert. But Shuvalov’s path toward Catholicism was different from the program of study and discussion that we have seen in the life of Gagarin. Shuvalov had spent most of the 1830s traveling through Europe with his wife, Sophie, and their two children. In 1834 while in Paris Shuvalov’s son was operated on for an abscess in his left leg, the first of a series of illnesses that would trouble the family over the next decade. The operation went poorly, and for six weeks the boy, eleven years old, suffered terribly, became emaciated, and was close to death. During this affliction Sophie Shuvalov prayed to God to take her life in order to save her son, a vow made just a few days before he began to recover. During her son’s illness she also invoked the same “miraculous medal” that had played such a prominent role in the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne. As her son recovered, however, Mme Shuvalov’s health deteriorated, and after years of debilitation and suffering, she finally died on February 10, 1841. During her illness, as a result of her son’s cure, and of her contacts with a number of Catholic clergy and converts, Mme Shuvalov came to accept Roman Catholicism, putting off her final abjuration only out of deference to her husband. She also tried to extract a promise from him that he would convert himself, which he refused to make.62 The death of his wife in 1841 threw Shuvalov into an extended religious crisis that concluded in January 1843, when he formally abjured Orthodoxy in favor of Roman Catholicism. It was in this period that he befriended Gagarin, who was in the midst of a spiritual crisis of his own. For the next several months they saw each other frequently, discussing their spiritual states and studying a number of works on the differences between the Roman and Orthodox churches, as well as Moehler’s Symbolique, a French translation of the German Catholic theologian’s account of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism.63 Their relationship went well beyond such intellectual exchanges, however, for it was in solidarity with his new friend that Gagarin renewed his participation in sacramental life. Shuvalov recalled sharing with Gagarin memories of his wife’s death, of his

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shame at having kept her from converting, and of his own desire to become a Catholic. As the anniversary of his wife’s death approached, Shuvalov decided to attend Mass and receive communion at the Orthodox chapel in the Russian embassy, and Gagarin agreed to join him. It had been four years since Gagarin had received communion, an absence based on his growing commitment to a Catholic identity, a situation shared by Shuvalov, who described himself as doubtful about the Orthodox Church but “not entirely Catholic. . . . We went to the holy table, in this Church where you deigned to remain captive, o my humble and glorious Savior! At this moment we were full of fervor and good will. The truth was our only goal, and we felt ourselves ready to sacrifice everything to obtain it. . . . We were ready to follow your inspiration, to remain in the Russian Church or to leave it. This communion was for us a final test, a final appeal to the truth.”64 Gagarin’s journal entry for this day suggests a less fervent disposition but confirms his sense of religious commitment and reveals the high religious standard he had established for himself: “God managed today to administer the Holy Mysteries to me. I pray and hope that they will help me to live a Christian life. I grieve that having intellectual faith, I did not feel the ardent faith of a pure repentant heart. I regret this, but I should not be depressed. A troubled heart hungering for purity is already the fruit of grace. I should pray for faith, but I cannot be depressed if it is not given to me instantly.”65 Shuvalov, like Gagarin, was anxious about the persistence of doubt, about a lack of heartfelt faith that would sweep away all concerns, but both men were reassured by their spiritual counselor, the Jesuit preacher Father Xavier Ravignan, who also played a key role in advising Alphonse Ratisbonne after his conversion in Rome. For Ravignan, such doubts were an example of “spiritual dryness” familiar from the work of Catholic mystics such as Teresa of Avila. As such they were to be welcome as a sign of God’s love, a challenge to be faced and overcome by force of will, with spiritual peace as a final and hard-won reward. For Shuvalov such a decision in the end was driven by feeling more than reason, “because in us there is something more than mind, there is the heart that seeks happiness, and which has the right to it.”66 In the months leading up to his conversion Gagarin was thus accompanied by a fellow-traveler who, while he came from a similar family background and had many of the same intellectual interests, was moved by personal tragedy more than study, and whose evolving religious identity had a powerful sentimental component. Gagarin had been moving toward a Catholic identity for several years, and in the end

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it is impossible to know with any certainty just what factors led him finally to convert in April 1842. But I want to suggest that the intense relationship with Shuvalov starting in October 1841 was an important precipitant. Certainly the atmosphere in the salon of Madame Swetchine was devout, but Gagarin and Swetchine both insist that they never talked about his conversion until the last minute. With Shuvalov, Gagarin seems to have been moving toward a more open and affective engagement with Catholicism, which he had already accepted on the basis of his doctrinal and historical study. Letters exchanged with his friend Georges Samarin in 1842 provide another perspective on Gagarin’s evolving identity and reinforce the sense that his intellectual pursuits were now mixing with a more devotional religiosity. Many of their letters contain lengthy expositions of doctrine and church history, exchanges through which Gagarin was deepening and sharpening his arguments in favor of Roman Catholicism. But in a letter of August 1842 Samarin interjects a surprisingly contemporary note, acknowledging that he had read the pamphlet Gagarin had sent to him about the miraculous conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne in January 1842. This account described how Ratisbonne had converted after several days of wearing a “miraculous medal” and saying the words of a prayer to Mary, actions he took as part of a wager with a friend to show how useless they would be in convincing him. As we saw in chapter 3, this story swept through Catholic circles in Paris, and in particular was preached from the pulpit of the church of Notre-Damedes-Victoires by Alphonse ’s brother, Théodore, who was also a participant in the salon of Madame Swetchine. Instead of being persuaded by this miraculous account, Samarin was appalled by the mechanical nature of Ratisbonne ’s conversion, in which his own will counted for nothing in the face of a supernatural act that overwhelmed him. “I confess to you frankly that in reading the history of Ratisbonne I experienced a feeling of terror, my heart was seized with fear and unease in regarding an irresistible force that takes possession of a man against his will, dominates him, strikes him down like the fate of the ancients and throws him into a state of supernatural exaltation. This is not how I understand the action of grace. It is impossible for me to sympathize with the order of ideas and beliefs within which this fact has occurred and been recognized. In the miracles of our Church I find nothing similar. It’s pure Catholicism.”67 In his response to Samarin Gagarin briefly insisted on the credibility of Ratisbonne ’s story but concentrated his defense of miracles by reference to

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those in the Bible.68 Gagarin was shocked by his friend’s assertion that miracles were simply natural occurrences that were interpreted as supernatural interventions by believers; he insisted on the facticity of the miraculous, on God’s willingness to intervene in human life outside of the normal workings of the natural world. And he pleaded with his friend to take up the same challenge that Alphonse Ratisbonne had accepted, to wear the “miraculous medal.” Samarin’s response was brief and blunt: “I don’t yet know how God should be adored, but I hope to know some day. For the moment, I am convinced it is not through the mechanical repetition of a prayer, nor in wearing a medal in which one does not believe. For my part, this would be an act of idolatry.”69 Over the next two years the friendship between Samarin and Gagarin cooled considerably, and the correspondence broke off in 1844. Eventually Samarin joined ranks with the Slavophiles and engaged in bitter controversy with Gagarin starting in the 1850s over the religious future of Russia.70 But as Gagarin moved toward Catholicism in 1842 he remained deeply attached to his friend, the only person he mentioned by name in the will he wrote in May of that year, just one month after his conversion: “I cannot keep myself from mentioning here in particular my friend Georges Samarin, who I hope will one day recognize the vanity of all systems derived from men, and will find peace of soul and true liberty of mind in the Catholic faith and the practices that it teaches.”71 In the months just before his final conversion Gagarin was deeply engaged with the religious struggles of close friends, one of whom eventually joined him, while the other moved toward Russian Orthodoxy. We have seen that Gagarin was intellectually serious and introspective as he contemplated moving across a religious boundary that involved a remaking of himself, and we have seen as well that he learned much about Catholicism in the social relations he formed in the salon of Madame Swetchine. The intellectual issues that Gagarin struggled with were also raised in the intimate relationships he formed with Shuvalov and Samarin, but in these friendships we see a personal and devotional element emerge, an affective dimension in his conversion that he discounted later in his life, but that was central to his religious journey in the 1840s. In choosing a new religious identity Gagarin was accepting the truth claims of Roman Catholicism, but he was also reordering his social life, choosing new friends and a new family, and accepting as well a more personal relationship with God. But such choices did not come easily, for the family and friends of the old Gagarin challenged his new identity and tried

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to reclaim him as their own. As a result Gagarin’s conversion was both a break with the past and an occasion for struggling with it and against it, a process that lasted years and was never fully resolved. Gagarin’s conversion on April 19, 1842, apparently came as a surprise to Madame Swetchine. In the weeks prior to his final abjuration Gagarin had been making the rounds of Parisian churches, listening to prominent preachers, as indicated by his notes on the sermons of the abbé Bautain, who spoke on the conversion of sinners and the return of the prodigal son at the parish of Saint Eustache during Holy Week, just prior to Easter, in March 1842. Bautain, who played a central role in the conversion of Théodore Ratisbonne, had moved from Strasbourg to Paris, where he was named a vicar general by Archbishop Affre. Bautain had accepted the papal condemnation of his major work, Philosophie du christianisme, but shared Gagarin’s conviction that Catholicism encouraged rather than suppressed liberty.72 Gagarin’s careful summary of the sermon on the prodigal son recalls many of the concerns that had preoccupied him over the last decade. In Gagarin’s notes we read that the prodigal son was in search of self-knowledge, which Christianity alone can provide. An “honest man” from a worldly perspective was in fact deluded about himself insofar as he did not acknowledge through gratitude and prayer his dependence on a sovereign God. And he was deluded as well in believing that he could accomplish his social duties without framing them within a broader relationship that included God as well as man.73 Bautain’s preaching clearly struck a chord with Gagarin, for on the day after hearing about the prodigal son he asked Father Ravignan to help him make his final preparations to convert. Ravignan was the most prominent preacher of the time, replacing Lacordaire in the pulpit at Notre Dame, a post he held from 1837 until 1846.74 From an aristocratic family in Bayonne, Ravignan had first pursued a career in law before joining the Jesuits, worldly experiences that allowed him to move easily in the highest circles of Parisian society in the 1840s. Although it is impossible to say exactly when Gagarin first met with Ravignan, their meeting in March 1842 produced a reading list of over forty books, a mixture of religious history, sermons, devotional works, and a healthy dose of Jesuit biographies.75 But Ravignan’s relationship with Gagarin was much more than one between teacher and student. As he did with Alphonse Ratisbonne, Ravignan became a spiritual adviser who witnessed and encouraged Gagarin’s emerging Catholic identity.

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We have little direct testimony about the immediate circumstances surrounding Gagarin’s conversion, what he referred to as his abjuration, which took place in the chapel of Madame Swetchine’s apartment on April 19. We know that his announcement of this move just two days earlier had led Madame Swetchine to ask for a delay while she consulted with Ravignan, so as to assure herself and her friends that the decision had not been made on the basis of a passing infatuation.76 One month after this momentous event Gagarin drafted a will that combines a sense of religious certainty with deep anxieties about the feelings of his parents, and about their salvation. After affirming his commitment to the Catholic Church, “out of which there is no salvation,” and vowing to set aside the nineteenth of each month as a day of recollection, he turns abruptly to family matters: My father and mother are still unaware of my conversion or at least have only vague suspicions. I beg them to consider that I decided on this action only after a long internal struggle, a criminal resistance to the grace of God, and after several years of indecision and only with the goal of bringing my actions into harmony with my faith while in this world, and of making possible my salvation in the next. I beg them to forgive me the wrongs, both knowingly and unknowingly, that I have committed with regard to them, and for which I feel in my heart bitter sadness and violent regret, and above everything else I beg them to examine and with the most serious attention the motives that keep them in schism and separated from the communion of the Holy Catholic Church, in which alone they will be able to find true happiness in this world and the next. I make the same recommendation to my dear sister, to my brother-in-law and in general to all those who have for me feelings of friendship and affection.77

Gagarin had found his way into the Catholic Church, but his “bitter sadness” and “violent regrets” for the wrongs he did his parents, along with his fears about their eternal salvation, indicate that he was still a troubled soul. Events over the next several months as his conversion became public knowledge only added to his inner turmoil. The coherent self he sought required more than an abjuration of Orthodoxy, it required a supportive family and social purpose that he seemed to have lost with his conversion to Catholicism. Two months after his conversion, Gagarin left for an extended stay in Russia, carrying with him a handwritten personal “prayer for the Russians”

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that begins by affirming his devotion to the church, described through the conventional metaphors as a city on a hill, a lighthouse that calls to those at sea. The prayer then turns directly to Jesus, asking for his help in the trials he expects to face. Jesus is called on to shade him from the burning sun, to clothe him in the cold, to be a fence on a slippery slope, a port in a storm.78 There is nothing original in this language, but the piling up of metaphorical troubles nonetheless suggests anxiety about the coming trip, a sentiment that the coming months would show to be fully warranted. In the summer and fall of 1842 Gagarin spent time both in Moscow and on the nearby family estate. In the city Gagarin again joined in the ongoing discussions between Westernizers and Slavophiles, but according to Samarin he was now much more openly critical of the Orthodox Church, “scattering to the right and left extracts of the works of Count de Maistre and Father Rozaven; preaching openly, freely, without hindrance his Paris Latinism.”79 The story of Gagarin’s conversion was spread so widely that an old friend whom he hadn’t seen in years stopped him on the street to ask if he had changed religions. Gagarin was thus in a false position, comparable to what we observed with Jewish converts to Catholicism, unable to acknowledge openly his new faith, for as a declared Catholic he would be an outlaw, and particularly vulnerable since he was also still an official in the service of the Russian tsar. Gagarin was in a false position with regard to his countrymen, but also in his family relations. His anxiety about his position in Russia overflows in a passionate letter written to Ravignan from Moscow in September 1842, the first sent since his departure from Paris in June. Gagarin pleads with his adviser to tell him what to do: should he stay in Russia or join his family in Berlin, where they had gone for medical treatment for his brotherin-law? Beyond this practical matter, however, was the deeper concern of how to tell his parents about his conversion. “I know that I must consider seriously the age, the tender feelings, and the anxieties of my parents, but I must consider as well the state of my soul and the desires it feels. It is not my will, but God’s will that I must follow. That is why I ask you to make a decision, I will obey and obedience will give me peace and courage.”80 Over the next few months Gagarin would continually adopt this deferential attitude in his letters to Ravignan, asking not only for help but for his adviser to take his future in hand and decide for him. This allegiance developed at the same time that Gagarin was breaking away from his family, a process that Ravignan encouraged, while at the same time counseling him to act with compassion

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toward his heartbroken parents. Gagarin had chosen a Catholic identity as a way to achieve personal coherence, but he had not fully understood how difficult this would be, as he worked to remake the bonds that held him to both his past and his future. Father Ravignan did not hesitate at all in his response to Gagarin, going so far as to claim (with only a modest qualification) that his advice could be understood as the will of God: “I believe I am able to tell you that such is the will of God.” Clearly concerned with Gagarin’s safety as well as the state of his soul, Ravignan advised (ordered?) Gagarin to leave Russia immediately and join his family in Berlin. Furthermore, he pleaded with Gagarin to hide his new Catholic identity, which might compromise his safety in Russia. “But in the name of God keep inside for some time your generous feelings, so that there would be no external manifestation [of your Catholicism] while in Russia; even outside of Russia, keep your religion a deep secret; prudence demands it. A day will come when you will be able to practice openly.”81 Over the next several months the relationship between Ravignan and Gagarin intensified, with Gagarin writing impassioned letters from Berlin, where he had gone in January 1843 to join his parents, sister, and brother-inlaw. Ravignan’s responses consistently expressed concern for Gagarin’s family but always emphasized that Gagarin’s first duty was to God and himself, whatever the difficulties that such a commitment might entail. Gagarin had one other crucial correspondent during this period, Sophie Swetchine, to whom he also revealed his religious turmoil, family conflicts, and concerns about his future. Together, Ravignan and Swetchine provided a kind of surrogate family even while his parents and sister expressed their doubts and at times their open opposition.82 When Gagarin addressed Ravignan as “mon révérend Père” he was using a conventional formula, but given the ongoing conflict with his father, Sergei Ivanovich, and the emotion invested in his letters to his adviser it seems fair to see this term as more than formulaic. Similarly, Madame Swetchine’s use of the phrase “mon cher enfant” may be generic, but repeated frequently in a series of long letters expressing sympathy for Gagarin’s delicate and difficult situation with his mother it suggests an emotional bond that could rival and in some sense replace the one he had with Varvara Mikhailovna. Such a claim does not have to be based on psychological speculation, for on one occasion Madame Swetchine made the comparison herself, when she wrote that she was “the one person in the world, and I don’t except your parents from this,

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whose thought turns itself constantly to you, who feels for you the most profound and lively tenderness in the midst of all preoccupations, who feels your presence as if you were before me. My respect, my admiration, my solicitude for you have so much identified me with everything that you are in the present, and everything to which God will consecrate you, I hope with all of my soul, in the future, that you have become this part of myself which consoles my other self, and on which it relies.”83 As he struggled to resolve his religious and familial conflicts between 1842 and 1844, Gagarin could rely on the advice and encouragement of a Catholic father and mother who could take the place of the Orthodox parents who resisted a conversion that he saw as the crucial step in establishing himself as a new and complete man. Ravignan and Swetchine helped move Gagarin away from Orthodoxy and his Russian family, but at the same time they urged Gagarin to be considerate of the feelings of his parents, and in particular of his mother. Soon after Gagarin had revealed to his parents not only his conversion but his intention to join the Jesuits, Ravignan urged him to act with “the veritable tenderness of a son.” But when opposition in his family grew Ravignan insisted that filial devotion, as admirable as it was, must not compromise Gagarin’s higher calling. Citing a passage from the Gospel of Matthew (10:37), he reminded the new convert that “whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” It is typical of Ravignan that he follows this citation with the claim that in accepting his vocation Gagarin would “be more help to your parents than your presence with them; believe firmly that God will bless everyone who is dear to you.”84 The pain that Gagarin was causing his parents, from Ravignan’s perspective, was insignificant and temporary compared to the benefits that his conversion would bring to them. Ravignan implies with this language that Gagarin’s conversion might be a means to ensure the ultimate salvation of his parents, thus adding a prudential motive to his argument and suggesting as well that a failure to remain firm could cost his family the blessings of God. Madame Swetchine was equally pointed in her comments, for although she praised Gagarin’s mother for her resignation to God’s will at those moments when she seemed willing to accept her son’s choice, she also called on Gagarin to be “armed against himself ” in order to resist her appeals.85 In a letter of 1844, just a few months after Gagarin had become a Jesuit novice, Swetchine responds at length and with fervor to continuing attempts by his family and some Orthodox friends to reconvert him:

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Your religious vocation, you would sacrifice it to achieve the happiness and ease the anxieties of your parents? But faith! Is it something that can sacrifice itself? Can you renounce your eternal salvation? Friends can speak of this, because they belong to the world; your parents, who have shown themselves to be Christians, should not. Your pious mother may be deeply hurt; but if she had the least idea that your life would be based on a lie, on something you did not believe, I am convinced her unhappiness today would be slight compared to what you would inflict on her in such an inadmissible situation. What can those who can claim some rights over you expect? Isn’t there a point at which one can say nature ends and God begins?86

Swetchine ’s tone here is bitter and angry toward those who would persuade Gagarin to deny his attachment to Catholicism in order to succeed in the world, and she insists that no good mother would ask her son to betray his conscience. Madame Swetchine always insisted that Gagarin act on the basis of a free conscience, but once he had made the decision to convert and then to join the Jesuits she was willing to intervene forcefully, building up his Catholic identity with effusive praise for his conversion and belittling those who would pull him back to Orthodoxy. Gagarin needed the support of Ravignan and Swetchine, for his parents were consistently opposed to his conversion and distressed by his decision to join the Jesuits. When he joined his family in Berlin in January 1843 Gagarin found himself in the midst of a family in crisis, with his brother-inlaw Sergei Buturlin seriously ill and his own future in jeopardy. As troubled as they were by his conversion, however, it was the announcement of his decision that he would join the Jesuits that provoked the strongest reaction, which covered sentiments ranging from anxiety, disbelief, and resentment to outright anger. Just after Gagarin’s departure in June his parents pleaded with him to delay a decision that would be irrevocable. To judge by his mother’s description of him as he left—“your pale face, your sad expression, your soulful cry”—Gagarin was distraught as well by the prospect of never seeing his parents again.87 Letters full of memories of his time with them and regret for his decision continued to arrive at the apartment on the rue SaintHonoré, where Gagarin was staying, but the tone changed sharply in August 1843. Gagarin at some point that summer must have written his parents with a Chaadaev-like critique of Russia, and their own lives, a final justification

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for his decision to join the Jesuits. His mother wrote almost apologetically that “it is possible that I have false ideas, that my manner of looking at things is erroneous.” But she quickly took a more insistent tone and begged to be heard, since “a mother, a friend, can and even must communicate with her son.” Mme Gagarin was particularly upset because of her son’s disdainful treatment of his sister: “You say sometimes that foreigners appreciate you more than your family; I could say the same thing about you with regard to your sister. . . . Would charity, I won’t even say friendship, lead to such insults? Certainly, we have our faults, but where is your indulgence? Where is the consolation I expect from you?”88 Gagarin’s language must have become even more offensive, for in the next letter Mme Gagarin refers to his criticism of them for “a lack of enlightenment, of civilization, of elevated feelings. We ’re narrow-minded, our conversations lack any interest whatsoever. Our friends are boring, drunks, unworthy of esteem, our acquaintances are unbearable.” Assuming that Gagarin’s mother accurately conveyed his criticisms, she seems justified in claiming that “this lack of indulgence in your judgments, in your conduct, can only dry up your heart.”89 We do not have Gagarin’s response to this bitter comment, though it must have wounded him. From his mother’s perspective, Gagarin’s behavior amounted to cruel treatment from an ungrateful son, though one she still loved. From his perspective, he was following a higher call to become a “complete man,” one that necessarily involved crossing over not only from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, but from a Russian family to the Jesuits.

Gagarin the Jesuit With the support of his Catholic friends Gagarin resisted the appeals of his parents, who by 1844 seemed to have reconciled themselves to his decision, and to the fact that they would never see him again. His brother-in-law, however, thinking perhaps that he would profit from a greater share of the family inheritance, denounced Gagarin to the Russian government, which led eventually to an official condemnation.90 His parents were distressed by this behavior and continued to provide financial support, and to write regularly through the 1840s. But the pain of their separation was a constant theme, as were entreaties for him to write more often.91 Gagarin seems to have been a poor correspondent, which led to criticisms from family and friends. When his mother grew ill, paralyzed and blind, a friend (possibly

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another Russian convert) wrote to condemn his detachment in the strongest terms, and to note that his behavior was provoking comments among his friends. “That you would have sacrificed your parents in order to live a more perfect life with God is an act of Christian heroism. . . . But is it admissible that God would ask us to deprive our parents of the final consolation that we can give them, and which we are permitted by the rule that we follow? It is not for me to tell you what you must do, but in this present case I follow the voice of my conscience and my affection for you. I confess as well that I suffer too much from hearing condemned by others, apparently for good reason, a friend, a Catholic, a father of the Company of Jesus, not to warn you about this.”92 Gagarin’s mother died in 1854, but his final letter to her did not arrive on time, which led his sister Marie to write a recriminating letter condemning him for his silence and apparent indifference.93 Like the Ratisbonne brothers, Gagarin maintained an attenuated connection with his family, and through his mother, sister, and later his niece kept abreast of news about their health, births, and deaths. The Gagarin name remained a source of pride and prestige, but Gagarin’s conversion had led him to the Jesuit family. Gagarin’s attachment to the Jesuits was a self-conscious choice made as he contemplated the isolation he faced following his conversion and his separation from his family. At the conclusion of the retreat he made as he entered the novitiate in August 1843 Gagarin recalled that “in the long and painful internal battles that have led up to this decision, when my heart ached at the idea of the animosity that I would face after my conversion, and the isolation in which I would find myself, the Company of Jesus appeared to me in a distant future as a refuge.” But even as he faced the end of his retreat and the moment of final decision Gagarin felt torn by his family loyalty, fearful of leaving his parents. After a prayer to Jesus and Mary, Gagarin heard “an interior voice saying to me with great sweetness: Do you believe I am incapable of providing you with the most abundant and truest consolations that you might have? In this moment, all difficulties completely vanished, and I offered myself to God with all my heart and surrendered to him with great confidence the care of my parents.”94 Gagarin struggled as he transferred his primary attachment from his biological family to the Jesuits, and we have seen that his parents were heartbroken by his distance, both physical and psychological, even while they were reconciled to his decision. The Jesuits, by offering Gagarin a surrogate family, compensated him for the loss of his

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parents while also encouraging him to maintain a connection with them. This arrangement led to considerable pain for all the parties involved, but there can be no doubt about the primary identity of Gagarin, who was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1848 and maintained an active career until his death in 1882. Gagarin’s Jesuit career was based on a commitment to the conversion of Russia, a task that allowed him to remain connected with his fatherland even though he was banned from reentering it. Jeffrey Beshoner has described in detail the various projects that this mission to Russia entailed, and his judgment that Gagarin was naïve about the prospects for a Catholic Russia is sensible and persuasive.95 For my purposes, Gagarin’s commitment to converting Russia is important insofar as it allowed him to define himself as faithful to his youthful devotion to his country, even while he had apparently abandoned it. Gagarin never visited Russia again after his departure in January 1843, and Russian Orthodox critics, including some old friends from the 1830s, reacted with hostility to his schemes to Catholicize their country. But Gagarin continued to insist on the point that he had first come to in his conversations with Chaadaev in the 1830s, that only Catholicism could free Russia from the chains of despotism and poverty and bring the country into communion with the civilization of Europe.

Conclusion: The Spiritual Exercise of Freedom and Submission Ivan Gagarin’s conversion to Catholicism and enlistment with the Jesuits resolved, although in an imperfect manner, the problems he posed for himself in the 1830s. He now could claim a coherent identity, albeit one that was troubled by echoes from his previous life, which could never be entirely silenced or forgotten. As a Catholic Gagarin had reconnected with religious practice, but in a way that established his freedom from the Orthodox Christianity of his parents. He had found as well a world-historical mission, one that allowed him to dream of reconciling his particular devotion to Russia with a commitment to universal reconciliation through the Roman Catholic Church. Such a union, unrealistic as it was, was based on Gagarin’s continued hopes for a Russia that would be freed from autocratic rule by virtue of its attachment to Catholicism. Gagarin managed to construct for himself an identity that matched in many ways his youthful vision of a “complete man.” But this process entailed an important adjustment in the way in which Gagarin

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thought about himself, one that led him to reimagine his sense of individual autonomy in favor of a self that was based on a corporate identity and on a relationship with God mediated by spiritual practices rooted in the Jesuit tradition. In July 1843 Gagarin had left his family and was living in Paris, struggling to decide if he should make a retreat with Father Ravignan at St. Acheul. In a series of letters written between July 10 and August 3 Gagarin exposed all of his fears and doubts and described to Ravignan his paralysis in the face of such a momentous decision. Although he continued to pray and receive the sacraments, he claimed that “never had he felt to the same degree such sadness and weakness.” Although “the better part of himself ” accepted that God had called him, he felt drawn to the world, and unable to leave it, the result perhaps of diabolical temptation. Gagarin’s description of himself at this moment recalls the language he used in his journal in the early 1830s, when he complained as well of his weakness and division. But even in this sense of abandonment Gagarin found consolation, comparing himself with Jesus and his struggles with his humanity in the Olive Garden: Tell me if I am mistaken, but the more I study this state of apparent abandonment in which God has left me, the more I believe I am discovering hidden grace. . . . If the will of God is made known to me, if with the better part of myself I adhere to it with full submissiveness, it seems to me that I must not be upset by the rebelliousness of the inferior powers of my soul and of the pain it will cost me to control them. From this point of view it seems that this battle proves nothing against my vocation. On the contrary, the Gospel gives us a divine model [of Jesus] in the garden of Olives, battling with humanity, abandoned for a moment to himself. He said: my Father, let your will and not mine be done! The important thing is that the will of God be accomplished; if there is in us a human will to break in order for the divine will to triumph, this can only be a sacrifice agreeable to God, far from being an obstacle.96

As a young man in his twenties Gagarin had sought to be someone “who knows what he wills and does what he wills.” Such an autonomous self would respond to the political and intellectual world he confronted, but on his own terms. At the end of his spiritual journey this early vocation proved unsatisfying for Gagarin, whose connections with the Catholic milieu of the

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Swetchine circle, and then with the Jesuits, combined with prayer, religious practice, and spiritual exercise, led to a self that surrendered to God. Gagarin’s new self was based on a willingness to forget himself, though the dynamics of this process are complex, insofar as they required him to choose this condition in the first place, to decide to accept God’s grace. This psychological state that involved a willful act to abandon one’s own will is at the heart of Gagarin’s mature identity. He reached this point with the help of a spiritual adviser, Father Ravignan, the first of several Jesuits who led Gagarin through retreats that established and reinforced over the years his priestly identity. First in their correspondence, and then in retreats conducted on the basis of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, Gagarin and Ravignan worked, in Loyola’s terms, at “preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul.” To attain this goal the exercises led retreatants through extended periods of prayer and contemplation, focusing on one’s sins and then following the life of Christ through his ministry, sufferings, and joys. The spiritual adviser was present, but his role was secondary, for “it is more appropriate and far better that the Creator and Lord himself should communicate himself to the devout soul, embracing it with love, inciting it to praise of himself, and disposing it for the way which most enables the soul to serve him in the future.”97 The person who would emerge from such a regime would be fully devoted to God, but only on the basis of an interlude marked by quiet and prayerful introspection, an exploration of the self in relationship to the divine will. Gagarin’s notes from 1843 suggest the importance of the yearly retreats he made as a Jesuit, which allowed him to work through the paradox at the heart of his struggles, to achieve a coherent identity on the basis of his own actions, which was at the same time an identity subservient to the will of God.98 Some of these notes take the form of a report to himself, and possibly to his adviser, on his spiritual state; others are reflections on topics such as the love of God; and still others are personally authored prayers. As in the days when he kept his journal, Gagarin’s writing served to focus his attention inward, but now this self-examination led outward as well, to the Jesuits, and upward to God. In contrast to the turbulence of the early months of 1843, Gagarin described the retreat in August that led to his vows as a Jesuit as marked by feelings “of profound peace, without trouble and without exaltation.” This

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serenity led, in his reflection “on the love of God,” to a capacity for selfsurrender, which Gagarin claims led to a sense of detachment from himself. “We must give ourselves to God completely, but we belong to him already, and in giving ourselves we merely learn this truth. The knowledge of this truth purifies our vision and allows us to contemplate God in everything, in ourselves, in all that surrounds us. This calm, attentive, respectful contemplation shows us God perpetually concerned with us, without being disturbed; we feel the need to consecrate all our actions, our words, our thoughts, to live only in him, without ever ceasing to contemplate his perfections, and thus we come, without difficulty, without effort, with an ineffable sweetness, to a detachment from creatures, and from ourselves.”99 The self that Gagarin constructed as a result of his conversion was in many ways a “complete man” according to the terms he set out for himself in the 1830s—someone with a clear sense of himself and charged with an important mission that touched on the future of his beloved Russia. But in one crucial sense he had moved beyond this earlier formulation, which left no place for a personal God. We will see in chapter 7 how the historian and essayist Ernest Renan moved in precisely the opposite direction in the period 1843–1845, at the seminary of Saint Sulpice, very near the home of Madame Swetchine. Although the Sulpician spirituality in which Renan was trained differed in some ways from the teachings of the Jesuits, both of these traditions emphasized the presence of God as “the absolutely indispensable element of the Catholic vie intérieure.”100 Gagarin was clearly an exceptional individual, but his story reminds us that some individuals, faced with choices about their identities, embraced patterns of self-construction that adapted powerful spiritual traditions to the conditions of the nineteenth century. At least twenty-three editions of the Spiritual Exercises were published in France between 1800 and 1850 and formed the basis for retreats that would address the substantial population of students in Jesuit secondary schools throughout the country.101 Anticlericals were appalled by Jesuit spirituality, as they understood it, as “an assault on individuality and selfhood” and subjected it to vicious attacks throughout the century, as in Eugène Sue’s Wandering Jew.102 The attacks by Jesuit opponents can perhaps be taken as a kind of backhanded compliment, a testimony to the effectiveness of the spiritual formation that was advocated and that was exemplified in the life of Gagarin. But they are also caricatures that represent individuals who become soulless automatons, blindly serving masters who seek world domination. Gagarin looks nothing at all like the mythic figures concocted by the

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anticlericals, although his decision to convert and to join the Jesuits did involve a loss of self. But Gagarin’s letters and notes show us as well an active self, pursuing self-consciously and constantly responding to what he understood to be God’s call. Believers and nonbelievers will differ about the reality of such a call, and historians are not in a position to adjudicate such questions. We can, however, acknowledge the ways in which individuals continued to examine their consciences on the basis of conversation, reflection, prayer, and spiritual exercises, practices that allowed them to construct identities centered on a relationship with God.

5. God and Liberty? Lamennais, Catholicism, and Freedom of Conscience

In the fall of 1835 George Sand set off for Brittany, where she hoped to spend time with the abbé Félicité Lamennais at his retreat in La Chênaie. Sand was in the midst of a personal crisis that involved her marital situation, but also her political commitments and her religious beliefs.1 What did Sand expect to find at La Chênaie? Nothing less than a prophet whose privileged communications with heaven would allow him to resolve the political and the personal anxieties that she confronted. In the end, Sand turned back while on the road, fearing that she was not ready for a visit that she saw as a sacramental occasion. But in a letter to Lamennais from December 1835 she begged him to take on the role of spiritual adviser, to “extend the protective and blessing hand of the one who, living amongst us, has the gift to rebaptize in the name of Christ, and to restore faith to those who have lost it.”2 Sand was not the only person in France who looked to Lamennais for guidance in troubled times. He had achieved celebrity status for the first time in 1817 with his Essay on Indifference (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion), an attack on the principles of 1789 and a critique of religious tolerance. The essay met with an enormous and unexpected response from the reading public, selling forty thousand copies and making Lamennais a principal figure in the Catholic revival of the Bourbon Restoration.3 The publication of Lamennais’s The Words of a Believer (Les paroles d’un croyant) in 1834 provoked an even greater response, with tens of thousands of copies printed and translations appearing in all the major languages. But by 1834 157

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Lamennais was no longer a stalwart defender of the pope and the Roman Catholic Church and instead promoted a Christianity that condemned monarchy, institutional religion, and economic exploitation and called for social justice and democracy.4 After Words of a Believer was explicitly condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in the encyclical Singulari nos (1834), most of Lamennais’s disciples deserted him; by 1835 he had abandoned the priesthood and was in the final stage of his separation from the Catholic Church. The story of Lamennais’s disenchantment with Catholicism is in an obvious way different from the conversions of the Ratisbonne brothers and Ivan Gagarin, who moved into and not away from the Catholic Church. But looking at the series of religious choices Lamennais made in his adult life allows us to explore more fully the ideological stakes involved in crossing religious boundaries. Lamennais is an important figure in the history of religious liberty, known for both defending and then condemning the close alliance of church and state. His religious choices involved personal decisions about belief and belonging, but also political commitments designed to solve the political and social problems raised by the French Revolution. The boundaries between religion and politics were not clearly perceived by Lamennais, who was confused and troubled as he moved into and away from Catholicism. Focusing on the moments when Lamennais made his religious decisions allows us to see the complicated interplay between religious liberty, understood in both its individual and collective senses, and the claims for expanded political rights and social justice that defined much of French public life in this period. Historians are familiar with the powerful role that religion played in French politics, but how was this shifting relationship experienced by someone who identified with Catholicism and came to believe that the church might be failing to live up to its own principles? Lamennais’s transformation has fascinated both contemporaries and scholars, who have seen in him a figure who embodies the religious, political, and social tensions that divided France during the Restoration and July Monarchy.5 Lamennais’s final conversion marked a decision to break once and for all with the conservative politics of the church, but it also shows him moving, hesitantly and anxiously, toward an acceptance of the rights of individual conscience that he had formerly condemned. Lamennais has left a rich body of evidence, both published works and private correspondence, that allows us to follow him along the circuitous path he took into and away from the Catholic Church. Political judgments

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played a central role in Lamennais’s decisions, but these were inextricably bound up with spiritual concerns and personal relationships. In addition to polemical works on church-state relations, Lamennais translated and provided commentary for the most popular edition in the nineteenth century of the classic text in spirituality, The Imitation of Christ. From the intensely personal religion of the Imitation, grounded in direct relationship with Christ, Lamennais could find inspiration and consolation that informed both his entry into and his departure from the Catholic Church. Finally, as he grappled with his political and spiritual dilemmas Lamennais was surrounded by a circle of family and friends, people on whom he depended, many of whom, like Charles de Montalembert, regarded him as a prophet uniquely gifted to explain the tragic events that had begun with the French Revolution of 1789. Breaking with the church meant breaking as well with people who respected and even revered him, a difficult decision that reveals again the personal costs that were paid by those who chose to exercise their religious liberty.

The Making of a Catholic Apologist In 1816 Lamennais made an agonizing decision to become a Catholic priest, following a period of almost ten years in which he struggled with himself, and with his close friends and his brother, about a vocation that both attracted and repelled him. Over the next ten years Lamennais became the most prominent spokesman for the Catholic Restoration in France, known for his vigorous defense of Catholicism as the only possible source of political legitimacy and social order in the chaos that followed the revolutionary era. The early life of Lamennais thus involved two momentous decisions, first to embrace Catholicism as a religion and a social force of inestimable value, and then to devote his life to defending it as a Catholic priest. Lamennais’s final decision to leave Catholicism clearly was an act of religious liberty, but so were the decisions he made earlier in his life to join the church, which paradoxically involved a surrender of his freedom of conscience. Félicité-Robert de Lamennais was born in Saint Malo in 1782, the son of a prosperous merchant and shipbuilder who was ennobled in 1788. We know very little of his early years, but as for so many others of this generation, Lamennais’s education was affected by the disruptions of the revolution. After his mother’s death in 1787 Félicité and his brother, Jean-Marie, were raised by their uncle Robert des Saudrais, who gave his nephews free

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Figure 8. Portrait of Félicité de Lamennais by Paulin Guérin, 1826. Château de Versailles et de Trianon. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

rein to browse in his extensive library. Féli, as he was commonly called by his family and friends, was largely self-educated, teaching himself Greek and reading widely and indiscriminately.6 Jean-Marie decided early on a vocation and was ordained a priest in 1804. For the next thirty years the two brothers would have a close relationship, damaged severely but not completely broken by Féli’s departure from the church in the 1830s. Féli, more brilliant and volatile than his brother, struggled over his future and flirted for some time with the philosophical ideas of Rousseau.7 Finally, in 1804, at the age of twenty-two he received his First Communion and from that point pursued his career as a writer preoccupied with the religious and political questions that divided France throughout his lifetime. Lamennais’s early writings, based on a collaboration with his brother, were polemical interventions that established some of the principal ideas that he would develop throughout the next twenty years: the relationship

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between church and state should mirror that between soul and body, with the former having primacy over the latter, the spiritual over the material; religious authority rather than individual reason is the basis for certainty in both religion and politics; ultimate religious authority resides in the pope; and accepting Gallicanism, which advocated an independent French church, would prevent the universal church from fulfilling its regenerative role in post-revolutionary Europe.8 Lamennais’s intellectual commitments in his early career, vigorous and dogmatic as they were, did not prevent tortured reflections about his personal future. In letters exchanged with his brother and with his friend the abbé Simon Bruté from 1809 through 1816 Féli relentlessly criticized himself for pride and indecisiveness, a form of self-loathing that led him to wish for a life of prayer and solitude as the only way to find inner peace. The spiritual conflict of Lamennais throughout this period revolved around his doubts about ordination to the priesthood, a state in life that simultaneously attracted and repelled him. The first step toward ordination was taken in 1809, when Féli was tonsured, followed by his acceptance into minor orders in December. This initial decision was accompanied by bouts of self-recrimination, but also by periods of spiritual consolation, a pattern repeated over the next seven years as Féli struggled over whether or not to complete his journey. His letter to Bruté in February 1809 expresses his anxieties about his suitability for the priesthood, and how he resolved them. “When I reflect on my past life, full of crises that the most rigorous austerity and the most severe penances would not be able to expiate, and then consider my present state of half-heartedness, lack of conviction, the sensuality that exhausts me, this self-love that cannot be controlled, I am seized with a fear that is only too justified, and I wonder if such an unhappy creature should enter the sanctuary, and if I would be better off prostrating myself at the foot of the temple, like the sinner of the ancient law, less a sinner than myself. One thought nevertheless reassures me a little: I obey the advice of those I must respect, and this is for me a source of hope that a good and merciful God will grant me the help I need.”9 Lamennais’s sense of worthlessness needs to be understood in part as reflecting an Augustinian tradition of spiritual writing in which mankind is viewed as thoroughly corrupted by original sin.10 But recognizing this tradition should not diminish our sense of Lamennais’s view of himself as weak and selfish, a constant theme in his letters. Despite his hesitancy Lamennais was received as a subdeacon in December 1815 at Saint-Sulpice in Paris

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and was ordained at Vannes in 1816.11 How, then, did Féli manage to overcome his self-loathing and finally accept a priestly career? Throughout the period between his tonsure and his ordination Lamennais explored in his letters a complicated psychological condition in which his will was divided between a desire to remain a layman, unworthy as he was of the priesthood, and the obligation to serve the cause of the church and of Christ by accepting ordination. In the face of agonizing self-doubt Lamennais relied on two sources of external authority to direct him: on his friends and family first of all, as suggested briefly in his letter to Bruté, but also on the figure of Christ, whose example of self-sacrifice he constantly referred to as he chose a path contrary to his own inclinations. There is a profound paradox embedded in Lamennais’s final decision in favor of the priesthood, for the apparent surrender of his own judgment about his future was at the same time a forceful assertion of an individual will, an act that could be characterized as both denying and affirming his religious freedom. Throughout the years of indecision Féli was encouraged by his brother, Jean-Marie, and his friend Bruté to take up the cross of his vocation, an argument that they reinforced by invoking the will of God and the saints. When Féli expressed doubts prior to his tonsure in 1809 Bruté wrote that he prayed that the Holy Spirit would enlighten him about God’s will and confessed to having a “a secret fear” that restrained him from adding his “worthless and crude ideas and words to the work, so pure as it is, of the Holy Spirit.” But this was a disingenuous claim, for Bruté immediately proceeded to insist that he and Féli’s brother were joined by Christ and a long list of saints in their conviction that he belonged in the church. “I must tell you in the presence of Our Lord Jesus, of his Holy Mother, of your good angel who will read this letter with you, and mine, who sees me write it, of our patrons and those of the seminary, the great St. Charles, St. Vincent, St. Francis de Sales, I must tell you, kissing yet again the feet of Christ, that I believe you must work for the Church, not only in prayer and solitude, but by study, advice, action, and communications of every kind in support of the active Church.”12 Féli resisted such pressure for several years but never fully abandoned the ultimate goal of ordination; for a time he considered becoming a Trappist monk in Kentucky as a way of fulfilling his vocation but avoiding the role of public activist that Bruté saw as his future.13 Lamennais made the final decision to become a priest under unusual circumstances in 1815. Having fled to London during the hundred days of

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Napoleon, Féli came under the influence of the abbé Guy Carron, an émigré priest who had established a boarding school for girls there in 1792.14 Writing to his brother, Féli described a situation in which he was isolated from his family and friends, and totally dependent on his new spiritual adviser. Still internally conflicted, he was nonetheless determined to obey the commands of Carron. [Providence] tears me from my fatherland, my family, my friends, and from this specter of repose that I pursued to the point of exhaustion, and leads me to the feet of his minister so I might confess my confusion and submit to his will. Glory to God, to his ineffable tenderness, to his incomprehensible goodness, to his adorable love that, among all his creatures, has chosen the most worthless of them in order to make him a minister of his Church. . . . But shame, confusion, profound humiliation to the miserable creature who fled for so long his divine Master, and with horrible obstinacy refused the goodness to serve him. Alas, even in this very moment I feel only too much that if my entire will were not in the hands of my beloved father, if his counsel did not sustain me, if I were not completely resolved to obey without hesitancy his salutary orders, I would fall back into my uncertainty and the bottomless pit from which his charitable hand withdrew me.15

Féli’s friends were delighted with his decision, even while they acknowledged the pain it caused him. Lamennais himself repeatedly compared his decision to accept ordination to Christ’s sacrifice of himself on the cross. In a letter written to Bruté just after receiving his tonsure he breaks into a prayer that expresses his attachment to Christ and his rejection of the world, two principles that at this point in life he accepted without question, even as he found it difficult to embrace them in practice. “Oh what life, what sweetness, what a happy life! My heart delights in being crucified with Jesus through the suffering, contradictions, scorn, ingratitude, hatred, outrage, persecution, and everything that could most crucify my pride and my flesh.”16 Inspired by both his friends and his attachment to Jesus, Lamennais managed eventually to overcome his doubts, though it is hard to avoid a sense that for him ordination was as much an act coerced by spiritual pressure as it was a decision reached on the basis of his own discernment. There is a conspiratorial tone and an almost ghoulish delight in the letter that the

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abbé Carron wrote to Bruté as Lamennais approached his final decision to become a priest: “He won’t escape me; the church will have what belongs to it.”17 In the period that followed his ordination Lamennais did not forget the spiritual crisis through which he passed on his way to the priesthood. His personal struggle with authority surfaces, covered by only the thinnest of veils, in the work that established him as major figure in French intellectual life. When the first volume of the Essay on Indifference appeared in 1817, just one year after Lamennais’s ordination, it created an enormous and unexpected sensation with the reading public. The book sold forty thousand copies and overnight made Lamennais into one of the principal figures in the Catholic revival of the Bourbon Restoration, along with Bonald, Maistre, and Chateaubriand. This was a book that, according to Monsignor Frayssinous, preacher to Louis XVIII and subsequently the grand master of the university, “would wake up a dead man.”18 The Essay on Indifference appealed to readers because of its rhetorical flair and its unequivocal condemnation of freedom and equality, the principles of 1789 that led to the catastrophes of the revolutionary era and the contemporary crisis. Only a rejection of religious indifference, and of the soft-headed tolerance of individual judgment, could restore the social order. In hammering this point in, Lamennais describes the social necessity for unquestioning submission to religious authority with language that recalls his personal crisis and final acceptance of the priesthood. The passion and power in Lamennais’s writing derives not only from his political and religious commitments but from their connection to his own struggle with authority, which continued even after his submission. “[Religion] cannot leave man free to believe and act according to his will; it constrains him to submit his reason to his faith, his desires to his duties, his body to the practices that it imposes. Now, in subjecting in this way the whole man, religion exhausts him, and drives his passions to despair. Never vanquished even when they obey, they work tirelessly to break the yoke that they bear, always murmuring against it. Pride, the father of lies, and eternal enemy of authority, suggests to the mind a crowd of sophistries.”19 To judge by this passage, even after his ordination Lamennais was not fully submissive and was engaged in a constant battle to master his pride and reject his individual impulses. This same conflict shows up as well in his translation of The Imitation of Christ, accompanied by an extensive commentary, which appeared in

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1824.20 In the history of spirituality the Imitation was a central text in the late medieval movement of renewal known as the devotio moderna. The Imitation emphasizes the importance of inner reflection on the life of Christ, and the constant struggle involved in battling with the self in pursuit of Christian perfection.21 In chapter 9 it calls for obedience and the renunciation of one ’s own inclinations, a topic that led Lamennais to one of his most extended comments, which he concluded with an unqualified endorsement of external authority: “No order in the world, no life without obedience: it is the bond between men, and between men and God, the foundation of peace and the principle of universal harmony. . . . In obeying the Pope, the Prince, the father, anyone who is the minister of God for the good (Romans XIII, 1), it is God whom one obeys.” From Lamennais’s perspective, only in such apparent self-abnegation does one really become free, for “delivered from the slavery of error and passion, from the slavery of man, he enjoys the true liberty of the children of God (Romans VIII: 21).”22 Ten years after the publication of The Imitation of Christ, Montalembert would refer precisely to this passage in urging his friend and mentor to submit to the church, surrender his personal judgment, and obey the pope in acknowledging his errors. As we shall see, Lamennais refused this appeal, for he had by then come to a very different understanding of religious liberty. Lamennais pushed very far in imagining how far the state, informed by Catholicism, could extend its reach into the lives of its citizens. At one point in the Essay on Indifference he insists that “private actions, habits, must also be regulated by laws that, penetrating to the heart of man, establish order in his thoughts and feelings; because feelings and thoughts are the principle and motive of all human actions.”23 Although Lamennais never overtly attacked the freedom of conscience as such, this passage suggests how deeply he resisted individual religious liberty, a principle he had rejected in his own life only after a long and painful struggle, and that he saw as endangering the salvation of souls and the social order.

