Catholics and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Global World (Routledge Studies in Modern History) [1 ed.] 0367650975, 9780367650971

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Catholics and Violence in the NineteenthCentury Global World

This book analyzes violence involving Catholics in the nineteenth-century world – revealing the motives for violence, showing the link between religious and secular grievances, and illuminating Catholic pluralism. Catholics and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Global World is the first study to systematically analyze the link between faith and violent action in modern history. Focusing on incidents involving members of the Roman Catholic Church across the globe, the book offers a kaleidoscopic overview of situations in which physical or symbolic violence attended inner-Catholic, Catholic-secular, and interreligious conflicts. Focusing especially on the role of agency, the authors explore the motives behind, perceptions of, and legitimation strategies for religion-related violence, as well as evaluating debates about conflict and discussing the role of religious leadership in violent incidents. Additionally, they illuminate the complex ways in which religious grievances interacted with secular differences and highlight the plurality of Catholic standpoints. In doing so, the book brings to light the variety of ways in which religion and violence have interacted historically. Showing that the link between faith and violence was more nuanced than theoreticians of ‘religious violence’ suggest, the book will appeal to historians, social scientists, and religious scholars. Eveline G. Bouwers is Senior Fellow of the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany, and a comparative scholar of modern Europe. Her research focuses on the history of religion-related protest, violence, and blasphemy. Other research interests include remembrance cultures and monument-making, mainly in the nineteenth century.

Routledge Studies in Modern History

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Catholics and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Global World Edited by Eveline G. Bouwers

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Eveline G. Bouwers; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Eveline G. Bouwers to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-0-367-65097-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-65104-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12785-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857 Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

List of Figures viii Foreword ix Acknowledgements xi List of Contributors xiii Violence and the Negotiation of Difference: NineteenthCentury Catholic Encounters with the Religious and Secular Other 1 EVELINE G. BOUWERS

PART I

Rejecting Secularization

31

1 Religion and Violence during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Between Tradition and Modernity

33

PHILIP DWYER

2 “To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”: Violence, Religion, and Counterrevolution in Restoration Spain

56

MARY VINCENT

3 Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium: Catholics in Defiance of State Legislation, 1857–1884 EVELINE G. BOUWERS

75

vi Contents PART II

Contending Clericalism

97

4 Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants on the Habsburg Periphery: Rabatz and Antisemitic Riots in West Galicia, 1846–1898

99

TIM BUCHEN

5 Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas: Catholic Pluralism and Religionero Violence in Michoacán, Mexico, 1873–1877

119

BRIAN A. STAUFFER

6 Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina: Teachings from the 1875 Anticlerical Riots

141

ROBERTO DI STEFANO

PART III

Resisting Religious Pluralization

159

7 From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred: French Catholic Responses to the Damascus and Dreyfus Affairs

161

JULIE KALMAN

8 The Trillick Railway Outrage: The Politics of Atrocity in Post-Famine Ulster

178

SEAN FARRELL

9 Catholicism and Violence in Korea: Two Case Studies from the Chosŏn Dynasty

199

FRANKLIN RAUSCH

PART IV

Imposing a Catholic Order

217

10 Violence in Circulation? Missionaries, Local Population, and Colonial Politics during the German War on the East African Coast, 1888–1889

219

RICHARD HÖLZL

Contents  vii 11 Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa: Violence and the Creation of Religious Statehood in South-Eastern Congo during the Partition Era, 1867–1914

241

REUBEN A. LOFFMAN

12 “The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”: Religion, Childhood, and Violence in Colonial New Guinea around 1900

261

KATHARINA STORNIG

PART V

Opposing Catholic Invasion

281

13 Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence: Celebrating FêteDieu in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal

283

DAN HORNER

14 The Popery Panic: Nativism, Anti-Catholicism, and Violence in Antebellum America

302

CASSANDRA L. YACOVAZZI

15 Occasional Martyrs: Catholic Life in Nineteenth-Century China between Coexistence and Subjugation

323

LARS PETER LAAMANN

PART VI

Conclusions

343

16 Parameters of Religion-Related Violence in Modern History

345

EVELINE G. BOUWERS

Index 355

Figures

3.1 Cernay Gillon, “Drama and Shooting in Heule, under the Government of ‘Procureur’ LEVAART [Heyvaert – E.G.B.] Pants Down, Baron of Heule / Happy Greetings, 1880. Civilized Belgium under the Ministry of the Seven Freemasons.” Photo courtesy of Rijksarchief Kortrijk 5.1 “El Padre Cobos,” February 24, 1876. Reprinted in El Padre Cobos y La Carabina de Ambrosio. Mexico City: Cámara de Senadores de la LVII Legislatura, 2000. Photo courtesy of Daniel Alonzo 10.1 “The St. Benedict of Pugu mission station, destroyed on January 13.” Die katholischen Missionen (1889), 80. Photo courtesy of the author 14.1 “Destruction of the Charleston Nunnery, August 24th, 1834.” Published in Harry Hazel, The Nun of St. Ursula, or, The Burning of the Convent: A Romance of Mount Benedict. Boston: F. Gleason, 1845. Photo courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society 14.2 John L. Magee, “Death of George Shifler [Schiffler – C.L.Y.] in Kensington. Born Jan 24, 1825. Murdered May 6, 1844.” Philadelphia: Wm. Smith, 1844. Photo courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia 14.3 “Father Gavazzi Delivering His Italian Discourses at the Princess’ Concert Room.” Published in Illustrated London News, March 8, 1851. Photo courtesy of HathiTrust

84

131 222

307

312 315

Foreword

The origins of this book lie in the Emmy Noether Research Group “Battles over Belief: Religion and Violence in Catholic Europe, 1848–1914”, which ran from 2013 to 2019, and of which I was Principal Investigator. Generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG 234.640.432) and based at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany, it proposed the first systematic enquiry into the use of physical violence by Catholic believers in defence of their religion and worldview, focusing on Europe from the Liberal Revolutions of the late 1840s to the beginnings of World War I. This was a time of expanding industrial economy, of urbanization, nascent democratic rule, and the emancipation of hitherto disadvantaged social groups such as workers and women. But it was also an era that saw the political realization of state secularism, the institutional consolidation of Ultramontanism, and an elaboration as well as an expansion of Catholic piety. Each in their own particular way, these events impacted Catholics’ relations with the world around them – from the top tiers of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to the humblest believers. While the research group looked at Catholic elites, its principal focus was on the actions of men and women whose influence on political decision-making was limited to voting (and even that was only for males and in some countries) and contention. How did ‘ordinary’ believers navigate the many changes introduced to and challenges imposed on Catholicism during the nineteenth century? What role did violence – from large-scale mêlées to small symbolic acts of property damage – play in the communication of difference? A dissertation by Péter Techet examined intra-Catholic conflicts along the Austro-Hungarian Littoral (in what is today Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia); a doctoral thesis by Sara Mehlmer investigated Catholic–Muslim relations in Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish exclaves in Northern Africa; my own study explored intra-Catholic and Catholic-secular clashes in Bavaria (Germany), Brittany (France), and Flanders (Belgium). Together, we, the members of the research group, showed that rather than the “decline” or “disappearance” of religion-related violence that historians have often seen in the

x Foreword nineteenth century, there was an intensification of contentious action pertaining to Catholicism. We moreover found that the use of violence in defence of the Catholic faith neither necessarily halted progress nor was a testimony to failed modernization; rather, it served to increase political participation and cultural awareness among believers. The research group furthermore unearthed the pluralism of the nineteenth-century Catholic community – seen in the varying levels of popular readiness to defend the Church’s claims, respect religious diversity, submit to the constitutional order, et cetera; it confirmed the tendency of adjacent secular differences to turn religion-related conflict from latent to violent; and it revealed the degree to which the laity operated independently from, and sometimes expressly against, the clergy. The German-language volume Glaubenskämpfe: Katholiken und Gewalt im 19. Jahrhundert, published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2019, placed the research group’s conclusions in a broader context that still focused for the most part on Europe or European influences. The present volume goes one step further, offering a kaleidoscopic overview of the different ways in which Catholics engaged with violence, either as victims or as perpetrators, across the nineteenth-century global world. Some of the chapters in this book are the revised or rewritten versions of contributions to Glaubenskämpfe and appear here for the first time in English: this applies to the chapters by Dwyer, Farrell, Kalman, Stauffer, and Vincent as well as to those by Bouwers, Buchen, Hölzl, and Stornig (the latter four having been translated by the very capable Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller). The contributions by Di Stefano, Horner, Laamann, Loffman, Rausch, and Yacovazzi were written specifically for this volume; the same holds for my own introduction and conclusion. Although concerned with the nineteenth century, this volume raises questions that are still relevant for society today – questions moreover that prompt heated debates among academics, politicians, and the general public. Under what circumstances is religion-related violence likely to erupt? In what ways do religious ideas shape and legitimize violent actions? Is conflict over religion alone likely to lead to violence or primarily if exacerbated by secular differences, such as economic marginalization, political oppression, and ethnic discrimination? What strategies were developed to avert violent action? Is there something typically religious, or in this case Catholic, about violence committed by believers or in the name of religion? How do the responses of the faithful (that is, the laity) relate to the actions of the religious authorities (that is, the clergy)? Even if Catholics and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Global World cannot provide definitive answers to these questions, it aims to offer some tentative solutions. In doing so, it hopes to chart an agenda for future research that will bring together two strands of historical research which have hitherto been treated mostly in isolation, namely, the history of violence and the history of religion.