The Making of a Catholic Renegade Almost twenty years after the initial crisis leading to his ordination Lamennais faced another wrenching decision as he moved away from the church that he had defended so passionately for two decades. Lamennais’s religious choices continued to be inextricably tied to the political and religious context,

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but the situation in 1830 looked very different from that of the Napoleonic empire and Bourbon Restoration. From the perspective of both Napoleon and the Bourbons, the political and social order that dissolved during the Revolution of 1789 required the close cooperation of church and state, reflected in the concordat negotiated by Napoleon in 1801 and honored by the Bourbons after they returned to France in 1814. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution of 1830 the July Monarchy at first seemed willing to break from the alliance of throne and altar.24 As we saw in chapter 1, under the revised charter Catholicism lost its position as the official state religion, a policy that was accompanied by a great deal of popular hostility directed at the church. In Paris the archepiscopal palace was sacked by rioters during the “three glorious days” of July that brought down the Bourbons in 1830. Archbishop Quélen was forced into hiding, and for months priests were afraid to wear their Roman collars in public. Religious rioting was renewed on February 14, 1831, when the palace was sacked again, along with the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois following a ceremony commemorating the death of the duc de Berry, the Bourbon prince who had been murdered in 1820. The government reacted slowly to these assaults, leading to recriminations that it was unwilling to defend the persons and property of the church.25 How might the Catholic Church understand and respond to such popular hostility? For Lamennais and his colleagues, the anticlerical violence that swept through Paris in 1830–1831 was the price being paid by the church for its bargain with the Bourbon monarchy, a choice that put it on the wrong side of history and compromised Christ’s message of equality, charity, and justice. In order to win back the people, the church would need to take up its call for liberty and abandon its traditional alliance with kings. This fundamental agenda of “God and Liberty” was proudly declared on the masthead of L’Avenir, the paper guided by Lamennais in the aftermath of the July Revolution, which attracted international attention because of the notoriety of its leader and the revolutionary nature of its appeal. From October 1830 to November 1831 L’Avenir served as a call to arms for reform-minded Catholics, and a frightening threat for conservatives desperate to maintain the social order. For Lamennais and his associates, the revolutionary movement that spread from Paris in the summer of 1830 revealed the inexorable movement of history, a providentially determined process that would overturn thrones in favor of democratic regimes. The Catholic Church had a special responsibility at this moment, to abandon its ties to decadent and oppressive

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power structures and to associate itself with the cause of liberty. But beyond the slogan “God and Liberty,” and the broad proposal of an alliance between Catholicism and liberal movements, what did liberty mean for Lamennais, and how was freedom in general related to the right of religious liberty? And finally, how can we explain Lamennais’s personal transformation, and what might it suggest about the experience of religious liberty in the age of revolution? The freedom at the center of the program of L’Avenir was first of all the collective right of the church to operate without any constraint from the state.26 In the first article that appeared in the paper, Lamennais insisted on the freedom of the church as an institution, which he linked to the issues of freedom of education and the press. Religious liberty meant the separation of church and state, which in turn implied that Catholics should be allowed to open schools unsupervised by the monopoly of the state university, and to publish freely.27 Freedom of education and the press were the most important domestic issues for both the journal and the Agence générale pour la défense de la liberté religieuse, an organization formed under the same leadership as L’Avenir and dedicated to defend religious liberty in the political sphere and the courts.28 All of these freedoms defended by Lamennais and his colleagues went well beyond what the July Monarchy was willing to accept, for while the revised charter demoted the Catholic Church, it retained the concordat, the university, and the right of censorship. The state still exercised enormous control over the church through its power of appointment and control of the purse strings; it continued to enforce its monopoly over secondary and higher education; and it monitored and at times suppressed public criticism of its policies. Freedom was more than an abstract cause for Lamennais and L’Avenir. Within two months of its first issue copies of the paper were seized for inciting hatred against the government. The articles in question challenged the right of the government to nominate bishops and condemned state officials for failing to defend churches from violent assaults. In January 1831 Lamennais was put on trial, along with Henri Lacordaire (1802–1861), a young Catholic priest who had become a principal collaborator on and one of the most frequent contributors to the journal.29 The trial was a dramatic event that drew a packed courtroom in the Palais de Justice in the heart of Paris, where the prosecutor M. Berville and Lamennais’s lawyer Eugène Janvier battled with each other over the issue of church-state relations, with frequent

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interruptions by the crowd. Late in the evening Lacordaire made an impassioned speech in which he described his own religious conversion from a skeptical lycéen to a Catholic priest, and then to his attachment to Lamennais and his ideas. An exhausted Lamennais was unable to speak on his own behalf, a condition that Janvier described as due to his genius, and he warned the jury as it departed “to take care that posterity not hold them to account for an unforgivable result.”30 Finally, at midnight, the jury rendered its verdict, with Lamennais acquitted and Lacordaire given a slap-on-the-wrist fine. Lamennais judged the result “a triumph for the Catholic cause.”31 The issue of freedom of education also produced a dramatic court case, when Lacordaire and Charles de Montalembert (1810–1861) opened a school on the rue des Beaux-Arts without the authorization of the university. This initiative was clearly intended to provoke the authorities, who shut down the school after just a few days and prosecuted its directors. This proved a more complicated matter than the state had anticipated, for soon after the school was closed in May 1831 the Count de Montalembert died, passing to his son Charles his title and his seat in the House of Peers. This meant that Charles de Montalembert could be tried only by his colleagues in the upper house of the French legislature. A young man, totally committed to the liberal Catholic agenda, Montalembert was devoted to Lamennais, who was his confessor as well as his political mentor. His speech in the Senate on September 19 in defense of freedom of education was a tour de force of romantic rhetoric in which he presented himself as a devout and humble young man, awed by the assembly but also driven by a fervent attachment to his Catholic faith and the freedom promised by the charter and now denied by the government.32 As with the prosecution of L’Avenir, a guilty verdict was accompanied by a modest fine, and Montalembert took his place alongside Lacordaire as a prominent public figure in the campaign for religious liberty. Through these moral victories Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert became major figures on the political stage in France as a powerful triumvirate, a mature sage supported by two impassioned young men, fighting to create a new world based on the shocking and exhilarating idea of marrying Catholicism to liberalism.33 Although this program was eventually and perhaps inevitably condemned by the institutional church, it is worth recalling that Lamennais and L’Avenir were frequently on the same side as the generally conservative episcopacy. In the aftermath of the Parisian attack on Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois,

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Lamennais’s paper condemned the government for its failure to defend the church, and in general for allowing “their faith, their prayers, their priests to be subjected to an inquisition by mayors and prefects, their crosses destroyed, their feast days regulated by ministerial circulars, their children brutalized by the university, their bishops named by deists, or by even more determined enemies.”34 L’Avenir was particularly outspoken in defending the authority of bishops over the administration of sacraments, most dramatically in the case of the abbé Grégoire in 1831. Grégoire had been the most prominent defender of the Constitutional Church created in the early days of the French Revolution, and unlike many of its proponents had never reconciled with Rome following the concordat. As he approached death Grégoire was living in the commune of Abbaye-aux-Bois in the diocese of Paris, under the jurisdiction of Archbishop Quélen. Despite Quélen’s prohibition Grégoire was able to find a priest who administered to him the Last Sacraments. A furious Quélen then tried to prevent a Catholic funeral service, but under the personal direction of Prime Minister Casimir Périer the church at Abbaye-auxBois was forcibly entered, and a Mass was said over Grégoire’s body by sympathetic clergy. L’Avenir responded to this series of events with an article condemning the state’s behavior as sacrilegious and using the scandal as another opportunity to defend the liberty of the church.35 Lamennais was eventually embittered by what he considered unfair treatment by the church hierarchy, and he was certainly naïve in his hope that the pope and the bishops would support his liberal agenda. Nonetheless, his sense of religious liberty did lead him to defend the rights of the church in terms that even his most vociferous opponents could appreciate, suggesting some common ground, though not covering the amount of territory envisaged by Lamennais. Despite L’Avenir’s support for episcopal prerogatives, and for freedom of Catholic education, Quélen and the vast majority of the episcopacy were deeply suspicious of Lamennais and his colleagues. As Lamennais made clear in his paper, the separation of church and state would, after all, mean the abolition of the ecclesiastical budget, the end of all state financial support for the church.36 How would the clergy survive, how would churches be maintained in such a world? Would ordinary Catholics be able to provide the support needed? And weren’t clerical salaries a necessary and just compensation for the state seizure of church property during the revolution? Beyond such institutional concerns, the bishops also feared the revolutionary rhetoric of Lamennais. While he foresaw a Catholic and democratic revival, the

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bishops feared a return of the violence and dechristianization of the 1790s. These hopes and fears were based not only on memories of the great revolution just one generation past but on the new revolutionary wave that struck in 1830.

Catholic Freedom and Political Liberty, 1830–1833

France was not alone in facing revolutionary change in 1830. As the editors of L’Avenir looked around Europe and beyond they found several examples that proved to them that the marriage of Catholicism and liberty was already at work, generating religious fervor and mobilizing democratic movements. The signs of the time were clear: Europe had reached a providentially determined turning point that was troubled and even violent but would soon produce a revived religious and political order inspired by the Catholic principles advocated by the prophet Lamennais and developed in L’Avenir. Four years before Tocqueville analyzed the separation of church and state in Democracy in America Lacordaire praised the Catholic Church in the United States as an “unprecedented marvel,” able to flourish precisely because it was independent of all state control.37 Ireland and Belgium were other examples trumpeted by L’Avenir as examples of the successful union of Catholicism and liberalism. In the 1820s the Catholic clergy and the layman Daniel O’Connell mobilized the Irish population and succeeded in forcing the British government to grant Irish Catholics political and civil rights in 1829. To the north of France French-speaking Catholics resented the rule of William I, the Protestant king of the United Netherlands. Their rebellion that began in Brussels in August 1830 led eventually to an independent Belgium in which freedom of education was guaranteed.38 But the most dramatic and ultimately tragic example of the alliance between Catholicism and liberty was the Polish rebellion that began in November 1830. From the perspective of L’Avenir this uprising was a battle of Polish Roman Catholics against a Russian Orthodox tyrant, demonstrating the perfect congruence between the causes of political and religious liberty. Montalembert took the lead in praising the “holy revolution of the Polish,” which succeeded at first in driving the Russian troops out of Warsaw. Freed from the “barbarous schismatic despot,” Poland would soon become a “new Catholic republic” and along with Ireland and Belgium presented a sign that “Europe will recover its political and religious balance.”39 By early 1831,

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however, as Russian troops advanced on Warsaw, the fate of Catholic Poland was being redefined in the pages of L’Avenir. Lacordaire adopted an apocalyptic tone as he foresaw the defeat of the Catholic revolution, which he linked to the continuing threats directed against Belgium: “Catholics! Your hour has come. You will show yourselves unshakable in your love for the faith of your fathers and for the liberty of which Belgium and Poland have made you the first-born of the nineteenth century. When the swarms of barbarians throw into the grave the civilization which you created a thousand years ago, be not afraid, and trust in your immortality. Know that great suffering is required for great accomplishments. Perhaps Europe will be crushed anew, but this will be done so that it might be brought together in a new combination, as has been written by a man of genius.”40 The genius Lacordaire referred to was Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet whose combination of Catholic zeal and nationalism brought him the admiration, not to say adulation, of Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert. I will come back to the Polish cause later, as it played a major role in the next stage of Lamennais’s religious crisis, when Pope Gregory XVI condemned the rebellion and called on Polish Catholics to accept the rule of Tsar Nicholas I. But in 1831 Lamennais and his circle still believed that the Catholic Church was the natural ally of Polish nationalism. The freedom of the Catholic Church to teach and publish apart from state interference and the freedom of Catholic people to govern themselves, these were the issues that defined religious liberty for Lamennais and L’Avenir.41 Freedom of conscience, understood as the right of an individual to choose a religion, never came into clear focus throughout the lifetime of the paper. Lamennais employs the term loosely, without clearly distinguishing freedom of conscience from freedom of religion in his programmatic article on the “Doctrines of L’Avenir” from December 1831: “In order that there be no confusion over our thought, we ask first of all for the freedom of conscience or the freedom of religion, complete, universal, without distinction or privilege; and consequently, in what concerns us as Catholics, the total separation of Church and State.”42 Only one article takes up explicitly the topic of liberté de conscience, a piece by the abbé Gerbet, another of Lamennais’s intellectual soul mates, who operates on a much more abstract plane than is typical of the journal. Gerbet attempts to illuminate the admittedly obscure nature of this doctrine by distinguishing sharply between “indifference” and “toleration.” Moving very far from Lamennais’s position in 1817,

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Gerbet insists that “civil tolerance in no way implies religious indifference, or the negation of obligatory moral beliefs.” But the “interior obligation to profess the true religion” can be enforced only by the moral sanctions of the church, and not at all by the state, “because it is Catholic doctrine that civil penalties should never emanate from spiritual authority. To deny this would be to deny radically the very distinction of the two powers, consistently maintained in the traditions of the Church.” Beyond this philosophical position, Gerbet sketches a historical evolution in which the medieval church called on the state to enforce moral law because of the immaturity of the European people, “a regime which must cease when they have arrived at the age of maturity, that is to say, when they have become capable of doing for themselves what previously could only be done by the fathers of the great family.” Gerbet’s analysis, though implicitly based on the rights of individual conscience to be protected from state interference, nonetheless continues to focus on the relationship between church and state and, like the work of his colleagues, never engages with the issue of personal religious choice. Lamennais summed up this political preoccupation in an essay on “religious liberty” published late in the summer of 1831, as he looked back on the momentous events in Europe over the past year. The mobilization of Catholics in Ireland, Belgium, and Poland showed Lamennais that “political liberty is inseparably tied to and can only be affirmed and developed through religious liberty.”43 The phrasing here is significant, for it suggests that religious liberty, while a principle concern, is nonetheless instrumental, aimed at achieving the ultimate goal of political liberty. Lamennais never abandoned his passion for politics, and he remained convinced that religious liberty required the separation of church and state. But between 1832 and 1836 he came to believe that religious liberty was threatened not only when the state interfered with the church but also when the church interfered with the individual conscience. This expanded view of religious liberty, however, came about precisely because of his battle with the Catholic Church over political questions. The rights of individual conscience became a prominent theme in his private correspondence, but they assumed greater importance as well in his public writings. Lamennais continued to insist on the need for political democracy and social justice, achieved through a religious and moral revolution that was first preached by Christ. But his personal and painful battle with the church led him to insist on the right of individual judgment, the principle he began his career by denying.

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The story of Lamennais’s confrontation with the Catholic hierarchy has been told many times, in large part because of the personal drama involved in his prolonged effort to convince Pope Gregory XVI and his advisers to embrace the cause of liberty and popular sovereignty. Lamennais wrote his own bitter account of his break with the church in Affaires de Rome (1836), but we have as well the extensive correspondence he carried out throughout the period 1831–1836 with the pope and his advisers, and with his close friends and collaborators. These sources show how Lamennais’s final break with Catholicism did not occur all at once, nor on the basis of a single catalytic event. In his correspondence of the early 1830s Lamennais shifts back and forth, sometimes hopeful, sometimes despairing, as he sought approval from Rome and, when this was not forthcoming, pursued toleration rather than condemnation for his position. In some letters written during his several months in residence in the papal city Lamennais is deeply pessimistic, viewing the hierarchy as dominated by political interests, the same position he takes in Affaires. In February 1832 he wrote to Charles de Coux that “Russia is all-powerful at the Vatican, and its policies dominate all church affairs. It is the final stage of the degradation of the Church; and since it cannot continue to exist in this state of abject slavery, it is certain that we are bordering on an immense revolution whose result will be the liberation of Catholicism. It will be preceded by great evils and bloody catastrophes; after which will come a regenerating Pope [Pape régénérateur].”44 Austrian spies managed to intercept this letter, which was then passed on to the Vatican. This practice became common in the spring of 1832, part of a concerted effort by the Austrian chancellor Metternich to discredit Lamennais with the pope, who was apparently eager to read these private letters.45 Lamennais’s virulent critique of the Catholic hierarchy, even while he sought an audience with the pope and avowed himself a loyal subject, made him appear duplicitous and figured in the final decision to condemn his doctrines in the encyclical Mirari vos, of August 1832. But prior to the issuance of this decision Lamennais never entirely lost hope in his situation and at times believed that the pope would resist the pressure to condemn his doctrines, thus ensuring his ability to continue to work for “God and liberty” in a renewed version of L’Avenir. He was particularly upbeat following an audience with the pope on March 13, 1832. After the ritual genuflections and the kissing of Gregory’s feet the pope chatted amiably about common friends and family members, blessed some rosaries, and sent Lamennais and his

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friends on their way. Although the pope never came close to discussing substantive ideas and the status of Lamennais’s appeal, his friendly reception suggested that Rome would forgo an outright condemnation, leaving the editors of L’Avenir free to continue their work.46 Lamennais was thoroughly mistaken in this assessment of his case. Throughout the spring of 1832 a council of five experts convoked by Gregory XVI to formulate a response to Lamennais’s appeal for a papal judgment drafted memoranda that called for an outright condemnation of the doctrines of L’Avenir.47 In July 1832 thirteen French bishops, led by Monsignor D’Astros of Toulouse, submitted a blistering attack that condemned the principle of separation of church and state and the freedoms defended by Lamennais and accused him of sowing divisions in the French church, where the young clergy were being seduced by a false prophet. Both the Roman experts and the French bishops targeted the political dangers of Lamennais’s agenda, but the French objections also focused on Lamennais’s “common sense” theology, his view that religious certainty was based first of all on the principle of universal consent.48 In their view, this doctrine denied that the Catholic Church provided exclusive access to essential religious truths and thus made Catholicism subservient to “common sense.” Although Lamennais was not blind to the power of the opposition, when he departed Rome in July 1832 he was convinced that his mission had at least achieved a modest success. Writing to Charles de Coux, Lamennais asserted that “our mission here is finished. It has confirmed our orthodoxy and left us perfectly free to act as we think the best.”49 After stops at Florence and Venice Lamennais and Montalembert reached Munich in August, where they were later joined by Lacordaire and greeted warmly by an imposing circle of Catholic intellectuals that included Joseph Görres, Franz von Baader, and Ignaz von Döllinger. But it was at Munich that the blow fell, when the encyclical Mirari vos arrived, accompanied by a letter from Cardinal Pacca, the secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Inquisition. The encyclical itself never mentions Lamennais by name, and not all the positions condemned by Gregory were part of L’Avenir’s agenda. For example, Lamennais never criticized clerical celibacy nor advocated the marriage of priests, positions explicitly condemned in the encyclical. Nonetheless, the absolute rejection of the separation of church and state, the condemnation of freedom of the press, and the insistence that people obey their rulers clearly targeted Lamennais. Pacca’s letter removed any doubt in the minds

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of Lamennais and his followers that the pope had rejected their ideas and the program of L’Avenir.50 Lamennais’s immediate reaction was to submit, a decision that was published in several journals in September 1832, after his return to Paris. The language employed in the public announcement was unequivocal in its acceptance of papal authority: “The undersigned editors of L’Avenir . . . convinced according to the encyclical of August 15, 1832 of the Sovereign Pontiff Gregory XVI that they are unable to continue their work without placing themselves in opposition to the formal will of the one whom God has charged to govern his Church, believe it their duty as Catholics to declare that, respectfully submissive to the supreme authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, they abandon the field on which they have fought loyally for two years.”51 Based on his private correspondence in the months following the publication of Mirari vos, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Lamennais’s acceptance of the papal decision. In letters to his fellow editors Lamennais even seems relieved; liberated from an exhausting public controversy, he could now take up a quiet life of study in his beloved retreat at La Chênaie, in Brittany. This is not to say that Lamennais now rejected the principles he had avowed in L’Avenir nor abandoned his prophetic tone. Writing to the Comtesse de la Senfft, he insisted as before that kings and emperors were on their way out, that the transition to a new order would be painful, and that in the end “we will see Christ again, Christ the savior, Christ the liberator, Christ who takes pity on the poor, the weak, and who breaks the sword of their oppressors.”52 On other occasions Lamennais struggled to retain his faith in a better future. To Father Ventura (1792–1861), the superior general of the Theatines and one of Lamennais’s few supporters in Rome, he wrote that “the heavens are dark, the storm approaches . . . but perhaps God himself has placed his fingers over the eyes of some, so they would not see, and the ears of others, so they would not hear, in order that what must happen will happen. Time will tell.”53 All of these sentiments, however, were expressed only in private, as Lamennais continued to honor his promise to cease publishing ideas condemned by the pope. At first Rome was pleased with Lamennais’s acquiescence; Cardinal Pacca informed him that his statement of September had satisfied the pope, that “this measure was the one that was expected of you.”54 But if Rome was satisfied, Metternich was not, and neither were the French bishops, who were convinced that Lamennais had in no way altered his opinions. Metternich’s

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agents continued to pass to Rome letters intercepted from the circle of Mennaisiens, including one from Montalembert, that showed them stubbornly holding to their views, even while they kept silent in public. The bishop of Toulouse insisted that Lamennais’s statement was not a retraction, and that his followers claimed that the encyclical was not binding on Catholics because it concerned matters not of faith and morals but of politics.55 Pressure from France prodded Gregory to write to the bishops of Toulouse and Rennes, expressing his disappointment that Lamennais had not gone further in his first statement and submitted wholly and without reservation to Mirari vos.56 Lamennais was furious that his initial submission, and its apparent acceptance by the pope, had ultimately proved insufficient in the face of a concerted effort by his enemies, who were interested only in an unconditional surrender. But for all his bitterness and frustration, he continued to seek some accommodation, which at one point involved lengthy and apparently friendly conversations with Monsignor Quélen, the archbishop of Paris. In the end, however, differences on the meaning of religious liberty, in both its political and personal dimensions, made it impossible for Lamennais to remain a Catholic priest, or even a Catholic. At first it was the Roman commitment to authoritarian regimes, and in particular the papal condemnation of the Polish rebellion, that pushed Lamennais to see that the Catholic Church could not fulfill the emancipatory role he saw as its providential mission. But this profound difference on a political question was accompanied by a second conflict that in the end separated Lamennais not only from the church but also from his own past, as he struggled and ultimately failed to reconcile his duty to obey with his emerging sense of the right of individual conscience. The papal letter to the Polish bishops of June 9, 1832, is the first of the “pièces justificatives” that Lamennais included in Affaires de Rome, an indication of how important this issue was to him as he worked out his relationship with the church. In a long and crucial letter that he wrote to Father Ventura in January 1833, Lamennais reflected on the previous six months and acknowledged that as a result of his stay at Rome “my ideas have changed in many ways, have been modified on some points, and are not entirely fixed on others. From the time I saw Rome up close, it is no longer for me what it used to be, and I am not alone in this.” Clearly Lamennais was disgusted by the ways in which rumor and innuendo shaped decisions, and by the power

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wielded by men for whom religious matters were secondary to politics, and to their careers. But it was the Polish question that served as the focal point for his resentment, and as the starting point for his break from Rome. “The first thing that made me reflect profoundly was the letter to the Polish bishops, gone over and corrected by the Cardinal Gagarin, the delegate of His Holiness the Emperor Nicolas, who had just sent 25,000 Catholics to the Caucasus without a single priest, and suppressed 192 Polish convents, all of the seigneurial chapels, and all the seminaries, except one, in Wilna, whose rector is a known spy.” From this reflection Lamennais went on to conclude that the church was now governed by men who, “indifferent to all principles, have temporal interests as their only goal.”57 The attachment of Rome to an old regime of despots continued to trouble Lamennais throughout 1833, with Poland as the most dramatic example of Catholic complicity with tyranny. The arrival in Paris of hundreds of Polish refugees, and in particular of the poet Adam Mickiewicz, kept the Polish cause alive for Lamennais and his colleagues, horrified by stories of Nicholas’s repression following the Russian victory of October 1832. It was sympathy for Catholic Poland that led Lamennais to break his silence and publish a “Hymn to Poland” at the conclusion of Montalembert’s translation of Mickiewicz’s Book of Polish Pilgrims (Livre des pèlerins polonais), which first appeared in May 1833. Both Lamennais and Montalembert were moved by Mickiewicz’s biblical language, and his evocation of a Poland that would redeem the nations of the world through its sacrifice, just as Christ had redeemed individual men.58 In a lengthy preface Montalembert made no reference to the papal letter that had called on the Polish people to submit to Nicolas and instead described him as a cruel and illegitimate tyrant. Moreover, Montalembert drew a direct line from Poland to France, suggesting that the suffering of the Polish exiles mirrored the experience of those in France who had also been silenced and excluded, a clear reference to Lamennais and his followers, condemned in Mirari vos: “The dominant ideas of [The Book of Polish Pilgrims] have an application more general than might at first appear, and they can be adapted clearly to the position of France and Europe. . . . Perhaps there are more exiles than one might think in modern society; perhaps it includes many pilgrims who walk sadly towards a murky future; souls banished after hard battles, from their youthful enthusiasm, their old faith, their most honorable feelings, their most legitimate hopes, and who search with uncertainty an unknown refuge.”59 The publication of The Book

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of Polish Pilgrims was a principal item in Gregory’s October letter to the bishop of Rennes, in which he called on Lamennais “to follow uniquely and absolutely the doctrine exposed in our encyclical letter . . . and to desist from writing or approving anything that does not conform to this doctrine.”60 Gregory’s attempt to discipline Lamennais marks an important point in which the political argument leads inexorably to one about the extent of papal authority over an individual conscience. This was familiar territory to Lamennais, who had devoted himself to the ultramontane cause throughout his career, but in the extended crisis of the early 1830s he came, after much painful soul searching, to see that papal authority could be abused. This recognition led in turn to an assertion of his freedom of conscience, the individual dimension of religious liberty that had previously remained in the background of his life and thought.

Testing the Limits of Freedom of Conscience, 1832–1836 Individual religious liberty had not been a major concern for Lamennais and L’Avenir; it figured not at all, for example, in the “mémoire” that Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert submitted to the pope in defense of their position in February 1832.61 But Mirari vos attacked nonetheless “that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. . . . Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.”62 However one interprets the precise meaning of “freedom of conscience” in this text, it can be seen as a justification for the pressure the hierarchy brought to bear on Lamennais, pushing him to abjure his principles. For almost a year after the submission of September 1832 Lamennais avoided both public comment on religious questions and any further communication with Rome. But in August 1833 he wrote the first of his three letters to Gregory. Lamennais’s particular goal at this point was to save the schools of the Brothers of Christian Instruction, a congregation founded by his brother, Jean, which was threatened because of its association with a possible heretic. Lamennais concluded his letter with two declarations. First, he acknowledged that “because it belongs only to the

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Head of the Church to judge that which is good and useful to it, I have resolved to remain in the future, in my writing and my acts, totally apart from matters that touch it.” He then avowed that “no one, thanks to God, is more submissive than me, in the bottom of his heart and without any reservation, to all the decisions that emanate from the Holy Apostolic See on the doctrine of faith and morals, as well as the disciplinary powers held by its sovereign authority.” Lamennais came to this position only after he had “questioned his conscience,” which assured him that accusations that he was acting in bad faith had no merit.63 Lamennais may have hoped that this statement would settle matters, but it was far from doing so. Instead, it was read by his enemies as an equivocation, an attempt to draw his own lines between politics and religion, and between papal authority and the individual conscience. A subsequent letter, written in November, only served to make the Vatican even more suspicious, as Lamennais combined his commitment neither to write nor approve anything that was contrary to the apostolic tradition as promulgated by the church with an assertion that carved out significant space for disagreement. Tellingly, Lamennais claimed that “my conscience makes it a duty” to draw a distinction, so that “if with regard to religion the Christian must only listen and obey, he remains, with regard to the spiritual power, entirely free in his opinions, his works, and his actions in the temporal order.”64 Between August and November “conscience” had taken on a new and more active role for Lamennais, for it was no longer being interrogated prior to an action but was now compelling him to act. It is shocking to read the third and final letter that Lamennais wrote to Gregory XVI on December 11, given his increasingly robust sense of the duty to resist imposed by his conscience. Although he had been discussing a long explanatory note with Archbishop Quélen, in which his previous position was spelled out in more detail, he wrote instead (in Latin) a note of less than fifty words saying that he “accepted absolutely the doctrine of [Mirari vos], and would neither write nor approve anything that contradicted it.”65 By this time, however, financial stress and the opposition of his local bishop in Rennes, who suspended him from priestly functions, had brought Lamennais to Paris. Living with Gerbet in a poorly furnished apartment on the rue de Vaugirard, Lamennais was in poor health, suffering from “violent spasms, fever every night, no sleep,” as he wrote to his friend the Marquis de Coriolis.66 When a hostile letter from Cardinal Pacca arrived in late November, in

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the midst of his conversations with Quélen, Lamennais was exhausted and in despair. Giving up, he abjured his position because, as he wrote to Montalembert three weeks later, he sought “peace at any price.” At that point, he admitted that he would have signed any statement at all, even “the declaration that the Pope is God, the great God of heaven and earth, and that he alone must be adored.” But this “deification” of the pope “would have been invincibly loathsome to my conscience.” Reflecting on his situation, Lamennais was led to “very great doubts on several points of Catholicism, doubts which, far from weakening, have only grown stronger.”67 Throughout 1833, while Lamennais was struggling with Rome, he was also writing The Words of a Believer, the book that led to his definitive break with the church. Influenced by both the prophets of the Old Testament and Mickiewicz’s Book of Polish Pilgrims, The Words of a Believer is a series of short prose poems aimed at a popular audience, a passionate appeal for Christian solidarity as the basis for a new world of political liberty and social justice. Lamennais knew that this text would provoke a papal reaction, but “the abominable system of despotism that is developing everywhere disgusts me so much that at this moment silence on my part would be as infamous as direct approval.”68 Certainly Lamennais still had Poland in mind, but in France as well the early 1830s were years of danger in which popular movements inspired by the July Revolution pushed against an increasingly repressive regime. A republican-inspired uprising in Paris, later to be memorialized in Hugo’s Les misérables, left more than one hundred dead in June 1832. Socialist ideas circulated in the press and helped inspire a massive strike in the silk industry of Lyon in 1834, followed by an armed uprising suppressed by the army. In its efforts to gain control the government passed legislation severely restricting freedom of association and the press in 1834, measures that were particularly odious to Lamennais.69 At the same time, in March 1834, the Catholic hierarchy, through the offices of Archbishop Quélen, once again renewed its efforts to push Lamennais to declare his “perfect obedience” and “inviolable devotion” to the pope.70 Exasperated and angry at himself for his recent surrender, as well as at the church for its unrelenting assault, Lamennais resolved “to save my conscience and my honor,” as he wrote to Montalembert, by publishing his incendiary book.71 The Words of a Believer was an enormous success, surpassing even the triumph of the Essay on Indifference. Within months tens of thousands of copies had been printed, with translations appearing in all the major European

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languages.72 One correspondent reported to Lamennais that people were renting copies in a lending library near the Odéon and reading it by the hour.73 Franz Liszt could not contain himself in his letter to Lamennais, whom he had befriended earlier in the year: “Sublime, prophetic, divine! . . . From this moment on, it is evident . . . that the Christianity of the nineteenth century, that is to say the entire religious and political future of humanity, is in you.”74 Such over-the-top enthusiasm was matched, unsurprisingly, by the horrified response of the Catholic hierarchy. The abbé Garibaldi, chargé d’affaires of the Holy See at Paris, filed his first report to Rome on the very day that Words appeared, the first of several that pilloried the work as the result of a “profoundly malicious calculation,” condemned its democratic tendencies, and compared it unfavorably to the Koran.75 The papal nuncio at Venice, Monsignor Orsini, wrote of Metternich’s consternation, and Cardinal Lambruschini, the pope’s secretary of state, provided a scathing report that informed Gregory’s condemnation of Words in his June encyclical, Singulari nos. Gregory XVI’s encyclical was vitriolic, accusing the “wretched author” of betraying his oath and composing a book that though “small in size is enormous in wickedness.”76 For all its venom, the analysis in Singulari nos is nonetheless accurate in identifying as principal themes of Words the condemnation of monarchy and the prediction of a popular revolution that would destroy it. In one startling scene Lamennais imagines seven kings participating in a black Mass, where they drink blood from a skull at an altar, curse Christ, and conspire to subvert the clergy to preach submission to their will.77 Monarchs will eventually fall, he contends, but only after a terrible period of “great terrors and wailing,” when “men will be seized with a thirst for blood and adoration of death.”78 Lamennais might well have pled guilty as charged to the papal complaint that Words had as its goal “to dissolve the bonds of all public order and to weaken all authority.” The papal condemnation was correct as well in its judgment that Lamennais had consciously adopted the role of prophet and used scriptures and references to Jesus and the Trinity in order to provide a religious sanction for revolution. Lamennais claimed that because he refrained from any specific reference to the Catholic Church, he was still complying with his oath not to deal with matters of faith and morals, but his political vision is nonetheless rooted in a messianic and even millenarian form of Christianity.79 The Words of a Believer is a political and religious tract that describes a decomposing monarchical system that will be replaced by a Christian community

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defined by mutual love, social solidarity, and justice. To judge by this text Lamennais was only marginally concerned with freedom of conscience as an individual right as he worked through his religious ideas in the critical years of 1832–1836.80 But as Lamennais expected, this open challenge to papal authority meant that, for him and his friends, the issue of freedom of conscience in relationship to the church could not be avoided. Could Lamennais still act as a priest, or even consider himself a Catholic, given his decision to flout papal authority with a book that would draw enormous attention, and raise obvious questions about his religious commitments? Charles de Montalembert was the most devoted of Lamennais’s followers, loyal to the master even when others, including Lacordaire, began abandoning him in the aftermath of Mirari vos. Their struggle to reconcile obedience and liberty in the 1830s reveals an odd symmetry with the crisis that had led to Lamennais’s ordination twenty years earlier. Once again Lamennais was challenged by those closest to him to abandon his own will and submit to the authority of the church. And the abbé Bruté made another appearance as well, trying again to win his old friend for the church, as he had when Lamennais was pondering the priesthood. The arguments of Montalembert and Bruté recall those of the earlier crisis, and in a sense so does Lamennais’s response, made through a prolonged and painful dialogue with his friends and himself about his obligations to his conscience and his church. Their exchanges offer us a privileged position from which to observe how these individuals grasped religious liberty as an intellectual problem, but also as an existential choice at a decisive moment in their lives, and in the history of European Catholicism. In the days just following the appearance of Mirari vos, the first condemnation of Lamennais and L’Avenir, it was Montalembert’s faith that was most severely shaken, and it was Lamennais who preached submission to the pope and resignation to God’s will. For Montalembert, the encyclical meant “the ruin of political and religious life, of my most sacred hopes, of my entire future. . . . For the first time in my life I have doubts about this religion, this Church to which I have consecrated my life!!” But Montalembert observed that in the face of this blow “M. Féli is admirable. He doesn’t hesitate for a moment on the position to take, it is submission and silence. It is not for us to save the Pope: he is the one that God has charged with directing the Church for good and for evil. Let God’s holy will be done!”81 These first responses were just the beginning of an extended conversation conducted over

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the next four years, as master and protégé battled with themselves and eventually with each other about the obligations they had to the church and to their own consciences.82 Of course, others were involved in this drama as well, with Lacordaire playing a crucial role, vying with Lamennais for the loyalty of Montalembert throughout 1833 and 1834. Lacordaire had walked away from Lamennais’s retreat in La Chênaie in December 1832, breaking definitively with his master over the need to submit fully to Rome. As Carol Harrison has shown, for the next two years Lacordaire sought to sustain his friendship with Montalembert in letters full of passionate concern. In Harrison’s terms, Lacordaire and Montalembert were “romantic Catholics,” drawn to each other through a shared Catholic spirituality that they saw as the basis for fraternal support and active citizenship among men.83 Lamennais and Montalembert shared a similar relationship, but the love between them was more filial than fraternal. For Montalembert, mourning his father, who died in 1831, and alienated from his mother for her meddling in his personal life, Lamennais was “my father and my mother,” someone whose love would endure even though he knew better than anyone his protégé’s many faults.84 As he reflected on the disasters of the past year in January 1833, Montalembert wrote to his guide that his one consolation was that “in this year you began to call me your child and to treat me as such. . . . I sincerely bless God for this grace. What would I do in this world if I didn’t have you, my beloved father, to tie my life to yours, to live from your faith and your hopes?”85 Lamennais was no less effusive, writing to Montalembert as his “beloved child” whose “tenderness consoles my last days, otherwise so sad, and which my heart gives back to you, believe me, with all the love in its power to give.”86 Political and religious differences eventually would drive Montalembert and Lamennais apart, but this rupture between intimate friends brings to mind the emotional pain in Jewish families when one of their members converted, considered in chapter 3.87 Freedom of conscience emerges as the crucial issue faced by Montalembert and Lamennais, as traced in their correspondence between 1833 and 1836. During this period, when Montalembert was traveling in Germany and Italy, they stayed in close touch, exchanging dozens of letters full of news and gossip.88 Political events in Europe were a central concern, most obviously in their collaboration on the publication of Mickiewicz’s Book of Polish Pilgrims. The reports and maneuvers of both their friends and enemies in Rome, Paris, and Vienna were another preoccupation, as they considered the

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gloomy prospects of their proposed marriage between liberty and Catholicism. But as the pressure on Lamennais to submit continued unabated, the two friends circled back more and more frequently, and with ever greater intensity, to the question of conscience. The publication of Words established the pivotal point that forced Lamennais and Montalembert to consult their consciences, their Catholicism, and each other in deciding how they understood the meaning of religious liberty. Montalembert had a clear premonition of the problems to come when he first read Words during a visit to La Chênaie in the summer of 1833, and he advised Lamennais not to publish it.89 As soon as he received his copy in May 1834, Montalembert knew that the decisive moment had arrived, for as he wrote to his master, after Words it would no longer be possible for Lamennais to try to protect himself by insisting that he was concerned only with temporal matters, leaving the spiritual dimension to the church. “The question will be to obey or not to obey, to be or not to be catholic. This is the infallible alternative to which you are reduced, and I tremble in thinking that the outcome of this alternative is doubtful.”90 In responding to Words Montalembert expressed some reservations about the evolution of Lamennais’s ideas. Perhaps his master had gone too far in his attacks on authority, both civil and ecclesiastical, and he was “very saddened to see direct attacks on property.”91 On this last point Lamennais himself moved quickly to distance himself from socialist ideas by writing a new chapter in defense of property within a month of the publication of the first edition.92 But Montalembert’s principal objections were practical rather than substantive; Lamennais might on the whole be right, but publishing Words, with the inevitable papal condemnation to follow, was inopportune. “I see . . . that you accept with joy these tests in order to be faithful to the voice of your conscience, which orders you to defend justice and truth. I am all the more ready to feel the truth of this objection because your conscience, I can say it, is mine; there is not one of your complaints against current society, not one of your attacks against tyranny, not one of your hopes for the future which are not etched most profoundly on my heart, that I haven’t repeated a thousand times and would repeat a thousand times again. I accept your position all the more because I am myself dominated by the force of conscience: in order to obey it I have condemned myself to solitude and exile.”93 Montalembert’s solution to his dilemma had been to live an isolated life, traveling in Germany and Italy, and keeping silent, a tactic that allowed him to preserve his conscience while avoiding a clear break with the church.

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This was the same path that he had hoped Lamennais would follow; when he didn’t, and instead published Words, it created a new situation that led them to a final confrontation over conscience and Catholicism. Although the personal cost was high, in the end Montalembert surrendered his personal judgment and accepted that of the church. Standing behind Montalembert’s growing uneasiness was the sense that in the end Lamennais was betraying his own principle of obedience to authority, which he had maintained even as he moved to embrace liberalism.94 When Lamennais was faced with papal pressure in 1833, Montalembert wrote to him that “Providence led me to open [The Imitation of Christ] to Chapter IX of Book I, entitled ‘Of obedience and renunciation of one’s own sense.’ I read with profound emotion this beautiful chapter and especially your reflection on it; I immediately thought of you and wondered how it would be possible for the author of these lines ever to give a better example of the most humble and blind obedience.” A few months later, in April 1834, it was Lamennais’s first polemical masterpiece, the Essay on Indifference, that came to mind when Montalembert wrote that he “was unable to imagine how one could logically distance oneself from the Church, without separating as well from Christianity, as you yourself so admirably demonstrated in the Essai.”95 Montalembert preached obedience and consistency to his master (and to himself ), but these were not issues of merely human significance, signs of personal integrity, they were also essential for the salvation of souls. Montalembert continued to affirm his commitment to Lamennais’s principles even after the condemnation of Singulari nos, but he pleaded with his master to abjure them nonetheless, because “I confess that the salvation of my soul, and of yours, are more dear to me [than these sentiments]; and I believe that this salvation can be compromised in preferring the uncertain to the certain, in obeying our reason and our own conscience rather than the inspirations of humility and submission.”96 In submitting to Rome Lamennais would be sacrificing himself, accepting humiliation and defeat from the perspective of the world, but in doing so he would be following the model of Christ, and saving his soul. “You will respond, I know, that the conscience is invincible, and I would say that after having reflected well on this point I am persuaded that the Christian must not obey exclusively his conscience and that there are cases where he must above all obey!” This was the choice Montalembert made, a wrenching decision that he both embraced and regretted. Following his formal submission in December 1834 he wrote to Lamennais that with

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this act he had done “great violence to my most deeply rooted convictions. . . . But I preferred this violence to the possibility of finding myself one day outside of this Church that alone offers me consolations for this intimate suffering that no political or intellectual activity would be able to relieve. I feel most profoundly the cruelty of putting myself in contradiction with myself, of destroying and denying in a sense everything that one has loved, defended, everything on which one has founded his life; but my life has already been so broken by causes outside my will that it matters little if I deliver one more blow from my own hand.”97 In the end Montalembert acknowledged that he was “Catholic above all.” He had been willing to follow his master “to the frontiers of Catholicism. But beyond these frontiers, no; because a law higher than all affection or all human conviction stopped me.”98 Lamennais was distraught by the growing separation between him and Montalembert, but he was unconvinced by the appeal to authority, even when supported by his own past arguments. Instead, in responding to his young friend he articulated with ever greater clarity his commitment to freedom of conscience, a position that led him first to abandon the priesthood, and then to cease to be a Catholic. In the face of Montalembert’s call to humble himself and submit after the condemnation of Singulari nos Lamennais responded that he acknowledged the possibility of being wrong but nonetheless was obliged to follow his conscience. “Everyone, after all, has only his opinion, and no one is so sure of his own that he can judge that of another with an unbefitting arrogance of infallibility. . . . I well know that I may be mistaken, and it is why I listen to everyone and don’t condemn those who think otherwise than I do. But at the same time, my conviction, whether it be right or wrong, is so profound that the opinion of others, without reasons which strike me, cannot shake it in any way or to any degree. What do those who blame me do? They follow their conscience and their reason. Why would I not have the same right?”99 Lamennais’s enhanced sense of the freedom of conscience appeared in his public writings as well: in his essay De l’absolutisme et la liberté, published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1834; in the preface to a collection of essays published in 1835; and with even greater force in Affaires de Rome (1836). In De l’absolutisme et la liberté, which appeared shortly after Words, Lamennais is no longer concerned with the freedom of the church, won by separation from the state, but with a larger battle between “two doctrines, two systems, which battle for control of the world.” In this Manichean vision, absolutism

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based solely on brute force is opposed by liberty, only apparently weaker because in the end its moral authority will triumph over the material resources of kings and tsars, who use brute force to crush liberty, “the spiritual rights of conscience and thought, which come only from God.”100 This sense of a providential historical process as the ultimate arbiter is applied to philosophical as well as political questions in the preface to Troisièmes mélanges. There Lamennais looks back on his own evolution and sees his altered position not so much as a contradiction but as a sincere effort to grasp a truth that “grows, constantly expands because it is infinite.” Imagining this truth as a “divine river that flows from its eternal principal, and waters the entire universe,” Lamennais ridicules those who claim to be able to possess the truth as a changeless absolute certainty: “Tiny shell on the bank that would say: I have the ocean in me! There is nothing more unreasonable than to stay rooted in the same ideas. . . . Because this state implies either that one knows everything, has seen everything, conceived everything, or else that one has chosen not to see more, to imagine more.” Lamennais insists that his search for truth, which led him to different positions, was also based on a sincere examination of his own conscience, but that he was nonetheless often mistaken. Such failings arise when individuals insist on certainty based on their own reasoning, when instead they should look for the “common sense of the species.”101 This argument may not be philosophically coherent; Lamennais both affirms and disavows the rights of his individual conscience to judge the truth, for it is only individual conscience that can assess what the “common sense” of humanity reveals. But this unresolved dilemma is nonetheless revealing, for even as he abandoned Catholicism on the basis of individual conscience, Lamennais remained suspicious of the principle that he had condemned with such force in the Essay on Indifference. In Affaires de Rome (1836) Lamennais does not engage in any questioning of the right of individual conscience, which he defends forcefully as part of an anti-Jesuit polemic. Working within a French tradition of antiJesuitism, Lamennais emphasizes that above all else the Jesuits are dedicated to “the destruction of individuality in their corps, in order to increase its power and unity.” This act of self-surrender reaches so far that “conscience itself finds its satisfaction there,” and thus the individual is freed from “all moral responsibility.”102 The Jesuit denial of individual conscience here stands as a particular example of what Catholics in general are required to do, a trial that Lamennais had just experienced himself and had concluded by

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affirming his individual rights and claiming his moral integrity. In Affaires, Lamennais considers the conscience within a specific institutional framework and defends individual freedom unequivocally, a reflection of his personal resentment of unrelenting and unjustified ecclesiastical pressure. But in Mélanges, where he approaches individual conscience from a philosophical perspective, as an element involved in the search for truth, Lamennais adopts a more confused and ambivalent posture, one that recalls without fully recapitulating his rejection of this principle in the Essay on Indifference. Lamennais’s struggle both with his conscience and with papal authority was accompanied by a separation from the liturgical and sacramental life of the church. He first announced his decision no longer to say Mass or perform any other priestly functions in January 1834, just after his last letter to Pope Gregory, in which he fully submitted to the judgments of the two encyclicals directed against him.103 From this point on his letters to Montalembert make it clear that Lamennais had lost his faith in the Catholic Church as a providential instrument and an authority with any credibility, human or divine. It is much harder to discern when Lamennais moved away from regular religious practice and orthodox belief. As late as August 1834 he was considering the possibility of once again saying Mass, and according to one report as late as 1836 he was still attending church regularly.104 Although in the end Lamennais abandoned Catholic religious practice he remained a theist who wrote fervently about the mission of Jesus.105 Lamennais clearly preserved a Christian sensibility after leaving the church, but what precisely this meant was unclear to some of his old friends and perhaps to himself as well. Louis Le Guillou, the editor of Lamennais’s correspondence, a scholar deeply familiar with and sympathetic to his subject, admits that while it is impossible to know with any certainty when Lamennais first had doubts about the divinity of Christ, these seemed to have become a conscious issue for him in 1835.106 A visit from Simon Bruté, the French missionary priest who played an instrumental role in Lamennais’s ordination, provided the occasion for rumors to circulate about his move toward heterodoxy. Although Lamennais was reluctant to see his old friend, who had written of his disapproval of the liberal turn in L’Avenir, he agreed to receive him at La Chênaie in October 1835. What happened at this meeting became a subject of public dispute, for Bruté reported in unequivocal terms to the bishop of Rennes, and later to the pope, that Lamennais not only denied the authority of the church but

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questioned the doctrines of original sin, eternal damnation, and the supernatural efficacy of the sacraments.107 When Bruté’s reports of this conversation began to circulate, Lamennais denied that his opinions had been fairly represented and accused Bruté of violating his confidence and spying for the church.108 He also suggested that Bruté was a fool, someone with whom he would have preferred not to meet because Bruté was incapable of grasping Lamennais’s positions on the church, and on the place of Christianity in world history. Lamennais may have rejected Bruté’s account of the conversation, but his own version of their meeting suggests nonetheless that his religious thinking was evolving in new directions. According to Lamennais, Bruté accused him of being a Humean skeptic who refused to believe his own unbelief (“il ne croyait pas ce qu’il croyait réellement”).109 Reviewing this confused exchange in a letter to Benoît d’Azy, Lamennais insisted that he had not opened himself to Bruté but acknowledged that “my convictions have changed on several points; nevertheless no one knows on what points and to what degree.”110 This last comment is puzzling, as it seems to invite his friend to speculate about Lamennais’s real beliefs, without suggesting an answer to the question. Lamennais’s position here seems fluid, as if he himself was not at all sure “on what points and to what degree” he still accepted fundamental Catholic doctrine. By this time, in early 1836, he had already rejected his priestly functions and his belief in the authority of the institutional church. In this final stage of his move away from Catholicism, religious liberty meant the right to construct a unique and individualistic version of Christianity. For the remainder of his life Lamennais continued to work as a journalist and social reformer. His criticism of the July Monarchy earned him a year in prison in 1840 but did not silence him. Following the revolution of 1848 Lamennais was elected as a Parisian delegate to the Constitutional Convention that established the Second Republic. Lacordaire and Montalembert also served in this assembly, but they never reestablished a friendship with Lamennais, maintaining a barely civil relationship. By the early 1850s the republican experiment had failed again, and Lamennais’s health led him to withdraw from politics. He continued to work, however, translating and writing a commentary on Dante ’s Divine Comedy, which was published posthumously. As he grew weaker and sicker early in 1854 some of his friends and relatives sought to bring him back to the church, but he denied them access to his deathbed and died without the sacraments.111

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Conclusion Lamennais’s disciples abandoned him in the 1830s, choosing to remain within the Catholic Church that he rejected. His life and thought were nonetheless influential, first of all in the short run, for the language of liberty that he made central to a defense of the church continued to shape the arguments of Lacordaire, Montalembert, and others as they battled for Catholic education against the state monopoly throughout the 1840s. This campaign would eventually contribute to a major victory with the Falloux law of 1851, though by this point Lamennais was no longer in favor of a clerical role in education.112 From a longer perspective, Lamennais’s insistence that Catholicism needed to embrace political democracy can be seen to anticipate the development of Christian democracy in the twentieth century, and his commitment to social justice establishes him as one of the founding figures of social Catholicism.113 Ernest Renan, one of the most astute critics of Lamennais, called attention to his political legacy in a review of his life and work that appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1857. Renan judged Lamennais a crucial innovator for establishing Catholicism as a force to be reckoned with in the world of democratic politics that was emerging in the nineteenth century: “Many others before him had put passion and intrigue at the service of their religious faith; the bold innovation of Lamennais was to make Catholicism a party.” Drawing on the ironic sense that was central to his own religious identity, which will be explored in a later chapter, Renan argued that Lamennais, despite his expulsion from the church, had in fact triumphed, for even if the church rejected his version of liberalism, it had embraced the need to play politics in regimes that were evolving toward mass democracy. According to Renan, it was Lamennais’s achievement “to have invented all the machinery of war that the catholic party has so usefully employed.” He was in the end a polemicist, “looking always for arguments to support his cause, rather than the truth, a powerful intellectual machine working over a void.”114 Renan’s hostility toward someone who, like himself, abandoned a clerical career to become a leading force opposed to the church is surprising. But Renan never imagined a progressive political role for the church and retained a nostalgic view of Catholicism, rooted in fond memories of the folk practices and simple belief of his Breton childhood, a generation after Lamennais’s troubled upbringing. Renan’s critique reflects as well his deep suspicion of democratic politics, precisely the development in which Lamennais placed his hope for the future. For all its vitriolic character, Renan’s

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point is worth pondering, for Lamennais’s movements into and then away from Catholicism were inextricably bound up with his positions on the evolving political and social order, an entanglement that both reflected and contributed to the church’s intense engagement with democratic politics in the modern age. Lamennais’s particular agenda was rejected, at least in the short run, but he stands as a key figure in adopting the language of liberty in defense of Catholicism, and in showing how the church might become a powerful political force in modern liberal states. Judged on the basis of his political agenda, Lamennais, in his lifetime and after, has been a controversial figure, a tragic failure for some in his stubborn refusal to accept the prudent guidance of the church, a prophet for others in formulating the basis for a liberal Catholicism open to effective engagement with the modern world. If we put aside, however, a concern for judgments of success or failure, another legacy of Lamennais might emerge more clearly. Lamennais is a significant figure because of his battle to reconcile Catholicism and liberalism, but also because of his struggle to define a proper relationship between his conscience and the authority of the church. How much weight should be accorded the church in forming one’s conscience, and how should conflicts between the two be resolved? Where should the line be drawn that divides matters of faith and doctrine essential to a Catholic identity from political and social questions about which citizens are free to differ? Lamennais’s struggles with church and conscience fascinated and troubled his contemporaries because they faced these same questions, which arose with particular force in the aftermath of the French Revolution and its sanction of religious liberty and political democracy.

6. Mysticism, Despair, and Progress George Sand’s Pursuit of Religious Liberty

George Sand sought spiritual direction from Lamennais in 1835 at a particularly difficult moment in her tumultuous life. In October there had been violent scenes between Sand and her husband at their estate at Nohant about the terms of their separation, and she had recently broken off her affair with the poet Alfred de Musset and become attached to the republican lawyer Michel de Bourges. This new liaison had pulled Sand deep into debates about political and social conditions in France, for Bourges was at the center of the team of lawyers defending the workers of Lyon who had rebelled in April 1834. All of these changes in her life were accompanied by religious anxieties, as she sought a form of belief that would accommodate her sense of personal freedom, her political beliefs, and her Christian mysticism. Sand had already become famous for her novels, starting with Indiana, which appeared in 1832, but the accumulation of personal and political troubles left her in a state close to despair.1 The friendship between Sand and Lamennais that began in this period of their lives endured, but both soon passed beyond an initial phase of mutual respect that bordered on sycophancy. By May 1836 Sand was writing to her friend Marie d’Agoult that Lamennais was “much more of a priest than I thought.” Lamennais’s prophetic vision of a democratic future remained appealing, but she resented his dogmatism and insisted that “on that point I claim a certain freedom of conscience which he would not grant me.”2 Sand’s declaration of independence is not surprising, for she is known as a woman who boldly challenged the conventions of her time, leaving her 192

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husband, engaging in a series of very public love affairs, dressing like a man, smoking cigarettes, and defending radical political and social ideas in her voluminous writings. In a recent biography Elizabeth Harlan suggests that beyond such “commonplaces” Sand’s life should be understood as “a ceaseless production of acts and works undertaken on behalf of the principle of freedom to which she remained committed throughout her life.” Harlan’s focus on a universal principle provides a useful perspective from which to view a life full of scandalous detail, but in her litany of the kinds of freedom Sand pursued (“personal, social, political, creative, professional”) she leaves out her concern for religious liberty, for the right to define her own views on God and his relationship with mankind.3 This quest, however, is clearly on display in Sand’s correspondence and imaginative writing, and in the autobiography she wrote in her forties, evidence that allows us to trace a complicated religious journey from an unorthodox education as a child, to a mystical Catholicism while an adolescent, to a form of social Christianity as an adult. As did Lamennais, Sand saw the struggle to create a better world as a sacred obligation, but her personal history, with its disastrous marriage and passionate love affairs, reveals a different path to religious liberty. For Sand, female subservience to men, especially within the illegitimate bonds of contemporary marriage, became a central theme in her life and work, issues that were pushed aside by Lamennais as irrelevant. But Sand’s life and writings show that her commitment to the rights of women evolved in intimate connection with a growing sense of individual religious liberty, a freedom she embraced in both her life and her literature.

Aurore Dupin Invents a God Since no one was instructing me in religion, it occurred to me I needed one, and I made one for myself. —George Sand, History of My Life

Liberty of conscience was central to Sand’s religious identity, but she came to a conscious recognition of this principle only after a remarkable religious journey that began when she was a child, creating a private religious world in the gardens of her Voltairean grandmother’s estate in Nohant, in Berry. Aurore Dupin, as Sand was named at birth, was the daughter of a

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Figure 9. Portrait of George Sand by Eugène Charpentier, 1835. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Gianni Dagli Orti/ The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

French officer, Maurice Dupin, and his wife, Sophie Delaborde, a demimondaine regarded with suspicion, and at times outright hostility, by Maurice ’s mother, Mme Dupin de Francueil, the granddaughter of the great general Maurice de Saxe. The tense family atmosphere became more pronounced with the death of Sand’s father when she was four, which led to a decision that her grandmother would take primary responsibility for her upbringing. Placing Sand with her grandmother had religious consequences, for while her mother was conventionally devout, Mme Dupin was a religious skeptic, though her aristocratic status and memories of the revolution led her to respect Catholicism as a basis for social order. Sand’s grandmother and various clerical tutors shaped an atmosphere that mixed belief and skepticism and provided her with a sense of religious liberty throughout her childhood, experienced as an ambivalent context rather than as a systematic principle.

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Although she was born a generation after Lamennais, like him Sand’s earliest education had little connection with the kind of catechetical training in religious orthodoxy that had become an ideal of the Old Regime but was only slowly and partially reestablished following the Concordat of 1801.4 Sand was educated at her grandmother’s estate by François Deschartes, a clergyman during the Old Regime who abandoned his vocation and clerical title in 1789 to become the tutor of Maurice, Sand’s father. During the Terror Deschartes played a key role in saving Mme Dupin from the guillotine, and he stayed with her as a devoted member of her household when she purchased the estate in Nohant after her release from prison. Known to the family as “the great man,” Deschartes was, like Sand’s grandmother, a religious skeptic who nonetheless believed in following conventional practices.5 Sand’s great-uncle, the abbé Charles-Godefroid de Beaumont, provided another example of how religion, and even a clerical identity, could be molded into a pattern that accommodated personal choice. An amiable storyteller and gourmand, Beaumont entertained Sand and her family at his Paris apartment and visited them frequently in Nohant. Sand recalled him fondly as “a cheerful character, a bit carefree, as some bachelors are, a remarkable wit, resourceful and inventive.” While a source of advice and friendship, the good abbé was not at all devout but was preoccupied with food and conversation; Sand described him as a “canonical type that has practically disappeared in our time.”6 Sand was not trained in Catholic orthodoxy, but she did develop a powerful religious sensibility, a disposition to believe and worship that was to take on a variety of forms as she matured, even while she also struggled against doubt and despair.7 Around the age of eleven, inspired by her reading of The Iliad and Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, Sand began constructing an elaborate personal religion, centered on her fantastic invention of a god or goddess that she called Corambé. These epics of heroic warfare, with gods and men contending with each other, and with themselves, fired Sand’s imagination and inspired a childish form of religious syncretism. In Tasso’s poem Sand read about Clorinda, a woman both passionate and devout, a Muslim warrior who accepted baptism as she died on the battlefield, having been slain by Tancred, the Christian knight who had fallen in love with her. Sand’s fond memories of Jerusalem Delivered suggest the profound impact of a story that combined romantic passion, feminine bravery, and religious fervor manifested in a dying conversion.8

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Corambé, as recalled in Sand’s autobiography, was a spirit of peace and reconciliation, a god or goddess “as pure and as charitable as Jesus,” but embodying as well “nymphic grace and Orpheus’ poetry.” Corambé was a literary muse as well as a sacred figure, a character who inspired what Sand called “songs” that described how the god or goddess charmed and consoled those who suffered, “listening to their tales of woe and leading them back to happiness through virtue.” More and more absorbed by her musings, Sand eventually built a secret shrine to Corambé in a thicket of woods on her grandmother’s property. Retreating to this spot in the afternoons, when her lessons were suspended for two hours, Sand decorated it with flowers and shells and for her ritual would free birds from the snares she had used to capture them. After a month or so, however, some of the local peasant children, Sand’s playmates, discovered her hiding place. “The spell was broken,” she recalled, and she abandoned her shrine, though not her devotion to Corambé, carefully burying the garlands and shells under the debris of the altar.9 During the time that Sand was creating Corambé and exploring a religious world of her own making, Mme Dupin decided it was time for her granddaughter to make her First Communion. But Sand’s preparation for this sacramental initiation was far from orthodox, given her grandmother’s rejection of transubstantiation, the doctrine that insists on the real presence of Christ in the consecrated host. For Mme Dupin, this was “superstition,” as were all the miracles recounted in the gospels; she insisted nonetheless that Sand “go through this ceremony with decency and for appearances’ sake, but to be careful not to offend divine wisdom and human reason to the point of believing I was going to ‘eat my Creator.’ ”10 Sand’s catechetical instruction was crammed into three short weeks, which she accepted with docility and mastered quickly. On the chosen day Sand was shocked to see her grandmother in church, where she had not set foot since her son’s marriage, more than twenty years in the past. In her autobiography Sand claims that she reconciled herself to the apparent hypocrisy of her performance by imagining the Last Supper as a celebration of equality and charity. On this point Bernard Hamon suggests that Sand might be projecting into her childhood an interpretation of the Eucharist beyond the capacity of even a precocious twelve-year-old.11 This is a reasonable perspective, but so is Hamon’s more general sense that in her autobiography Sand describes a rich and confusing religious formation that left her in search of a God of infinite goodness with

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whom she could form an intimate personal relationship. Though it would prove to be a phase rather than a permanent commitment, during her adolescence, Catholicism fulfilled this religious need.

Convent School and Catholic Conversion As a child Sand was precocious and adventuresome, but her grandmother was concerned that she was also undisciplined and lazy and as an adolescent would need to acquire the polish appropriate to a young woman with an aristocratic lineage. During the revolution Mme Dupin had been imprisoned for a time in a convent of English nuns in Paris, a congregation that established a boarding school for elite girls during the Restoration.12 This establishment became Sand’s home for three years, a period of time when she saw her grandmother, mother, and other relatives only rarely. Sand’s vivid memories of her years in this cloistered community are the basis for some of the most fascinating pages in her autobiography, where she recounts her transformation from mischievous troublemaker to devout young woman, converted by a mystic experience and convinced that she had a religious vocation.13 The couvent anglais that was home to Sand from 1818 to 1820 was shut off from the life of Paris, recalled by her as “quite truly a prison, but a prison with a big garden and numerous companions.” But Sand did not suffer from these apparent restraints on her freedom and insisted that “not for a moment did I experience any of the rigors of captivity, and the meticulous precautions that were taken to keep us under lock and key and prevent our having even a glimpse of the outside world only struck me as funny.”14 André Maurois has suggested that convent life, although full of external constraints, offered Sand an “oasis” where she no longer felt herself a source of conflict between her mother and grandmother.15 In her autobiography Sand develops a paradoxical view of the monastic setting as a prison-like atmosphere within which she was nonetheless free to explore spiritual possibilities and change her religious identity, a perspective that shapes her metaphysical novels of the 1830s, Lélia and Spiridion. As we will see, these works include sharp criticisms of orthodox Catholicism, reflecting Sand’s anticlerical views of monasteries as tyrannous and cruel institutions. But her hostility is shaded by a competing sensibility that saw in a cloistered life the opportunity for quiet reflection and study and a community that would support rather than repress the aspirations of its individual members.

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Upon entering the convent Sand was at first placed with the lower of two classes, where she quickly decided to join the “devils.” The young girls in this group were determined to be troublemakers, which meant for the most part annoying their teachers with harmless juvenile pranks, passing notes to each other, sleeping through catechism, and mocking Miss D., a lay teacher despised for her strict religiosity and meanness. But the devils had a grander mission as well, and starting in her first days in the convent Sand joined their regular nighttime outings to free female prisoners they imagined were held somewhere in the underground passages or obscure hallways that honeycombed the convent.16 Although Sand writes that she and her friends “convinced ourselves that we heard sighs and moans coming from under paving stones or issuing from the cracks in the doors and walls,” these nightly expeditions were essentially a form of play, but what did the game mean? In her autobiography Sand recalls “this mania for seeking the victim [as] something profoundly stupid and also heroic; stupid, because we had to suppose that these nuns, whose sweetness and goodness we adored, practiced some frightful torture on someone; heroic, because we were risking our lives every day to liberate an imaginary being.”17 Sand’s comment points to an absurd quality of the game, but perhaps she is too quick to dismiss it as “profoundly stupid.” As Sand realized, in their play the girls were acting out a prominent theme in the fashionable gothic literature, which featured heroes and heroines imprisoned in the dark recesses of monasteries.18 The nuns of the convent may have been generally beloved by the girls, but as Sand pointed out they were also their wardens, enforcing a life separated from the world in which cold and hunger were not unusual and punishing them when they broke the rules. The popularity of gothic novels and plays in which monks and nuns locked away innocent victims drew on a broader anxiety about the potential for repression in Catholic congregations, and in the church more generally. Sand and her friends were engaged in a childish fantasy, but one that tapped into both personal experience and a cultural mood in which individuals were called on to act heroically to gain their freedom from the Catholic Church. Sand pursued her career of “deviltry” during her first year at the convent, but she also sought advice and consolation from Sister Mary-Alicia Spiring, a young woman admired by all the girls for her beauty, warmth, and authentic piety. To the surprise of the other devils, Sand asked to be “adopted” by Sister Alicia, and they were even more surprised when she accepted Sand

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as her daughter. This special relationship allowed Sand to spend a few minutes every evening with her mentor, who was more amused than troubled by her childish behavior, which led to good-humored reprimands. Sand would return to her room afterward, “bearing, as if by magnetic influence, some of the serenity and candor of that beautiful soul.”19 Sand’s decision to seek the support of Sister Alicia was followed in her second year by her abandonment of the devils, though she also refused to identify with the “sages,” the good girls whose ostentatious piety annoyed her. In her autobiography Sand recalls her conversion in terms that echo in many ways Augustine ’s famous Confessions. Writing in the 1850s, Sand drew on her knowledge of Augustine, and she likely embellished some details and smoothed out the narrative of her conversion to make it accessible to her audience.20 Her autobiography is nonetheless precious evidence, reflecting her adult conviction about the reality of the spiritual transformation of her youth and offering some sense of how it involved both her own will and the rich and mysterious religious environment of a Catholic convent. “I became religious. It happened suddenly, like a passion that ignites in a soul unaware of its own powers.” Sand’s language as she begins the account of her conversion suggests it was the result of her own volition, but also of a mysterious process that occurred below the level of consciousness. The “devils,” like all the girls, were required to spend a half hour in the chapel each evening, and to pass the time Sand began reading an abridged version of The Lives of the Saints that she found in the pews. While skeptical about the miracles in these stories, Sand admired “the faith, courage, and stoicism of the confessors and martyrs,” which “plucked some secret string that was beginning to vibrate in me.”21 During these evening visits Sand also began to observe two paintings in the chapel, one showing Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed that God might spare him from his death, foreseen for the next day, and the other representing Augustine at the moment when he heard the words “Tolle, Lege” (“Take up and read”), which led him to the Epistle of Paul to the Romans and then to his conversion.22 Contemplating the image of Christ, Sand found herself in tears as she attempted to understand the meaning of his death, “the secret of his chosen, yet so bitter suffering,” and she “began to have a presentiment of something grander and more profound than what I had been told.” The painting of Augustine led her to the story of his conversion, to the epistles of Paul, and to the gospels, which she read attentively for the first time. All of this reading

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and reflection, however, was merely a prelude to the revelation that finally led Sand to a serious commitment to Christianity, and a possible vocation. In her second year at the convent Sand had moved toward Christianity, but without abandoning her devilish identity. One evening she decided to sneak into the chapel so she could observe an old hunchbacked nun at prayer and then describe “how the little monster writhes on her bench” to her friends. But once inside, the nun disappeared, and Sand lapsed into a reverie, entranced by the single sanctuary light and the nuns who prayed and left, until she was alone. Sand recalls this moment in her autobiography: I was oblivious to everything. I did not know what was happening to me. I was absorbing an atmosphere of indescribable sweetness more through my soul than my senses. Suddenly my whole being was mysteriously shaken, a whirling whiteness passed before my eyes on the way to surrounding me. I thought I heard a voice murmuring in my ear, “Tolle, lege.” I turned around thinking it was Marie-Alicia speaking to me. I was alone. . . . I felt simply that faith had filled my being and that it had come to me, as I had hoped, through my heart. I was so grateful, so ecstatic, that tears streamed down my face. I again felt that I loved God, that my thought embraced and accepted fully this idea of justice, tenderness, holiness that I had never doubted, but which had never touched me directly; finally, I felt a direct bond, as if the insuperable obstacle that had stood between the hearth of infinite warmth and the dormant flame in my soul had been swept away.23

Moved profoundly by this mystical experience, Sand abandoned her devilish ways entirely, began receiving communion regularly, and took up ascetic practices, such as wearing a rosary around her neck, which cut her and made her bleed. She became close at this time with a lay sister, Hélène, one of those charged with the manual labor of the convent, and through her influence decided she had a religious vocation. This sudden transformation was regarded with some sarcasm by her former friends and was naturally welcomed by her teachers. But Sand was careful to note that the nuns did not try “to augment my fervor by any of the seductive means that religious communities are accused of exerting on their pupils.” And she was particularly grateful to her confessor, the Jesuit abbé de Prémord, who ordered her to stop her pursuit of moral perfection through an overscrupulous examination

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of conscience and an ascetic lifestyle that was damaging her health. Both Prémord and Sister Alicia also expressed reservations about Sand’s vocation and warned her against taking premature vows. In recalling her convent years thirty years later Sand remained grateful to her mentors, who refused to take advantage of her conversion to entice her into a religious life. Their advice was based on a conviction that only a mature individual could freely choose to pursue a vocation, and thus they affirmed the principle of personal religious liberty. As we will see, Ernest Renan found a similar atmosphere of freedom while a student at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in the 1840s. Sand would eventually abandon Catholic belief and practice, and she adopted as well many of the standard positions of anticlericalism that saw the Catholic Church as an intolerant institution based on superstition and opposed to reason. During the 1820s she grew into a young woman increasingly confident in her independent religious judgment, skeptical about Catholic doctrine, but still tied to Catholic practice and to clerical advisers whose ideas she valued. This complex position was based on the early freedom she experienced in the gardens of her grandmother’s estate at Nohant, but also on the combination of fervor and freedom she found in her Paris convent.

Family Troubles and Religious Exploration When her grandmother learned of Sand’s turn to religious devotion she decided that her charge had spent enough time with the nuns and brought her back home to Nohant in the spring of 1820. For the next ten years Sand’s life revolved around the estate, and her increasingly complicated family situation. In exploring this period Sand’s biographers have focused on her unhappy marriage to Casimir Dudevant, the birth of her two children, and the first of her many extramarital affairs. These personal dramas became in turn material that shows up transformed but still recognizable in the literature that Sand produced in the 1830s. But the evidence Sand has left us reveals as well a sustained concern with religious questions, an evolving sense of her relationship with Catholicism, and a growing appreciation of her religious liberty. Sand is best known for her rejection of traditional marriage as an oppressive institution in which husbands exercise an illegitimate authority over wives, but her disillusionment with conventional family life developed in close conjunction with her increasingly critical view of orthodox religion. The freedom that Sand pursued brought her up against the institutions of

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marriage and the Catholic Church, a struggle that led her eventually to abandon both and that allows us to see through the prism of an individual life the close links between religious liberty and the quest for personal autonomy. The fullest account of Sand’s religious evolution in the 1820s can be found in her autobiography, where she describes the books, discussions, correspondence, and reflections that transformed her from a pious Catholic schoolgirl to a religious doubter. After her return to Nohant Sand was left free to read in her grandmother’s extensive library, where she began a program of self-education that recalls Lamennais’s experience amid his uncle’s books a generation earlier. On the advice of her confessor, the parish priest of La Châtre, the town just south of Nohant, she read Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme, which rekindled her spiritual life but also taught her to consider Christianity as aesthetic experience and moral guide, and not as a doctrinal cage. Early in her return to Nohant Sand also reread L’imitation du Christ, in a copy given to her by her beloved Sister Alicia, which she now saw as a text preaching hostility to the world and to human connections. This book of “abominable selfishness . . . commanded me to forget all earthly affection, banish all pity from my breast, break all family ties, have only myself in view, and leave all others to God’s judgment.”24 Sand recalled as well being moved by Leibniz’s insistence that “true piety consists of God’s love, but an illuminated love, whose fervor is accompanied by enlightenment.”25 But unsurprisingly it was Rousseau, “man of passion and feeling par excellence,” who had the most profound effect on Sand. After reading Emile, Les lettres de la montagne, and Le contrat social Sand recalled that “I understood everything!”26 Through Chateaubriand and Rousseau Sand was drawn to a romantic Christianity of the heart, to a God who could be approached through nature as well as the sacraments, and who discounted the doctrinal differences between Protestant and Catholic. But how did this emerging religious sensibility fit with the orthodox Catholicism that she had absorbed while at the couvent anglais? Sand wondered herself about this question, to which she gave an equivocal answer that suggests how hard it was for her to state clearly what her religious convictions were as a young woman: “Was I still Catholic the moment when, having saved the best (Jean-Jacques) for last . . . I was finally to fall under the spell of his touching reason and fervent logic? I do not think so. While still practicing the religion, still refusing to break from its formulas interpreted in my fashion, I had left, without my least suspecting it,

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the confines of its orthodoxy. Unknown to myself, I had broken irrevocably with all its social and political conclusions. The spirit of the Church was no longer in me; perhaps it never had been.”27 Sand here describes an in-between state not unlike the uncertainty we have seen in other converts as they moved across the borders around Catholicism. Sand’s retrospective denial of her Catholic identity in the 1820s may overstate the extent of her alienation from the church at the time. As she acknowledges in her autobiography, she continued to practice Catholicism regularly, she stayed in touch with her religious advisers from her convent days, the abbé de Prémord and Sister Alicia, and she was in regular contact as well with the local clergy. But we can still respect Sand’s mature judgment that she had moved some distance from orthodoxy without fully realizing it, a pattern common to other converts as well. Nonetheless, friends and family would have had no reason to doubt Sand’s Catholicism, even if she also showed herself to be an independent-minded and temperamental young woman. Sand’s behavior in the period surrounding the death of her grandmother, Mme Dupin de Francueil, in December 1821 illuminates the complexity of her attachment to Catholicism, which combined a commitment to the authority of the church and the grace available through its sacramental system with a respect for the individual conscience. Still a very young woman, only seventeen years old, Sand helped nurse her grandmother through a long and debilitating illness for most of the year. As her condition grew more serious, Sister Alicia encouraged Sand to convince Mme Dupin to receive the Last Sacraments, while the abbé de Prémord took a more tolerant position, writing to her that “[to] take the initiative in the delicate matter of her conversion would have been contrary to the respect that you owe her.”28 The situation was complicated by the arrival at Nohant of M. Leblanc de Beaulieu, who had recently retired as the bishop of Soissons. Leblanc was the illegitimate half brother of Mme Dupin, the son of her father and Mme d’Epinay, the famous Paris salonnière of the eighteenth century. Sand described him as well-meaning but fat, oafish, and vain. Leblanc was grateful to Mme Dupin, whom he addressed as “Dear Mama,” for her solicitude during his childhood and was determined that she die with the sacraments and thereby avoid eternal damnation. When Mme Dupin asked if Sand shared her uncle ’s fears on her behalf the granddaughter insisted that “I am on my knees to bless you, not to preach to you.” Moved by this act of confidence, but also willing to accommodate her half brother and continue to follow

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religious conventions, Mme Dupin received the Last Sacraments from the parish priest the following day. But the ceremony was conducted with her characteristic sense of irony toward orthodox Catholic practice. As the priest went through the prayers she would comment, “I believe in that” or “that is meaningless,” while Archbishop Leblanc pretended not to notice. In her autobiography Sand sees this episode as marking her own movement to a more relativistic understanding of Catholicism, a comment that seems fair, especially in light of her intellectual development, which paralleled the period of her grandmother’s illness and death. Sand was not a self-conscious advocate of religious liberty in the early 1820s and was still some distance away from a clear break with Catholicism. But in her reading and in her family life she was testing religious boundaries and, without fully realizing it, exploring the condition of religious freedom that would eventually become a central theme in her writing. The birth of Sand’s first child, Maurice, in 1823 and a busy schedule of visits to Paris, to friends in the countryside, and to the Pyrénées for an extended vacation were not enough to distract Sand from some harsh truths about her husband and her marriage. Following the death of her grandmother, and in order to escape the control of her mother, who sought to reestablish her authority over her daughter, Sand rushed into a marriage with Casimir Dudevant. Although a man of some personal charm, Casimir had no interest in ideas and was devoted to the hunt and to hard drinking, much of it done in bouts with Sand’s half brother Hippolyte, who was an almost constant presence at Nohant. Sand’s troubles with Casimir, and her exhaustion from caring for the baby Maurice, led to a depression that she attributed as well to “the almost imperceptible cooling of my religious faith.”29 On the advice of the abbé de Prémord, Sand returned to her convent in Paris for a retreat early in 1825 that she hoped would restore her faith. Living again at the scene of her adolescent devotions provided some relief. Both she and Maurice, who was given the special privilege of being allowed into the cloister, were spoiled by the nuns, and Sand was consoled by Sister Alicia, who praised the advantages of married life and motherhood. Sand thought again about the appeal of the quiet life of a cloistered community but left hurriedly when Maurice seemed to fall ill. The retreat did not bring Sand back to the fervor of her adolescence, but it illustrates her continuing desire to explore her religious beliefs and feelings, which were about to face a major challenge in the person of Aurélien de Sèze.

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As the many biographers of Sand have pointed out, her alienation from Casimir led to several flirtations and, in the mid-1820s, to a serious love affair. Sand met Aurélien de Sèze during their trip to the Pyrénées in 1825, and for the next five years their love for each other made for an extraordinarily complicated life, a first chapter in her long and well-chronicled history of amorous intrigue.30 During the early stages of their romance Sand made it clear that she intended to stay faithful to her husband, even while admitting her passionate love for Aurélien. In a long series of letters written to her lover in October and November 1825 Sand poured out her heart, reflecting on their time together, and the combination of joy and pain she experienced in contemplating their impossible situation. Sand’s insistence on marital fidelity was tied to religious sentiments that are threaded into the letters, a motif that made God into a third party in her relationship with Aurélien.31 Sand concluded one letter, for example, with a prayer in which she begged God to “bless our union, purify it, perfect it, to the point that you might see it with pleasure, and root out anything that might be impure and imperfect. My God, my God, make me worthy of you.”32 On another occasion Sand anticipated a heavenly reward for the virtuous lovers: “Let us believe that this dust will live again, that the Eternal who created it will be able to bring it back to life. He will be grateful to us perhaps for having born with a life that was nothing for us without each other. He will reunite us forever then, in a state of peace, where tenderness will be allowed and happiness will last.”33 The future blissful state that Sand foresaw was very far from the trouble that followed from Casimir’s discovery of her journal, which contained several letters to Aurélien. Sand insisted that this correspondence gave no evidence of infidelity, but Casimir was understandably furious and their marriage was in serious jeopardy. This crisis was resolved, at least for a time, on the basis of Sand’s “lettre-confession,” an eighteen-page document she sent to her husband on November 15, 1825. Sand made no apologies for her feelings for Aurélien, claimed the right to continue her relationship with him, and asked that Casimir accept him as a friend. Thus began a triangular platonic relationship that, at least for a time, seemed to satisfy the interests of the three parties involved. The November letter marks a turning-point in Sand’s life; the longest she had written to that point, it included a forthright account of Casimir’s failings and the problems in their marriage and established her own clear conditions for their staying together. Less than a full declaration of female and wifely independence, it was nonetheless a move toward greater openness and freedom within marriage.

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Just one month after her “lettre-confession” to Casimir, Sand wrote another remarkable and lengthy letter, this one to Zoé Leroy, a close friend from Bordeaux who had facilitated her relations with Aurélien.34 Encouraged by Casimir’s willingness to accept her conditions for their marriage, Sand expressed her absolute confidence in “this all-powerful Being” and criticized as unjust those who “would not place their hopes for happiness entirely with him.” This confidence in a loving God was followed by an extended analysis of a local controversy over a recent conversion that had led the abbé Cyprien Pouget, the curé of Nérac, to publish a letter condemning M. and Mme Dumont, a couple who abjured Catholicism in favor of Protestantism.35 Their decision and the curé’s response were the talk of the region; Sand reported that “nobles and dévots” criticized the Dumonts, while liberals found fault with the abbé Pouget for publicly castigating a couple who were well regarded in their community. Sand found the priest’s pamphlet full of “commonplaces, useless comments, unjust reasoning, and crude exhortations that neither persuade nor move.” Her comment about Pouget led into a more general condemnation of the clergy whose conduct brought religion into disrepute: “Is it not a subject of sadness and continual bitterness to see a sublime religion degraded, reviled, ridiculed because of its ministers, by those who should make it cherished and respected? . . . How unworthy are those at the top of the hierarchy, who confer a sacred character on a drunkard, a vile person, a libertine?” This criticism of the clergy brings to mind Sand’s views about her husband and suggests a connection between the dissolute behavior and abusive authority of husbands and priests. A growing hostility toward male power in both personal and religious matters shows up as well in Sand’s resentment of Aurélien, who believed that while M. Dumont may have converted for solid reasons, Mme Dumont, as a weak-minded woman, could only have followed someone else ’s lead. Both men and women, Sand argued, were capable of taking “an action that must have no other motive than that of a deeply personal conviction.” And she insisted as well that “God opens his arms to those in this religion as well as the other, if they have embraced it in order to serve him better.” Sand followed this daring statement by assuring her friend that she had no intention to convert and stating at length what she called “my profession of faith”: I believe in the Roman Church in which I was raised. I believe in it on all points; I follow all of its rules. I don’t feel myself intelligent

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enough to discuss it. I never attack it, I never defend it however tempted I might be by those who cleverly ridicule it, however indignant I might be with those who impiously insult it. I haven’t examined it at all, and I don’t want to. What does it matter if some of the ceremonies are useless, as long as they do no harm, as long as the moral foundation is that of Jesus Christ, sublime and divine? If I came to believe that this morality had changed (which it is has not) and that the Protestants followed it more closely, I would regard it as a cowardly weakness to continue to practice a religion only because of those around me. . . . I would ask God to speak to my heart and if I heard the voice of my conscience tell me to change my dogma, I would do it the next day. . . . I see nothing but good and laudable in our Catholic customs. I follow them with an interior satisfaction. I recall with gratitude the sweet and simple instruction I was given at the convent. I love my religion as much as I believe it.36

Sand was still committed to Catholicism, and still committed to her marriage, but by the end of 1825 she no longer accepted the authority of the church or of her husband to define her religious identity and family status. These were now to be determined by her own conscience, and her letter to Zoé Leroy suggests that she could imagine herself crossing a religious border, especially because of the bad behavior of the clergy. Sand’s letters to Casimir and Zoé were written in the midst of a personal emotional crisis, and in them she made no effort to formulate a systematic analysis of marriage and the church. Taken together, they nonetheless illuminate how her growing sense of the need for independence within marriage was intricately related to a commitment to religious liberty. Sand still considered herself a Catholic, but her belief and behavior grew increasingly unorthodox in the late 1820s. Although she remained on friendly terms with some of the local clergy, Sand’s religious practice became irregular. Late in 1827, apparently to consult doctors about a persistent cough, she traveled to Paris, accompanied by Stéphane Ajasson de Grandsagne. Sténi, as he was known by his friends, had flirted with Sand since they first met in 1820, but during their time in Paris together they become lovers, and not in the platonic mode that she had preached to Aurélien. Although there is no definitive proof, Sand scholars generally agree that Stéphane was the father of Solange, who was born in September 1828.37 Over the next two years Sand continued to put up with an obtuse and at times threatening

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husband, distracting herself by reading, providing medical care to the peasants of the area, painting and playing music, and visiting friends. These last included Aurélien, with whom Sand at some point may have abandoned her pledge to honor her marriage vows. But Aurélien’s position as advocate general in Bordeaux made him cautious about seeing her in public, and by the spring of 1830 their romance was in its final stages. Although her subsequent life makes it hard to imagine, Sand might have continued to live at Nohant, estranged from her husband but occupied with her intellectual and artistic interests, her children, her estate, and perhaps an occasional lover. But in November 1830, while browsing in Casimir’s office, she found a sealed letter addressed to her, to be opened only after his death. Sand didn’t wait, and what she found was a long and detailed indictment that expressed with brutal candor Casimir’s dislike for his wife.38 Sand confronted Casimir with the letter and announced her intention to move to Paris, supported by an allowance and perhaps income from a writing career she hoped to begin.

Romance and Religion, Love and Despair In Paris Sand settled into a small apartment on the quai Saint Michel, where she was joined by Jules Sandeau, who was her companion and lover for the next two years. They had first met at La Châtre in July, and Sand was immediately attracted to the aspiring poet, six years younger than herself, who quickly replaced Aurélien in her affections. Over the next several years Sand embraced the bohemian culture in which conventional views about society, politics, and gender were challenged, on the pages in novels, treatises, and poetry, but also in the lives that Sand and many other young people built for themselves in the apartments, publishing offices, theaters, and cafés of Paris. Already accustomed to wearing men’s clothes from her days of riding horses in the countryside, Sand now refined this habit, wearing pants and boots that allowed her access to the streets and the inexpensive standing-room “pits” of Parisian theaters. But throughout her bohemian years Sand continued to be a solicitous mother, spending considerable time in Nohant with her children, arranging for a tutor and then a boarding school for Maurice, and taking Solange with her to Paris in 1832. And she stayed in touch as well with established figures in society, including François Duris-Dufresne, the representative from Nohant to the National Assembly, and Charles Meure, a state prosecutor whom she met when he was stationed at La Châtre in 1826–1827.