Acknowledgements

In 2013, the German Research Foundation awarded me a major grant to set up a junior research group with the aim of examining how Catholic believers had historically defended their religion and worldview by violent means. Temporally, the focus was on the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, whilst geographically, the research was to concentrate on Europe. “Battles over Belief: Religion and Violence in Catholic Europe, 1848–1914” ran from 2013 and 2019 and was generously funded within the framework of the Foundation’s Emmy Noether Program. Named after the brilliant mathematician Amelie Emmy Noether (Erlangen 1882–Bryn Mawr 1935), whose academic career was hampered by the relentless discrimination she faced as both a woman and a Jew, it helps young scholars in Germany on the road to academic independence. I am very grateful to the German Research Foundation for providing the funds and practical assistance to turn a tentative research idea into a well-defined research programme, comprising activities and publications. The research group’s focus on conflicts involving Catholics in Western Europe, Spanish Northern Africa, and the Western Balkans was first placed in a broader context with the German-language volume Glaubenskämpfe: Katholiken und Gewalt im 19. Jahrhundert, published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2019. Some of the authors who contributed to that book agreed to revise or rewrite their chapters for the present volume, for which I am very grateful. I would, of course, also like to thank the other authors who joined this project. All experts on a specific world region, they made generous efforts here to appeal to non-specialists, patiently enduring my many requests to add more explanation, for which I am also very grateful. In addition, my heartfelt thanks go to the 15 colleagues who kindly reviewed the individual chapters and to Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller, who, with great efficiency and a  wonderful grasp of historical detail, translated four chapters from German to English; she also proofread my introduction and conclusion. At Routledge, I thank Max Novick for his enthusiasm and understanding – excellent qualities in any editor but especially in an editor working during a

xii Acknowledgements global pandemic that stretched everyone’s patience and capacities. Finally, a huge thank-you must be extended to the archive, library, and university staff without whose support we historians would never be able to conduct the research that forms the basis of all our publications, the present volume included. The value of the work they do became even clearer in recent years, when repeated closures due to COVID-19 deprived us of the opportunity to access the materials on which we depend.

Contributors

Eveline G. Bouwers is Senior Fellow of the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. She is a historian of religiously motivated protest and remembrance cultures in modern Europe. Publications include Public Pantheons in Revolutionary Europe: Comparing Cultures of Remembrance, c. 1790–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and Demystifying the Sacred: Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022), which she co-edited with David Nash. Tim Buchen is Junior Professor of the History of Germans in Eastern Europe at Technical University Dresden, Germany. His research focuses on the history of antisemitism, imperial, and rural history in modern Eastern Europe. He is the author of Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the late Habsburg Monarchy (New York: Berghahn, 2020) and co-author of Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (New York: Berghahn, 2015). Roberto Di Stefano is Associate Professor at the National University of La Pampa, Argentina, and Senior Researcher at Consejo de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). Publications include Ovejas negras. Historia de los anticlericales argentinos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2010) and Marian Devotions, Political Mobilization and Nationalism in Europe and America (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), which he co-edited with Francisco Javier Ramón Solans. Philip Dwyer is Professor of History and founding Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has authored and edited several books on European history, with particular emphasis on the Napoleonic Empire and the history of violence. Recent publications include Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection, 1815–1840 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). With Joy Damousi, he