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During her early years in Paris Sand and her friends explored the borderland that separated bohemian from bourgeois culture during the July Monarchy with an intensity that was both exhilarating and exhausting.39 There was little space in bohemian Paris for the Catholic Church. In a letter to one of her circle, the medical student Emile Regnault, Sand suggested that friendship and love had become her new religion. Suffering from fragile health, Sand insisted she would continue to live, because she loved her companions more than God himself: “No, I don’t want to leave you, even though I believe firmly in God, I love you a thousand times more than him, and were he to place my soul in the most beautiful of suns, in the purest of his creations, I would still regret our poor planet, so dirty and ugly, so stupid and cursed, but where I’ve spent such beautiful days, where I’ve tasted such pure affection.”40 In a gesture that symbolized a definitive break from her Catholic past, Sand visited the couvent anglais one last time soon after her arrival in Paris. She found it much changed, with no students because of the unrest in Paris following the July Revolution and the nuns in general somber and anxious. In her autobiography Sand recalls “telling myself I would no longer pass through this gate behind which I was leaving affections preserved at a stage when the gods have no wrath and the stars are not obscured.”41 Sand may have bid farewell to her old friends, including the beloved Sister Alicia, but they were still on her mind, to judge by her first novel, Rose et Blanche, written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau and published in December 1831 under the name J. Sand. Sand later dismissed this work as puerile, but in telling the story of two women, one destined for the convent and the other for a career as an actress, it sketches out the radically divergent paths that she considered before choosing the one that led to bohemia. As would be the case for many of her novels, Rose et Blanche draws heavily on Sand’s own life. Sister Alicia and the abbé de Prémord show up as Sister Adèle and the abbé de P . . . , exemplary religious figures in a Paris convent of English nuns. The archbishop of Auch, a ridiculous and pompous throwback to the Old Regime, is modeled on M. Leblanc de Beaulieu, the bishop who had presided over the death of Sand’s grandmother ten years earlier. The plot of Rose et Blanche is full of improbable twists and turns, as the authors acknowledge in an epilogue, but it conveys nonetheless an equivocal position toward Catholicism. Blanche is attracted to the religious life, but she is a timid creature, suffering from amnesia brought on by a sexual assault.

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She dies following a marriage to a feckless young man, Horace, who is the man who assaulted her. Horace was in fact in love with Rose but was prevented from marrying her by a snobbish but devout sister. After a short career in the theater Rose ends up deciding on a life in the convent, where she teaches singing to the students and lives in Blanche’s old cell. The novel concludes with an endorsement of the cloistered life: “The air of freedom is no longer needed by those who have travelled the world and known men. Friendship, the leisure to study, the sun, air and flowers, these are the elements of a nun, and does a heart that love and glory have betrayed need anything more?”42 To judge by Sand’s life, this question would be answered with a resounding yes, but this may not have been perfectly clear to her in 1831. Love and literature dominated Sand’s life during the 1830s, a period of passionate affairs with lovers who included Alfred de Musset and Frédéric Chopin, and of literary successes that established her as one of the leading authors of the time. Her career took off in 1832 with the publication of Indiana, a novel that became an instant bestseller and drew enormous public attention for its criticism of the subservient position of wives.43 Indiana marked a new stage in Sand’s personal identity as well; it was the first work published under her nom de plume, which she subsequently adopted in conversation and correspondence. The story she told of the deeply unhappy marriage between Indiana and a retired army officer, Colonel Delmare, drew heavily on Sand’s own life. Alienated from her husband, whose behavior clearly recalls that of Casimir, Indiana falls in love with the handsome but coldhearted aristocrat Raymon de Ramière before finally finding happiness with Ralph Brown, a stolid Englishman who loves her sincerely. Sand’s main targets in Indiana are patriarchal authority and loveless marriage, though the character of Raymon also allows her to criticize men who use a sentimental vocabulary to hide their heartless seductive intentions. Religious feeling is not a central concern, but it shows up nonetheless as a crucial element in pushing the story forward, and in its final resolution. Despite her passion for Raymon, Indiana attributes her ability to resist his advances to God’s help, and her belief in God also helps keep her from choosing suicide as a way to end her misery.44 Toward the end of the novel, when Raymon tries to lure her back to France from the Ile de Bourbon, Indiana declares at length her religious convictions, which she contrasts with his self-serving religiosity:

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As for me, I have more faith than you have. I serve the same God but I serve him better and with a purer heart. Yours is the god of men, the king, the founder, and protector of your race; mine is the God of the universe, the creator, the support, the hope of all creatures. Yours has made everything for you alone; mine made all species for each other. You think yourselves masters of the world; I think you are only its tyrants. . . . But the feeling of the existence of God has never reached your heart; perhaps you’ve never prayed to Him. I have only one belief, probably the only one you don’t have; I believe in Him. But the religion you have invented, I reject. All your morality, all your principles, are but the interests of your society that you have erected into laws and that you claim emanate from God Himself, just as your priests have set up the rites of church worship to establish their power and wealth over the nations. But all that is lies and blasphemy. I who invoke God, I who understand Him, I know very well that there is nothing in common between Him and you and that it is by clinging to Him with all my strength that I can detach myself from you who continually strive to overturn His works and sully His gifts.45

Sand’s religious convictions in 1832, to judge by this text, already included the social dimension that would take on even greater weight over the next several years. But Sand’s extended reflection suggests even more an intensely individualized religiosity, intimately connected to a sense of independence from male authority and institutional religion. Working at a furious pace, Sand published Valentine, her second novel, in November 1832, another work in which the inequities of contemporary marriage take center stage.46 In this case, the union of the aristocrat Évariste de Lansac with the naïve but well-intentioned Valentine is condemned as a loveless affair arranged only for the sake of family status and a venal aristocracy. Valentine ’s true love, Benedict, is a well-educated and artistically gifted peasant but out of reach because of the social conventions that prohibit such a mésalliance. As in Indiana, religious scruples prevent Valentine from consummating her affair with Benedict, which remains platonic despite their mutually acknowledged love. And as in Indiana, fear of God helps them to ward off the idea of suicide as the solution to their impossible situation. Sand’s heroines were certainly more scrupulous than she was with regard to marriage vows; the strained but virtuous fidelity of Indiana and Valentine

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might have been a prudent gesture toward an audience unwilling to condone the unbridled passions of bohemian Paris. But Sand’s next novel, Lélia, along with her letters and journals from 1833 to 1835, reveal that she shared the despair expressed by Indiana and Valentine as they struggled to reconcile their physical desires and spiritual aspirations. Sand’s successes with Indiana and Valentine were not at all matched by Sandeau, whose youthful indolence increasingly wore on her and led eventually to the end of their affair early in 1833. The arguments and resentment that accompanied this breakup took place in a somber political context, with Sand observing from her Paris apartment the ravages of the cholera epidemic that began in March 1832 and the brutal repression of the republican uprising of June.47 It was during this period of personal and public hardship that Sand wrote and published Lélia, which marked a sharp departure from her previous novels in its extended engagement with philosophical and religious questions. These reflections accompanied the story of the doomed love between Lélia and Sténio.48 Sténio is a young poet, madly in love with Lélia, whose unhappy past includes a failed affair that makes it impossible for her to respond physically to his advances. Three other characters play central roles in the novel: Trenmor, a friend of Lélia, an ex-prisoner whose incarceration brought him to a stoic resignation to the will of God; Magnus, a guilt-ridden Catholic priest obsessed with Lélia; and Pulchérie, Lélia’s sister, a courtesan who has unashamedly devoted herself to a life of sensuality. These characters do not appear as individuals set within a carefully observed context, as in Sand’s earlier novels, or those of Balzac and Stendahl. They represent different perspectives on life, choices to be made about the relationship between body and soul, God and man, good and evil. In a note written by her friend Gustave Planche during a discussion of the novel as it was being drafted, the characters are identified with predominant traits: Lélia/doubt, Trenmor/ stoicism, Sténio/credulity, Magnus/superstition, Pulchérie/sensuality. In her own notes on the novel Sand identifies with all of these characters: “Some will say that I’m Lélia, but others would be able to recall that I used to be Sténio. I’ve also had days of uneasy devotion, of passionate desire, of violent combats and fearful austerity, where I’ve been like Magnus. I can be Trenmor as well. Magnus, it’s my childhood, Sténio, my youth, Lélia is my maturity; Trenmor will be my old age perhaps. All these types have been in me.”49 In her autobiography, Sand recalls not being able to speak to her friends about the “preoccupations” that drove her to write Lélia: “To become an atheist

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and suppose an unintelligent law ruling the fortunes of the universe is to admit something far more extraordinary and unbelievable than to avow oneself of limited reason surpassed by the motives of infinite reason. Faith thus triumphs over its own doubts, but the wounded soul feels the limits of its power shrink narrowly back on itself, and secure its devotion in such a little space that pride forever flees and sorrow remains.”50 Sand’s comments suggest how her characters offered her a range of religious options, but she oversimplifies them as well, for in the course of the novel the positions of Lélia, Sténio, and the others are far from stable. They debate, criticize, and waver in their judgments, agonizing over the choices that confront them. At times they seek to reassure each other that a merciful God exists, revealed in nature, who offers hope for eternal peace. At other times they admit to searing doubt, as when Magnus, called to administer to Lélia when she appears to be dying, cries out, “Oh, God. . . . Oh, sweet dream which has fled from me! Where are you? How will I find you again? Hope, why have you abandoned me? . . . Madame, allow me to leave you. When I am with you all my doubts take over. Here in the presence of death my last hope and my last illusion vanish. You want me to help you find God and give you heaven. You are going where you will find out if He does exist. You are happier than I because I don’t know.”51 On several occasions in the novel Lélia makes the same point, describing herself as torn between belief and doubt. When Trenmor asks her if she believes in God she answers equivocally: “Nearly always!”52 To Sténio she confesses that “I need heaven, alas, but I doubt it exists.”53 At other times she preaches to the young poet a religion in which God grants moments of mystical ecstasy, anticipations of a final harmony in which the soul will be freed from the “burning, insatiable desires” of the body: “We continue to be deceived until disillusioned, enlightened, purified, we finally abandon hope of a durable affection on earth. Then we raise to God that enthusiastic, pure homage that we should have directed only to Him.”54 The conclusion, in which Sténio commits suicide and Lélia is strangled by a crazed Magnus, undermines any facile and redemptive interpretation of the novel. Reviewers at the time judged it as a dark comment on French culture, an indictment of what Sainte-Beuve called “the powerlessness to love and believe.”55 Sand herself described the novel in 1834 as “a cry of pain, a bad dream.”56 As with her previous novels, Lélia confronts the troubled relationships between men and women, the tension between sexual desire and love, but these were now cast in a larger religious

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framework that was only a marginal presence in Indiana and Valentine. From my perspective, Lélia is a novel that illuminates the pain and despair that could accompany religious liberty as experienced by individuals intensely aware of their subjectivity, troubled and indecisive about God, his existence, his nature, and his relationship to humankind. The religious crisis Sand expressed in Lélia was in no sense relieved by its publication and continued to trouble her over the next two years. For Sand, as with Lélia, religious anxiety was inseparable from a turbulent love life, as she pursued an ideal human lover and a reassuring God, both of whom seemed hopelessly out of reach. The publication of Lélia and the breakup with Sandeau were followed by a very brief encounter with Prosper Mérimée and a relationship with the actress Marie Dorval that may or may not have been sexual. But the most melodramatic period of Sand’s life began in June 1833, when she met the young Alfred de Musset. Sand was drawn to Musset for his artistic brilliance, as a leading poet of the romantic generation, a writer whose tortured characters recalled those in her own work.57 Sand’s maternal instincts may also have played a role, as she hoped to save Musset, only twenty-two years old at the time, from a life of debauchery that threatened his health and his art. Over the next year these two carried on a tempestuous affair, with the central act a famous winter voyage to Venice, where both fell ill and Sand began an affair with Pietro Pagello, the Italian physician who cared for them both. After recovering from an illness that at times produced hallucinatory fits of rage, Musset returned to Paris while Sand stayed in Venice with Pagello, writing furiously to cover debts that she could never quite manage to pay off. She and Pagello came back to France together in August 1834, but even the exceptional good nature and patience of the Italian doctor could not endure the renewal of the destructive relationship between Sand and Musset that occurred in a continuing series of stops and starts over the next several months. Pagello returned to Italy in October 1834, leaving the two miserable lovers battling, separating, and reconciling until they definitively broke in March 1835.58 The pain and despair that Sand experienced in her tortured relationship with Musset have been described repeatedly, based on the surviving correspondence and notebooks that provide intimate testimony of an emotional crisis. But Sand’s writings from this period show that her affair was also the occasion for her continuing pursuit of the religious questions that she had dealt with imaginatively in Lélia. Writing from Venice in May 1834, Sand

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referred to Musset’s mocking attitude about her religiosity but then went on to compare God’s love with his, a comparison not to the advantage of her earthly lover: “And God Himself, what you call my chimera, what I call my eternity, isn’t it a love that I embraced in your arms with more passion than in any other moment of my life? I find there, close to me, my friend, my support. He doesn’t suffer, he isn’t weak, he isn’t suspicious, he doesn’t know the bitterness that eats away the heart, he doesn’t need my strength, he is calm, he loves me and leaves me at peace, he is happy without making me suffer, without making me work for his happiness. And as for me, I need to suffer for someone, I need to use this excess of energy and sensibility I find in myself. . . . Oh why could I not live with you both, and make you both happy without belonging to either one or the other.”59 In this passage, which might easily have been introduced into Lélia, Sand reveals her longing for both human and divine love, which at times seemed to come together in Musset’s arms. But God’s love, described in terms that echo Paul’s famous description in his First letter to the Corinthians (13:4–8), has nothing of the bitterness and jealousy that soured her relationship with Musset. As different as they are, however, God, like Musset, seems to want to possess Sand, while she aspires to love both without surrendering to either.60 Sand’s religious despair led her at times back toward the Catholic Church, seeking the kind of certainty and comfort she had found for a time in the couvent anglais. In a note written in March 1833, just before her first meeting with Musset, Sand recalled with nostalgia the comforts available to those who can confess their sins to a priest and be forgiven and consoled. But such relief seemed unavailable to people like herself, “without enthusiasm and without poetry, who fade away slowly in the shade of our intimate suffering and belated repentance, what can we do with this fiery coal that devours our conscience? Where can we find relief when the stones of the churches and the lustrous water of the sanctuary no longer refresh us?”61 This hope for forgiveness in the confessional recurs in the journal intime that Sand began keeping in November 1834, as her affair with Musset was dissolving in a series of bitter fights full of recrimination and resentment. In the journal Sand addresses Musset, accusing him of demeaning her in public, of humiliating her, despite her continued passion for him. But she also appeals directly to God, praying for forgiveness and expressing grief about the flawed human nature that he has created, and that explains her own failings. In her despair Sand describes an evening visit to the church of Saint-Sulpice,

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where she cried out, “Will you abandon me? Will you punish me to this point? Isn’t there anything I can do to earn your forgiveness?” At this point Sand writes that she heard a voice respond, “Confess, confess and die.” Remarkably, Sand did go to confession the following day, “but it was too late, and I wasn’t able to die, one lives, one suffers all this, one drinks his chalice drop by drop, one feeds oneself on bile and tears, one spends every night sleepless, and in the mornings one nods off with frightening dreams.”62 During Sand’s bohemian years she broke from orthodox Catholicism, but her novels, letters, and journals show her still constrained by a God she in turn loved, respected, feared, and resented, sentiments that also defined her relationship with her earthly partners, and especially Musset. Musset did not share Sand’s religious beliefs, but in Confessions of a Child of the Century he sets a fictionalized version of their affair within a general context of religious doubt. Sand herself admired his book for its honest treatment of their life together and its insight into the cultural moment in which they carried out their affair. In describing the mood of young people, such as Sand and himself in 1834, Musset draws a contrast between “exalted spirits, sufferers, . . . expansive souls who yearned toward the infinite, bowed their heads, and wept” and materialists who insisted that “man is here below to satisfy his senses. . . . To eat, to drink, and to sleep, this is life.”63 In the end Sand failed to keep Musset from the life of drinking and debauchery that eventually killed him, but both of them understood that Sand’s love for him was tied to a sense of spiritual yearning that even a religious skeptic like him could appreciate. Sand’s life was clearly exceptional, but it was also fascinating to the French public of the 1830s, which had an insatiable demand for her writings. Marriage and the fraught relationships between men and women were at the heart of Sand’s concerns in this period, and were clearly on the minds of her readers as well. In her treatment of families, sexuality, and love Sand expressed the doubts and struggles of individuals, especially women, who sought a greater freedom of choice in these matters. Sand’s own life, as well as her writings, testifies to the painful complications that accompanied such choices. Her life and writings show as well that choices about love, sex, and marriage were inseparable from questions about God, religion, and the Catholic Church. In 1835 Sand was in the midst of a personal and religious crisis that left her in a state of doubt and despair, but also free to choose a path that would eventually lead her to embrace a religion of humanitarianism.

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A Final Conversion: Republicanism, Social Justice, and the Religion of Humanity Sand’s personal life did not become simpler with the end of her affair with Musset, to say the least. In April 1835 she met Louis-Chyrsostome Michel, known as Michel de Bourges, a prominent lawyer and a staunch republican. Initially drawn by his charismatic defense of radical reform, within weeks she had become his mistress, a relationship that only further complicated her marriage with Casimir. After apparently agreeing to leave Nohant in exchange for the income from a property in Paris, Casimir grew increasingly resentful about his wife ’s affairs, and her dominant status at the estate. He finally exploded in a drunken tirade at the conclusion of dinner on October 19, when several guests had to forcibly prevent him from hitting his wife, or perhaps even shooting her.64 Sand immediately began legal proceedings for a separation, starting a court case that dragged on for years before she finally won control over Nohant and custody of her children. Public life was equally somber in this period, marked first of all by the brutal repression of uprisings by republicans and workers in Lyon and Paris in April 1834. In its aftermath the government passed laws restricting the rights of association and the press and began a trial of 121 conspirators charged with organizing the rebellion.65 Early in 1835 Sand continued to express in both her published work and private letters a religious anguish that corresponded with the miserable state of her affair with Musset. In her fifth lettre d’un voyageur, published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in January, Sand mourned that “God is no longer in me” and that “many have, like me, fallen into the abyss. It is a vast world, it is like a world of the dead moving and stirring beneath the world of the living.”66 Writing to her confidant Sainte-Beuve in April she reflected nostalgically on her former Catholicism, and sadly on her current confusion: “But what can one do to enter this temple [the Christian religion]? Every time I pass before its door, I genuflect before this divine poetry, seen from afar. But if I approach, I no longer see what I believed could only be found there. It is no more than a surface for what I was looking for. I would like to find my God in all his majesty and glory and prostrate myself before him, and have no one of my species tell me, it is He, because then I would doubt it. . . . What crime have I committed to be condemned to the role of wandering Jew?”67 Sand, like Edgar Quinet and others in this period, found in the “wandering Jew” a symbol that linked an aspiration to believe with an acceptance of doubt. Just one month later Sand again described herself, in a letter to her

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Saint-Simonian friend, Adolphe Guéroult, as a religious skeptic committed to finding her own way to God. While encouraging him to travel to Egypt, where he would meet up with the exiled leaders of the group, Sand also cautioned him against putting his faith in any individual, a “fanaticism” that she found “degrading and stupid.” Speaking for herself, she declared that “I have not enrolled under the banner of any leader and while maintaining esteem, respect and admiration for all those who nobly profess a religion, I remain convinced that there is not under the heavens a man who deserves to be approached on bended knee.” In this same letter, however, Sand admitted that she had just recently fought off precisely such an attachment, “refusing to modify in the least my skepticism,” despite having met “a very great man of politics.”68 The politician in question was Michel de Bourges, the first of three men who would play a decisive role in Sand’s final conversion in the latter half of the 1830s. Despite her reservations about following the religious lead of others, Sand became for a time a devoted follower of all three, but more or less quickly she also found reasons to criticize them, a process that led in the end to her own particular religious position. Sand’s amalgamation of ideas drawn from her past experience and from the religious resources of the 1830s does not constitute a major contribution to the history of theology. But these ideas do provide a fascinating example of the religious choices the leading woman writer of her generation pursued in the 1830s, which she shared with an enormous and fascinated public. The crisis of religious doubt that plagued Sand through her writing of Lélia and her affair with Musset began to dissipate soon after she met Michel de Bourges during a trip to Bourges on April 9. Responding to her new friend in a rhapsodic letter to Franz Liszt, Sand asked him to “rejoice, if you have any affection for me; I feel myself reborn and I see a new destiny open itself before me. I can’t quite say yet what it is, but it is no longer the slavery of love. It is something like a faith to which I will consecrate everything that is in me, the God who has not yet descended on me, but for whom I’m now building a temple, that is to say, purifying my heart and my life.”69 In her autobiography Sand recalls the weeks after her meeting with Michel as the moment of “a swift conversion,” and she refers to his letters from this period as a form of “proselytism.”70 The gospel of republicanism that Michel was preaching was not entirely new to Sand. Prior to meeting him she had identified broadly with principles of the July Revolution of 1830, understood as

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offering hope for “a more generous constitution, more profitable for the lowest classes of society, less exploitable by the ambitious.” But she acknowledged as well that she had not thought seriously about politics and had no great hopes for the future, a posture of “social atheism” that Michel found egotistical.71 From their first meeting at Bourges, when they spent the whole night in a conversation that included her friends Alphonse Fleury and Gabriel Planet, Michel challenged Sand to “extend this ardent and dedicated love, which will never receive its recompense in this world, to all humanity which is disparaged and in pain. Lavish not so much care on one creature! Alone, none of them merits it, but together they deserve it in the name of the eternal author of creation!”72 In her sixth lettre d’un voyageur, addressed to Michel and published in the Revue des Deux Mondes soon after their first meeting, Sand publicly declared herself a newly enlisted soldier in the cause of radical republicanism, a vow that she immediately began to fulfill by throwing herself into the most controversial political trial of the 1830s. Michel had taken a leadership role in the defense of 121 men accused of plotting and carrying out the republican rebellions that broke out in Lyon and Paris in April 1834. In May Sand traveled to Paris, where at Michel’s request she drafted a letter to be signed by all the defense lawyers, stating their principles.73 It was during their time in Paris that Sand and Michel also became lovers, the start of another affair that would end in jealousy, resentment, and mutual recriminations. Sand had a long list of reasons for breaking with Michel, and even in her earliest enthusiasm for him she expressed serious reservations about his personality and his politics. Sand opened the same public letter of June 1835 in which she accepted his political teaching by referring to him as a “highminded hypocrite” and chiding him for thinking “that it is a sense of duty and not your instinct for power that leads you up the steep and fatal ascent.”74 She was suspicious at the outset as well of Michel’s stated willingness to endorse violence as the means to his end, though she did not take seriously his comment to her that “if it were my duty to kill you, I would tear you from my heart and strangle you with my own hands.”75 Sand’s letters to Michel in 1836 and 1837 show her at times pleading for his love but also complaining of his jealousy, arrogance, and authoritarianism. “Submissiveness and servile fear, that’s all you want,” she wrote in January 1837.76 Even in the midst of a temporary reconciliation in March 1837 Sand expressed bitterness about Michel’s patronizing attitude toward women: “You treated me like a child

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whose sufferings one appeases with some potion. You have never seen women except as children; you believed that one amuses them until the day when one no longer cares for them, and then they pass on to other loves or to the cult of some social vanity.”77 By the summer of 1837 Sand was finished with Michel as a lover and mentor. She remained grateful to him for his help with her legal troubles with her husband, and in her autobiography from the 1850s she continued to praise his courageous defense of his ideals in the 1830s. Through Michel, Sand was drawn into the “social question,” and for the rest of her life she favored policies that she believed would address the issues of poverty and inequality. But she recalled herself in this period as “searching for a single religious and social truth,” a quest that the worldly lawyer could not fully satisfy.78 In the end she came to understand these problems not within the Jacobin-like framework of Michel but from the perspective of two religious prophets, Lamennais and Leroux. Even before they met Sand was drawn to Lamennais, first of all through her reading of The Words of a Believer, which she described briefly in her third lettre d’un voyageur, of September 1834. Responding to the criticism of an Armenian monk with whom she was chatting on the island of San Servolo near Venice, Sand wrote that “while reading it I felt a livelier faith dawn in me; the love of God, the hope of seeing his kingdom come on earth had transported me to the foot of the eternal throne. Never had I prayed so fervently.”79 Sand finally met Lamennais during his stay in Paris in the spring of 1835, where he along with Michel served as members of the team organized to defend the workers in the “monster trial.” To the fervent atmosphere fueled by intense discussions of political tactics and republican dreams, and inspired by the virtuoso piano performances of Liszt, Lamennais added a compelling religious dimension, casting the work of Sand and her friends as part of a providential moment in which monarchies would give way to popular democracies. For a few months in 1835–1836 Sand was swept away by Lamennais, who appeared to her as a savior, someone in whom she could believe even in her darkest moments. “In the days of my most bitter skepticism,” she wrote to him, “you were always the only divine emanation, clothed in flesh, that my doubts respected, the spirit of negation lodged in me did not dare to attack you. For years I’ve regarded you as the only child of man who could do something for me, and whose virtue seemed to me stronger than my pain.” At the conclusion of this letter, full of inflated rhetoric, Sand asked

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Lamennais to become her spiritual director: “Guide me, no longer let me write for the despairing unbeliever, and allow me to submit to your authority any serious writing produced in my solitude.”80 Lamennais responded to this remarkable request to submit all her work to his judgment with a grandiloquent letter that in turn flattered Sand and called on her to fulfill a divine mission: “I well knew, Madame, that a soul as strong and elevated as yours would sooner or later take flight towards other regions than those where the present generation wanders so painfully.” Like Michel de Bourges, Lamennais insisted that Sand expand her understanding of love so that it would embrace all of humanity, a sentiment that would necessarily include the love of God as well: “Life, it is love, but the love of others, of God first of all, of our brothers next, and this life must expand and overflow, and rise like an ocean that never ebbs.”81 In a period just after he had been condemned by the pope and abandoned by most of his Catholic friends, Lamennais eagerly took up Sand’s offer of friendship and accepted the role of spiritual adviser. His old friends were scandalized by an association with “this shameless George Sand . . . who has written novels so abominable that no honest women would confess to having read them.”82 From Sand’s perspective, Lamennais was destined to play the role of the abbé de Prémord, as she wrote a friend from her convent years, Sister Eliza Anster: “I have finally succeeded in placing in another holy priest the great personal esteem and unlimited confidence in his intelligence that I had for [the abbé de Prémord].”83 Sand was infatuated with Lamennais for a time, seeing in him a later version of the Jesuit who advised her during her convent school years. But their friendship cooled when he tried to impose on her his views on women and marriage. In 1837 Sand agreed to contribute several articles to Le Monde, a paper that Lamennais agreed to edit after leaving once and for all his home in Brittany. Objecting to her views on the equality between men and women, he took the liberty of cutting some passages he believed offensive without consulting her. Sand’s response, while it began with a show of respect, insisted on divorce as the solution to the injustices within marriage, a position in which she explicitly reversed their roles: “Believe me, I know better than you, and for this one time the disciple dares to say: ‘Master, there are paths you have not walked, abysses where my eyes have plunged, while yours were fixed on the heavens. You have lived with angels; me with men and women, I know how one suffers, how one sins, how one needs a rule that makes

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virtue possible.”84 Sand never broke completely with Lamennais; she continued to acknowledge his crucial role in her political and spiritual conversion of 1835–1836 and mourned his death in 1854.85 At the same time that she was moving away from Lamennais Sand was forming an attachment to Pierre Leroux, another of the prophets from the 1830s who combined religious fervor with social radicalism. Leroux influenced Sand for a longer period and with greater impact than did Lamennais, but he was the last man to play the role of spiritual guide for her, ending a series that began with François Deschartes and the abbé de Prémord. Sand first met Leroux at her Paris apartment in June 1835, following a suggestion by her friend Sainte-Beuve that he might help her in her quest for enlightenment. Leroux’s timidity, her preoccupation with her marriage and the “monster trial,” and the powerful influence of Lamennais and Michel kept Sand from pursuing a friendship at that moment. But the growing distance from her two mentors, and a reading of an essay of Leroux on happiness, led Sand to initiate a friendship in 1836 that helped her to define a religious position that endured in its essential elements for the rest of her life. For ten years Leroux and Sand were close collaborators, working together on a variety of journalistic and literary projects centered on a belief in a God who was immanent in humanity, and who inspired and watched over a history of endless progress. At the time of their meeting Leroux had already established himself as an important figure in the world of socialist ideas that swirled through the newspapers, workshops, and salons of Paris. He had been a disciple of Saint-Simon but broke with the movement when Prosper Enfantin began defending the principle of free love and asserting his own uncontested authority. Leroux, together with Jean Reynaud, edited the Encyclopédie nouvelle (1836–1841), which published a series of influential articles that Sand saw as the definitive statement of “the philosophy of progress that all the modern theorists have taught us to deduce from the flow of events . . . the great discovery, at least the great philosophical certainty of modern times.”86 Sand became a devoted reader of the Encyclopédie nouvelle and by 1839 was referring to Leroux as “a new Plato, a new Christ.”87 Sand was by this point deeply involved with Frédéric Chopin, an affair that lasted from 1837 to 1847, more or less parallel to her closest association with Leroux. Chopin did not share Sand’s fascination with Leroux, but he accepted him as a source of inspiration and consolation for his partner, whose religious needs were

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greater than his own. Sand’s language shows a real devotion to Leroux’s ideas, but her attachment to him was due in part to the fact that they already shared a sense that the present moment was in need of a new religious synthesis. In the earliest stage of their association Leroux wrote in flattering terms about Lélia, which he saw as a “beautiful symbol” for their age, characterized by “moral sadness.” “What do the poets write in our day, if not to paint under all its forms this suffering of the human soul in search of nourishment. . . . Lélia is a soul who seeks her nourishment.”88 Leroux consistently praised Sand in their correspondence, referring to her as an “oracle” who would help him to recover a state of holiness and wholeness: “Be sure of it, you will save me, because we will save each other.”89 For Leroux, Sand was uniquely able to carry out the divine mission that he ascribed to artists, capturing both the agony of the present and hope for the future.90 Some of Sand’s friends at the time, such as Heinrich Heine, resented Leroux, “who unfortunately exercises a rather unfavorable influence on the talent of the penitent, drawing her into obscure dissertations of half-developed ideas.”91 Leroux certainly played an essential role in Sand’s conversion in the late 1830s but, as Isabelle Hoog Naginski has argued, the imaginative effort on display in her novels, along with her correspondence, shows her to have been an equal participant in their philosophical and religious explorations.92 Sand was attracted to the elevated role that Leroux granted the artist in the formulation of a new “religion of humanity,” a phrase that he was probably the first to employ.93 In 1837 Sand and her friends became known as “humanitarians” and were parodied in the press for their supposedly extravagant ideas and behavior, displayed in the salon maintained by Marie d’Agoult, Liszt’s mistress, in the Hotel de France.94 The literature that Sand produced starting in 1836 marked a conversion to a religious posture that she maintained, with only slight modification, for the rest of her life. This conversion was facilitated by Leroux, along with Michel and Lamennais, but it was mediated essentially by Sand herself, working throughout the night, writing constantly, and producing a remarkable series of stories and novels that conveyed her new understanding of God and his relationship to human history. A number of these focused primarily on the social question, criticizing aristocratic society, the inequality between men and women, poverty, and the plight of artisanal and agricultural laborers.95 Other works, and the ones that will preoccupy me here, dealt with religious questions, and with Sand’s increasing commitment to the cause of religious liberty, a principle she saw as

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threatened by an intolerant Catholic Church. Sand embedded her ideas in imaginative historical narratives whose characters did not come easily to their positions, but who reflected the anxiety and religious despair that she had experienced herself and that she understood as a characteristic problem of her time. Sand’s short story “The Unknown God” provides an early example of her quest for a new religion based on selfless charity, written just as she was becoming acquainted with Leroux. Set in Rome in the time of the Diocletian persecution of Christians, the story tells of a meeting between the pagan aristocratic woman Leah and Pamphilus, a Christian missionary working to support and console a community threatened with martyrdom. Leah risks her life to come to the catacombs, where she confesses her dissatisfaction with the old gods, and with her status as a powerless adornment in a society dominated by men. Rather than convert in order to regain her youth and beauty, or for vengeance, Pamphilus counsels Leah to pray for support in her suffering and to give up the “circuses and carnivals and chariots and the temples of powerless gods.” Two years after this meeting a dying Leah asks to see Eusebius, another Christian minister, who learns that she has followed all of Pamphilus’s advice. He agrees to baptize her, without any further instruction, while insisting that “a sincere heart and a life of atonement are the truest forms of baptism.” Leah then dies peacefully, happy to leave a corrupted world and convinced that she will be “going back to the home of imperishable beauty.”96 Leah’s description of her plight, an abandoned woman in despair about her lost love, calls to mind some of Sand’s worst moments as she broke from Musset and Michel. Leah was seeking religious answers, but in this story she finds solace only by retreating from the world, enduring its pain without complaint, and putting her trust in a loving God. As she worked her way into the religious ideas of Leroux, Sand moved away from this kind of ascetic and mystical escapism to embrace a view in which humans were responsible for acting in the world to forward God’s plan for social progress and spiritual enlightenment. But even in her most assertive mode Sand retained her sympathy with those who struggled in search of religious answers. This combination of religious affirmation and a troubled conscience is at the heart of Spiridion, which Sand dedicated to Leroux, described as “brother and friend” but also as “father and master.”97 Sand set her novel in a gloomy and mysterious Italian Benedictine monastery of the eighteenth

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century, a backdrop that draws on the tradition of the gothic novels that Sand had read as a young woman and that recalls some of the scenes from Lélia. Spiridion revolves around the troubles faced by two monks, Alexis and Angel, who in the 1790s live on the margins of the community, ostracized for obscure reasons, and who come to depend on each other. Alexis, a sage devoted to scientific pursuits, adopts a confused and troubled Angel as his protégé. Much of the novel is taken up with Alexis’s telling of the history of the monastery to Angel, an account that traces the religious struggles of its founder, Spiridion, as well as those of Alexis and Angel. Spiridion is a convert two times over, a Jew who first became a Protestant, and then a Catholic, before establishing and leading the monastery. In his position he is soon deeply disappointed with the lives of the monks, who are concerned more with their material comfort than with prayer and study, an observation that leads Spiridion to question Catholicism.98 In an attempt to restore his faith Spiridion began a course of study, but this use of “freedom of examination” leads only to more doubt. In the end, trusting in “individual reason,” Spiridion rejects the divinity of Christ and looks forward to a new religion that will replace Christianity.99 But because he cannot discern the features of the new faith, Spiridion keeps his doubts to himself, continues to practice Catholicism, and dies with the last rites. On his deathbed he reveals his doubts to his only friend but insists that this young monk, Fulgence, make a free choice about his religion and not be guided by his master: “My dear child, I’ve initiated you into all the battles, all the doubts, all the beliefs of my life. I have told you everything that I have found, both good and bad, both true and false, in all of the religions I have traversed. I leave you to be your own judge, and to consult your conscience in deciding. If you think I am wrong, and that Catholicism, where you have lived since a child, satisfies your mind and your heart, don’t follow my example, and hold to your belief. One must stay in a place that one finds good. To move from one faith to another it is necessary to cross an abyss, and I know too much how painful the road is myself to push you there.”100 Spiridion, who dies in 1698, also leaves Fulgence orders that he be buried with a manuscript that summarizes all of his beliefs, looking ahead to a time when Fulgence, or others who might come after, would be ready for a new religion. Fulgence, feeling himself unworthy, does not dare to read the manuscript, but he tells Alexis of its existence, before he also dies with the Last Rites of the church.

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Spiridion’s last testament is finally read by Alexis and Angel, but only after they experience a prolonged battle with their own attachment to Catholicism, and to the monastery. At one point Alexis is given permission to leave for a time, in order to assist the local population, suffering from the plague. This experience shows him the fallacy of seeking God only through study, and the need for charity toward his fellow men. Despite his distaste for his fellow monks, and his evolving sense of religion that would combine reason and charity, Alexis returns to the monastery. Like Spiridion, he does not want to move too quickly, nor to ask others to join him in a premature conversion to a new religion. In recounting his return to the monastery Alexis describes a complicated relationship with the church, and with his own doubts. “I had done nothing to that point to destroy the Catholic faith. I am not in favor of an education that moves too quickly. When it is a question of ruining established convictions, without having formulated a new idea, we must not rush to throw a young mind into the abyss of doubt. Doubt is a necessary evil. One might say it is great good and that, undergone with sadness, with humility, with impatience and desire to arrive at a new faith, it is one of the great gifts that a sincere soul can offer to God.”101 Spiridion concludes with the sacking of the monastery by a French revolutionary army, just after Alexis has read Spiridion’s manuscript. Alexis is killed by the soldiers, but he accepts his fate with serenity, seeing them as attacking only the decrepit forms of a dying religion, and thereby helping a new one to be born. The soldiers are brutes, but they are acting in the name of the “sans-culotte Jesus” and initiating the age of a new religion appropriate to its times.102 Sand wrote Spiridion in 1838–1839, starting it on her estate in Nohant and completing it while living with Chopin and her children in an abandoned monastery on the island of Majorca, a setting that clearly influenced her descriptions in Spiridion. In this same period she was also completing a revised version of Lélia, which began appearing in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1839. In Lélia II Sand introduces a new character, a reform-minded Cardinal Annibal who attempts to reform the Catholic Church from within. He is assisted in this task by Lélia, who is not murdered by Magnus but becomes the abbess of a Camaldolese convent. In the end, however, the efforts of Annibal and Lélia fail, and she is exiled from the convent and dies of despair.103 The conclusion is still tragic, but Sand now placed greater emphasis on the failings of the Catholic Church, rather than on the existential condition of a humanity caught between faith and doubt. This alteration partially aligns

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Lélia II with the sentiments in Spiridion, but in the preface to Lélia II Sand insists that she did not alter “the basis of the ideas in this book, even though they have changed dramatically since I wrote it. . . . Lélia is still a work of doubt, a moan of scepticism.” Sand confesses that this is no longer her position, because “in the time in which we live, the elements of a new social and religious unity have appeared, scattered within a great conflict whose goal is beginning to be understood by some superior minds.” While she is now “sincerely and loyally converted to the new doctrines,” Sand insists on the importance of recalling the doubt and despair of her previous years. “Doubt and despair are the great maladies the human race must undergo in order to accomplish its religious progress. Doubt is a sacred right, an enduring reality of the human conscience which examines in order to reject or adopt its belief. Despair is its fatal crisis, its fearful paroxysm. But my God! This despair is a great thing. It is the most ardent appeal of God towards you, the most undeniable witness of your existence in us and of your love for us.”104 In this remarkable passage doubt is not dismissed as the opposite of belief, for in Sand’s experience the two religious moods converge, with the new faith understood as intimately related to the despair that preceded it. Leroux’s religion was based on a belief that the entire history of humanity constituted a single whole in which the sufferings of the past could not be separated from a glorious and redeemed future. In Spiridion Sand accepted this idea, but also extended it to include her individual characters, whose past doubts are resolved but not forgotten in the present moment of illumination. In her religious vision divinely inspired progress necessarily involved pain and despair on both the individual and collective level. Sand thus emphasized the sacrality of doubt, even as she moved toward a confident belief in a God who oversaw mankind’s inexorable progress toward a blissful future. Sand and Leroux were not alone in embracing a religion centered on human progress, a common theme among utopian thinkers of the nineteenth century. Other elements of their system would also have been familiar to contemporaries who followed the development of religious ideas: Christ was not the Son of God, but a divinely inspired prophet who preached a gospel of equality that had been suppressed by a Catholic Church that colluded with emperors and kings; other prophets before and after Christ also deserve respect; Christianity was not the only true religion, although it marked an important stage in the progress of humanity, since its universalism transcended the particularism of the Jews.105 Sand, like Leroux and other utopian thinkers

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of the time, coupled this critique of Christianity, and especially of Catholicism, with a rejection of materialism and a belief in spiritual reality and in the immortal soul. Sand, however, was not perfectly clear about the nature of this afterlife. Eternal punishment in hell was an insult to a benevolent God, but the joy of a Catholic heaven seemed static and incommensurate with the principle of universal progress. Leroux, however, came to believe in reincarnation, in which the souls of the dead were embodied in later generations, but without a clear memory of the past within the individual conscience.106 These religious ideas found in Spiridion also inform Consuelo and The Comtesse de Rudolstadt, two novels that Sand wrote between 1842 and 1844, when she was still close to Leroux.107 First appearing in the Revue Indépendante, the journal subsidized by Sand and edited by Leroux in the early 1840s, these works provide an elaborate statement of their religious principles but also illuminate her complex and not always consistent understanding of religious liberty. Combining elements of her earlier works, Consuelo and The Comtesse de Rudolstadt place a love story within a gothic setting that includes underground passages and mysterious apparitions and use the characters to convey religious and political ideas aimed at radical reform.108 Set in the middle years of the eighteenth century, the love story centers on the tortured relationship between Consuelo, a virtuoso operatic performer from Venice, and Albert, the Count of Rudolstadt, in Bohemia. Drawing on her memories of Venice, and her relationship with Musset, Sand recounts the flight of her heroine from a passionate affair with an unworthy lover. Consuelo ends up as the music instructor for the Rudolstadt family in the “Castle of Giants” in Bohemia, where Albert, the heir to the count, falls madly in love with her. Albert, however, is a profoundly troubled young man, subject to mysterious fits, periods when he flees to an underground hiding place. There he imagines himself as the reincarnation of Jan Zizka, the leader of the Hussite rebellion of the fifteenth century, an identity that has made him reject the devout Catholicism of his father.109 Consuelo discovers Albert’s hiding place and learns from him the history of the Hussites, and in particular of their doctrine of communion under two species. For Albert and Consuelo, and for Sand as well, this insistence on “the chalice for everyone” established the heretics as preaching the true gospel of equality that the Catholic Church had suppressed in favor of privileged clergy and an alliance with repressive monarchs. Consuelo concludes with the apparent death of Albert, just after his

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marriage to Consuelo, who agrees to the union despite her conviction that she respects and admires but does not love him. In the sequel Consuelo falls in love with Liverani, a mysterious stranger who rescues her from Frederick the Great’s prison of Spandau. But she learns as well that Albert is still alive, and a principal member of the Invisibles, a secret society dedicated to introducing a new religion of equality and justice to the world. As in Indiana and Valentin, the Consuelo novels recount a battle between marital fidelity and the demands of passionate love. Consuelo is distraught by these competing obligations, both of which she wants to affirm. On a parallel plane, Consuelo is also troubled by the demands of the Invisibles, who invite her to join them of her own free will, but in doing so to commit herself absolutely to their cause. Should she, like Liverani, “bind myself by vows to the Invisibles? . . . With my eyes closed, my conscience silent, and my mind in the dark, I must surrender and renounce my will . . . ?”110 Even when faced by an awesome council of judges dressed in “red cloaks with ghastly white masks that made them look like corpses” Consuelo defends her freedom of choice. She is willing to accept membership, on the condition that it does not violate her conscience. “Does [divine law] command that I bless and devote myself to you wholeheartedly? That I accept. But if it prescribes that I go against my conscience to oblige you, mustn’t I object? Judge for yourselves.”111 The judges respond that “we have no right to put your conscience in chains and take hold of your life if you don’t freely and voluntarily surrender them to us.” But they also claim the right “to probe the most secret recesses of your soul,” should Consuelo agree to join them.112 In the end, after a week of further reflection, Consuelo accepts these conditions and is initiated into the order through a series of tests, including a denial of the divinity of Christ and a prolonged visit to torture chambers that display the instruments used by kings and priests to maintain their power. Consuelo has joined the Invisibles, but in their first authoritative act over her they claim the power to dissolve her marriage with the count. Once again Consuelo challenges them: “I don’t recognize any theocratic power. You yourselves have taught me to recognize that the only rights you have over me are those that I’ve freely given you and to submit only to a fatherly authority. Your authority would not be fatherly if it were to dissolve my marriage without my husband’s assent as well as my own.” At this moment the sibyl Wanda (who is also the mother of Albert!) enters the scene and reaffirms the divorce decree, so that Consuelo might marry Liverani, “in virtue of the inalienable right of

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love in marriage.” Consuelo finally accepts the divorce but refuses to marry Liverani, which she understands as a selfish act designed only for her own happiness. At this moment Liverani’s mask is torn off; he is revealed to be Albert, while Wanda proclaims “that God has granted you to reconcile love and virtue, happiness and duty.”113 The two lovers are then married for a second time in an elaborate ceremony conducted in the midst of the congregation of the Invisibles, who “were all called to sanction this religious consecration of two beings bound to them by a common faith. They raised their arms over the bride and groom to bless them, then all joined hands to form a vibrant circle, a chain of fraternal love and religious fellowship.”114 For a moment, at least, conflicts between individual religious liberty and authority, and between husbands and wives, seem to be resolved by a sacrament of a new religion. This ecstatic moment does not conclude the ceremony, however, which is interrupted when the sibyl breaks into the circle and delivers an impassioned speech that mesmerizes the congregation: Do you really know what love is? . . . If you knew, venerable leaders of our order and ministers of our worship, you would never have anyone utter before you this formula of eternal commitment that God alone can ratify, which, consecrated by man, is a sort of profanation of the most divine of all mysteries. What strength can you impart to a commitment that by itself is a miracle? Yes, it is a miracle when two wills abandon themselves to each other and become one, for every soul is eternally free by divine right. And yet, when two souls give and bind themselves by love one to the other, their mutual possession becomes as sacred, as much a matter of divine right as individual liberty. You can see that it’s a miracle, and one that God keeps forever a mystery, like life and death.115

Sand here struggles to reconcile her sense of individual liberty with marriage and religion, both of which require a commitment to surrender the self in favor of a community. Accepting marriage and joining the Invisibles necessarily compromises individual freedom, a dilemma that the sibyl cannot resolve except by retreating to the concepts of miracle and mystery. Only faith in an inscrutable but benevolent God can allow Consuelo to transcend the apparent contradictions between individual freedom, the need to surrender one ’s liberty for the sake of marriage, and social justice, all of which are sacred obligations.

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Following their marriage Consuelo carries on her work for the Invisibles while pursuing a brilliant operatic career, accompanied by Albert. Despite these efforts, however, monarchies and the Catholic Church battle successfully to maintain their power. The Invisibles are defeated, and Consuelo and Albert are last seen wandering in the Bohemian mountains, living off the charity of the peasants who come to hear their preaching. Albert now floats between madness and a visionary lucidity, cared for by Consuelo, who continues to believe in him, even when his language is too obscure to be understood. By the time that Sand reached this point in the saga of Albert and Consuelo she had begun to regard Leroux with a sense of detachment, an attitude perhaps reflected in the final scenes of The Countess of Rudolstadt. Leroux was constantly demanding financial help, stubbornly pursuing his invention of a new typesetting process that never worked. Their correspondence, regular since 1836, petered out by the end of 1845, after which time they communicated only rarely. In a letter to the worker-poet Charles Poncy in November 1845 Sand described Leroux as admirable but unstable, someone who saw further than anyone else but “who is not God, able to pull the sun from the sea where it still rests.” But in this same letter Sand reaffirms the religious truths that she embraced after writing Lélia, when she was “embittered, sick, unjust, and unhappy with myself, and with God. I had either to be healed or to die. I was healed because I still felt the power to love that I had refused Lélia, and whoever can still love his fellows is unable to doubt God for any time. . . . It may not be logical, but in believing in God and his goodness, we can’t help but believe his teachings and promises, for the future, for the ideal.”116 Ten years later, in concluding her autobiography, Sand repeated this credo and expressed her gratitude to Lamennais and Leroux for helping her “to create for myself a fusion of these great sources of truth.”117 Sand was never again plagued by the doubts of Lélia, but at a conceptual level she continued to struggle over the exercise of religious liberty, a dilemma already on display in the Consuelo novels. In 1848 Sand was an active participant through her journalism in the revolutionary regime that replaced Louis Philippe in February. In three essays published in La Vraie République in May Sand defended the emergence of the new religion of republicanism based on the principles of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which were derived from a Christianity detached from a divinized understanding of Jesus and the corruption of the Catholic Church. The new religion required a new cult, but how could the obligation to participate in a national religion

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of republicanism be reconciled with individual freedom? In Sand’s words: “How can one draft the formula for this oath: ‘I bind myself to be free.’ It is obvious that it is impossible even to express such an idea, because freedom is opposed to any alienation of the conscience and to the human will.” In a rhetorical solution to the problem that recalls Rousseau, Sand imagines a cult that would express “UNANIMITY, the great social law of the future,” based on “the free and spontaneous agreement of all.” But she acknowledges that this is for the time being “a dream” and that “we would be crazy not to recognize the moral state of humanity in practice.”118 Sand could not resolve the philosophical tension between the rights of individual conscience and the need for a religiously sanctioned social order. But in practice she remained faithful to the religious principles that she embraced following the crisis of Lélia. This is not to say that her religion was wholly static for the rest of her life. When her beloved granddaughter died in 1855 at the age of five she consoled herself by reading Jean Reynaud’s Terre et ciel and embraced his view of the soul’s progressive reincarnation on other planets.119 This was only one of the difficult moments Sand lived through over the last thirty years of her life. Her affair with Chopin ended in jealousy and resentment, she became alienated from her daughter Solange, and she was deeply distressed by the bloody conclusion of the revolution of 1848 and the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. But throughout the last thirty years of her life Sand continued to advocate, in her literature and her correspondence, for the religion of humanity that she had learned in her association with Michel, Lamennais, and Leroux. Freedom of conscience remained central to Sand’s religion over the last thirty years of her life. From her perspective, the Catholic Church remained a principal threat to religious freedom, with its monopolistic insistence on the truth of its own dogmas. This point was most clearly made in Mademoiselle La Quintinie, her 1863 novel that tells of the conversion of the eponymous heroine from an intolerant Catholicism to a religion that mirrored Sand’s own views.120 The novel was a huge success, especially with the students of Paris. During a visit to the capital in February 1864 to witness the opening of a new play of hers, Sand was escorted back to her apartment by a crowd of students shouting, “Long live George Sand! Long live Mademoiselle La Quintinie!”121 The Catholic Church responded to the novel by placing all of Sand’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books.122 Sand was unrelentingly hostile to the Catholic Church’s intrusion into the conscience

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of an individual, but she held herself to this same standard, refusing to claim the kind of prophetic authority she came to suspect in Lamennais and Leroux. In the course of a long correspondence in 1863 with Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie, a Catholic woman of letters plagued by doubts, Sand was forthright in declaring her own religious principles: “Go to God without an intermediary, without a priest.” But she advised her friend that if abandoning the church was too painful and frightening, she should continue to practice Catholicism and should spare herself the agony of doubt: “If the habit, the convenience, the need for consecrated formulas ties you to cultic practice, go there in a spirit of confidence, of liberty, and the veritable faith that is in you. . . . God doesn’t want you to doubt yourself, because it is the same as doubting him.”123 In January 1876, just a few months before her death, Sand wrote a long and moving letter to Flaubert, whose pessimism she constantly battled during their friendship in the last ten years of her life. Worried about her friend’s despair, Sand affirmed her confidence in humanity, her commitment to social equality, and her belief in a future that might include successive reincarnations in other worlds. But she rejected the idea that “I want to convert you to a doctrine. But no, I wouldn’t dream of it. Everyone has a point of view, and I respect their free choice.”124 When Sand died six months later her family was faced with the decision of whether or not to have her buried with a Catholic service. Sand did not leave clear instructions on this point, although many of her friends were convinced that she never would have wanted a religious burial. She never asked for a priest to visit her as her condition grew worse, although the local curé made himself available and was observed wandering in the gardens of the estate while Sand was dying. Her daughter Solange, always a difficult person, nevertheless pushed hard for a Catholic burial, and her brother Maurice finally acceded to her wishes, for the sake of family peace. Perhaps Sand might have been persuaded by some of the arguments made by Solange and her supporters, that a civil burial would have shocked the pious peasants of the region, who packed the church to honor her. And perhaps Sand would have been amused by the irony of the situation, which brought her skeptical friends, including Renan and Flaubert, into the small church near her estate. Sand never ceased to challenge their pessimism, a position based on her goodwill and generosity, but also on her conversion to the religion of humanity.

7. Philology and Freedom Ernest Renan’s Struggle with Catholicism

Ernest Renan’s decision to leave the Catholic Church in 1845 struck at the heart of French Catholicism, the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, the most prestigious institution in France for the training of clergy. As Renan walked away from the imposing building in the Faubourg Saint-Germain he was abandoning a promising career for an uncertain future. A brilliant student of impeccable morals, Renan had been singled out for special attention by his clerical mentors as someone whose intellect could defend Catholicism against those who belittled the intellectual resources of the church. Renan’s disenchantment came at a moment when the church showed signs of recovering from the assaults of the revolutionary years of the 1790s and 1830. Lacordaire ’s lectures at the cathedral of Notre Dame in 1835 had drawn a large and distinguished audience to hear his defense of orthodox Catholicism, inflected with a Mennaisien conviction that the church could accommodate itself to a modern and liberal regime.1 From a devotional perspective, Marian piety was flourishing, as evident in the much publicized conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne in 1842. Catholics also had become more active in addressing the social question, most notably in the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, founded by Frédéric Ozanam in 1833.2 In 1838 Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the enormously supple Old Regime bishop who had abandoned his ministry to serve the revolutionary regime, the Napoleonic empire, the Bourbon Restoration, and the July Monarchy, made a dramatic deathbed conversion. Although some observers, including Renan, questioned the 234

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sincerity of Talleyrand’s return to the church, French Catholics were thrilled with the homecoming of a prodigal son.3 The priest responsible for Talleyrand’s conversion, Félix Dupanloup, who was to preach at the baptism of Alphonse Ratisbonne and play a central role in Renan’s life, was a rising star whose fame allowed him to make the junior seminary of Saint-Nicolas-deChardonnet a fashionable secondary school in Paris. In a more polemical mode, Louis Veuillot became a ferocious defender of ultramontane Catholicism through his journal L’Univers. Imprisoned briefly in 1844 for his attacks on the university, Veuillot wrote that “on the other side of the wall there is only liberty, the liberty of dogs without masters, liberty that I regard as a whore.”4 Anticlericals were not slow to respond to these signs of Catholic renewal. As we have seen, Eugène Sue ’s The Wandering Jew (1840) accused the Jesuits of swindling families in a cynical campaign to accumulate power, while Jules Michelet’s Le prêtre, la femme, et la famille (1845) presented the clergy as using the confessional box to alienate wives from their husbands and families. Catholic education was an especially divisive issue in the 1840s, with Catholics led by Montalembert pushing for the right to open secondary schools and thus break the monopoly of the French university system.5 Renan was generally aware of these debates during his early years in Paris (1838–1845), but he did not engage directly in the hostile exchanges between Catholics and anticlericals.6 Unlike Félicité Lamennais and George Sand, who saw their religious choices as intimately connected to controversial political and social issues—church-state relations, social justice, the status of women—Renan’s religious decisions flowed from a more introspective process of reflection and struggle over fundamental philosophical and religious questions: Can the teachings of the Catholic Church be defended on the basis of reason? Is the Bible a work based on divine revelation? Who was Jesus Christ? Does God exist? Renan was moved by intellectual and spiritual concerns, but like the other converts in this study, these considerations merged with family feeling in an intricate pattern. Renan’s life nonetheless followed a different path than the one we observed with other Catholic renegades. Born in 1823 into a devout family from Brittany, Renan avoided the religious turbulence associated with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era that marked the early years of Lamennais and Sand. But Renan shared with these other and older Catholics who chose to move away from the church a profound commitment

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to the individual conscience as the basis of religious liberty, an idea that by the 1840s was able to penetrate the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, an inner sanctum of Catholicism. Renan, like Lamennais and Sand, shows us a powerful and independent intellect contending with a Catholic institution committed to orthodox dogma and ecclesiastical authority. But in both the letters and notes he wrote during his crisis, and in the Souvenirs of his maturity, Renan explores with passionate intensity the powerful appeals of both sides of this debate, offering a sharp contrast with the more resentful and politicized Lamennais and the more heterodox Sand. His account illuminates as well a surprising paradox, for Renan’s move away from the church was mediated by Catholic teachers who taught and encouraged him, and in the end respected his conscience-driven decision to leave them. This chapter explores the question of how a pious young man from Brittany, the most devout region in France, raised in a fervent Catholic family, and treated with generosity and solicitude by his clerical mentors, could abandon a priestly vocation and, over a period of just a few years, reject not only the dogmas of the church but belief in the supernatural. No answer to this question will ever be fully satisfying, a point Renan himself recognized in his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1883), where he describes a complex and ambiguous religious identity. The Souvenirs must be the starting point for any discussion of the conversion that led him to reject a clerical career and orthodox Catholicism in the 1840s. A brilliant and moving memoir of a spiritual crisis, Renan’s masterpiece tells us a great deal about the religious and social climate inside the Catholic Church in the 1840s, a context that enabled a decision that stands as an important moment in the history of religious liberty. But the Souvenirs can only be a starting point, to be taken “cum grano salis,” as Renan himself wrote in the preface of the work, which appeared almost forty years after he walked away from the seminary in October 1845.7 Fortunately, we have as well his correspondence and his notebooks from this period, invaluable complements to the Souvenirs, which have been scrutinized and edited by scholars who devoted their lives to exploring Renan’s inner life and intellectual career.8 Taken together Renan’s writings give us an opportunity to observe a poignant decision that illuminates how battles over the borderlands between faith and reason, individual liberty and ecclesiastical authority, were being waged within the conscience of a devout Catholic who was finally unable to reconcile freedom and Catholicism.

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Destined for the Priesthood In his Souvenirs Renan recalls with affection and nostalgia his earliest years in Tréguier, a port town in Brittany, where he was raised by Manon Renan, his widowed mother, and Henriette, an adoring sister.9 Renan’s family struggled financially to pay off his father’s debts, with Renan’s mother managing a small shop, while his sister tried her hand at running a school for girls before the need for more income led her to accept a position as a teacher in Paris.10 We have no reason to doubt Renan’s description of himself as a devout Catholic boy, watched over by a pious mother and educated by the clergy in a town dominated by its fourteenth-century cathedral. In recalling his early years Renan begins with the story of Is, a Breton city swallowed up by the sea, whose church towers can still be glimpsed through the waves on a stormy day and whose bells can be heard when the weather is calm.11 Writing as a preeminent secular intellectual at the height of his power and influence, known especially for his Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus, 1863), which denied the historicity of Christ’s miracles, Renan looked into himself as well as back in time and found there a call to believe that he could no longer hear: “It seems to me that I have at the bottom of my heart a city of Is whose bells still ring stubbornly, calling to Mass the faithful who no longer hear.”12 Throughout the Souvenirs Renan repeatedly evokes this sense of a divided self, drawn to a past he has rejected but never entirely left behind. In the early chapters of the Souvenirs Renan describes himself as torn between the emotional and the rational, between “childish sensibility, candor, innocence, and love” and “bitter scholastic arguments,” with the dividing line his experience at the seminary of St. Sulpice. Renan’s path to religious liberty passed directly through the seminaries where he studied, which in a profound irony led him away from rather than deeper into the Catholic faith within which he was raised. The Catholicism of Renan’s childhood was marked by regular sacramental practice, devotion to saints, the belief in miracles, and the fervor of communal pilgrimages. These practices were watched over by a “serious, disinterested, and honest clergy,” whose lessons he never doubted until the age of fifteen, when he moved to Paris. Even while he draws a contrast between his childhood and his Paris years, Renan insists on the permanent impact these Breton teachers made on him: “These worthy priests were my first spiritual preceptors, and I owe to them whatever is good in me. . . . At the bottom I feel that my life is always

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governed by a faith that I no longer have. Faith has this particular character, that even when it is gone it still acts on you.”13 Renan’s first teachers, the Brothers of Christian Instruction (the order founded by Jean-Marie de Lamennais) identified him as an excellent student, and by 1832, when he entered the minor seminary at Tréguier, he was already destined for a clerical career. In his Souvenirs Renan recalls himself at this stage foreseeing his life as a respected teacher in a local seminary, following in the footsteps of the priests he so admired. But he recalls as well that the thought of becoming a priest was not a freely made decision, “not the result of reflection, of an impulse, of reason. It more or less went without saying. The possibility of a profane career never occurred to me.”14 These memories of a preordained path into the church are supported by a series of letters Henriette wrote to her mother after she moved to Paris in 1835. But Henriette, in acknowledging the apparent inevitability of ordination that his mother and the local clergy planned for her brother, also expressed reservations about his future, a point she returned to continually over the next ten years. Countering her mother’s ambitions for her son, Henriette begged her to “preserve this cherished creature from the enthusiasm which is so common to young people.”15 Despite her doubts about Ernest’s clerical future, Henriette’s ambition for her brother was instrumental in bringing him to Paris, where he was awarded a scholarship at the minor seminary of Saint-Nicolas-deChardonnet. Directed by the able and ambitious abbé Dupanloup, SaintNicolas had been transformed into a prestigious and unique institution. Based on Dupanloup’s vision of a church that would fulfill a social as well as a religious mission, the school recruited both wealthy aristocrats, many of whom did not intend to pursue a clerical career, and priestly aspirants with limited means drawn from throughout France, who were offered scholarships supported by the paying students.16 It was this policy that brought Renan to Paris, where he studied at Saint-Nicolas for three years before moving on to the seminary of Saint-Sulpice. Renan’s Souvenirs offer a mixed review of Dupanloup, and of his education at Saint-Nicolas. Looking back from the 1880s, he judged Dupanloup to be an intellectual lightweight, someone who moved easily in the elite circles of Paris, and whose piety was “worldly, fashionable, free from scholastic barbarisms and mystic jargon, piety as a complement to the ideal of good society, which was, to tell the truth, his principal religion. . . . Religion for him was inseparable from good manners and the good sense derived from study-

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ing the classics.”17 But despite his criticism of the “superficial humanism” that was taught at Saint-Nicolas, Renan acknowledged its transformative character: “From a poor little provincial thoroughly constrained by his past, Dupanloup drew out an active and open mind.” At one point in the Souvenirs Renan describes the changes he experienced at the minor seminary as a conversion: “My coming to Paris marked the passage from one religion to another. . . . My old priests . . . appeared to me like magi, speaking eternal truths; now I saw a religion of candles and ribbons and flowers, a theology for girls.”18 The Catholicism of Saint-Nicolas may have differed from the more austere devotions of Brittany, and Renan’s letters to his mother from 1838 to 1841 are certainly full of descriptions of elaborate feast days, processions, and ceremonies. But there is nothing in the correspondence from this early period to suggest that as a very young man, only fifteen when he first arrived in Paris, Renan saw himself as entering a new religion. On this point, Renan’s Souvenirs seem to read back into his youth a critical attitude toward the sentimentalized devotions he found at Saint-Nicolas that he did not or perhaps could not articulate at the time. Renan’s letters sent from his Parisian minor seminary, written from 1838 through 1841, show us a young man intellectually precocious and conventionally pious, deeply attached to his mother, and homesick for his native Brittany. They show at first no sign of his later criticisms of Dupanloup and the education he was receiving at Saint-Nicolas. His loneliness was relieved by regular Thursday visits from his sister Henriette, and by regular conversations with the abbé Tresvaux, a Breton priest serving as a vicar general in the diocese of Paris, who chatted with him in his native language. In letters to his mother Renan combined effusive expressions of love and longing to be with her with reassuring details about his academic successes, excursions to the monuments of Paris, and the sermons of père Ravignan, the popular Jesuit preacher who played a major role in the conversions of Ivan Gagarin and Alphonse Ratisbonne.19 Although he would later criticize the flowery atmosphere of Catholic devotions from this period, Renan was enthusiastic in describing the chapel at Saint-Nicolas for the opening of the “month of Mary” in May 1839, a setting that was “truly heavenly,” where “one feels and breathes only the sweetest odors, and all the flowers in their silent language seem to join in one voice to praise the purest of Virgins, to celebrate Mary.”20 There is nothing remarkable in this language, nor in the constant references to God’s will and mercy that are laced throughout Renan’s correspondence;

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they indicate only that as an adolescent, Renan embraced the Catholic culture that surrounded him. Renan continued to accept as well the clerical path that was so clearly marked out for him. On Pentecost Sunday in May 1839, toward the end of his first year at Saint-Nicolas, Renan donned the cassock, an event marked by his assisting at High Mass at the cathedral of Notre Dame. Proudly reporting to his mother, Renan described his “great joy” at being one of the seminarians chosen for this honor and “the indescribable feeling” evoked in him by the gothic majesty that surrounded him.21 He would abandon this external expression of a clerical identity only six years later, when he left Saint-Sulpice in 1845. Another sign of Renan’s determined commitment to a clerical vocation can be seen in his pursuit of his papers of “excorporation,” which placed him in the jurisdiction of Paris, rather than Saint-Brieuc, his home diocese in Brittany. Henriette, although she continued to have reservations about her brother’s vocation, was instrumental in this process, which required some deceptive maneuvering, circumventing the local clergy of Tréguier, who were interested in bringing their young prodigy back home. For Henriette, if Ernest “continues to want to join the clergy, at least let it be in Paris, so much more distinguished in comparison with our good country.”22 By the end of his first year at Saint-Nicolas Renan had established himself as a devout scholar, and so dedicated to his new school that Dupanloup charged him to help recruit other promising candidates from his native Brittany. During his vacation in the summer of 1839 Renan succeeded in attracting two close friends, François Liart and Fiacre Guyomar, to join him at Saint-Nicolas. In his second year at Saint-Nicolas Renan continued to flourish, joining the school’s elite as a member of the devotional Congregation of the Virgin, and becoming a leader in the “Academy” charged with discussing and evaluating student essays. His personal life was also happier, as he enjoyed the company of Liart and Guyomar, the visits of his sister, and the esteem of his teachers. The first signs of doubt about his vocation came only in Renan’s third year at Saint-Nicolas. Renan’s reservations emerged early in 1841 in the midst of a difficult period in his personal life: Liart had returned to Brittany to continue his seminary training; Guyomar died of tuberculosis in October 1840. An even more serious loss occurred when Henriette left Paris early in 1841, taking a position as the tutor to the daughters of Count André Zamoysi, a Polish nobleman. Over the following years Henriette would continue to play a central role in her brother’s life, providing crucial financial and moral

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support, but her departure, coupled with the loss of his friends, left him in a somber mood. In this context Renan wrote to Liart and struggled to describe “I don’t know what kind of change of mind that’s come over me.” For the first time we can observe a sharp tone directed at his teachers, as he ridiculed his course in rhetoric, of which nothing could be “more boring, more pedantic, more monotonous, more absurd, more atrocious.” Renan was frustrated by having to employ devices designed to manipulate an audience, rather than state points simply and directly.23 But his criticism earned him an interview with Dupanloup himself, since the letter was read by a clerical overseer who passed its contents along to the director. This conversation was apparently an open and friendly exchange rather than an admonition, and along with a letter from Liart, defending the art of persuasion, it led Renan to a quick retreat, to what he called a “conversion” in which he now saw rhetoric and philosophy as necessarily linked. This exchange in early 1841 established a pattern that would continue over the next five years, in which critical observations were followed by second thoughts, qualifications that moved Renan away from the radical potential of his ideas but never all the way back to the starting point of a secure and uncritical orthodoxy.

Issy: Liberty and Doubt among the Sulpicians From 1841 until 1845 Renan was a student at the Sulpician major seminary, spending two years studying philosophy at Issy, just outside of Paris, followed by two years of theology in the heart of Paris. Both of the buildings where Renan studied remain in use; Issy is still the home of a Sulpician seminary, while the Paris site now houses the city hall for the sixth arrondissement. The two schools were linked in the 1840s by the rue de Vaugirard, a long walk that the seminarians in Paris would take each week to enjoy some country air. Today the extension of Vaugirard beyond the Paris city limits that leads to the seminary at Issy has been renamed the rue Ernest Renan, an ironic reminder that the Sulpicians were instrumental in “completely determining the direction of my [Renan’s] life.”24 In his Souvenirs Renan draws a sharp contrast between the humanistic education of Saint-Nicolas and what he considered the more serious training of Saint-Sulpice. From this perspective, the crucial break in Renan’s life was not his arrival in Paris, and his immersion in the devotional and humanistic world of Saint-Nicolas, but the intellectual discipline that he acquired under the direction of his Sulpician

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mentors. Renan’s letters from his Sulpician years, especially those to Henriette and Liart, confirm the significance of this period, which he recalled as “a terrible battle that completely possessed me, until the point that these words, which I resisted for such a long time as a diabolical obsession: ‘This is not true!’ resounded in my inner self with an unconquerable persistence.”25 Renan fought his battle on two closely related fronts. He was concerned first of all with the truths of the Catholic faith, which he found to be increasingly fragile when examined through the corrosive lens of reason. This intellectual struggle was intricately linked to doubts about his personal destiny, as he considered whether or not he could in conscience become a priest, and thus accountable for defending the Catholic religion and responsible to ecclesiastical authority. Renan’s battle was not fought in the open, through hostile exchanges with his teachers and superiors, but was conducted almost exclusively on an internal plane that he revealed in part to his friend Liart, more fully to Henriette, and most revealingly in a series of personal notes and reflections. Renan’s personal crisis coincided with the heated debate over the right of the Catholic Church to open secondary schools, and not long after the controversy over Lamennais’s efforts to marry liberalism to Catholicism. But Renan, though aware of these public discussions about religious liberty, did not engage with them in any direct manner. Because he kept his distance from the world of political dispute, Renan’s conversion allows us to see with clarity and depth some of the key intellectual, psychological, and moral issues that shaped the experience of religious liberty in post-revolutionary France. Perhaps the most surprising observation in Renan’s Souvenirs is his insistence on the freedom he enjoyed at the seminary in Issy. His comment that “there is surely not an establishment in the world where the student is freer” was not, however, referring to a spirit of free inquiry that seriously challenged orthodox Catholicism.26 Rather, Renan was describing a Sulpician attitude that left it to students to decide how much or how little time they would devote to their studies, and a relaxed attitude about regulations. As he wrote to Liart soon after his arrival, “We live here in an honest freedom, under a regime generous in its application of the rules, and without the least difficulty or restraint. . . . The youngest student is treated as if he were a reasonable man.”27 Renan enjoyed as well the freedom to wander in the enormous garden, decorated with orange trees and statues, which he compared favorably to the “little courtyard of Saint-Nicolas.”28 From his new situation at Issy Renan looked back scornfully at his minor seminary: “As much as Saint-

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Nicolas is shrunken, sad, limited, Issy is spacious, agreeable, happy.”29 After only a few months in this bucolic and liberating setting Renan had already begun to entertain serious doubts, generated by a sense that the philosophy he was being taught could not yield the certainty to which he aspired. Philosophical instruction at Issy was designed to provide the basis for confidence in the theological truths asserted by the church. Through Sunday lectures by the abbé Gosselin, the superior at Issy, and the philosophy course offered by the abbé Manier, the Sulpicians defended as certain the testimony offered by human witnesses and historical tradition, but from the outset Renan was not convinced.30 Already in January 1842, just a few months after his arrival, he wrote to Liart, “Here’s what I’ve learned, that there are objections and difficulties everywhere.” In a passage that suggests how deep these concerns went, Renan admitted that while he used to laugh at the extreme skepticism of Pyrrhonism, unable to believe “that anyone could be so absurd to accept such ideas, now I no longer laugh.” Renan was quick to assure his friend that he was not himself a skeptic, a move typical in its step back from the more radical position he seemed to contemplate.31 Renan was able to take a more lighthearted tone with his mother, joking with her in a letter about the questions being posed in his classes: “Is it true I exist? Is it perhaps a dream, an illusion? I can see my dear mother becoming indignant: of course my Ernest exists, and I’d like to see anyone deny it. So you see that philosophers are the funniest people in the world: they doubt everything.” It is telling that Renan went on to assure his mother that if he were ever to become a skeptic, he “most assuredly would never doubt your affection, nor mine.”32 Intended to amuse and reassure, this comment accurately describes a position Renan would come to in just a few years, when he would abandon the church but remain devoted to his Catholic mother. Renan was troubled but also exhilarated by philosophy, a discipline that he embraced as being the “science of things rather than words” in a letter to Henriette, another shot at what he regarded as the superficial training at Saint-Nicolas. Unlike rhetoric, in philosophy “reason reigns,” and its real task is “less to give us assured notions than to clear away a cloud of prejudices. You are completely surprised to see that until now you have been the plaything of a thousand errors, rooted in opinion, custom, education; it’s the death of a beautiful ideal, you see things as they are, and are surprised to see the most certain judgments placed in the category of problems.” Renan found some relief from the anguish and excitement of philosophy in the study of mathematics, also treated in the first year at Issy, a subject he had

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always enjoyed, and one that held out the promise of certain knowledge, which he felt obliged to pursue.33 But Renan found more direct consolation in contemplating the lives and works of Pascal and Malebranche, who provided models of how one could reconcile faith and reason, in Malebranche’s case while pursuing a clerical career. Writing to Liart in May 1842, Renan was close to despair in confronting the problems raised by his philosophical studies. “It is certain that God has used this man [Pascal] in order to conserve my faith: without him I would have lost it six months ago.”34 Renan was equally impressed with Malebranche, the seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian who pursued the rationalist method of Descartes and was “the most impressive logician that ever existed . . . a bold thinker, and yet still a priest.”35 In drawing inspiration from Pascal and Malebranche Renan was moved by their ability to combine an uncompromising commitment to reason, and a willingness to face the doubts that ensued, with a sustained belief and practice of Catholicism. Their personal example held out a model that Renan could hope to follow, while he continued to pursue his quest for a satisfying philosophical basis for his faith. In the Souvenirs Renan notes that for a time he was able to address his doubts by accepting the reasoning of the Scottish “common sense” school of philosophy, which defended the human capacity to reach religious certainty through an investigation of nature and psychology.36 Renan continued to study the work of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart over the next several years, as well as the philosophy of Victor Cousin, the influential French philosopher who combined Scottish “common sense” with British empiricism and German idealism. Renan valued these thinkers for their approach to religion through observation rather than metaphysical speculation. Renan’s sense that the truth claims of religion needed to pass an empirical and rational test in order to be credible would later be applied to his study of scripture, a connection that suggests the important role played by “common sense” in mediating the spiritual crisis that led Renan away from Catholicism.37 Renan’s philosophical struggles did not go unobserved by his teachers at Issy, a group of men whom he looked back on with heartfelt but patronizing affection in his Souvenirs. Renan expressed the highest regard for the abbé Gosselin, the superior at Issy, who also became his spiritual director, an elderly priest full of “good will, cordiality, and respect for the conscience of a young man.” The freedom Renan found in general at Issy was exemplified in Gosselin, with whom he had frequent and intimate conversations, reading

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to him for a half-hour each morning: “The freedom which he allowed me was absolute. Observing my honesty, the purity of my morals, my upright nature, the idea never occurred to him that doubts would arise for me in questions where he himself had none.”38 Renan admired Gosselin for his solid religious conviction, his commitment to Catholic dogma, which he saw as rooted firmly in the scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and the councils. Armed with such belief, Gosselin rejected the fashionable apologetics of Chateaubriand, which emphasized the emotional and aesthetic appeal of Catholicism, and taught confidently that reason accorded perfectly with faith. Renan was personally attracted to Gosselin as a model of virtue and erudition, but these qualities could not hide what he believed was an unwarranted confidence in the ability of reason to sanction religious certitude. Renan admired other teachers as well. In addition to his philosophy professor the abbé Manier he was struck by the intelligence and piety of the abbé Pinault, formerly a professor of mathematics in the university, before he abandoned a secular career for the Sulpicians. Pinault was physically deformed, a small man twisted by rheumatism, but a powerful personality who served as a kind of pendant to Gosselin, for despite his scientific training he was scornful of the knowledge he imparted. As the leader of the “mystics” at Issy, Pinault mocked Renan for his studious ways. But Renan nonetheless admired him for his insight and integrity, and in the Souvenirs he acknowledged that Pinault had grasped the weaknesses in the attempts of Gosselin and Manier to reconcile their reason with their faith.39 In 1842 Renan was clearly in the camp of Gosselin and the rationalists, drawn to those teachers at Issy who were confident that their Catholicism could not fail to pass any test posed by a rational critique. But during his first year at Issy he began to harbor doubts that he could accept the mental gymnastics needed for such an effort to succeed. In the summer of 1842, between his first and second year at Issy, too poor to return home to Brittany, Renan spent his two months of vacation at the seminary. With most of the students gone, Renan was left even more on his own, free to wander in the park, “a real desert” where he experienced both a great calm and “an inexpressible sadness.”40 In this atmosphere Renan made his first effort at autobiography, drafting a short essay he entitled “Confessions d’Issy” in which he presented himself as taking up the same task of self-examination found in Augustine and Rousseau. In the early paragraphs Renan’s text has a prayer-like quality, as he addresses himself to God, praised

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for his immutability, a divine contrast with the sorry state of human inconstancy. “You alone, God, are changeless. For us, change is our natural state.” But despite this humiliating condition, Renan admits that he loves to consider all the “different colors of the times of my life, so brief, yet so full of sin and pain.” In the middle of this two-page confession, Renan abandons the references to God to address himself directly: “I am: this word I is unique: when one goes into it deeply, one gets lost. . . . I am me: this poor me is a joke of an individual. It is the being of the world that I know the least, and with whom I am most familiar. . . . It is a fact that when I search my intimate self [mon moi intime], it flees me; sometimes I seem to be with him and then I am living in truth, which consists of being with one self as one self, and not as with a stranger, not to lie to this poor self, but to go with him purely and simply. I am always in dispute with my self. . . . Oh! How difficult it is to destroy the barrier between self and self.” At this point Renan seems to have rejected the Sulpician discipline that calls for a discovery of oneself through the mediation of Christ, found through a combination of prayer and introspection, in favor of a purely subjective method. In the final paragraph he reverts briefly to addressing God (“I exist, thanks to you, my God.”) before concluding that he grasps himself through feeling: “It is this intimate feeling that constitutes everything for us.”41 The “Confessions d’Issy” are perhaps the earliest example displaying what Jan Goldstein has described as Renan’s “liminal position between a religious and a secular vie intérieure” in which he struggled to decide what role, if any, God might play in his self-understanding. This struggle would continue throughout his seminary years and beyond, and I would argue from the evidence of this period, and from the Souvenirs, that it was never fully resolved.42 In his Souvenirs Renan focuses on a particular moment during his second year at Issy, in the spring of 1843, which crystallized the beginnings of his spiritual crisis, and which illuminates how the teaching methods at Issy as well as the generally liberal atmosphere unintentionally encouraged him to doubt. Philosophical instruction at Issy allowed for lively discussion of controversial ideas in weekly meetings, conférences, which were led by the best and more advanced students.43 During his second year Renan was chosen as a “maître de conférence” and was in the middle of conversations that testified to the intellectual freedom at Issy, albeit framed within orthodox Catholicism. Following the scholastic convention of solvuntur objecta (solutions to objections), students debated and responded to the ideas of fashionable philosophers such as Victor Cousin; of the Catholic liberals Lamennais,

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Montalembert, and Lacordaire; and of the socialist Pierre Leroux, who was exercising enormous influence over George Sand at precisely the same moment. Recalling these sessions in the Souvenirs, Renan concludes that “under the cover of weak refutations, all of modern ideas came to us.”44 During one discussion Renan insisted so convincingly on the strength of the objections that some in the group began to smile, leading the abbé Gottofrey, the clerical observer, to bring the class to an end. Gottofrey was, like Pinault, a religious zealot suspicious of reason. After the class he heatedly admonished Renan for what he considered his anti-Christian confidence in reason and concluded with a devastating judgment: “You are not a Christian!”45 Renan was shaken by Gottofrey’s accusation, which resonated with doubts he had entertained for over a year, and which he brought to his adviser Gosselin the following day. At this point his philosophical and spiritual crisis intersected in troubling ways with his professional ambitions and family feelings. Gosselin reassured his protégé that his doubts arose from the normal anxieties of seminary students, and would disappear once Renan was ordained. But this conversation followed closely after an agonizing period in which Gosselin and Renan had finally decided that he should receive the tonsure at end of the academic year, an issue that he never raises in the Souvenirs. This ritual cutting of the hair marked an important step in a clerical career, though it did not involve an irrevocable vow. Renan nevertheless had serious reservations about the tonsure, which he poured out in letters to his mother, and to Henriette and Liart, and which he thought had been resolved by surrendering himself to Gosselin, and to his mother’s pious wishes that her son become a priest. Faced with Ernest’s reservations, Manon Renan responded with the kind of advice that recalls the emotionally charged exchanges between Lamennais and his friends and family prior to his ordination. In both cases clerical aspirants confused about their future were asked to weigh their personal doubts against familial pressure and God’s will, powerful arguments that pushed them forward toward the priesthood. Renan’s mother insisted that she had never spoken to him about his vocation, which came from “God alone,” who had guided him throughout his life, starting with his cure as a child from a dangerous illness following her pilgrimage to a shrine to Our Lady of Good Help. But she could not hold back an expression of her maternal pride and aspirations for her son: “A most worthy position awaits you; to serve the good God in his sanctuary. . . . That is my entire ambition.”46 Manon Renan’s attitude placed her son in a double bind, as she

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insisted that he feel free to do as he wanted, but also to do as she wished, a complex sentiment compounded by the presumably determinative role that God played in this drama. Faced with such pressure, Renan responded to his mother in May 1843 that “everything is finally decided.” He would be tonsured after all, accepting the decision of Gosselin, whose will he accepted as “the voice of God himself.” God had given him an adviser and a mother whose authority he embraced, but in a curious passage Renan brought himself and his conscience back into the equation: “How can I thank you, my good mother, for the way in which you have led me in all this, to have left me so entirely free for an act which depends only on God and the conscience?”47 Gottofrey’s accusation, coming just after this anxious and ambiguous surrender of his freedom, raised again Renan’s doubts about his worthiness to be tonsured.48 Gosselin, always sensitive to his advisee, reversed himself and withdrew his recommendation that he take this step, but with the understanding that putting off tonsure involved only a delay, and in no sense suggested that Renan no longer had a vocation to the priesthood. The entire episode of the tonsure was nonetheless crucial in Renan’s development, for it provided him the occasion for reflecting deeply on his clerical future. As in the past, he used Henriette and Liart as sounding boards, but in the early months of 1843 he began to articulate with greater clarity the reasons that drew him to the priesthood, and those that drove him away. Renan’s correspondence with his sister during his time in Issy shows him hesitant about his vocation, which he feared would lead to a life surrounded by mediocre men whose authority he would have to accept. He wrote, in September 1842, that he would prefer a life of isolation to one with colleagues marked by “frivolity, duplicity, and a sycophantic character,” and that he feared submitting to ecclesiastical authority, “which will never bend me to its will if it involves performing a base act.”49 But despite such reservations, a constant theme in his correspondence, Renan would always balance his doubts about the priesthood with the advantages, for a clerical career offered him the best possibility of reaching his goal of a quiet, studious life of research and reflection. Even after the decision to put off tonsure, Renan insisted that his ultimate goal remained the priesthood, but in taking this position he also emphasized his reliance on the opinion of the Sulpician community rather than his own. “I’ve never believed so intimately, my superiors have never assured me with such certainty, that God wills that I be a priest.”50

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Despite an impulse to leave, Renan continued to feel himself bound by past commitments made to his family, his friends, and his religious teachers. Henriette’s letters to Ernest in 1842 and 1843 were both reassuring and troubling, for she constantly affirmed her love and support for Ernest, regardless of what he chose, but she made clear as well her own position, which she knew would reinforce his doubts. In tone, though not in content, Henriette’s letters resemble those of her mother to the much-admired brother and son. Like Manon Renan, Henriette insisted that any final decision had to come from Ernest himself, but also like Manon, she could not resist sharing her own views. “You can be certain that as much as I desire that your decisions come from yourself, I am also resolved always to tell you without restriction my opinion and my fears.”51 Henriette addressed the issue of freedom within a career by noting that her own position as a woman and a teacher had taught her a lot about the constraints that apply in some sense to everyone. “I can assure you, based on my own experience, that you have to fight hard to attain this inner freedom, protected from any outside interference, and to make our paymasters understand that on some matters we are accountable only to God and our conscience.”52 In any career he might choose, she admitted, he would be constrained by some authority, but clerical vows added an additional and troublesome dimension: “Is a priest a free agent? Isn’t he obligated to follow the orders of his superiors? . . . I am only posing some questions here; may your reason and your conscience help you to resolve them.”53 Ernest did not dispute Henriette’s claims, admitting that as a priest he would not be able to speak out freely and openly, but he insisted that even as a clergyman he could retain an inner freedom, “never adopting nor rejecting an opinion only on human authority.” He would at times have to be silent, but this was an obligation that all men who wished to live in peace must honor, and one that his adviser Gosselin told him was especially important for a priest: “My dear son, he said to me, if I knew that you didn’t have the strength to be quiet, I would beg you not to enter the ecclesiastical estate.”54 As he prepared to leave Issy for advanced theological training in Paris Renan was still determined to pursue his vocation, but reflecting (with a push from his sister) on its philosophical and professional challenges led him into a difficult corner, where his freedom of conscience could be preserved only by retreating into silence. Philosophical doubt and professional anxiety produced a religious crisis for Renan, but in the Souvenirs he insists that after his two years at Issy his faith was not diminished. “My faith was destroyed by historical criticism, not

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by scholasticism nor by philosophy.” He also suggests in his memoir that the Christianity he espoused was somehow inauthentic: “I imagined that in being polite like M. Gosselin and moderate like M. Manier I was Christian.”55 Like the other converts in this study, Renan looked back on his past to find evidence that even before his open and definitive move across a religious border he had, without realizing it consciously, already made this choice. Although we need to be careful about accepting too easily such judgments, Renan’s perspective here has the virtue of seeing conversion as a continuous and complex psychological process. Like the other converts Renan lived for an extended period of time in a borderland, a gray area of religious doubt and ambiguity. Eventually, he would make a conscious move, exercising his freedom of conscience and religion, and thereby manifesting to himself and to his friends and family the new person he had become. But during his visit home for the summer vacation of 1843, Renan’s friends and family in Brittany would have had no doubt about his Christianity and his Catholicism. They would have observed a young man, robed in a cassock, accompanied by a proud mother on long walks in the countryside and on family visits, assisting at Mass, taking the Eucharist, a brilliant seminarian on the verge of theological study that would lead to ordination and an outstanding career.

Paris: Beginning and Abandoning a Priestly Career Just as Issy offered a stark contrast with Saint-Nicolas-de-Chardonnet, so did the Paris seminary of the Sulpicians differ markedly from the bucolic setting of Issy where Renan had studied philosophy. Saint-Sulpice in Paris was a larger institution, situated on a busy square on the Left Bank, dominated by the monumental church of Saint-Sulpice. The seminary was home to 220 students, who were polite to each other but not inclined to pursue close friendships, knowing that they were there only briefly, for two years of study, before returning to their home dioceses for ordination and careers. Renan was distraught at first after his arrival, once again suffering the pangs of an intense homesickness, which he poured out in sentimental letters to his mother, to Liart, and to Henriette.56 His anxiety was in large part due to the return of the issue that had so troubled him in his last year at Issy: receiving the tonsure. In Paris the director of the seminary, the abbé Carbon, along with his spiritual adviser the abbé Baudier, called on him to take this step at the ordination ceremonies held at Christmas, a prospect that raised again all

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his anxieties about his vocation. In a letter to Liart, who had similar concerns about entering a clerical career, Renan laid out more clearly than ever before how he saw his dilemma, focusing on his concern that he might be compelled to accept as true something he no longer believed: “What I fear above all is ecclesiastical authority, the engagements that one takes, especially intellectual, the irrevocable obligation to uphold a cause that one believes true, while a young man, but that one would also be obliged to uphold still, when mature reason would lead to another conclusion.” Typically, Renan went on to assure his friend, and himself, that he had no doubts at the moment, but then foresaw the possibility of a change of mind in a series of complicated phrases that testify to his confusion: “It is not that I now doubt, thank God, but who can swear about the future? Without a doubt, it appears indeed that this will not happen; but this could happen, that things would not appear to me in the same way; I assure you that this has led me to cruel reflections, and I thank God not to have allowed me to proceed.”57 These thoughts led Renan, in a similar letter to his sister, to admit that he was willing to surrender his freedom and let others decide for him. “I never before understood how powerful Providence is in the destiny of every man, until seeing how the most influential act in shaping this destiny is so little in his power. Because finally, I can’t hide from myself that all my reflections give me very little direction. . . . Yes, without a doubt, we are led. . . . Happily the Christian can add: we are well led. There, to tell the truth, is the only logical and truly solid consolation.”58 In his first months in Paris Renan seemingly made a decision to give up his freedom, but he continued also to equivocate and qualify, a posture that endured for two years, but that became more difficult to uphold as he pursued his study of scripture and pondered the reality of a clerical career. In the end, Renan did accept the tonsure at a ceremony on December 23, 1843, in the Paris chapel, where Archbishop Affre ordained 105 priests, deacons, and subdeacons and oversaw the tonsure of 56 seminarians. Always eager to gratify his mother, Renan wrote to her that “while painful uncertainty and battles preceded the great act of my first consecration to God, now I have found again calm and joy in taking his share finally for myself and consecrating myself to him without looking back.”59 These reassuring words, however, provide only a partial view of Renan’s inner life at this moment, which he revealed inadvertently in describing the scene after the ordination ceremony. When the abbé Baudier repeatedly called Renan mon tonsuré Renan agreed with him but emphasized his adviser’s decisive role:

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“c’est votre ouvrage” (it’s your doing). As he advanced in his clerical career, Renan continued to establish a certain distance from the identity he was publicly embracing. Renan expressed his inner turmoil as well in an intense set of reflections written in the days surrounding the ceremony. In these “principles of conduct,” begun as part of a retreat in preparation for the tonsure, Renan asserts that he had begun to “master my troubles,” but taken as a whole they show him still caught in an ongoing struggle that pitted the good student, loyal son, and devout Catholic against the independent-minded seeker of truth.60 Reflecting perhaps on his own recent decision to accept the tonsure, Renan criticizes himself for being too willing to please those around him and resolved “not to alter himself [altérer son unité] in order to please someone or other.” But he acknowledges as well that this commitment would have to be balanced against a priestly career where he might be confronted with positions he did not share. In such situations, he planned to retreat into a tactical silence, and instead of sharing his own ideas he “would be quiet and keep myself from either agreeing or arguing.” Such a posture is difficult to accommodate to the unequivocal defense of the pursuit of truth that comes toward the end of his reflections. After quoting the passage from Psalm 16 used at the tonsure ritual (“The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup”), Renan goes on to substitute truth for the Lord as the object of his ultimate devotion: “Dominus pars [The Lord is my portion]. . . . Truth is my portion; I embrace it, I take it for my companion, I abandon everything for it; I renounce everything to follow it and attach myself to it.” In a passage that has a certain shock value, Renan then imagines that “if Christianity were not true, this ceremony would still be delightful [délicieuse], and I would not repent having done it. It would be an initiation to the search for truth, the separation from men, the renunciation of the superficial.” After having gone so far, Renan once again reverses field and affirms that he has embraced Christianity as true, only to shift his ground once more, coming back to his doubts: “If (which is as far as possible from my thoughts, and which I would say is impossible, if man was not an inexplicable mystery) the future shows me the truth lay elsewhere, well then! it is to the truth that I am consecrated, I would follow the truth where I saw it and still be truly tonsured.” Even as he committed himself to the priesthood, Renan was conflicted about his religious beliefs and muddled in his thinking about how his situation might be resolved. He would become a coherent, integrated person but would keep

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silent rather than cause trouble; he would move toward ordination as a Catholic priest, while imagining a future in which he would choose the truth over the orthodox Christianity that the clergy were charged to defend. Renan did not confine his doubts about Christianity and the priesthood only to his notebooks, and in the months following his tonsure pursued them in letters to Henriette and Liart. To his sister he emphasized that he was able to accept the tonsure because it did not bind him “irrevocably before God and man,” and because he still felt that the priesthood offered him the best opportunity for pursuing a life of study and reflection. But in this same letter he asked Henriette to take up a plan she had proposed to him, to look for a position as a teacher in Germany that would allow him a year away from the seminary and delay the definitive decision, to be ordained as a subdeacon.61 Here Renan continued the dance he was constantly engaged in, matching a step away from the priesthood with a half-step back, seeking a position outside the seminary, but seeing it as a move that would allow him time to make a decision, rather than being a decision in and of itself. To Liart, who had recently been ordained as a subdeacon, Renan recalled that before his tonsure his doubts had reached well beyond the immediate decision, to touch his faith itself, “these beliefs with which I was imbued, which filled my childhood, which were the perpetual object of my thoughts, the foundation of my life and my happiness.” While he claimed that after “the most agitated days of my life came the happiest and most tranquil days I’ve known for a long time,” he acknowledged as well that he was still fighting his doubts. In reflecting on this struggle he concluded that it was impossible to reconcile faith and doubt. “I don’t believe that there could be two men in the world more incapable of understanding each other than a believer and a doubter, when they find themselves face to face, whatever their good faith and intelligence.”62 This comment can be read as a description of Renan’s spiritual crisis but also as a premonition of an emerging intellectual agenda in which he would struggle to span what he feared was an unbridgeable gap. His “principles of conduct,” along with his letters to Henriette and Liart, can be read as indications that Renan was well on his way out of the seminary and the church, even while he worked hard to deny this outcome. While this is a reasonable judgment, it is valuable as well to stay with Renan in the midst of his anxiety, and to recall what his counselors told him, and which he for a time believed, that doubts about a vocation were common and would dissipate as he pursued his clerical career. While the abbés Gosselin

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and Carbon eventually proved mistaken, Renan’s continued success in the seminary, in both pastoral and intellectual work, suggested to them, and to Renan as well, that despite his hesitancy he could still anticipate a successful and even prominent future inside the church. The poignancy of Renan’s spiritual confusion is especially clear when we consider his work as a preacher and teacher in the church of Saint-Sulpice, just next to the seminary, which he began just as he was racked by doubt about his tonsure. Saint-Sulpice, then as now, was an imposing baroque church that drew parishioners from its fashionable neighborhood of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mounting the pulpit at Saint-Sulpice was both a reward and a responsibility, which Renan understood and took seriously. He proudly announced to his mother that he had been one of the five seminarians chosen to lead the Catechism of Perseverance, designed for two hundred young people between the ages of twelve and twenty, who met each Sunday “to hear religious instruction on the foundations of the faith and Christian morality.”63 Now robed with a surplice, the accomplished and promising cleric delivered his first sermon to his young audience, and many of their parents as well, during the Advent season on December 10. Renan followed Bossuet closely in his sermon on the life and work of John the Baptist, the precursor of Christ. But it is hard not to hear a veiled reference to his own plight when he contrasted the voice of John, “severe and hard,” with the sweetness of Jesus. From this Renan drew the lesson that “God uses our pain to cure us” and that “after this salutary bitterness will come ineffable sweetness.”64 In preaching on the infancy of Christ three weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, Renan focused especially on Jesus’s silence in the cradle. Repeating a theme from his “principles of conduct,” Renan embraced as an ideal a “Christian silence, which is at the same time patience, humility, resignation.”65 In the Souvenirs Renan insists that his struggles with Catholicism became acute not because of philosophical objections but because his study of scripture in Paris led him to see the fallacies of Catholic teaching.66 From what we have seen, this claim would seem exaggerated, but Renan’s letters and notebooks confirm the central role of philology in pushing him away from orthodox Catholicism. Saint-Sulpice in Paris was in fact the only Catholic institution of higher learning in France where it was possible to pursue a serious study of the scriptures through a direct contact with the Hebrew Bible. Antoine Garnier (1762–1845), the superior general of the congregation,

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was an old man when Renan entered the seminary, but his manual was the basis for his first course in scripture, which dealt with the Pauline epistles and the book of the Apocalypse. Jean Pommier’s detailed study of Garnier’s manual, and Renan’s notes on his courses in 1843–1844, reveal an approach that was both erudite and scrupulously orthodox.67 Garnier and his successor as professor of Hebrew, the abbé Le Hir, considered questions of divine inspiration, historical accuracy, and doctrine with reference to an exhaustive list of previous commentators, up to and including recent German critics, such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and Wilhelm Gesenius, innovators who used philological research to distinguish what they viewed as myth from historical fact.68 Renan was thus introduced to writers who approached the scriptures in a critical spirit, but in a context “which left nothing to fear from the corrosive force of German thought . . . whose criticisms were dispersed, half-hidden by refutations, drowned in the middle of considerations favorable to the good cause.”69 The philological tradition at Saint-Sulpice established by Garnier continued with Le Hir, an accomplished linguist remembered fondly by Renan in the Souvenirs: “M. Le Hir made me what I am; I was a philologist by instinct. I found in him the man most capable of developing this aptitude. Everything that I am as a savant I am because of M. Le Hir.”70 Under Le Hir’s tutelage, Renan made rapid progress in Hebrew, and his prodigious talent led his professor to send him to the Collège de France to study Syriac with Etienne Quatremère. Le Hir was thus crucial in creating a bridge between Renan and the world of secular scholarship, which would eventually reward him by making him the administrator of the collège in 1883. But Le Hir, like Garnier, was thoroughly committed to orthodox notions about the Bible that Renan found increasingly difficult to accept. He found ridiculous, for example, the convoluted efforts made to explain how the New Testament could be defended as infallible even when it mistakenly cited passages from the Old.71 A critical approach to sacred scripture cast doubt on fundamental teachings, that Moses was the sole author of the Pentateuch, that the Psalms included prophecies fulfilled by Jesus, that the four Gospels were eyewitness accounts written by the disciples, and that the stories of the miracles of Jesus could be taken at face value.72 Renan’s doubts were expressed in an Essai psychologique sur Jésus Christ written during a retreat in May 1845 and in the notebooks he began writing in June 1845. As Robert Priest has written, in the Essai Renan “grappled with the question of Jesus’ divinity and historicity.”73

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Renan rejected out of hand rationalist arguments that Jesus was a fraud, which could not account for the success of Christianity. But he rejected as well any easy assumption of divinity. Instead, Renan sought to interpret Jesus as emerging from a Jewish culture at a moment when “extraordinary psychological laws” were operating. At such times new religions might be generated through a historical process that involved the mediation of individuals, but without recourse to supernatural explanations. Renan’s Essai might be read as a very rough first draft of The Life of Jesus, a “disorderly blend of modern philosophy and orthodox theology.”74 In the notebooks that he began just after writing the Essai he shows for the first time signs that he was also becoming an embittered and angry dissident. In one comment from early in the notebooks Renan divided the orthodox into two camps, the first including bishops and noncritics (such as Dupanloup) who set the boundaries within which the second group, the scholars, must work. As a result of this divide Catholic biblical scholars were forced to adopt a posture of “bad faith,” because from his perspective “it is scientifically evident that the orthodox explanation of Scripture is unsustainable.”75 Renan’s critique of Catholic scholarship led him in turn to a broader condemnation of the institutional church, which he saw as characterized by “religious pride” and “scornful intolerance,” exemplified even in the teacher he so admired, the abbé Le Hir.76 Renan’s faith was shaken by his study of scripture, mediated by his increasing respect for the “higher criticism” emanating from Germany. But it was not only German biblical scholarship that drew Renan during his training at Saint-Sulpice. He was influenced as well by Kant, also a guide to his sister Henriette, who invoked the German philosopher to encourage her brother to pursue his career outside of the church: “Duty, sublime word! You offer nothing agreeable to man, you speak to him only of sacrifices, and yet you alone reveal to him his dignity, his freedom! Do you recognize Kant in this maxim?”77 Throughout his religious crisis Renan described repeatedly an inner conflict between his desire to please his teachers and his mother and his sense of duty, understood as the pursuit of a self-determined and rational goal, grasped apart from any self-interest or emotional desire, in short, a version of Kant’s categorical imperative. Herder along with Kant figured largely in Renan’s pantheon of German scholars, both of them representatives of a world he idealized for its ability to combine a serious commitment to Christianity with unfettered philosophical, philological, and theological research.

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In the summer of 1845, with his knowledge of German now well advanced, Renan read deeply in Herder, and other German writers, translating and annotating them with increasing appreciation.78 By the end of the summer, as he was approaching his return to Paris and an uncertain future, he wrote to a clerical friend that in studying German scholars he felt that he had entered into a temple. “Everything I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful, touching,” a list of traits that contrasted sharply with “dry orthodoxy, rejection of the critical spirit, stiff, sterile, small: type Saint-Sulpice.”79 In his Souvenirs Renan regrets that he had not been born in Germany, where he imagined himself like Herder, combining a clerical vocation with rigorous scholarship, a possibility open to Protestants but not Catholics, in his view.80 Earlier in his seminary years Renan had consoled himself by thinking of Malebranche, a French Catholic priest as well as a distinguished philosopher, but by the end of his time at Saint-Sulpice his model was Herder, a Lutheran bishop, philosopher, and theologian. Throughout his years in the seminaries of Issy and Paris Renan had confided constantly in his sister Henriette and in Liart, who provided sympathetic ears and encouraged him to take possession of his own future. But it was only in the spring of 1845 that Renan acknowledged to Henriette that his doubts about a clerical career were based on a fundamental break with orthodoxy, and not simply on a distaste for ecclesiastical authority. In a letter to her in April 1845, Renan confessed that “I don’t recall ever telling you the motives that have soured me on a clerical career; I want to do it today with the clarity of a frank and upright soul, speaking to an intelligence capable of understanding. And so! Here it is in a single word: I don’t believe enough.” Despite his best efforts to persuade himself of the truths of Christianity on rational grounds, he could not. But even at this decisive moment of declaring his doubts to the person he loved and trusted most Renan managed to pull back into a more ambiguous posture: “God preserve me from saying that Christianity is false; this word would describe very little the bearing of my thought: a lie doesn’t produce such beautiful fruit. But it is one thing to say that Christianity is not false, and another that it is the absolute truth, as understood in the manner of those who present themselves as its interpreters.”81 Renan agonized over the situation he found himself in, being forced to choose between a Catholicism that had exercised its authority over him since his youth, mediated by clerical mentors and a mother he revered, and the doubts generated by the reason that the church had trained him to use. This

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ordeal of freedom was expressed most clearly in a letter Renan wrote to Liart in March 1845, just before his friend died: Oh my friend, man is so little free in determining his destiny! Here you have a poor child, who acts only by impulse and imitation. And it is at this age that one makes him choose his life: a superior power wraps him in indissoluble bonds; it pursues its work in silence, before he begins to know himself, he is tied without knowing how. At a certain age, he wakes up, he wants to act, impossible! . . . It is God himself who binds him, and cruel opinion makes of the vague desires of childhood an irrevocable edict, and will laugh at him if he wants to leave behind the toy that amused him as a child. . . . How many times have I desired that man be born totally free or totally unfree. . . . With this unhappy sliver of freedom he is strong enough to resist, not strong enough to act, exactly what it takes to be miserable. Oh my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?82

In this passage Renan moves from the third to the first person, suggesting that he saw his particular predicament as exemplifying a broader conflict between the individual conscience and religious authority. He closes with a quote from the opening words of Psalm 22, repeated as Christ’s dying words in the New Testament (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34), a telling reference that illuminates how he could not conceive of his doubts about Christianity apart from his identification with the person of Christ, a tension that continued to define his intellectual and religious life. During the summer of 1845 Renan confronted his dilemma and made his choice to pursue a career outside of the church. From this point on Renan and his sister discussed at length the practical problems raised by his decision to pursue another career. She wrote in August 1845 that it was absolutely necessary for Renan to be “entirely free” (a phrase used twice in the same paragraph) for a year, so that he could prepare for the baccalaureate, and then the licence and agrégation.83 And she applauded and reinforced the decision he had so painfully reached: “I finally see [in your letter] a sense of resolution, I find there some signs of that energy, of that force of will that I have so much desired for you and without which we are all our lives only big children.”84 With Henriette ’s support Renan had broken decisively with orthodox Catholicism and no longer envisaged a clerical career. As for the future, they decided that Renan would return to Paris in October, consult with

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his spiritual advisers, and seek a position, perhaps even within the seminary itself, that would allow him to study for the baccalaureate, the first of the state exams he would need to take to pursue a career as a secular scholar. All these plans were negotiated by correspondence during the summer vacation of 1845, while Renan was home with his mother, wearing a cassock that, as far as Manon Renan knew, indicated that her son was still on track to be ordained. In order to avoid distressing her he suggested that he might take a year off to pursue independent study but led her to believe that this would be an interruption, not a definitive break from the career path that she had envisioned for him. To his friend père Cognat Renan bemoaned the false position he was in: “[My mother’s] caresses desolate me; her beautiful dreams, which she never stops discussing and which I don’t have the courage to contradict, break my heart. . . . I would sacrifice everything for her, except my duty and my conscience.”85 Although he managed to keep his decision a secret from his mother, Renan declared himself openly to the abbé Baudier, his spiritual adviser, as the summer came to an end: “One thing that I now seem to know certainly, is that I will not return to orthodoxy while following the line I’ve adopted, I mean to say rational and critical examination. Until now I hoped that after I traveled the circle of doubt, I would return to my point of departure; I’ve totally lost this hope; the return to Catholicism no longer seems possible except by a move backward, breaking clearly the line which I’ve engaged, dishonoring my reason, declaring it once and for all null and void, condemning it to a respectful silence.”86 With his letters to Cognat and Baudier, Renan shared with his clerical friends and advisers his loss of faith that he had already announced to Henriette, but what would come next? It is one thing to say that you no longer believe, and can no longer pursue a clerical career, and another to decide what to do when your entire life had been directed toward that single goal.

Breaking Free: From One Religion to Another? Renan returned to Paris in early October, determined to map a new future for himself, without having a clear idea of what that might be. He was forced into a difficult position immediately after his arrival, when he learned that Archbishop Affre, well aware of his talent, had chosen him to be a professor at a new faculty of theology that he was planning. Convinced that his lack of faith made such a position impossible, Renan refused the offer,

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spoke at length with his clerical advisers, and was gratified to find them sympathetic and helpful. “I’ve been delighted by the esteem and affection they have shown me. I never would have believed in such generosity in the center of strict orthodoxy.” But in the letter to Henriette describing the warm reception he found in the seminary he added that “they’re all persuaded that I’ll come back,” an attitude that pleased him, and that he typically managed to entertain momentarily himself.87 Renan spent the first few days outside of the seminary in a rooming house nearby, still wearing his cassock, and visiting the church of Saint-Sulpice at night, hoping to recover his faith. During this period the abbés Carbon and Le Hir, as well as Monsignor Dupanloup, were instrumental in finding Renan a position at the College of Saint Stanislaus, where he would be a tutor and have sufficient time to study for the baccalaureate. Although anxious and alone, Renan seemed about to enter into a smooth transition out of the seminary, and of the church.88 This hope was immediately quashed when Renan was told by the abbé Gratry, the head of Saint Stanislaus, that against his expectations he would be required to wear the cassock while fulfilling his duties at the collège. After his first few days outside of the Paris seminary Renan had abandoned his clerical exterior for the first time since 1839; the idea of putting the cassock on again just two weeks later appalled him.89 He argued politely but firmly with Gratry, who brushed off his objections and insisted that the position absolutely required the clerical habit. For Renan this was too much, and he realized that there could be no “middle way between leaving the school and keeping up a clerical appearance.”90 Renan’s abandonment of the cassock can be seen as a crucial step in his journey out of the church, for he now had left behind the external sign that identified him with the clerical profession and brought his public self into line with his internal convictions. Although he experienced moments of anxiety about his future, especially in the days immediately after his departure from Saint Stanislaus, within a few weeks his mood had changed dramatically. He soon found a reasonably priced boarding house in the Latin Quarter, and a more suitable position as a private tutor, which provided a small stipend to supplement Henriette ’s investment in her brother. At his pension on the rue des Deux Eglises Renan met Marcellin Berthelot, who was to become one of the most prominent chemists of the nineteenth century and remained a close friend of Renan’s for the rest of his life. Berthelot, like Renan, had recently abandoned Catholic practice, and the two of them

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found reinforcement and consolation in long conversations together. All in all, Renan’s letters and notebooks of late 1845 and 1846 show us an energetic and optimistic young man, breezing through his state exams for the baccalaureate and licence in 1846, and the agrégation in 1847, impressing secular intellectuals just as he had his clerical teachers with his brilliance, spread across philosophy, theology, and literature. Within just a few months of leaving Saint-Sulpice Renan was engaged in deep conversations with Adolphe Garnier and Jean-Philbert Damiron, professors of philosophy at the Sorbonne, and had impressed as well Frédéric Ozanam, professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne (and a devout Catholic), and Eugène Burnouf, the leading scholar of Sanskrit and a professor at the Collège de France. At Burnouf ’s urging, by the end of 1846 he had begun work on a manuscript that ran to fifteen hundred pages over four volumes, Essai historique et théorique sur les langues sémitiques en général et sur la langue hébraïque en particulier. By March it was finished and was awarded the Prix Volney by the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. Renan proudly described to his mother the details of the award ceremony at the Institut de France, with members of all five French academies present and Alexis de Tocqueville presiding.91 After years of struggle, doubt, and hesitation Renan had left behind Catholicism both as a set of beliefs and as a vocation and was well on his way to a career that would establish him as one of the most significant secular intellectuals of the nineteenth century. But where on the religious landscape had Renan’s conversion left him? David Drach, Théodore Ratisbonne, Sister Philomène, and Ivan Gagarin also went through extended periods of doubt and uncertainty about their religious identity before settling inside the Roman Catholic Church. It is harder to characterize the religious territory that Lamennais and Sand finally occupied, but Christian socialism might be a reasonable description. Laudyce Rétat, Renan’s most sensitive interpreter, borrowed a phrase from the Souvenirs to describe the period between 1842 and 1849 as one in which he moved “from one religion to another” but purposefully (and wisely) did not specify Renan’s religious destination.92 Renan’s notebooks, letters, and unpublished manuscripts from the late 1840s show him freed from orthodox Catholicism, yet still preoccupied with the questions that led him away from the church, and still bound by the intellectual frameworks he had absorbed in his youth, and at Saint-Sulpice. At the most obvious level, Renan’s conversion can be explained as a rejection of a traditional understanding of the supernatural, a point he made

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clearly in the spring of 1845 when he wrote in his “cahiers” that “we need to banish from the world the God of fantasy that our fathers dreamed of. . . . God, since he has created beings and their laws, has not once revoked the course of these laws, has not once put his hand to his own work.”93 But this bald statement, which might seem to associate him with a Voltairean-like deism, is only one dimension of Renan’s religious identity. In his notebooks, and in L’avenir de la science, the long, complex, and confusing text that Renan wrote in 1848–1849 but did not publish until 1890, he struggled to define a new “religion entirely as sweet, entirely as wonderful as the most venerable cults.”94 Renan was aware of his failure to present this new faith in a coherent manner, and toward the end of L’avenir asks the reader’s indulgence for his exaggerations and inconsistencies, but concludes that “above all what I have wanted to inculcate in this book is faith in reason and in human nature . . . faith in science and the human spirit.”95 The science that Renan evoked and idealized referred primarily to the humanities, what the French term the “human sciences,” and was rooted first of all in philology, the historically informed study of ancient languages and ancient texts, and not the natural sciences.96 Although the precise end point of the critical study of religion was unclear, in Renan’s view it might well end up rejecting “a personal God, providence, prayer, anthropomorphism, personal immortality, etc.”97 But this future religion, which could not be clearly specified, would nonetheless be a superior and purer form of belief, because it would be based exclusively on the human capacity to pursue and obtain the truth. At one point Renan describes this process as one in which humanity would “make God perfect.” Reason, after organizing human society, “WILL ORGANIZE GOD.”98 Renan’s hazy vision of a new religion, shaped by human reason and rejecting any orthodox understanding of the supernatural, looks very different at first glance from the Catholicism that he left behind. But Renan’s insistence that he carried much with him from his earlier religion is worth taking seriously. This continuity is most evident in his enduring devotion to the person of Jesus, not understood as a mythological figure linking the divine and the human, as Renan understood the German biblical critics to argue, but as a historical figure who both lived within and transcended the Jewish culture of his time. The language Renan used to express his understanding of the historical Christ drew heavily on his Catholic training: “[Jesus] is really the son of God and the son Man, God in man.”99 Even more telling than such linguistic continuity, however, is Renan’s profound psychological

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attachment to Jesus, expressed with astounding force in a dream he recorded at length in his notebooks at some point in 1846. In the dream Renan was a witness to the trial of Jesus, whose appearance before the magistrates provoked in him a feeling of profound love. Renan pushed forward to defend the accused, praising his purity and sweetness, but then stopped abruptly when he realized that “no one will believe me.” At this moment the dream became confused, with Jesus merging with his late friend Guyomar and an anonymous young man condemned for breaking a law he didn’t know. A priest appeared, at whose feet both the accused and Renan knelt and prayed, with Renan whispering to the victim to ask God to give him back his lost faith. After recounting this dream Renan adopted a prayer-like style, addressing Jesus directly, insisting that he could never deny him, but that in order to love him he needed to imagine him “as my fellow man, having like me a heart of flesh. . . . My God! Poor friend, where are you? Do you hear me, do you still love me? Do you forgive me? . . . My God! I don’t know what I’m looking for, I’m looking for something.”100 Renan’s continuing inclination to pray took a less troubled form during a trip to Italy he undertook in 1849–1850, a state-subsidized excursion to explore the collections of several libraries. While in Rome Renan was moved by the piety of the laity, described in detail in letters to his sister and to Berthelot, which led him to a new appreciation of popular forms of Christianity, and to question his exclusive devotion to critical reason.101 In a notebook he kept during his time in Rome he described what happened during a visit to the cemetery of Santo Spirito: “Today I prayed. How did I return to prayer. In the cemetery, the tomb of a young girl. My thought, perhaps I would have loved her. Pray for her. And yes! I will pray, pray for her sweet soul; I fell on my knees and I said for her the prayer of Christians. Since this time, I’ve completely changed; I believe that I again became a Christian.”102 However we interpret this passage, which adds an erotic element to Renan’s religious sensibility, it illuminates his sympathy for religious forms whose content continued to draw him, without the power to persuade him of their truth when judged by his critical reason. This attitude is expressed even more clearly in Renan’s sketch of a novel, “Patrice,” also written during his time in Italy, in which his protagonist admires the simple piety of the young woman Cécile, without being able to embrace it. Patrice, like Renan, writes from Rome to describe his experience, wondering if “it would be possible to be a Catholic without believing in Catholicism. Because on the one hand I

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want to be able to call myself Catholic, but on the other hand it is absolutely impossible for me to believe all that Catholicism teaches.”103 In his notebooks and letters from the late 1840s Renan openly acknowledged the complexity of his new religion, as he struggled to reconcile the sentimental attachment he felt for Catholicism with the demands of reason. The spiritual battle that he seemed to have resolved in October 1845 was in fact continuing, conducted now without the complicating factor of having to decide about his professional future. Laudyce Rétat suggests that this conflict should not be taken as an inability or unwillingness to decide, but as the essential element in Renan’s new religion, a free choice on Renan’s part to embrace inconsistency and doubt.104 From this perspective, Renan’s unsatisfied yearning for his lost faith was not nostalgia, but a religious principle. In exercising his religious liberty, Renan chose to occupy an ambiguous position that left him outside of the church, but also outside of any alternative that would endorse once and for all any particular doctrine or associate him with any particular institution. He acknowledged that this position would not produce “a perfectly harmonized intellectual system” but accepted the consequences, affirming that “we are happy as a result of this inconsistency, and a certain attitude that accepts patiently what might otherwise be understood as torture.”105 This posture achieved an epigrammatic expression in Renan’s notebooks from 1846, where he wrote that “doubt is so beautiful that I have just prayed to God never to deliver me from it.”106 In both his writings from the late 1840s and the Souvenirs of 1883 Renan self-consciously expresses a complex religious identity that looked at Catholicism with a combination of sympathy and critical distance. Renan seems less aware of some other dimensions of his new religion that recall his Catholic and clerical past, and that suggest a less flattering but fuller understanding of how much he carried over from Catholicism into his new life. In L’avenir de la science Renan draws a sharp distinction between an intellectual elite able to attain an elevated cultural state and the masses who are unable to reason and are thus relegated to a cruder and simpler existence, framed by a Christianity appropriate for them, but not for him and his colleagues. In Renan’s cultural elitism we can hear a clear echo of clericalism, a sense that a privileged few, possessed of a special and sacred knowledge, were obliged to direct a fickle and ignorant majority. “The good of humanity being the supreme goal, the minority must not be scrupulous in leading against its will, if it be necessary, the selfish and stupid majority.”107 Renan flirted briefly with

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socialism in the wake of the February revolution and was generally sympathetic with the need to improve the material circumstances of the lower classes, a position that led to one of the few quarrels he had with his sister Henriette. But his sense of superiority, and of the incapacity of the masses, made him skeptical as well of placing an absolute value on freedom. Some of the language used in L’avenir de la science recalls Gregory XVI’s criticism of liberty as less valuable than truth, expressed in Mirari vos, his encyclical condemning Lamennais in 1832. “Without a doubt we must carefully maintain the liberties we have conquered with so much effort; but what matters even more is to realize that this is an advantage if we have ideas, a disaster if we don’t. What good is it to have the freedom to assemble, if we don’t have something worthwhile to communicate? What good is it to be free to speak and to write if one doesn’t have something true and new to say?”108 Renan’s new friends counseled him against publishing L’avenir de la science when he showed it to them in 1849, before his trip to Italy, concerned that the public was not prepared for some of his advanced positions on religion and society. Renan accepted their advice and admitted in his preface to the 1890 edition that his attempt to summarize “the new faith that had replaced my ruined Catholicism” was at times overstated and crude, and that in refusing to publish it he was making a sacrifice “to what one calls in France good taste.”109 During his spiritual struggles at Saint-Sulpice Renan had at one point accepted the advice of his superiors to keep silent as a way to preserve his relationship with his clerical colleagues and to honor, at least in an external sense, ecclesiastical authority. In the end he found such discretion too difficult a policy to maintain, but his act of self-censorship in addressing the public suggests that here too Renan’s new religion incorporated elements of the Catholicism that he had tried to leave behind. Renan’s decision to leave the church can stand as a clear affirmation of the freedom of conscience, and an example of how difficult and painful it was for a devout Catholic to accept and in the end act on the basis of a personal judgment that went against the culture within which he was born and raised. But the language Renan used to describe his decision also suggests that he was compelled by the faculty of critical reason, which mirrored the competing power of ecclesiastical authority reinforced by family feeling. This sense of obligation to accept reason shows up first of all in the “principles of conduct” from Renan’s retreat before his tonsure, when he vowed “to preserve himself from any constraint against the natural progression of my

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mind,” and runs as a theme through his correspondence during his crisis, and in particular in the letters he exchanged with his friend the abbé Cognat. Despite his desire to remain in the church, he could not because “Catholicism suffices for all of my faculties, except my critical reason.”110 This faculty “eliminates, discusses, purifies, is impossible to silence. Ah! If I had been able to do so I would have.”111 For years Renan had struggled with his doubt and had let his conscience be formed by his superiors, even as he was unable to convince himself that what they taught was true. In the end Renan gave in to the pressure of disbelief, expressed in “Patrice” in a litany-like form interspersed with his inevitable qualifications: “This book [the Bible], you say, is the authentic history of primitive times. This is not true; this book is admirable, precious, divine; I adore it but is not what you say it is. This bread is substantially the body of Jesus. This is not true. This bread, I respect, I adore it; if I dared I would receive it on my lips, and I hope to God that someday, converted and again blind, I would be able to participate in the feast of the simple, and receive communion anew, with the woman and the child. But this bread is not what you say it is. This confessional box is a place of supernatural operations, where, at a given moment, sins are forgiven: this is not true.”112 By 1850, five years after he had left Saint-Sulpice, Renan was certain about what he did not believe, but unable to detach himself fully from the Catholicism that had shaped him. He spent much of the rest of his life working within this tension, most notably in The Life of Jesus, which appeared in 1863, a work that presents an idealized Christ, a supremely important moral teacher, but not the miracle worker of orthodoxy.113 Just three years before he died Renan wrote for the Revue des Deux Mondes a final testament, an “examination of philosophical conscience,” which began with a more elaborate version of his understanding of the constraints imposed by reason that he first expressed in the 1840s: “The first duty of a sincere man is not to influence his own opinions . . . [but] to assist as a spectator the internal battles that are undertaken in the depths of his conscience.”114 Even as he left the church, Renan sought to place himself under an authority that could not be questioned, and even as he exercised his freedom of religion, he paradoxically surrendered it to a rational faculty whose coercive power over him he both accepted and regretted.

Conclusion

In 1852 the enormously profitable Catholic publishing firm run by the abbé Migne produced a Dictionnaire des conversions, a volume of sixteen hundred pages, with entries on “more than eight thousand conversions, and references to millions of others.” Although the dictionary ranged widely, going back to Augustine and the early church, the editor, Charles-François Chevé, singled out “the immense movement back to Catholicism in our era” as “the most striking characteristic of the nineteenth century.”1 For Chevé, conversions testified to the truths of Catholicism, and the failure of other faiths, including rationalist disbelief, to provide religious certainty and social cohesion. Chevé praised converts for their successful struggle to overcome a devotion to individual judgment, the erroneous principle that “destroys the unity of the human race, isolates and separates man from man, in taking as its point of departure the contingent, variable, and limited individual being; it . . . leads to individualism, egoism, absolute disassociation, and universal skepticism.” Individuals who embraced this sens privé were constantly changing their position, “affirming one day what they denied the day before, moving from religious belief to philosophical system, to political and social convictions, shifting from one idea to another . . . destroying what they once adored, adoring what they once condemned, affirming at the same time yes and no, for and against. Nothing is more general or more ordinary than this sad spectacle.”2 Chevé’s last comment challenges his previous claim that conversion to Catholicism was the defining trait of the modern world, which now seems marked by an uncertainty that leads to constantly changing religious postures. 267

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But if we extend the concept of conversion to cover all the choices that Chevé finds so disturbing, as well as moves into the Catholic Church, his two positions can be reconciled and together capture the underlying argument of this book. Stories told by and about converts in the period after the revolutionary era were a crucial element in French culture, fascinating a broad audience drawn by a heightened consciousness of religious liberty, and a deep anxiety about the exercise of this newly acquired right. At their most immediate level, conversions raised questions about the imperatives of individual salvation and religious truth, set against the love and loyalty that people owe to their family and community. The dramatic scenes in which these conflicts unfolded illuminate the frustration and anger that often accompanied the decision to convert, though they at times show the possibility of reconciliation and family unity across religious boundaries. Converts provoked domestic and communal dramas, but in exercising their religious liberty they also became involved in issues that extended well beyond the confines of homes and families, churches and synagogues. Crossing sacred boundaries also involved confronting the political, social, and historical implications of religious choice. In exercising their individual religious liberty converts reflected on the appropriate relationship between churches and congregants, and between church and state. Religious choice meant as well sorting out obligations to others in an age when poverty and social inequality were generating new concern with the “social question,” and new solutions in the programs of socialist thinkers. And finally, in making their religious commitments converts were also assessing the place of religion in the rapidly evolving history of Europe and the world, positioning themselves within older traditions, newer alternatives, or a combination of old and new that they deemed most likely to shape the future. In the aftermath of the French Revolution converts made choices about individual salvation and fundamental religious truths that were intimately bound up with a range of complex issues that continue to intersect with personal religious identity. Paris provided a liberating space where individuals could consider their religious beliefs and choices, but the converts we have studied brought to the French capital cosmopolitan experiences and concerns. The Ratisbonne brothers of Strasbourg were members of a family involved in international banking and were preoccupied with finding an appropriate place for Jews in the modern world. Heinrich Heine explored religious choices in

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Paris from the perspective of an ambivalent conversion from Judaism to Protestantism in Germany. Ivan Gagarin was a Russian diplomat who knew Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, and Munich as well as Paris, travels that led him to question Russian Orthodoxy and autocracy. George Sand and Félicité Lamennais spent long periods at their family estates in Berry and Brittany, adding a provincial flavor to their lives in Paris. But they also traveled beyond France, Sand to Spain and Italy, Lamennais to London, Munich, and Rome. Both Sand and Lamennais wrote extensively about their travels, experiences that broadened the perspective from which they viewed the religious landscape, and their places within it. At the time of his conversion Renan had never lived elsewhere than his native Brittany and Paris, but his correspondence with his sister during her travels as a tutor, and his own intense interest in German scholarship, opened up to him the wider world and expanded the religious choices he felt free to make in the heart of France. All of these converts profited from the freedom available in Paris, but they made their choices while looking out on Europe and the rest of the world, and engaging in the religious questions raised by the upheaval of the revolutionary era. At the most intimate level, all of the converts whose lives we have considered faced terrible struggles with themselves and their families as they confronted their religious choices. David Drach’s family fled to London after he converted, leading him to plot and carry out the kidnapping of his children, all of whom eventually joined religious congregations. Théodore Ratisbonne wept as he admitted to his father that he had become a Christian; his brother Alphonse exchanged anguished and bitter letters with his uncle and fiancé after a Marian apparition in Rome brought him to Catholicism. Ivan Gagarin’s parents were profoundly hurt by what they felt was his abandonment of family, church, and country, feelings that Ivan reciprocated in letters that produced only a fragile reconciliation. Lamennais’s departure from the church led to a break with his brother as well as his close friends, a wound that was never healed during his or their lifetimes. George Sand left the church at a time when she was also fighting a public battle to separate from her husband and engaging in a series of tempestuous love affairs. Ernest Renan hesitated for months to share with his pious mother his decision to leave the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, afraid of the disappointment she would feel. Renan’s mother eventually made her peace with his decision, an open-hearted attitude he did not foresee.

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As they struggled to make their choices, all of the converts sought, in different ways and in some cases desperately, to ensure that their new religion would provide a sense of home and family that they knew was threatened by their decisions. As Renan moved away from Catholicism, and perhaps a break with his mother, he was reassured by his sister’s love and loyalty, which provided him with an altered but intact family on the other side of the religious border he was crossing. Théodore Ratisbonne’s conversion took place within an intimate circle in which the abbé Bautain served as a father figure for him and his close friends. Lamennais and Alphonse Ratisbonne joined their brothers and formed religious communities that provided a kind of extended family for them in their new lives. Alphonse’s letters to the Jesuit Ravignan in the months just after his conversion are laced with effusive references to his new father. Ivan Gagarin’s letters to Ravignan include similar sentiments, but his correspondence also suggests that he found a surrogate mother in Madame Swetchine. George Sand’s family situation is more complex. Her adolescent conversion to Catholicism was mediated by a young sister in a Paris convent school whom she always remembered fondly and stayed in touch with for years. As she moved away from Catholicism Sand was pulled in several spiritual directions, toward Lamennais, the Saint-Simonians, and Leroux, while also engaged in tempestuous earthly affairs with Musset, Michel de Bourges, and Chopin. This mix of religious and familial turbulence was relieved in part by her constant devotion to her two children, but of all the converts studied here Sand struggled most to find a place to settle. If we place Sand’s experience alongside the troubled stories of Emily Loveday and Sister Philomène, Protestant and Jewish women who converted to Catholicism, we observe how patriarchal attitudes presented an additional impediment to the exercise of their religious liberty. For all of the converts, their public accounts but especially their private correspondence reveal a profound anxiety that echoed the dilemmas of religious seekers portrayed in novels, plays, and operas. Taken together, these stories show us the costs of religious liberty paid by converts and those close to them as they struggled to reconcile personal belief and family feeling. For those who embraced Catholicism, either for a time or for the rest of their lives, salvation achieved through the sacramental powers of the church was a primary motive that drove them to beseech their families and friends to join them. This is most clearly the case with David Drach and the Ratisbonne brothers, eager to bring to the baptismal fount family members

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and as many of their Jewish community as they could persuade, sometimes with methods that provoked bitter quarrels about coercive pressures that violated the freedom of conscience that the converts themselves embodied. Lamennais and Gagarin both sought to reconcile their personal experience of religious liberty with commitments to a Catholic Church that demanded respect and obedience and, if necessary, the submission of one’s conscience to its authority. For Gagarin, the church represented the perfect balance between conscience and authority, a position shaped by his experience with a Russian state that insisted on both autocracy and Orthodoxy. Like Lamennais in the early 1830s, when he was the editor of L’Avenir, Gagarin saw the Catholic Church as a beacon of liberty charged with a universal mission, and in particular with the incorporation of Russia into a European Christian civilization. For him, like the Romantic Catholics studied by Carol Harrison, Catholicism offered salvation in the next world, and a religious home in this one that was both comfortingly authoritative and tolerant of individual preferences, within boundaries that were expansive but also regulated.3 Lamennais’s long years of conflict with Rome showed the limits of Catholic tolerance and ended with his decision to leave the church behind, convinced that it had abandoned its historic mission to lead the world into a new age of liberty and equality. His struggle illuminates the tension between conscience and authority inside Catholicism, and the political and social challenges the church faced in the wake of the French Revolution. Lamennais’s concern with equality and justice was shared with his friend George Sand, both of whom came to see their religious choices as necessarily involving positions sympathetic to radical political and religious change. For Lamennais and Sand the exercise of religious freedom in post-revolutionary France was an act of resistance against the established social order, a posture incompatible with a Catholic Church traumatized by the attacks it suffered during the 1790s. But choosing to leave Catholicism behind did not mean adopting a view of the world as disenchanted. As they moved away from Catholicism Lamennais and Sand assumed complex religious identities that combined an idiosyncratic Christianity with radical political and social commitments. Their religious choices testify to strains with Catholicism, but also to the freedom of individuals to imagine new forms of Christianity that were shaped by contemporary issues. Ernest Renan shared for a brief time the social concerns that were so important in the religious decisions of Lamennais and Sand. But he left

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behind the Catholic Church that had nurtured and educated him primarily because it failed to meet the standards of rational inquiry and judgment that he saw as imperatives guiding the individual conscience. Renan’s intellectual journey away from Catholicism was a brave personal decision, but one that he made with significant regret as he looked back on the spiritual security of Breton Catholicism, mediated by a loving mother and solicitous clerical mentors. Renan’s sharp critique of Lamennais in the 1850s, which accused his fellow Breton ex-Catholic of reducing Catholicism to a political party, shows him nostalgic for a lost world that he both valued and rejected. Religious liberty for Renan allowed him to assume a deeply ironic position that was both critical of the truth claims of Christianity and respectful of the social and psychological benefits that relied on them. A number of recent scholars have explored the emergence of what Jan Goldstein has termed “the post-Revolutionary self.”4 Charly Coleman has sharpened the terms of analysis used by historians in this field by proposing a contrast between a “culture of self-ownership,” in which “men and women were thought to possess and stand accountable for themselves and their actions,” and a “culture of dispossession that valorized the human person’s loss of ownership over itself and external objects.” According to Coleman, the culture of self-ownership triumphed in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when “what had been a debatable, even dubious proposition—the human person’s status as an autonomous, possessive subject—became an obligatory point of departure for thinking about the self.”5 In one sense the stories of the converts I have studied here confirm Coleman’s position, for all of them took advantage of the freedom available after the revolution to reflect and decide on a personal religious identity that was defined against varying arrays of external constraints. Converts made themselves accountable for their religious identities, resisting the coercive power of family, friendship, community, and church. But their struggles, doubts, and frequent reversals over religious identities also qualify Coleman’s claim that the autonomous self was “an obligatory point of departure” for the construction of a modern self. Instead, the lives of converts might teach us that the “autonomous, possessive subject” was a difficult goal to reach, and a fragile accomplishment. The attention paid to their exercise of religious liberty, broadcast in sermons, pamphlets, and memoirs and on the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes, reveals a public fascination with issues of belief and belonging, faith and doubt that is found as well in the literature and theater of the romantic age.

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The stories of the converts I have studied do not yield any simple lessons about religious liberty, a right that they struggled to understand and embody. Grappling with their beliefs and doubts, in an age when orthodox religious faith was both vigorous and contested, they saw the appeal of religious authority and certainty as claimed by Roman Catholicism. Some of them saw as well a threat that such authority could pose for an individual conscience determined to defend its autonomy. The issues raised about the exercise of religious liberty by the converts I have studied were not unique to France and the romantic age. To take a famous example, in England John Henry Newman embraced Roman Catholicism in October 1845, precisely the moment when Renan was leaving the seminary of Saint-Sulpice. Both men came to their decisions only after long and serious intellectual effort and anguished personal struggle.6 In the United States converts to Catholicism were moved by a desire for salvation, but also by their opposition to the individualism and materialism they saw as dominant values in the majority culture of Protestantism.7 France saw a wave of conversions to Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including prominent figures such as Charles Péguy and Jacques and Raissa Maritain.8 The same period also saw movement away from Catholicism, when the modernists Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell were excommunicated for challenging orthodox positions on scripture and theology.9 In the twentieth century Catholic proselytism directed at Jews provoked intense controversy at times. In the “Finaly affair,” two young Jewish boys, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were returned to their Jewish family in 1953 only after being hidden by Catholic zealots for several years.10 Jewish conversion to Catholicism provoked a more recent controversy as well, when Cardinal Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, identified himself as both a Jew and a Christian during a trip to Israel in 1995. Lustiger converted at the age of thirteen, in August 1940, while hiding with a Catholic family in Orléans; his mother later died in Auschwitz. Yisrael Meir Lau, the chief rabbi of Israel, dismissed Lustiger’s claims to be Jewish and condemned his conversion as a betrayal of his people and his faith.11 More generous responses, such as that of Michael Wyschogrod, challenged Lustiger’s Judaism but also expressed respect for his freedom of conscience.12 Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the Holocaust Jewish conversion remains a fraught issue, most recently addressed by the statement of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, which called for a halt to Catholic proselytism directed at Jews.13

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Conversion retains its power to fascinate authors and audiences in the contemporary world, to judge by two recent works by French writers that were quickly translated into English. Michel Houellebecq’s controversial novel Submission (Soumission, 2015) opens with an epigraph from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s autobiographical En route (1895), which recounts the conversion of its central character, Durtal. In the passage, a desperate and confused Durtal finds his way to the church of Saint-Sulpice and describes his experience with words that recall George Sand’s visit to the church in 1835. Durtal is “haunted by Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and candle wax. I hover on its outskirts, moved to tears by its prayers, touched to the very marrow by its psalms and chants.”14 François, the central character in Submission, is a Sorbonne professor and a specialist in Huysmans, drawn to the spiritual struggle that led to his conversion to Catholicism in the late nineteenth century. Huysmans and Durtal seem to offer models for François, who escapes from the turmoil of Paris just after an election in 2022 that produces an Islamic president. He travels south and spends several days at the shrine of Notre-Dame de Rocamadour in southern France. Although an atheist, François visits every day the chapel that holds the Black Virgin, the medieval statue of Mary and Jesus that has drawn pilgrims since the Middle Ages. During his final visit François has something close to a visionary experience. “I was in a strange state. It seemed the Virgin was rising from her pedestal and growing in the air. The baby Jesus seemed ready to detach himself from her, and it seemed to me that all he had to do was raise his right hand and the pagans and idolators would be destroyed, and the keys to the world restored to him.” But immediately after this apparent epiphany, which recalls the apparition of the Virgin to Alphonse Ratisbonne in Rome in 1842, François pulls back and reduces his spiritual experience to a physical reaction: “Or maybe I was just hungry.”15 Back in Paris, François is offered an elevated position at the Sorbonne, but only on the condition that he convert to Islam. He listens politely to the proselytizing conversation of Robert Rediger, the president of the university and himself a convert, but without any genuine religious interest. Presented with Rediger’s brief work describing Islam, he passes over the chapters on religious duties and fasting to get quickly to the one on polygamy. The possibility of a generous appointment, and of three wives, convinces François to convert to Islam, but it is exclusively a practical decision, a shallow commitment with no religious depth. Houellebecq’s novel concludes with a conversion that flattens the experience

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of religious liberty, a decision motivated exclusively by egotistical considerations. But François’s entire journey, his fascination with Huysmans, and his visit to Rocamadour remind us of another possibility, of a vibrant, soulaltering conversion that he longs for but fails to achieve, and that we have observed in the converts of post-revolutionary France. We can observe precisely such a conversion in Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom (Le royaume, 2014), where the author recalls his decision to embrace a devout Christianity in the 1990s.16 Carrère’s work combines a memoir in which he tries to explain to himself and his readers the sources of his religious transformation with an extended reflection on the history of early Christianity, of the conversion of Jews and Gentiles as reported in the New Testament. From 1990 to 1993 Carrère was “touched by grace,” attending daily mass, receiving the sacraments regularly, and filling eighteen notebooks with reflections on the Gospel of John. Looking back on these pages twenty years later, Carrère struggles to understand his conversion, his commitment to a “mad belief: that Truth with a capital ‘T’ took on the flesh of man in Galilee two thousand years ago. You’re proud of this madness, because it’s not natural, because in adopting it you surprise and surrender yourself, because no one around you shares it.”17 When confronted with doubt Carrère seeks relief in spiritual writers who insist that “doubts are our best assurance.”18 Despite such efforts, however, Carrère comes to believe that “the mystics’ advice seems like brainwashing, and true courage appears to be turning away from them to confront reality.”19 Carrère ’s loss of faith, however, is deeply ambiguous, a point he continually acknowledges as he weaves his way through an interpretation of the Epistles of Paul, the Gospel of Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles. When he confronts the question he imagines readers will ask—“Okay but really, are you a Christian or aren’t you?”—his answer moves from a forthright negative to an equivocation: “No, I don’t believe that Jesus was resurrected. I don’t believe that a man came back from the dead. But the fact that people do believe it—and that I believed it myself—intrigues, fascinates, troubles, and moves me. . . . I’m writing this book to avoid thinking that now that I no longer believe, I know better than those that do, and better than my former self when I believed. I’m writing this book to avoid coming down too firmly in my favor.”20 This combination of disbelief and regret for his loss of faith recalls the position of Ernest Renan, who is unsurprisingly one of Carrère’s intellectual heroes. It resonates more generally with the spiritual anxiety that

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all of the converts I have studied experienced as they confronted the religious liberty newly available to them in the early nineteenth century. Houellebecq’s account of François’s conversion, compared with that of Durtal/Huysmans, suggests that religious choices that were formerly authentic must now be regarded with sarcasm and irony. Carrère’s work holds out the possibility that conversion and disenchantment might still be the work of a troubled but sincere conscience.

Abbreviations AJPF AN ANDS GSA

GSC GSOA LCG

RCG ROC

Archives Jésuites de la Province de France, Vanves. Archives Nationales. Archives de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Sion. George Sand. Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand. Edited by Thelma Jurgrau. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. George Sand. Correspondance. 26 vols. Edited by Georges Lubin. Paris: Garnier, 1964–1995. George Sand. Œuvres autobiographiques. 2 vols. Edited by Georges Lubin. Paris: Gallimard, 1970–1971. Félicité Robert de Lamennais. Correspondance générale: Textes réunis, classés et annotés. 9 vols. Edited by Louis Le Guillou. Paris: Colin, 1971–1981. Ernest Renan. Correspondance générale. 3 vols. Edited by Jean Balcou. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995–2008. Ernest Renan. Œuvres complètes de Ernest Renan. 10 vols. Edited by Henriette Psichari. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947–1961.

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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; 279

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5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

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. Taylor, A Secular Age, 3. 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. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; Nock, Conversion. Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 4. A similar approach is taken by Segal, Paul the Convert, and Seigel, Between Cultures. 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. 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.”

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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.”

282 n o t e s t o p a g e s 8 – 1 5 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

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 6 – 1 7

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

283

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. 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.” Plongeron, “De la Réforme aux Lumières”; Lecler, “Liberté de conscience”; Guggisberg, Lestringant, and Margolin, La liberté de conscience. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross; Holt, The French Wars of Religion. Frame, Montaigne, 266–288. 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

284 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 – 2 1

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

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. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 759–760. Ibid., 763. Screech, in ibid., 759. Ibid., 490. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:250; Lecler, “Liberté de conscience,” 383–394; M. Smith, Montaigne and Religious Liberty, 33– 50. 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. 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. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 721. Rosen, “The Genius of Montaigne,” 51. 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.” 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. Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, x; Benedict, The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots, 282–283; Labrousse, Conscience et conviction, 243, 284;

n o t e s t o pa g e s 21 – 2 5

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

285

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. 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. Luria, Sacred Boundaries; Hanlon, Confession and Community; Borello, “Entre tolérance et intolérance.” Labrousse, Conscience et conviction, 148; Tannenbaum, Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary, 205–217. 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. Bayle, Philosophical Commentary, 77. I have slightly amended quotes drawn from this translation for the sake of stylistic uniformity. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 196; Bayle, De la tolérance, 251–252. Negroni, Intolérances, 140. Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Bayle, Philosophical Commentary, 243. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 151. For a similar argument, see Galenkamp, “Locke and Bayle.” 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. Linton, “Citizenship and Religious Toleration,” 157–174. Quoted in Strayer, Huguenots and Camisards, 96. Benedict, The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots, 283. Burson, “Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier.” Bergier, “Liberté de Conscience.” Bergier, “Tolérance, intolérance,” quote from 130. The editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française that appeared in the eighteenth century

286 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 5 – 2 8

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

continued to attach pejorative connotations to their definitions of tolérance; see Merrick, Desacralization of the French Monarchy, 135. Monahan, Let God Arise; Joutard, Les Camisards. Bergeal, Protestantisme et tolérance, 65. Ibid., 91–96. 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. Garrioch, The Huguenots of Paris; Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion; McManners, Church and Society, 2:644–657. 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. Bien, The Calas Affair; Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs; Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 211–228. Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance, 3–13. 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. 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.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 8 – 3 3

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

287

Rousseau, Confessions, 65–74. Ibid., 67. Rousseau, Emile, 156–157. Ibid., 264–265. Ibid., 267, 318–322. Ibid., 266. Ibid., 267. 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. Rousseau, Emile, 269. Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 358–359; Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 147–162; Cranston, The Noble Savage, 352–362. Rousseau, Emile, 304. Ibid., 312. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 265–266. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 329–330. Rousseau defended his positions on religious liberty against the attack of Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, in “JeanJacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva, to Christophe de Beaumont” (1763). Quotes are drawn from the translation in Rousseau, Rousseau’s Political Writings, 84–173. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 169–172. Adams, Huguenots and French Public Opinion, 147–162. Rousseau, cited in Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 356. 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

288 n o t e s t o p a g e s 3 3 – 3 6

79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85. 86.

87.

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. 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.” “Conscience,” Encyclopédie. Rousseau, Emile, 304. 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). 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. Fauchois, “La difficulté d’être libre,” 71–72. Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture, 19–20, 210–218; Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 263–272. 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. 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.

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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.

290 n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 0 – 4 4 105. 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.

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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.

292 n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 6 – 5 1 132. 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.”

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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.

294 n o t e s t o p a g e s 5 6 – 6 0 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

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

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du Juif Errant (1856). Doré’s images were published as illustrations of Dupont’s poem. Jordan, Fromental Halévy, 62; Hallman, Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism. Letellier, Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots.” Fulcher, The Nation’s Image. Conway, Jewry in Music, 216–217. For the significance of Scribe, see Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 244–246. Espagne, Les juifs allemands, 85. 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). Conway, Jewry in Music, 211–222, 248–256; Hallman, Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism; Letellier, Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots.” 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). Halévy, La juive, includes the full libretto. For a performance by Neil Shicoff, see https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_wUP07DVq9E. Portalis, La liberté de conscience et le statut religieux, xvii. 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. Thureau-Dangin, Histoire de la monarchie de juillet, 3:189–204; Price, The Perilous Crown, 272. 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. 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

296 n o t e s t o p a g e s 6 6 – 7 0

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

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. 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. W. Scott, Ivanhoe, 466. Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 37–73; Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 102–116. Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 46. 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.” Eugénie Foa to Théodore Ratisbonne, 1845, ANDS, 2A1. Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 45. Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 106. “Chronique Dramatique”; Dandrey, “Polyeucte à la scène.” Corneille, Polyeucte, 85. Ibid., 111–120 (act 4, scenes 3–5); 127–136 (act 5, scenes 2–3). Ibid., 138. For translations I have relied on Corneille, Chief Plays of Corneille, 219–274, quote from 271. Corneille, Polyeucte, 140; Corneille, Chief Plays of Corneille, 273. Racine, Esther, 269. For translations I have used Racine, The Complete Plays of Racine, 2:303–370; quote from 323. 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. 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

n o t e s t o pa g e s 7 0 – 7 3

73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

297

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. 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. 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. Maczka, “La ‘belle juive ’ ”; Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 92–99, 113–120. From a letter of Heine to Rahel Varnhagen, cited in Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 155. Sasson, “The Dying Poet: Scenarios of a Christianized Heine,” 316. 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. Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 108. Elon, The Pity of It All, 65–101, quote from 82; Hertz, How Jews Became Germans. 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. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 15; Holub, “Heine’s Conversion,” 286. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 14–16. 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.

298 n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 3 – 7 7 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, “SaintSimonism 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, “Heine’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.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 7 7 – 8 1

102. 103. 104. 105.

299

Neither Holub nor Prawer deals with Heine ’s fantasy of a conversion to Catholicism. Heine, “Les aveux d’un poète,” 1185. Ibid., 1195–1196. Ibid., 1202–1204. 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.

300 n o t e s t o p a g e s 8 1 – 8 5 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.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 8 5 – 8 8

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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,

302 n o t e s t o p a g e s 8 8 – 9 3

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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.” Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 34, Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:42. Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 50. 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. Catrice, L’harmonie, 108, 147. Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 13–26. For Drach’s use of the Talmud, see Drach, Deuxième lettre d’un rabbin converti, 2. Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 28. Ibid., 36–37; Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:47–50. Drach, De l’harmonie, 1:66–70. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 164–171; Berkovitz, Rites and Passages, 174–203. Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, 128–149. Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 51–52. Ibid., 46. Landau, “David Paul Drach.” 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. For the most detailed account of these events, see Catrice, L’harmonie, 202–239. For the help given to Drach by the French government, see AN, F7 9430, dossier 14314. AN, F7 9430, 14314, letters of minister of interior to prefect of police, December 4, 1824, March 24, 1825. For Drach’s description of these events, see Drach, Lettre d’un rabbin converti, 1–53. Catrice, “L’orientaliste Paul Drach.” Drach, Relation de la conversion de M. Hyacinthe Deutz, 10. Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 75–85; Landau, “Le cas étrange de Simon Deutz.”

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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

304 n o t e s t o p a g e s 9 7 – 1 0 0

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77.

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. 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. Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:43. Ibid., 1:44–46. Ibid., 1:16. T. Ratisbonne, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:xliii. 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. T. Ratisbonne, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:lii. 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. 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

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 0 0 – 1 0 4

78.

79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

305

Religion, February 27, 1835, 785–789; March 12, 1835, 141–143; March 14, 1835, 173–178. 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. 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.” 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.” Cited in Poupard, L’abbé Louis Bautain, 187. T. Ratisbonne, Essai sur l’éducation morale. T. Ratisbonne, “Notice,” in Bautain, Philosophie du christianisme, 1:lx. 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. Laurentin, Alphonse Ratisbonne, vie authentique, 129. Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière?, 59. A manuscript copy of Flore ’s letter of February 14 can be found in ANDS, 2A3. 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. Laurentin, Alphonse Ratisbonne, vie authentique, 121. Kselman, “Social Reform and Religious Conversion in French Judaism.” Laurentin, Alphonse Ratisbonne, vie authentique, 179.

306 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 0 4 – 1 1 3 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.

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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

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126. 127.

128. 129. 130.

threat, and the responses of Cohen, “Conversion in Nineteenth-Century France,” and Endelman, “Anti-Semitism and Apostasy in NineteenthCentury France,” as well as Helfand’s response, “Assessing Apostasy.” Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin. 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. Isser, “The Mallet Affair”; Ford, Divided Houses, 131–133. A dossier on the investigation and trial can be found in AN, F19 5799. Cahen, “Etudes sur les conversions,” 372–383, 434–442, 499–507. Ibid., 377.

4. Family, Nation, and Freedom 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

Stern, Mémoires, souvenirs et journaux, 275–276. Ibid., 276. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 2. “Récit de ma conversion et de ma vocation,” in Gagarine, Journal, 267. “Cahier bibliothèque d’enfant,” AJPF, Ga, 1a. Details on the childhood of Gagarin are drawn from Tempest, “Ivan Gagarin”; Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 24–28; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 1–4. “Curriculum vitae jusqu’en 1857,” AJPF, Ga, 1a. 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. Frede, Doubt, Atheism, 17. 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. Gagarine, Journal, 65. 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.

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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-XavierIvan Gagarine SJ,” 34–37. 31. Chaadaev, “Letters on the Philosophy of History,” quote from 167–168.

310 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 3 1 – 1 3 8 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.

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56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

311

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. Swetchine, Lettres, 2:296. Gagarin to Samarin, April 2, 1840, in Rouleau and Galievsky, I. S. Gagarine, 107. Bakhmetyeva, “Madame Swetchine,” 200–258. Milbach, Les chaires ennemies. Rouleau, introduction to Rouleau and Galievsky, I. S. Gagarine, 15–16; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 225n40. Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 29–39. Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 89, takes a similar position. Schouvaloff, Ma conversion, 88–99, 155–156. 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.” Schouvaloff, Ma conversion, 284–286. Gagarine, Journal, 262, entry for February 10, 1842; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 36. Schouvaloff, Ma conversion, 292, 295–299. Rouleau and Galievsky, I. S. Gagarine, 186–187. Ibid., 189–193. Ibid., 209. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 300–307. AJPF, Ga, 1b; Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 92–93; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 37–38. Bautain, La religion et la liberté. “Retraite paschale prêchée par l’abbé Bautain à St. Eustache, pendant la semaine de la passion du carême de 1842,” AJPF, Ga, 1b. Ponlevoy, Vie du R. P. Xavier de Ravignan, 1:185–229. “Liste de livres, donnés par l’abbé de Ravignan à J.G., 18 mars 1842,” AJPF, Ga, 1b. Swetchine, Lettres, 2:288. AJPF, Ga, 1b; Giot, “Jean Serguéiévitch Gagarin,” 92–93; Beshoner, Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, 37–38. “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.

312 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 4 6 – 1 5 5 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-XavierIvan 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.

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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. 2. 3. 4.

GSOA, 2:366. GSC, 3:186. Winock, Les voix de la liberté, 161. Lamennais, Les paroles d’un croyant. Renduel, the official publisher, brought out eight editions in the six months following publication; well over fortyfive 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.

314 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 6 0 – 1 6 5 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

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

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countless, and whose dew comes to rest on the dry leaves as well as the green.” LCG, 2:445. Van Engen, Devotio Moderna. Lamennais, L’imitation de Jésus-Christ, 34–35. Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, 1:333. Kroen, Politics and Theater, shows how the alliance did not always work smoothly. Bertier de Sauvigny, “Mgr de Quélen et les incidents de Saint-Germainl’Auxerrois,” 110; Limouzin-Lamothe, Monseigneur Quélen, 2:12–19, 46–49; Latreille and Rémond, Histoire du catholicisme, 277–279. 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). 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. L’Avenir, December 18, 1830, 186–190. Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais, 313–322, 423–430. 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. LCG, 4:416. L’Avenir, September 21, 1831, 666–687; Lecanuet, Montalembert, 231–251. 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. L’Avenir, February 19, 1831, 339. 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.” Lamennais, “De la séparation de l’église et de l’état.” Lacordaire, “Mouvement d’ascension du catholicisme.”

316 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 7 0 – 1 7 4 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, SainteBeuve, 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

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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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.” LCG, 5:143. Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 128–133. Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condamnation de Lamennais, 261–262. LCG, December 15, 1832, 5:245. For similar prophetic comments, see LCG, 5:199, 208–209, LCG, November 15, 1832, 5:220. 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. Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condamnation de Lamennais, 277–291. Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 358–375. 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. 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. Montalembert, “Avant-propos,” 21–22. Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 371–373. Ibid., 31–69. Gregory XVI, Mirari vos, Article 14. LCG, 5:446–447.

318 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 7 9 – 1 8 2 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.

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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

320 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 8 5 – 1 9 0

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

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. LCG, 6:578. LCG, 6:706. LCG, 6:808. LCG, 6:833. LCG, 6:309. “De l’absolutisme et de la liberté,” Revue des Deux Mondes, August 1834, 298–322. Lamennais, preface to Troisièmes mélanges, iii–ix. Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, 16–20. 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. LCG, 5:23, 6:601. 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. Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 319. “Rapport de Mgr Bruté, évêque de Vincennes, sur M. de La Mennais,” LCG, 6:502–507. LCG, 7:546–548. LCG, 7:25–26. LCG, 7:35. “Les derniers moments de Lamennais vus par A. Barbet,” LCG, 8:852–879. LCG, 8:671. Duroselle, Les débuts du catholicisme social en France. 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.

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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

322 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 9 6 – 2 0 0

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

decision to wear men’s clothing at times, though she herself does not make this connection. 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. GSA, 623. Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 12. Cédoz, Un couvent de religieuses anglaises à Paris. 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. GSA, 641. Maurois, Lélia, 40. Sand herself wrote that she “was more comfortable in the convent than with my own family.” GSA, 660. GSA, 652–657. GSA, 657. 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. GSA, 680. Courcelle and Courcelle, “ Le ‘Tolle Lege’ de Georges Sand.” GSA, 694–695. 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.” 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.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 0 2 – 21 2

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

323

GSA, 757. GSA, 767. GSA, 770. GSA, 765. GSA, 759, 771. 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. 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. 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. GSC, 1:224. GSC, 1:244. GSC, 1:306–313. 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. GSC, 1:312. 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. Sand described the moment in a letter to her friend, and the tutor of Maurice, Jules Boucoiran. GSC, 1:735. Seigel, Bohemian Paris. GSC, 2:18–19. GSA, 905. J. Sand, Rose et Blanche. For Sand’s views on the novel, see Delpont’s “Postface,” in ibid., 461–476. For a list of the reviews published in May and June 1832, see GSC, 2:115–116n1. G. Sand, Indiana, 76, 171–172. Ibid., 190–191. G. Sand, Valentine. GSC, 2:102–105.

324 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 1 2 – 2 1 6 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.

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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.

326 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 2 1 – 2 2 6 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.

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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

328 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 3 2 – 2 3 6

119.

120.

121. 122. 123. 124.

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. 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. 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. 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. Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 209. GSC, 17:416–417; Hamon, George Sand face aux églises, 248. 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

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 3 6 – 2 4 3

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

329

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.” An older brother, Alain, also played a role in raising Renan; Van Deth, Ernest Renan, 20–21. 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. Renan was already contemplating the significance of this story in 1845; see “Cahiers de Jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:106. Renan, Souvenirs, 1. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 87. RCG, 1:31. Henriette made similar comments in letters of September 1836 and January 1837; RCG, 1:28, 37. Lagrange, Mgr. Dupanloup, 99–102. Renan, Souvenirs, 99–100. Ibid., 103. RCG, 1:139, 151, 154–155, 220. RCG, 1:93. For descriptions of other ceremonies, see RCG, 1:126, 134. RCG, 1:100–101. RCG, 1:95–96. 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. Renan, Souvenirs, 117. The street name changes again, to rue du Général Leclerc, before passing in front of the seminary. Ibid., 115–116. Ibid., 133. RCG, 1:253. RCG, 1:254, 258. RCG, 1:286. Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse, 24–25.

330 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 4 3 – 2 5 1 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

RCG, 1:271–272. RCG, 1:279–280. Petit, “La formation de l’esprit scientifique d’Ernest Renan.” RCG, 1:295–296. RCG, 1:356. Renan, Souvenirs, 140–143. Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 251–268. Renan, Souvenirs, 135. Renan, Souvenirs, 140; RCG, 1:274. RCG, 1:311. Renan, Souvenirs, ed. Balcou, 240–241. 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. RCG, 1:263. Renan, Souvenirs, 143. Ibid., 150. RCG, 1:377–378. 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. Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale, 233–243. RCG, 1:325. 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. RCG, 1:364. RCG, 1:365. RCG, 1: 335. RCG, 1:397–398. Renan, Souvenirs, 149. RCG, 1:425–428, 432–437, 439–444, 447–455. RCG, 1:443. RCG, 1:453–454. RCG, 1:462. Renan made similar comments in a letter to Liart later that year; RCG, 1:476–477.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 5 2 – 2 5 7

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

331

“Principes de Conduite,” ROC, 9:1480–1492. RCG, 1:488. RCG, 1:476–482. RCG, 1:435; see also Renan’s letter to Liart, RCG, 1:442–443. “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. “Homélie sur la Sainte Enfance de N.S.J.C.,” in Renan, Travaux de jeunesse, 17. Renan, Souvenirs, 149, 170. Pommier, La jeunesse cléricale, 63–80. Ibid., 72, 103, 398–399, 403–404, 599. 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. 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. Ibid., 169. 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. Priest, The Gospel According to Renan, 23. Ibid., 38. Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:66n38. Ibid., 9:69n41. 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.” Renan, “Etudes de littérature allemande.” In Souvenirs, 177, Renan recalls that Herder “was the German writer I knew the best.” RCG, 1:622–622. For other reflections on Germany, see Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:66n38, 193n151. Renan, Souvenirs, 177. According to Jean Baubérot, “Renan’s principal regret is not to be able to conduct himself with regard to Catholicism

332 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 5 7 – 2 6 2

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99.

as Protestant intellectuals do with regard to Protestantism: a movement of internal contestation without rupture”; “Renan et le protestantisme,” 436. RCG, 1:579. RCG, 1:571. Liart, already very ill, died before he was able to read this last letter. RCG, 1:616; for their previous exchanges on his plans, see RCG, 1:590–594, 603–610. RCG, 1:613. 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). RCG, 1:632. RCG, 2:36. Renan provided a full account of the details of this climactic week in his letter to Henriette; RCG, 2:57–64. 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. 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. RCG, 2:372–374. Rétat uses this phrase to categorize Renan’s early writings in the collection of texts he edited, Renan, Renan: Histoire et parole. Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–1846,” ROC, 9:33n49. Renan makes a similarly unequivocal assertion in L’avenir de la science, ROC, 3:765. ROC, 3:982. ROC, 3:1074–1075. 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. Renan, L’avenir de la science, ROC, 3:805. Ibid., 3:757. Renan, “Les historiens critiques de Jésus,” 166.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 6 3 – 2 7 3

333

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.

334 n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 7 3 – 2 7 5 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.

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Index Articles 291–294 (penal code), 45 Ashkenazic Jews, 83 Asiatic Society, 89 atheism, 22–23, 30, 126, 127, 131 Athénée Royale, 42 Augsburg, Peace of (1555), 6 Augustine, 22, 77, 161, 245; Confessions, 90; conversion experience, 2, 90, 199, 267 Aurélien de Sèze, 204–205, 206, 207, 208, 323n30 Auschwitz, 273 Austria, 173 authority. See collective authority; patriarchal authority

Note: Pages in italic type indicate images. Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 261 Acts of the Apostles, 275 affiliation, definition of, 2–3 Affre, archbishop of Paris, 112, 144, 251, 259–260 afterlife, 12, 228 Agence générale pour la défense de la liberté religieuse, 167 agnosticism, 11 Agoult, Marie d’, 122–123, 192, 223 Ahasvérus (the Wandering Jew), 9, 53, 57–60, 294n33 Ahasvérus, king of Persia, 69 Ajasson de Grandsagne, Stéphane (Sténi), 207 Aladel, Père, 112 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 33; Encyclopédie, 33–34 Alexander I, tsar of Russia, 133 Alicia, Sister, 198–199, 201–204, 209, 270 Anabaptists, 46 ancient world: Christians in, 17–18, 68–69, 74, 275; gods of, 74; and liberty concept, 17–18, 42; and philology, 262 Anster, Sister Eliza, 221 anticlericals, 119, 155–156, 235 antisemitism, 48, 61, 62, 74, 86–87 apostasy, 2 apostolic tradition, 179 Archives Israélites, 85, 107, 108, 117, 118, 120 Article 10 (Declaration of the Rights of Man), 8, 83; debate over, 13–16, 27, 33, 34–35, 36, 37, 37; qualification of, 39; statement of, 13

Baader, Franz von, 174 Babylonian exile, 75–76 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, mayor of Paris, 35, 35 Baker, Deborah, The Convert, 280n6 Ballanche, Pierre, 4, 58 Balzac, Honoré de, 212 banking families, 85, 86, 96, 97, 268 baptism, 81, 87, 88, 96, 98, 101, 123, 124; coerced or insincere, 119; and converts’ families, 270–271; of dying Jew, 107; of Jewish orphan girls, 4, 112, 114 Baptists, 46 Barrault, Emile, 4 Barruel, abbé de, 38–39 Bataillard, Paul, 58–59 Baudier, abbé, 250, 251–252, 259 Bautain, Louis, 97–100, 111, 137, 144, 270, 304n69; Philosophie du christianisme, 144, 303n67 Bautain circle, 99–101 Bayle, Jacob, 22

369

370 i n d e x Bayle, Pierre, 8, 21–24, 26, 27, 32, 33, 285n38; Dictionaire historique et critique, 22; Lettre sur le comète, 22; Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, “Compel Them to Come In, That My House Be Full” (Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus Christ: Contrains-les d’entrer, 22, 23, 26 Beaumont, Charles-Godefroid de, abbé, 195 Belgium, 170, 171 Bénichou, Paul, 58 Béranger, Pierre de, 56 Bergier, abbé, Dictionnaire de théologie, 24–25 Berlin Society for Culture and Science of the Jews, 86 Berr, Michel, 89 Berry, Duc de, 166 Berry, Duchesse de, 93 Berthelot, Marcellin, 260–261 Berville, M., 167–168 Beshoner, Jeffrey, 139, 152 Bible, 26, 76, 143, 244, 245, 266; critical study of, 89, 254–257, 262; and orthodoxy, 255, 256. See also Hebrew Bible; New Testament Bibliothèque Nationale, 86 bildungsroman, 127 Bill of Rights (U.S.), 3 bishops, 39, 169, 175–176 Black Virgin, 274 blood libel, 86, 87, 94 Bluth, Anna, 119 Boissy d’Anglas, François Antoine, Rapport sur les libertés des cultes, 38 Bonald, Louis de, 40, 44, 84, 164 Bonnechose, Henri, 304n68 Book of Argument and Truth in Defense of the Despised Faith, 75 Bordeaux, 25, 83 Bordeaux, Archbishop of, 112 Bordeaux, Duc de, 92 Börne, Ludwig, 73–74 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 134, 254 Boumsell, Claudine, 44, 114–115 Bourbon Restoration (1814), 8, 16, 40–41, 85, 234; and Catholic revival, 157, 164, 166 Brentano, Clemens, 74 Britain. See Great Britain Brittany, 157, 175, 235–240, 250, 269, 271

Brothers of Christian Instruction, 178–179, 238 Brownstein, Rachel, 70 Brussels, 50, 52, 170 Bruté, Simon, abbé, 161, 162, 163, 164, 182, 188–189 Buée, Adrien Quentin, and Pierre Louis Buée, 316n48 Burnier-Fontanel, abbé, 90 Burnouf, Eugène, 261 Bussières, Gustave de, 80 Bussières, Théodore de, 80, 103–104 Buturlin, Sergei, 149 Cahen, Isidore, 120–121 Caigniez, Louis-Charles, 52–53; Le Juif Errant, 52 Calas affair, 25, 27, 32 Calvinism, 28, 39, 41, 286n54. See also Huguenots Camus, Armand Gaston, 35 Carbon, abbé, 250, 254, 260 Carrère, Emmanuel, 2; The Kingdom (Le royaume), 275, 276, 280n6 Carron, Guy, abbé, 163, 164 Castellane, Count de, 13–14 Catechism of Perseverance, 254 categorical imperative, 256 Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 (Britain), 3, 170 Catholic Enlightenment, 24 Catholicism: and anticlericals, 119, 155–156, 201, 202; appeal of, 12, 122–123, 136, 245; authority of, 136, 235, 271, 273; and believers’ doubts, 10–11; and biblical scholars, 256; Bourbon Restoration revival of, 157, 164, 166; British emancipation of, 3, 170; church fathers’ interpretations of, 26, 27; and clerical celibacy, 45, 174; climate in 1840s, 236; and conscience (see freedom of conscience); constancy/continuity of, 135, 139; and constitutions, 37, 38; converts to (see conversion; proselytism; names of specific converts); credo of, 139; cultural authority of, 8–9, 32; death rites of, 107–108, 112, 203, 204; divisions (1830s) in, 137; and European unity, 139; excommunication from, 11, 158, 273;

index “feminization” of, 113; and fideism accusations, 99–100; and French romanticism, 65, 66; and Index of Prohibited Books, 232; intellectual appeal of, 10, 174, 234; legal authority of, 32; and liberalism, 137, 166–178, 190, 191, 246–247, 315n26; and mixed marriage, 45, 48, 64–65, 78, 108; movements to and away from, 273; persecution of Protestants, 7, 17–27, 33, 46, 48, 63; philosophical basis of, 244–245; and Poland, 170–171, 177; popular hostility to, 166; Protestant challenge to, 69, 73; as “religion of majority,” 45; as religious liberty threat, 44, 47, 103, 224, 232; renewal in 1840s of, 234–235; revival post–1795 of, 38, 39, 40–44; and revolutionary movement (1830), 166–171; “romantic,” 123, 183, 271, 315n33; and salonnières, 10, 122–123, 137–138; and social justice movement, 190; as state religion, 3, 4, 6–7, 14, 17, 25, 32, 34, 35–36, 41, 44–45, 48, 166; state separation from, 39, 167, 174; and supernatural, 12, 52, 56, 142, 236, 256, 261–262, 266; ultramontanism, 94, 137, 138, 178, 235; in United States, 170; utopians’ critique of, 228. See also church-state relations; papacy Catholic League, 17, 63 Central Consistory, 86, 89, 91, 112–113, 118 Chaadaev, Peter, 129–130, 131–132, 135, 152 Chamber of Deputies, 40, 86 Charles IX, King of France, 63 Charles X, King of France, 42 Charpentier, Eugène, 194 Charter of 1814, 44 Chateaubriand, 164, 245; Atala, 65–66; Génie du christianisme, 202 Chatel, abbé, 46 Chernyshevsky, Nicholay, 126 Chevé, Charles-François, 267–268 children: and Catholic conversions of Jewish girls, 4, 10, 82, 106, 112, 113–114; religious identity of, 29–33, 45, 109, 110, 119, 273; religious instruction of, 29–30, 33, 64 choice. See freedom of conscience Chopin, Frédéric, 210, 222–223, 226, 270 Christ. See Jesus; Passion of Christ Christianity: in ancient world, 17–18, 68–69, 74, 275; atheism vs., 23; and conflicts, 135;

371 early conversions to, 275; and Judaism, 91, 98; messianic, 181; and republicanism, 231–232; romantic, 202; utopians’ critique of, 227–228; and Wandering Jew, 50, 53, 71. See also Catholicism; Protestantism “Christian silence” ideal, 254 Christian socialism, 54, 261 church fathers, 5, 25, 27 church-state relations, 1–3, 14, 35–39, 169; and boundaries, 158; and Bourbon restoration, 40, 166; and Catholicism, 15, 17, 25, 32, 38, 39, 41, 45, 48, 167, 171, 174; and Catholic schools, 78–79, 138, 167–169, 190, 235, 242; Concordat of 1801, 39, 45, 47, 166; contemporary policy, 1; and converts, 268; “cuius regio, eius religio” doctrine, 6, 7; early 19th century, 3, 8–9, 44–45; Falloux law (1851), 190; and July Monarchy, 166; laïcité policy, 1; Lamennais’s works on, 158, 159, 160–161, 165, 167–168, 171; and primacy of state, 22, 36, 45, 235; and public display of religious symbols, 1–2; and religious minorities, 34, 46; and religious uniformity, 21, 22; and Restoration, 41, 42; and rights of state, 24; Rousseau’s view of, 32, 33; separation (1905) of, 39, 41; separation ramifications, 169–171; and toleration by state, 24, 27; and value of religious uniformity, 19. See also established religion; freedom of conscience; liberté des cultes; religious liberty; tolerance Circourt, Countess de, 136 circumcision rite, 106 citizenship rights, 119 Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790), 36, 40 civil religion, 32, 41 civil rights, 15, 34, 117 civil tolerance, 34, 172 clerical celibacy, 45, 174 Clermont-Tonnerre, Comte de, 83 Cognat, abbé, 259, 265 Cohen, Hermann, 4, 300n8 Coleman, Charly, 272; Virtues of Abandon, 308n12 collective authority, 35, 42, 230, 236, 286n53 Collège de France, 86, 255, 261

372 i n d e x College of Saint Stanislaus, 260 Collège Royale of Strasbourg, 97 Collin de Plancy, Jacques de, 56 Collins, Jeffrey, “Redeeming the Enlightenment,” 282–283n8 Comminges, Bishop of, 24 “common sense” philosophy, 174, 187, 244, 316–317n48 communion, 41, 196, 200, 228, 266 complainte (rhymed narrative), 50, 52 Concordat of 1801, 39, 45, 47, 166, 167, 195 Condorcet, Marquis de, 38, 179 confession, 132–133, 215, 216, 235, 266 Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, 92 conscience, 33–34. See also freedom of conscience; liberté de conscience Constant, Benjamin, 16, 41–42, 44; Principles of Politics, 41 Constituent Assembly, 83 Constitution, U.S., 3 Constitutional Church, 169 Constitutional Convention (1848), 189 constitutions, French, 35–37, 40; of 1791, 36, 38, 282n7; of 1791, 1793, 1795, 36; of 1814, 3; clerical oath to, 37; and religious liberty, 3, 8, 13, 16, 38, 47, 65, 83, 95, 97 Consulate (1799–1804), 39. See also Charter of 1814 Convention (1792–1795), 36 conversion, 2–11, 17, 21, 28, 29–30, 44, 48, 55, 67, 68–69, 74, 80–121, 123–158, 267–276; appeal of, 273; clerical role in, 46, 239; and coercion, 7, 24, 46, 63–64, 119, 271; and competing claims, 10, 62, 70, 71, 110; and conflicted identity, 108; and conscience, 5, 34, 60, 64, 88, 110, 117, 123, 156; in contemporary world, 274–275; contexts of, 6, 261; as continuous/complex process, 250; deathbed, 46, 108; Dictionnaire des conversions, 267; and doubt, 7, 261; and family relations, 92, 97–108, 124–125, 149–152, 268, 269, 270–271; as fashionable, 123; and French romanticism, 49–50, 65, 71; and gender, 10, 82, 111–121; and “honest man” ideal, 87–88; as individual choice, 6, 7, 9, 14–15, 16, 82, 95, 97, 120, 123, 267–269, 271; Jewish issue of (see under Jews); and

Marian miracle, 9, 59, 80–81, 81, 82, 96, 103, 104, 105, 111, 234, 269, 274; meaning of, 5–7; metaphors for, 2; and mixed marriage, 64; motivating factors, 10, 90–91, 261–262, 270–271; nineteenth-century movement of, 46, 123, 267–268, 273; novels about, 66, 67, 225; operas about, 59–66, 70–71, 82–83; Parisian salons and, 137; plays about, 68, 70–71; as political decision, 123; pressures of, 46–47, 80, 87; proper grounds for, 134; Protestant issue of (see Protestantism); and religious differences, 71; salvation from, 46, 82, 95, 102, 107, 114, 124, 145, 148, 149, 268, 270, 271, 273; and scandal, 119; and shame, 88; and spiritual anxiety, 275–276; typologies of, 2–3, 4, 7; and Wandering Jew trope, 52, 55–56, 58. See also proselytism; specific converts conversion narratives, 44, 83, 88–89; of Drach, 88–91, 93, 95; French interest in, 82; of Gagarin, 123, 139; interpretation of, 5–6, 7; of Théodore Ratisbonne, 97–98 Conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne, The (painting), 81 Conway, David, 60 Corambé (Sand invented deity), 195–196, 322n9 Corinthians, 215 Coriolis, Marquis de, 179 Corneille, Pierre, Polyeucte, 68–69, 70, 71, 296n71 Cousin, Victor, 97, 130, 244, 246, 308n12 couvent anglais (Paris), 197–201, 202, 204, 209, 215 Coux, Charles de, 173, 174 Crémieux, Adolphe, 85, 86–87, 112–113 “cuius regio, eius religio” (whose realm, his religion), 6, 7 Damascus affair (1840), 86–87, 94, 118, 298n93 Damiron, Jean-Philbert, 261 Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, 189 D’Astros, Monsignor, 174 Daughters of Charity, 111, 112 David, Jacques-Louis, The Oath of the Tennis Court (painting), 34–35, 35

index death: Catholic conversion prior to, 46, 108; and Catholic rites, 106–108, 112, 203, 204; and eternal damnation, 189, 228; and immortality of soul, 75, 77, 228; and reincarnation, 12, 228, 232, 233 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 37, 40, 44, 45, 46, 64. See also Article 10 deism, 262 Delaborde, Sophie (Sand’s mother), 194, 204 democracy, 23, 128–129, 158, 170, 172, 190–191; rights of, 11, 13 Desan, Suzanne: Reclaiming the Sacred, 38, 288n87 Descartes, René, 244 Deschartes, François, 195, 222 despotism, 177, 180, 282n7 Deutz, Emmanuel, grand rabbi of France, 88, 91, 93, 95 Deutz, Simon (later baptized as Hyacinthe), 92–94 devotio moderna (renewal movement), 165 Dictionnaire des conversions, 267 Diderot, Denis, 33; Encylopédie, 33–34 Directory (1795–1799), 36, 38 dissenters, treatment of, 23, 32, 33, 35, 36 divorce, 41, 221–222 Döllinger, Ignaz von, 174 “Dom Gerle affair,” 36 Doré, Gustave, La légende du Juif Errant (prints), 294–295n41 Dorval, Marie, 214 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 126 Drach, David, 82, 87, 88–96, 98, 110, 112, 121; career in Paris of, 92–93; conversion of, 88–91, 93, 95, 96, 104, 108, 114, 116; doubt and uncertainty of, 261; and family conflict, 92, 269, 270; L’harmonie entre l’église et la synagogue, 94, 95, 118 Drach, Sara, 92 Dubner, Stephen, 2; Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family, 280n6 Dudevant, Casimir (Sand’s husband), 201, 204, 205–206, 207–208; Sand’s legal separation from, 217 Dufriche-Desgenettes, abbé, 105, 111 Duguerry, Father, 137

373 Dumas, Alexandre: The Count Monte Cristo, 67; The Three Musketeers, 66 Dumonteil, abbé, 45 Dupanloup, Monsignor, 81, 235, 238–239, 240, 241, 256, 260 Dupin, Aurore. See Sand, George Dupin, Hippolyte (Sand’s half-brother), 204 Dupin, Maurice (Sand’s brother), 194, 195, 233 Dupin de Francueil, Mme. (Sand’s grandmother), 196, 197, 201, 202; death of, 203–204, 209, 232; religious skepticism of, 194 Dupont, Pierre, La légende du Juif Errant, 294–295n41 Durand de Maillane, Pierre-Toussaint, 37 Duris-Dufresne, François, 208 Düsseldorf, 72, 78–79 Dutch Republic, 15, 22 Eckstein, Baron d’, 4, 5 Edict of Fontainebleau (1685), 21, 22, 26 Edict of Nantes (1598), 6–7, 19–20, 69, 284n24; revocation of (1685), 7, 21, 22, 25 Edict of Versailles (1787), 34 education: of Catholic girls, 118; Catholic schools, 41, 78–79, 138, 167–169, 190, 235, 242; English convent school, 197–201, 202, 204, 209, 215; freedom vs. state monopoly on, 167, 168 Egger, M., 46 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 255 Elisabeth-Charlotte von der Pfalz (Princess Palatine), 64–65 emotives, 5–6, 83 empiricism, 244 Encyclopédie, 33–34 Encyclopédie nouvelle, 222 Enfantin, Prosper, 73, 222 England. See Great Britain Enlightenment, 22, 23, 26–34, 73, 74, 132, 133, 135; Voltaire and, 8, 26–27, 32 Ennery, Marchand, grand rabbi of France, 107 Epinay, Madame d’, 203 Epistles of Paul, 199, 215, 255, 275 equality, 164, 227, 228, 233 Espagne, Michel, 60 established cults, 46

374 i n d e x established religion, 3, 6–7, 14, 25, 32, 34, 35–36, 41, 44–45, 48, 166 Esther (biblical), 69–70 Etudes (Jesuit journal), 140 evangelicalism, 41 excommunication, 11, 158, 273 exiles, 75–76 Eymar, abbé d’, 14, 33 faith, 99–100, 244, 272; loss of, 275–276 Falloux law (1851), 190 Fathers of the Church, 245 Faubourg Saint-Germain (Paris), 10, 122, 234, 254 February Revolution (1848), 189, 231, 232, 265 Félix, Elisa. See Rachel (actress) feminism. See women’s rights feuilletons (serialized novels), 53, 54–55 fideism, 99–100. See also faith Finaly affair, 273 First Amendment (U.S. Constitution), 3 Flaubert Gustave, 233 Fleury, Alphonse, 219 Foa, Eugénie: conversion of, 113, 123; La juive, 67, 71 Fontainebleau, Edict of (1685), 21, 22, 26 Ford, Caroline, 44 Fourier, Charles, 54, 55; Les Mystères de Paris, 54 Franck, Adolphe, 86 Frayssinous, Monsignor, 164 Frede, Victoria, 126 freedom of association, 180, 217 freedom of conscience, 3, 6, 7–11, 14, 15, 16, 27, 29, 30, 282n7; Bayle’s defense of, 22, 23, 24; Catholicism and, 24–25, 45, 123, 137–138, 182–185, 187, 191, 233; collective authority vs., 35, 42, 236, 286n53, 230; communal solidarity vs., 65, 121; conversion and, 5, 34, 44, 48, 60, 64, 88, 110, 117, 120, 123, 134, 149, 156, 268–269, 271, 273; cultural anxiety over, 9, 10; divided identities and, 70–71; Encyclopédie entries on, 33–34; family religious ties vs., 108, 110; Gagarin and, 138; Gregory XVI criticism of, 265; growing acceptability of, 25; Heine commitment to, 74; as individual right, 23–28, 43, 45, 120–121, 158, 182; Jewish identity and, 119;

Lamennais and, 158, 159, 165, 171, 172, 176, 179, 182, 183–184, 186–188, 190, 191, 235, 236, 318n80; liberté des cultes and, 43–44; mixed marriage and, 45, 64; Montaigne and, 17–21; moral judgment and, 34; nineteenthcentury acceptance of, 47–48; obedience reconciled with, 182, 315n33; outward behavior vs., 22; papal authority vs., 11, 178–182; personal identity based on, 34; philosophes’ defense of, 26; pressures of conformity vs., 34, 35; proselytism and, 46–47, 271; public order vs., 48; reconciliation of obedience with, 182; as religious liberty basis, 7, 21, 24–25, 27, 31, 32, 34, 43, 44, 47, 56, 171, 236, 258; Renan and, 236, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 258, 259, 265, 272; Rousseau and, 28–31, 32, 33, 43; Sand and, 192, 193, 207, 230, 232–233, 235, 236; silence and, 249; subjectivity of, 23, 34; Swetchine and, 137–138; Vinet’s two aspects of, 42–43; Voltaire and, 27. See also liberté de conscience; religious liberty; tolerance freedom of cults. See liberté des cultes freedom of education, 167, 168 freedom of inquiry, 42 freedom of opinion, 178 freedom of press, 167, 174, 180, 217 freedom of religion. See freedom of conscience; religious liberty; tolerance freedom of speech, 178 freedom of thought, 13, 37 free love, 222 free will, 95 French constitution. See constitutions, French French Revolution (1789), 65, 133, 195, 197, 267–269, 271; and Catholic Church property, 169–170; and Constitutional Church, 169; Declaration of the Rights of Man, 37, 40, 44, 45, 46, 64; and human autonomy, 272; political and social issues raised by, 128–129, 158, 159, 164, 166; and religious liberty concept, 1, 8, 16, 26, 34–38, 47, 48, 49, 191; wars of, 36 French romanticism, 49–79, 122, 123, 214, 272 Fromentin, Eugène, 58–59 fundamental rights, 8, 45, 47 Gagarin, Cardinal, 177

index Gagarin, Ivan, 3, 4–5, 17, 123–156, 125, 317n57; autobiography of, 135, 139; background of, 10, 124–133; constructed identity of, 152–153; conversion to Catholicism, 10, 51, 123, 132, 134, 135, 139–150, 155, 158, 239, 261, 269, 271; diplomatic career, 125–133, 135; family of, 124–125, 149–152, 269; influences on, 129–132; and Ravignan, 144, 145, 146, 147, 270; and salon of Madame Swetchine, 10, 123, 133, 135–136, 139, 142–145, 147–148, 154; self-construction of, 153, 154–156, 308n12; surrogate family of, 147–148, 151–152, 270 Gagarin, Marie (sister), 151 Gagarin, Sergei Ivanovich (father), 124–125, 147, 149–150 Gagarin, Varvara Mikhailovna (mother), 124–125, 147, 148, 149–151 Gallicanism, 137, 161 Gans, Edward, 72, 73, 74 Garibaldi, abbé, 181 Garnier, Adolphe, 261 Garnier, Antoine, 254–255 gender: and conversion, 10, 82, 111–121; and inequality, 223; and religious liberty, 12. See also patriarchal authority; women; women’s rights General Assembly of the Clergy (1651), 24 Gerbet, abbé, 171–172, 179 Gerle, Dom, 35, 36 German idealism, 77, 130, 244 Germany: converts to Catholicism, 74; discrimination against Jews, 48, 72; freedom of conscience, 26; Heine background, 71, 72, 77, 78; intellectual life, 130; Jewish conversions, 72–73, 74; Peace of Westphalia, 6, 26; proselytism, 117; scholarship, 255, 256–257, 262, 269; university system, 72 Gesenius, Wilhelm, 255 Gibbon, Edward, 134 Girodet, Anne-Louis, 65 Goeschler, Isidore, 98, 99, 100, 204n74 Goethe, Johann von, 127 Golden Rule, 67 Goldstein, Jan, 3, 246, 272 Görres, Joseph, 74, 174

375 Gospels, 90, 199, 255; of John, 275; of Luke, 22, 26, 95, 105, 275; of Mark, 258; of Matthew, 148, 258 Gosselin, abbé, 243, 244–245, 247–250, 253–254 gothic novel, 198, 225, 228 Gottofrey, abbé, 247, 248 grand opera. See opera Grand Sanhedrin, 84 Gratry, abbé Alphonse, 260, 304n68 Great Britain, 15, 44, 273; Catholic Emancipation (1829), 3, 170 Grégoire, abbé, 35, 38, 84, 169 Gregory XVI, Pope, 81, 105–106, 111, 171; encyclical against mixed marriage, 64; and Lamennais’s lost faith, 188; letter to Polish bishops, 176, 317n57; Mirari vos encyclical (1832), 11, 173, 174–175, 178, 179, 182, 265; Singulari nos encyclical (1834), 158, 181, 185 Gronland, M., 45 Guéroult, Adolphe, 218 Guizot, François, 129 Guyomar, Fiacre, 240, 263 Haber, Mlle de, 112 Hague, The, 37 Halévy, Fromental, 67, 73; La Juive, 9, 60–63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 113, 121; Le Juif Errant, 59–60, 65 Halévy, Léon, 73 Haller, Charles Louis de, 291n126 Hamon, Bernard, 196 Hapsburg Empire, 15 Harland, Elizabeth, 193 Harrison, Carol, 123, 183, 271, 299n1 Hebrew Bible, 69–70, 76, 77, 78, 98, 180, 254–255, 255; Greek translation, 89 Hebrew studies, 255 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 73 Heine, Heinrich, 4, 71–79, 223, 268–269, 298n93, 309n27; Jewish identity of, 72, 75–76, 86; religious development of, 73–79; works: Confessions of a Poet (Les aveux d’un poète), 77, 78–79; “Disputation,” 76–77; “Hebrew Melodies,” 75, 76–77; “The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” 73; “Jehuda ben Halevy,” 75–76; Romanzero, 75, 78; “To an Apostate,” 72, 74

376 i n d e x Hélène of Mecklenberg-Schwerin, 64, 65 hell, 228 Hempton, David, 7 Henri de Navarre. See Henri IV Henri III, king of France, 17 Henri IV, king of France, 17, 63; Edict of Nantes, 20–21, 69 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 256, 257 heresy, 22 Herodias, 54, 55 Herzen, Alexander, 131 Hindmarsh, Bruce, 6, 7 Holocaust conversions, 273 Holub, Robert, 79 Holy Roman Empire, 135 Holy Spirit, 139, 162 Houellebecq, Michel, Submission (Soumission), 274–275, 276 Hugo, Victor, 93; Les misérables, 180 Huguenots, 6–7, 17–21, 24–25, 26, 71; St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 17, 38 Huguenots, Les (Meyerbeer and Scribe opera), 60–61, 63–64, 65, 66 humanitarianism, 56, 58, 216 Humann, Marie-Louise, 97, 137 human progress. See progress human rights, 13, 30, 36, 40, 43, 44, 83, 119, 290n21 Hume, David, 189 Hussites, 228 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, En route, 274, 275, 276 idealism, 77, 130, 244 Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 154, 155 Iliad (Homer), 195 Imitation of Christ, The (L’imitation du Christ), 159, 164–165, 185, 202 immortal soul, 75, 77, 228 Index of Prohibited Books, 232 individual choice. See freedom of conscience individualism, 132, 187, 273 individual liberty. See freedom of conscience “infamous decree” (1808–1818), 85 Institut de France, 261 intellectuals, 10–11, 126, 131, 174, 264 intermarriage. See mixed marriages intolerance. See tolerance

Irish Catholics, 170 Islam, 1, 46, 135, 274, 280n6 Israel, Jonathan, 23 Israel, state of, 273 Jacob (biblical), 70 Jacobins, 29 James, William, 2 Janin, Jules, 296–297n72 Jansenists, 34, 135 Janvier, Eugène, 167, 168 Jaucourt, Louis de, Conscience, 33 Jehuda, 75–76 Jerusalem, 76 Jesuits, 78, 81, 135, 141, 144, 221, 239; denial of freedom of conscience, 187–188; and Gagarin, 10, 124, 138, 140, 148, 149–156; opponents of, 155–156, 187–188, 235; and Ratisbonne (Alphonse), 102, 103, 111, 270; Spiritual Exercises, 154, 155; teachings of, 155; and Wandering Jew, 54, 55–56 Jesus: Bayle’s view of, 22; and communion, 196, 266; crucifixion of, 90–91, 105; as divinely inspired prophet, 227; dying words of, 258; equality and justice message of, 166; and family ties, 95; Gagarin personal prayer to, 145–146; in garden of Gethsemane, 199; historical, 262–263; humanity of, 56; Lamennais writings on, 188, 320n105; medieval statue of, 274; as Messiah, 89, 98, 99; miracles of, 237, 255; parables of, 22; Renan’s beliefs about, 12, 237, 254, 255–256, 258, 262–263, 266; Roman Catholic Church founding by, 139; Sand’s view of, 231; and scriptures, 255; Second Coming of, 111; self-sacrifice example of, 162, 163; as Son of God, 139; utopians’ view of, 227; and Wandering Jew legend, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57–58, 59. See also Passion of Christ Jewish Assembly of Notables, 84 Jews: assimilation of, 60–61, 83–87; and blood libel myth, 86, 87, 94; collective religious identity of, 121; communal life of, 84–85, 119; conversions to Catholicism, 4, 9–10, 62, 66, 67, 69–74, 76–77, 78, 80–121, 183, 268, 270–271, 273, 275, 300n8; conversions to Protestantism, 72, 73, 74, 225, 269; and

index discrimination, 72 (see also antisemitism); Drach conversion mission to, 93; and early Christians, 275; family loyalty of, 69, 183; French emancipation of, 83–84; French population of, 300n10; Heine identification with, 72, 74–76, 78, 82–83; and Holocaust conversions, 273; identity of, 72–73, 119–121; Jesus associated with, 256; literary and operatic portrayals of, 9, 52–53, 59–71, 113, 121; and mixed marriages, 84, 107–108; and modern society, 73; and mystical tradition, 86; proselytizing of, 46–47, 80–82, 87, 96–97, 111, 112–118, 119, 121, 273; regeneration program, 98; social and religious status of, 39, 41, 50, 51, 67, 83–91, 103, 119, 300n10; and women’s piety, 113, 118. See also Wandering Jew John, Gospel of, 275 John the Baptist, 54, 254 Jouffroy, Théodore, 126, 130 Judaism. See Jews Judgment Day, 58 juif errant. See Wandering Jew Juif Errant, Le (Halévy and Scribe opera), 59–60, 66 Juif Errant, Le (Merville and de Mallien play), 53 Juive, La (Halévy and Scribe opera), 9, 60–63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 113, 121; contemporary revivals of, 61, 62 Julian the Apostate, 17–18 July Monarchy (1830–1848), 9, 16, 45–46, 234; and Catholic conversions, 46, 123; and Catholic divisions, 137; and Catholic renewal, 235, 236; and church-state controls, 166; and Jewish integration, 85–86, 121; Lamennais critique of, 189; repressive measures of, 180, 217, 219; republican uprising (1832), 180, 192, 212, 217, 219; and revolutionary change, 166–170; and social radicals, 222. See also Louis-Philippe July Revolution (1830), 44, 45, 85, 92, 166, 170, 180, 209, 218 Kaballah, 86, 89 kaddish, 108 Kamen, Henry, The Rise of Toleration, 283n8

377 Kant, Immanuel, 256–57 Koran, 181 Krüdener, Mme de, 41 Kuzari, 75 Laborde, François Jean-Joseph de, 15, 27 Lacordaire, Henri, 144; and Catholic education, 190; and Catholic liberalism, 168, 247; and Catholic rebellion, 316n38; defense of orthodox Catholicism, 234; and freedom of conscience, 178, 319–320n94; and Lamennais, 4, 167, 174, 182, 189, 315n33; and L’Avenir trial, 167; Montalembert correspondence, 315n33 (see also Montalembert, Charles de); and Polish cause, 171; and “romantic Catholicism,” 183; and salon of Madame Swetchine, 137, 310n53 laïcité policy, 1 Lambruschini, Cardinal, 106, 181 Lamennais, Félicité, 4–5, 137, 138, 157–181, 160, 202, 233, 246, 270, 315n33; background of, 159–161; celebrity of, 157–158; confrontation with church authority, 11, 164, 165, 173–186, 188–189, 269, 271, 310n53; and conscience, 11, 158, 159, 165, 171, 172, 176, 179, 182, 183–184, 186–191, 235, 236, 318n80; conversion of, 3, 52, 271; death without sacraments of, 189, 222; and defense of freedoms, 316n41, 318n80; dogmatism of, 192; early ideas of, 160–161; excommunication of, 11; on gender roles, 221–222; internal conflicts of, 164–165, 176–177, 182; legacies of, 190–191, 272; and liberalism, 167, 181, 185, 189, 190, 191, 242, 315n26; Mirari vos encyclical condemning, 11, 173, 174–175, 178, 179, 182, 265; move away from Catholicism of, 11, 158, 159, 160, 165–177, 187–189; newspaper of (see L’Avenir); notoriety of, 164; on obedience, 165, 315n33; and ordination decision, 161–164, 247; political vision of, 167, 181, 185, 189, 191, 261; and religious liberty, 11, 17, 40, 158, 164, 165–172, 176, 184, 189, 316n41; 318n80; Renan’s appraisal of, 190–191, 272; as Sand’s spiritual adviser, 12, 157, 192, 195, 220–221, 223, 231, 232, 270; spiritual crisis of, 161–164; travels of, 269;

378 i n d e x Lamennais, Félicité (Continued) trial of, 167–168; works: Affaires de Rome, 173, 176, 186, 187–188; De l’absolutisme et la liberté, 186; Divine Comedy commentary, 189; Esquisse d’une philosophie, 320n105; Essay on Indifference (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion), 157, 165, 180, 185, 187, 188; Les evangiles, traducion nouvelle, 320n105; “Hymn to Poland,” 177; The Imitation of Christ (L’imitation du Christ) commentary, 159, 164–165, 185, 314–315n20; Mélanges, 188; Trosièmes mélanges, 187; The Words of a Believer (Les paroles d’un croyant), 157, 158, 180–182, 186, 319n87, 319n93 Lamennais, Jean-Marie (brother), 159–160, 161, 162, 163, 178, 238, 269, 270 Lamoignon de Malesherbes, ChrétienGuillaume de, 34 Laquedem, Isaac (Wandering Jew), 52, 53, 56 Last Judgment, 52 Last Sacraments, 203, 204 Lau, Yisrael Meir, Chief Rabbi, 273 L’Avenir (Lamennais newspaper), 166–171, 173, 182, 188, 271; papal condemnation of, 174–175 Leblanc de Beaulieu, Jean Claude, Archbishop, 203, 204, 209 Lebreu, A., 57 Lecler, Joseph, Histoire de la tolérance, 283n8 Le Guillou, Louis, 188 Le Hir, abbé, 255, 256, 260, 332n90 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 202 Leroux, Pierre, 222–223, 224, 231, 233, 247, 270; belief in successive reincarnation, 12, 228; and new “religion of humanity,” 223, 227, 232 Leroy, Zoé, 206 Leroyer de Chantepie, Marie-Sophie, 233 Lewel, Jules, 97, 98, 99, 100, 303n67 Lewis, Matthew, The Monk, 52, 53 Liart, François, 240, 242, 243, 247, 248, 251, 253, 257; Renan’s letter of spiritual doubt to, 258 liberalism, 16, 23, 47, 137; and Catholicism and, 168, 191, 246–247, 315n26; and Lamennais, 167, 181, 185, 190, 191, 242, 315n26 Libermann, François, 300n8

liberté de conscience, 17, 23, 26, 27, 33, 37, 43, 45, 64, 171; Montaigne on, 16, 20–21. See also freedom of conscience liberté des cultes, 16, 37–44, 37, 43, 138; and conversion, 66; limitations on, 46; and mixed marriages, 38, 45, 64, 65, 66; and proselytism, 46–47; and Protestants, 38, 39, 41, 42; specific meaning and usage of, 37–40; and Swetchine circle, 138; threats to, 47 liberté du culte, 43, 45 liberté religieuse, 16, 36, 37, 38, 43, 167, 288. See also religious liberty liberty of conscience. See freedom of conscience liberty of cults. See liberté des cultes liberty of religion. See religious liberty Liszt, Franz, 4, 122, 181, 218, 223, 300n8 literature, 9, 11, 123, 127; French romanticism, 65–67; gothic novels, 198, 225, 228; la belle juive tradition, 71; serialization of novels, 53, 54–55; Wandering Jew portrayals, 9, 50, 51–56. See also theater Lives of the Saints, The, 199 Locke, John, 23–24 Loisy, Alfred, 273 London, 92, 162, 269 Louis XIV, king of France, 24, 25, 64 Louis XV, king of France, 25 Louis XVI, king of France, 21, 34 Louis XVIII, king of France, 164 Louis-Philippe, king of France, 44, 64, 85, 231 Louvre, 65 Loveday, Douglas, 44 Loveday, Emily, 44, 270 Lubin, George, 322n23 Ludwig I, king of Bavaria, 130 Luke, Gospel of, 22, 26, 95, 105, 275 Luria, Keith, 5, 6, 7 Lustiger, Aaron Jean-Marie, archbishop of Paris, 273 Luther, Martin, 73 Lutheranism, 39, 41, 64, 65, 257; converts to, 72, 73; converts to Catholicism from, 80 Lyon uprising (1834), 180, 192, 217, 219 Magnin, Charles, 57, 58 Maistre, Joseph de, 10, 87, 133–134, 146, 164 male authority. See patriarchal authority

index Malebranche, Nicolas, 244, 257 Malesherbes. See Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Chrétien Guillaume de Mallet affair, 119 Mallien, Julien de, Le Juif Errant, 53 Manier, abbé, 243, 245, 250 Marguerite of Valois, 63 Marian apparition, 9, 59, 80–81, 81, 82, 96, 104, 105, 111, 269, 274; “miraculous medal” and, 80, 103, 140, 142, 143, 234 Marian piety, 81, 234, 239 Maritain, Jacques and Raissa, 273 Mark, Gospel of, 258 Marriage. See mixed marriages Matthew, Gospel of, 148, 258 Matthew Paris (Benedictine monk), 51 Maurois, André, 197 Meister, Wilhelm, 127 Mennaisiens, 138, 176, 234 Mérimée, Prosper, 214 Mertian, Louis and Adèle, 90, 92 Merville, Pierre, Le Juif Errant, 53 Methodists, 46 Metternich, Klemens von, 173, 175–176, 181 Meure, Charles, 208 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 59–60; Les Huguenots, 60, 63–64, 65, 66 Michael the Archangel, 53, 59 Michel, Louis-Chyrsostome. See Michel de Bourges Michel de Bourges, 192, 217, 218, 219–220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 232, 270 Michelet, Jules, 54; Le prêtre, la femme, et la famille, 235 Mickiewicz, Adam, 171, 177; Book of Polish Pilgrims (Livre des pèlerins polonais), 177–178, 180, 184 Middle Ages, 6, 57, 73, 132, 135, 165 Migne, abbé, 92, 267 millennialism, 111, 181 Ministry of Cults, 46, 47 minorities. See religious minorities Mirabeau, Count de, 14, 15, 33 miracles: as conversion factor, 9, 80–81, 81, 96, 103–104, 105, 111, 140, 142, 143, 234; Gagarin’s defense of, 142–143; of Jesus, 237, 255; Renan’s denial of, 12, 237. See also Marian apparition

379 “miraculous medal,” 80, 103, 140, 142, 143, 234 mixed marriages, 48, 63, 64–65, 78, 106; and freedom of cults, 38, 45, 65, 66; and Jews, 84, 107–108; papal condemnation of, 48, 64 modernity, 4, 267 Moehler, Symbolique, 140, 311n63 monarchy, 181–182; “cuius regio, eius religio” model, 6, 7. See also specific monarchs monasticism, 6 Monica (mother of Augustine), 90 Montaigne, 8, 16, 17–21, 23, 30; “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” 19; Essays, 17–21, 23; “On Presumption,” 20 Montalembert, Charles de: and Catholic education, 168, 190, 235; and Catholicism, 168, 247, 319n23; 319–320n94, 320nn103, 105; and conscience, 178, 319n23; and Constitutional Convention, 189; death of, 168; and Lamennais, 4, 11, 15, 32, 158, 159, 165, 168, 170, 174, 176, 177, 180, 182, 185–186, 189, 315n33, 319n93, 319nn81, 82, 320n103; and Polish Catholic revolution, 170, 171, 177; and “romantic Catholicism,” 183; and salon of Madame Swetchine, 4, 137, 310n53 Montefiore, Moses, 86–87 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, 286n48 moral judgment. See freedom of conscience Mordecai (biblical), 69 Morrison, Karl, 6 Mortara affair, 119 Moses (biblical), 76, 78, 98, 255 Munich, 125, 128–131, 133, 139, 174, 269 Munk, Salomon, 86–87 Muslims. See Islam Musset, Alfred de, 192, 210, 214–218, 228, 270; Confessions of a Child of the Century, 216 mysticism, 55, 130, 133, 141, 245, 275; Constant and, 41; Jewish Kabalistic texts, 86, 89; Sand and, 11–12, 192, 197, 200, 213, 224, 322n23, 193 Naginski, Isabelle Hoog, 223 Nantes. See Edict of Nantes Napoleon, 16, 40, 72, 163, 234; Concordat of 1801, 39, 45, 47, 166, 167, 195; criminal code (1810), 39; and status of Jews, 84, 85

380 i n d e x National Assembly, 13–15, 26, 33–37, 42, 43. See also Article 10 National Convention, 37, 38 natural rights, 25, 73 nature, 24, 244 Negroni, Barbara de, 23 Newman, John Henry, 273 New Testament, 22, 130, 255, 258, 275. See also Epistles of Paul; Gospels Neymann, M., 92 Nicholas I, tsar of Russia, 10, 123, 128, 131, 136, 139, 171, 177 Nock, Arthur, 2 Nohant estate, 192, 193, 195, 201–202, 203, 208, 217, 226 Notre Dame, Cathedral of, 88, 234, 240 Notre-Dame de Rocamadour, shrine of, 274 Notre-Dame de Sion, Congregation of, 9–10, 105, 114 Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, church of, 81, 105, 111, 142, 144 novels. See literature Numbers, Book of, 76 Oath of the Tennis Court, The (David painting), 34–35, 35 obedience, 31, 146, 165, 182, 185, 315n33 O’Connell, Daniel, 170 Old Regime, 16–17, 40, 83 Old Testament. See Hebrew Bible “one king, one law, one faith,” 7, 25 opera, 9, 50, 59–64, 65, 70–71, 82–83 Order of Saints Maurice and Lazare, 94 Organic Articles (1802), 39, 45 original sin, 161, 189 Orléans, Duc de, 64 orphanage for Jewish girls, 4, 10, 82, 106, 112, 113–114 Orsini, Monsignor, 181 Orthodox Church: Gagarin conversion from, 10, 124, 126, 130–133, 138–141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152, 271; and Polish Catholic rebellion against, 170, 177; and Swetchine’s husband, 311n55 Our Lady of Sion, Congregation of, 82, 105, 106, 107, 112–118, 123, 300n8; founding and

mission of, 82; redefined mission of (1960s), 96 Ozanam, Frédéric, 234, 261 Pacca, Cardinal, 174–175, 179–180 Pagello, Pietro, 214 Paine, Thomas: Common Sense, 316n48; The Rights of Man, 282n7 pantheism, 73, 75, 131 papacy, 135, 139, 173–182, 265; condemnation of mixed marriages, 48, 64; individual conscience subordinate to, 11, 178–182, 188; supremacy of, 94, 133, 137, 161; and ultramontanism, 94, 137, 138, 178, 235. See also specific popes Paris Commune (1871), 232 Parisian salons. See salons Paris Opera, 59–65 Pascal, Blaise, 244 Passion of Christ, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 90–91, 163 patriarchal authority, 12, 67, 74, 87, 95, 110, 113, 206, 210, 211, 224, 229, 270 Patrizi, Cardinal, 81 Paul: conversion experience of, 2, 6, 90, 104, 199; Epistles of, 199, 215, 255, 275 Peace of Augsburg (1555), 6 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 6, 26 Péguy, Charles, 273 penal code, 41, 45 Pentateuch, 255 Périer, Casimir, 169 Peter, 139 philology, 254–255, 262 Philomène, Sister, 114–117, 121, 261, 270 philosophes, 24, 26, 313 philosophy, 8, 243, 244, 246–247, 256–257 Phineas (biblical), 76 Pinault, abbé, 245 Pius VI, Pope, Quod aliquantum (1791), 40 Pius VII, Pope, 48 Pius VIII, Pope, Litteris acerbo (1830), 64 Planche, Gustave, 212 Planet, Gabriel, 219 Plongeron, Bernard, “De la Réforme aux Lumières,” 282–283n8 poetry, 57–59, 71, 75 Poland, 139, 170, 176–177, 180, 317n57

index political liberty, 172, 180, 181 Pollet, Louise, 113–114 Pommier, Jean, 255 Poncy, Charles, 231 popular sovereignty, 35, 173 Portalis, Auguste, 47–48; La liberté de conscience et le statut religieux, 47 Portalis, Jean-Etienne-Marie, 47 Pouget, Cyprien, curé of Nérac, 206 Prémord, abbé de, 200–201, 203, 204, 209, 221, 222 Priest, Robert, 255 Prix Volney, 261 prodigal son, 144, 235 progress, 222, 224, 227–228 proselytism, 28, 80–82, 87, 93–94, 96–97, 105–110, 111, 112–118, 119, 121; and freedom of conscience, 46–47, 271; Vatican Commission halt to, 273 Protestantism, 2, 16–27, 135, 257; “church of the desert,” 25; conversions to, 4, 5, 6, 71–74, 225, 269; conversions to Catholicism, 4, 21, 28, 44, 46, 66, 97, 270, 273, 286n54; and Edict of Fontainebleau, 21, 22, 26; and Edict of Nantes, 6–7, 19–20, 69; and Edict of Nantes revocation, 7, 21, 22, 25; and freedom of conscience, 24–25, 34; and liberté des cultes, 38, 39, 41, 42; limited rights of, 34, 38; as minority, 6–7, 14, 35; and mixed marriages, 64–65; persecution of, 7, 17, 21–22, 24–25, 33, 38, 46, 48, 63; Rousseau’s reconversion to, 286n54; St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), 17, 38. See also Calvinism; Huguenots; Lutheranism Prussia, 15, 72 Psalm 22, 258 Psalm 137, 75–76 Psalms, 98, 255 public order, 15, 48 public worship: French constraints on, 24, 34, 41, 46; as fundamental human right, 43, 44; liberté des cultes and, 37–38, 43, 119 Quakers, 41 Quatremère, Etienne, 255 Quélen, archbishop of Paris, 166, 169, 176, 179, 180

381 Quinet, Edgar, 54, 56–59, 217, 294n33; Ahasvérus, 57–59; Les Tablettes du Juif Errant, 57 Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, Jean-Paul de, 14, 15, 33, 34, 35, 38 Rachel (actress), 68, 70, 296–297n72 Rachel (biblical), 70 Rachel (fictional), 71 Racine, Esther, 68, 69–70 Rambo, Lewis, 2–3, 4, 7 rationalism, 23, 73, 132, 245, 267, 272. See also reason Ratisbonne, Achille, 105 Ratisbonne, Alphonse, 2, 3–4, 17, 96, 101–107, 144; baptism of, 235; family of, 97–98, 102–103, 104, 105, 268, 270–271; miraculous conversion of, 9, 10, 52, 80–82, 81, 83, 101–104, 108, 111, 112, 114, 123, 140, 141, 142, 143, 158, 234, 239, 269 Ratisbonne, Louis, 101, 102, 103 Ratisbonne, Pauline, 102 Ratisbonne, Théodore, 3–4, 10, 17, 82, 96–105, 107–112, 121; and brother’s conversion, 102, 111, 142; complex identity of, 110; conversion process of, 8, 9, 10, 52, 67, 81, 97–99, 104, 108, 114, 116–117, 123, 144, 158, 261, 270, 303n67; 303–304n68, 304n69; family of, 97–100, 101, 103, 104–106, 268, 269, 270–271; ordination of, 81, 96; and Our Lady of Sion founding, 82, 114, 116, 117, 119; proselytizing by, 82, 96–97, 123; and Terquem deathbed conversion, 107, 108 Ratti-Menton, Comte de, 86 Rauzan, Duchess of, 136 Ravignan, Father Xavier de, 102, 141, 144–149, 153, 239, 270 reason, 22, 24, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247, 262, 264, 265–266 Rebecca (fictional), 66, 67, 71 Récamier, Juliette, 70 Reddy, William, 5–6, 83, 88 redemption, 56–59 Reformation, 6, 16, 47, 73, 291n126. See also Protestantism Regnault, Emile, 209 Reid, Thomas, 244

382 i n d e x reincarnation, 12, 228, 232, 233 religious liberty, 1–48, 279–280n3, 282–283n8; ambiguity and reach of, 48, 108; Bayle’s defenses of, 21–24, 25; as both individual and collective right, 8, 44, 83, 121; Constant’s defense of, 41–42; constitutional basis of, 3, 8, 13, 16, 38, 47, 65, 83, 95, 97; constraints on, 1–2, 10, 14–15, 21, 34, 41–45, 47, 85, 103, 224, 232 (see also church-state relations); and converts, 268 (see also conversion); dating of origin of phrase, 36; and debate over Article 10, 13–15; evolving concepts of, 16–17, 21–48; and French romanticism, 65–72, 79; Gagarin’s defense of, 138; and gender, 12, 123, 270; and Heine, 75; as human right, 13, 30, 36, 40, 43, 44, 83, 119, 290n21; individual vs. collective dimensions of, 11, 36–37, 45–46; and Jews, 83–88, 95, 103, 119, 121, 300n10; and Lamennais, 40, 158, 164, 165–172, 176, 184, 189, 316n41; 318n80; language of, 8, 43–44, 45; and liberté des cultes, 46, 47; as natural right, 25; as personal autonomy, 201, 202, 272; and philosophes, 26; and pluralism, 30; Portalis’s analysis of, 48; promise and threat of, 117–121; and public worship, 24, 34, 37–38, 41, 43, 44, 46, 119; and religious minorities, 6–7, 8, 15, 17–21, 24–26, 34, 63, 70; and Renan, 236, 237, 242, 250, 264, 266, 272; and Restoration, 40–41; restricted to private sphere, 1–2; and Rousseau, 27–29, 31–33, 41, 287n72; Russian tsarist denial of, 139; and Sand, 193, 201, 204, 214, 223–224, 228, 231; and self-ownership, 272; and shift from “toleration” to “liberty,” 43–44, 43; and sixteenth-century religious wars, 17–21; tension between two senses of, 121; terms referring to, 16, 33, 36–37, 37, 43, 43; threats to, 48; toleration differentiated from, 34, 43, 283n8; and university system, 235; and Wandering Jew symbolism, 49, 50–51, 53, 54, 56, 82; and wars of religion, 6, 8, 17–18; and women’s autonomy, 12. See also freedom of conscience; tolerance religious minorities, 6–7, 8, 15, 21; civil rights of, 15; freedom of conscience defense of, 23, 33; liberté des cultes state policy toward,

43–44; public worship by, 24, 34. See also Huguenots; Jews; Protestantism religious schools. See education religious wars. See wars of religion Renan, Ernest, 3–4, 17, 26, 86, 155, 233, 234–266, 269, 275; break with Catholicism of, 258–259, 265, 269, 271–272, 273; Catholic influences on, 237–238, 266; and “Christian silence” ideal, 254; and conscience, 248; conversion of, 52, 239, 261–262; critical reason of, 265–266; cultural elitism of, 264–265; early years of, 235–236; family ties of (see Renan, Henriette; Renan, Manon); final testament of, 266; first sermon of, 4, 254; and German scholarship, 256–257; and intellectual defense of Catholicism, 234; on Lamennais’s political legacy, 190–191, 272; loss of faith of, 237–238, 249–250, 257–259; new religion of, 263–264; notebooks of, 256, 264; and priesthood, 237–242, 247–253, 265; and “principles of conduct,” 252, 253, 254, 265; and Prix Volney, 261; religious choices of, 12, 235; religious identity of, 190–191; secular career of, 255, 258–266; spiritual crises of, 26, 242, 244, 246–247, 249–257, 264, 265; vision of new religion, 262–263; visit to Rome of, 263–264; works: L’avenir de la science, 262, 264, 265; “Confessions d’Issy,” 245–246; Essai historique et théorique sur les langues sémitiques en général et sur la langue hébraïque en particulier, 261; Essai psychologique sur Jésus Christ, 255–256; The Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus), 12, 86, 237, 256, 266; “Patrice” (sketch), 263–264, 266; Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 11, 47, 236, 237, 238, 239, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249–250, 254, 255, 257, 261, 264 Renan, Henriette (sister), 237, 238, 239, 240, 256, 265; and brother’s religious doubts, 253, 257, 258–259; and brother’s secular career, 260, 270; correspondence of, 242, 243, 247, 248, 250, 251, 269; on individual constraints, 249; influence on brother’s life, 240–241 Renan, Manon (mother), 237, 238, 240, 243, 247, 256, 261; and son’s break with church,

index 269, 270; and son’s faith, 257; and son’s ordination, 251, 254, 259; and son’s vocation decision, 247–248, 249, 250 Rennes, bishop of, 176, 178, 188 republicanism, 217, 218–219; Sand’s defense of, 231–232 Restoration (1814–1830), 9, 40–42, 57, 72, 197; conversions during, 44; and freedom of cults, 43; religious, social, and political tensions, 158; and status of Jews, 85 Rétat, Laudyce, 261, 264 revolution of 1789. See French Revolution revolution of 1830. See July Revolution revolution of 1848. See February Revolution Revue des Deux Mondes, 57, 58, 71, 73, 77, 186, 190, 217, 219, 266, 272 Reynaud, Jean, 222; Terre et ciel, 232 rights, 8, 13, 45, 47; of conscience (see freedom of conscience); natural, 25, 73. See also Declaration of the Rights of Man; human rights; women’s rights Robespierre, Maximilien, 38 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholicism; papacy Roman Empire, 17–18, 68–69 romantic Catholics, 123, 183, 271, 315n33 romantic Christianity, 202 romanticism. See French romanticism Rome: campaign for Jewish converts, 105; Drach stay in, 92, 94; Lamennais stay in, 170, 173–174, 176, 269; and Marian apparition, 9, 80–81, 81, 96, 103, 269, 274; Ratisbonne (Theodore) travel to, 105–106; Renan stay in, 263–264. See also papacy Romilly, Jean-Edme, 33 Rosen, Charles, 20 Rothschild, Jacques de, 85, 86 Rothschild family, 92, 118 Rouleau, François, 129 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 26, 28–33, 34, 77, 160, 232, 245; contradictions of, 33, 41; conversions of 28, 286n54; and freedom of conscience, 28–31, 32, 33, 43; and general will, 286n53; influence on Sand, 202; on religious liberty, 27–28, 31–33, 287n72; works: Confessions, 5, 28; Emile, 26, 28–30, 31, 32, 33, 202; Les lettres de la montagne,

383 202; “Savoyard Vicar” text, 28, 29–31, 32; The Social Contract (Le contrat social), 26, 31–32, 33, 202, 287–288n78 Roussel, Napoleon, 46 Rozaven, Father, 103–104, 146, 316n41 rue Ernest Renan (Paris), 241 Russia: Catholic converts, 3–4, 10, 123, 124; exiles in Paris, 122–123, 133; repressive regime, 123, 128, 129, 139, 271; SlavophilesWesternizers debate, 10, 131–132, 139, 143, 146. See also Gagarin, Ivan Russian Orthodoxy. See Orthodox Church sacraments, 169, 189, 203, 204, 270–271. See also specific sacraments Sacrilege Law (1825), 41 Sacy, Silvestre de, 89 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), 17, 38 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Auguste, 213, 217, 222, 314n18 Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, church of, 90 Saint Eustache, parish of, 144 Saint-Germain-des-Près, 4, 45, 166 Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, church of, 168–169 Saint-Nicolas-de-Chardonnet seminary, 235, 238–239, 240, 241, 242–243, 250 St. Philippe de Roule, church of, 105 Saint-Roch, church of, 122 Saint-Simonianism, 4, 46, 72, 73, 74, 218, 222, 270 Saint Stanislaus, College of, 260 Saint-Sulpice, church of (Paris), 4, 78, 108–109, 161–162, 215–216, 250, 260, 274; Renan’s first sermon at, 254 Saint-Sulpice, seminary of (Issy), 155, 201, 236, 238, 240, 241–250, 257, 261; atmosphere of, 242–243; and intellectual freedom, 246–247; prestige of, 234 Saint-Sulpice, seminary of (Paris), 250–259, 260, 261, 265, 269, 273; study of scripture, 254–255 Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, church of, 122 Saint Vincent de Paul, Society of, 234 Salon of 1791, 34 Salon of 1808, 65

384 i n d e x salons: and Catholic piety, 122–123, 124, 137–138, 293n19; of Countess d’Agoult, 122, 223; and gender roles, 137; of Madame Récamier, 70; of Madame Swetchine, 4, 10, 113, 122–123, 124, 133, 135–139, 142, 143 salvation, 19, 46, 105, 154, 165, 185; Catholic conversion and, 46, 82, 95, 102, 107, 114, 124, 145, 148, 149, 268, 270, 271, 273; Wandering Jew and, 56 Samarin, Georges, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146 Samuels, Maurice, 67 Sand, George, 3–4, 11–12, 17, 192–233, 194, 274; affair with Ajasson de Gransagne, 207; affair with Aurélien, 204–205, 206, 207, 208, 323n30; affair with Chopin, 226, 232, 270; affair with Michel de Bourges, 192, 217–224, 232, 270; affair with Musset, 192, 210, 214–215, 216, 217, 218, 228, 270; affair with Sandeau, 208; anticlericalism of, 201; background of, 11, 193–195, 270; and break from Catholic past, 209; Catholic conversion of, 52, 199–201, 218–219, 223, 270; Catholic education of, 12, 197–202, 204, 221; and Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, 232–233; childhood religious sensibility of, 195–197, 322n9; children of, 201, 204, 207, 208, 217, 226, 232, 233, 270; death and Catholic burial of, 233; final religious beliefs of, 222, 223–224, 227–228, 233, 235; and freedom of conscience, 192, 193, 207, 230, 232–233, 235, 236; and grandmother’s death, 203–204, 232; grandmother’s influence on, 11, 194; and humanitarians, 216, 223; and Lamennais’s death, 222; and Leroux and, 12, 222–223, 224, 227, 228, 231, 327n116; “lettreconfession” of, 205, 206; literary successes of, 210; literary themes of, 213–214; male dress of, 193, 208; marital separation of, 192, 193, 217, 220, 269; marital unhappiness of, 12, 157, 201–202, 204–208; and mystical experience, 11–12, 192, 197, 200, 213, 322n23; and Parisian bohemians, 208–216; personal crisis of, 151, 192, 216; personal religion of, 195–196, 218; political and social views of, 52, 193, 219, 220, 231–232, 271; profession of faith of, 206–207; and

“religion of humanity,” 223, 232; religious evolution of, 196–197, 201–203, 211, 216, 218–221, 227, 231–233, 327–328n118; spiritual crisis of, 2, 4, 53, 157, 192, 213–218, 221–222, 269, 270; spiritual guides of (see Deschartes, François; Lamennais, Félicité; Leroux, Pierre; Prémord, abbé de); travels of, 214, 269; unconventionality of, 192–193; and utopianism, 227–228; and wandering Jew symbol, 53, 217; and women’s autonomy, 11, 12, 193, 206, 211–212, 216, 219–223; works: 223–224; The Comtesse de Rudolstadt, 228, 231; Consuelo, 228–231; History of My Life, 193; Indiana, 192, 210–211, 214, 229; Lélia, 197, 212–214, 215, 218, 223, 225, 231, 232; Lélia II, 226–227; lettre d’un voyageur, 217, 219; Mademoiselle La Quintinie, 232; Rose et Blanche, 209–210; Spiridion, 197, 224–226, 227, 228; “The Unknown God,” 224; Valentine, 211–212, 229 Sandeau, Jules, 208, 214 Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte, church of (Rome), 9, 80, 101–102 Saudrais, Robert de, 159–160 Saxe, Maurice de, 194 Schallmeyer, Father, 78–79 Schechter, Ron, 50 Scheffer, Ary, 53, 131 Schelling, Friedrich von, 129–130, 309n27 Schir, Curé, 100 Schlegel, Friedrich, 74 “schlemiel” (term), 76 scholasticism, 250 schools. See education Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe, 66, 67, 69, 71, 113 Scottish “common sense” philosophy, 244 Scribe, Eugène, 61; Les Huguenots, 60, 61, 63–64, 65, 66; Le Juif Errant, 59–60, 65; La juive, 60–63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70 scripture. See Bible; Hebrew Bible; New Testament Second Republic (1848), 84, 189 Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), 96, 283n8, 313n5, 334n13 Seigel, Jerrold, 130 Senfft, Comtesse de la, 175 Sephardic Jews, 83

index Septuagint, 89 Sèze, Aurélien de, 204–205, 206 Shuvalov, Grigorii, Count, 139, 140–141, 142, 143 Shuvalov, Sophie, 140, 141 Sièyes, abbé, 37 Simon, Jules, 332n89 Singer, Alexander, 104 Sisters of Charity, 106 skepticism, 23, 189, 194, 195, 243 socialism, 180, 222, 247, 265, 268; Christian, 54, 261 social justice, 11, 56, 158, 172, 180, 190 social progress. See progress Société d’encouragement du travail, 98 Société Orientale, 46 Society for Christian Morals, 42, 47 Society for the Culture and Science of Jews, 72–73, 86 Sorbonne, 90, 92, 261 soul, 12, 75, 77, 161, 228 Spiring, Sister Mary-Alicia. See Alicia, Sister Stahlen, Sophie, 107 state religion. See established religion Stendahl, 212 Stewart, Dugald, 244 Stouhlen, Sophie, 106, 112 Strasbourg, 97, 98, 104–106, 111, 112, 137, 268 Sturdza, Roxanne, 133 Sue, Eugène, The Wandering Jew (Le Juif Errant), 9, 53–56, 58, 59, 66, 155, 235; Les mystères de Paris, 54 Sulpicians, 155, 241–242, 246, 248–249. See also Saint-Sulpice, seminary of supernatural, 12, 52, 56, 142, 236; Renan disavowal of, 256, 261–262, 266 Suzanne, Sister, 114 Swetchine, Sophie (Madame Swetchine), 134, 155, 310n38, 310–311n55; Catholic conversion of, 12, 113, 133–134; and freedom of conscience, 137–138; Gagarin relationship with, 10, 123, 135–136, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147–149, 154, 270; and liberté des cultes, 138; salon of, 4, 10, 113, 122–123, 124, 133, 135–139, 142, 143

385 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 37; deathbed conversion of, 234–235 Talmud, 76, 87, 89 Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, 195 Taylor, Charles, 2 Tennis Court Oath (1789), 34–35, 35 Teresa of Avila, 141 Terquem, Lazare, 96, 105, 106–110, 112, 113, 121 Terquem, Olry, 82, 106, 107, 108–109, 110, 113, 121 Terror (1793–1794), 38, 195 theater, 9, 68, 69–70, 123; Wandering Jew dramatizations, 52–53, 56 Theatines, 175 Thiers, Adolphe, 86 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 128, 261; Democracy in America, 170 tolerance, 55, 61, 67; Bayle on, 22, 23–24, 26, 32, 33; Bonald condemnation of, 40; Catholic orthodoxy vs., 25, 26; civil, 34, 172; development of concept of, 8, 15–16, 19; Encyclopédie on, 33–34; French law of, 48; and Jews’ status, 73; liberté des cultes replacing, 43; and mixed marriage, 45; Montaigne’s position on, 19; Montesquieu view of, 286n48; negative association of, 24; Paine view of, 282n7; Rousseau disinterest in, 32–33; shift to “liberty” as term for, 43–44, 43, 283n8; Voltaire treatise on, 26–27, 32 tolérance de religion, 43 tolérance religieuse, 43 Torah, 76 Toulouse, bishop of, 176 Toussenel, Alphonse, 86, 118 transubstantiation, 196 Tresvaux, abbé, 239 Trinitarianism, 320n105 Triomphe, Pierre, 44 truce of God, 48 Tyrrel, George, 273 ultramontanism, 94, 137, 138, 178, 235 United States, 3, 170, 273 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man (United Nations), 280n4 University of Munich, 130 utopianism, 54, 227–228

386 i n d e x Valois monarchy, 18 Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, 273 vaudeville, 53 Venice, 214, 228 Ventura, Father, 175, 176 Véronique, Sister, 115 Versailles, Edict of (1787), 34 Veuillot, Louis, 107, 235 Villefort, Father, 103–104 Vinet, Alexander, 42–43 Virgin Mary. See Marian apparition; Marian piety Viswanathan, Gauri, 2 Voltaire, 8, 26–27, 32, 262; Treatise on Tolerance, 26–27 Vrai portrait du Juif-Errant, Le, 51 Wagner, Richard, Jewry in Music, 61 Walicki, Andrzej, 132 Wandering Jew, 9, 10, 49, 50–70, 51, 71, 72, 82, 93; characterization of, 52–53; Doré prints of, 294–295n41; heroic version of, 52–53; history of legend of, 51–52; and opera, 59–64; and Passion of Christ, 50, 51, 52, 59; redemptive dimension of, 56–59; sightings of, 50, 52; Sue portrayal of, 9, 53–56, 59, 66,

155, 235; supernatural powers of, 52, 56; symbolism of, 10, 50, 56, 59, 217 Warens, Mme de, 28, 286n54 wars of religion, 6, 8, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25 wedding feast, parable of, 22 Weil, Baruch, 90 Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 6, 26 Weywada, Louise, 112, 113 William I, king of the Netherlands, 170 women: la belle Juive tradition, 71; and religious choice, 66, 67, 71, 106, 107, 112–117, 118, 123; salons of, 122–123, 136–139 women’s rights, 11, 193, 206, 210, 211–212, 216, 219–223; and male authority (see patriarchal authority); and religious liberty, 12; Sand’s conflict with Lamennais on, 221–222 Wurmser, Elise and Celestine, 112, 113, 114 Wyschogrod, Michael, 273 Yom Kippur, 108 Zagorin, Perez, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 283n8 Zamoysi, André, Count, 240 Zimri (biblical), 76 Zizka, Jan, 228