xiv Contributors co-edited the Cambridge World History of Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Sean Farrell is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, United States. He has published widely on religion and politics in nineteenthcentury Ireland, including Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Modern Ulster, 1784–1886 (Lexington KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000). His latest book, co-authored with Mathieu W. Billings, is The Irish in Illinois (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2021). Richard Hölzl is Lecturer of History at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and specializes in environmental history and the history of colonialism. His publications have focused on the history of forestry including Umkämpfte Wälder: Die Geschichte einer ökologischen Reform in Deutschland 1760–1860 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2010) and Managing Northern Europe’s Forests: Histories from the Age of Improvement to the Age of Ecology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018; co-authored with K. Jan Oosthoeck), as well as on imperial missions, including Gläubige Imperialisten: Katholische Mission in Deutschland und Ostafrika (1830– 1960) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2021). Dan Horner is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada, and a member of the Montreal History Group. Publications include Taking to the Streets: Crowds, Politics, and the Urban Experience (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). Julie Kalman is Associate Professor of History at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century France (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2017) and Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Lars Peter Laamann is Senior Lecturer in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the interface between medicine and popular religion, especially Christianity, in late imperial China, as well as on ethnicity (Manchus) and peripheral identities. On Christianity, he has authored Christian Heretics in Late Imperial China (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006) and The Church as Safe Haven: Christian Governance in China (Boston: Brill, 2018), which he co-edited with Joseph Lee. Reuben A. Loffman is Senior Lecturer in African History at the School of History, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom. His latest book, Church, State, and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890–1962,

Contributors  xv was published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan. He has written widely on Central African history, notably the mission encounter and development. Franklin Rausch is Associate Professor of History at Lander University (Greenwood, South Carolina, United States) lecturing in East Asia, religion, and world history. He specializes in the history of Catholicism in Korea, particularly themes of violence and martyrdom. Publications include “The Late Chosŏn Korean Catholic Archives” in The Journal of Korean Studies (2019) and “Christian Martyrdom in Korea” in the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom (2020). Brian A. Stauffer is a translator, archivist, and historian of modern Mexico. He serves as translator and curator of the Spanish Collection in the Archives and Records division of the Texas General Land Office. His first book, Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Revolt, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2019. Katharina Stornig is Junior Professor of Cultural History at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany. Her research focuses on the history of Catholicism, mission history and religious internationalism, women’s and gender history, and the history of photography. Publications include Sisters Crossing Boundaries. German Missionary Nuns in Colonial Togo and New Guinea, 1897–1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013) and Gendering Global Humanitarianism in the Twentieth Century. Practice, Politics and the Power of Representation (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2020), which she co-edited with Esther Möller and Johannes Paulmann. Mary Vincent is Professor of Modern European History and Vice-President for Education at the University of Sheffield. The author of Spain: People and State 1833–2002 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), she has published widely on religion and right-wing politics and on gender. She is currently writing a monographic study of religious violence at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Cassandra L. Yacovazzi is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida where she lectures in American history. She is the author of Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference Nineteenth-Century Catholic Encounters with the Religious and Secular Other Eveline G. Bouwers

On the evening of July 11, 2020, a statue of the Virgin Mary at St. Peter’s Church in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester was set ablaze with the aid of a bouquet of plastic flowers. It was not the first time that the area had witnessed anti-Catholic violence. Attacks on religious symbols had been on the rise since at least 2016, prompting Boston Police to investigate whether the assault classified as hate crime. One Ultra-Catholic commentator soon linked the Dorchester strike to the culture war that he saw being waged on Conservative values across the United States – relating the damaged statue in Boston, an assault on praying believers in Saint Louis, and the decapitation of a statue of Jesus Christ in Miami to racial justice protests.1 Some of these incidents had indeed involved equal rights campaigners; the toppling of the Sacramento statue to Father Junípero Serra, an eighteenth-century Spanish priest who founded the Californian mission system, which had repeatedly used violence against Native Americans, is an example.2 But these acts of iconoclasm also revisited anti-Catholic violence of earlier times, such as the raids on convents of the mid-nineteenth century. Anti-Catholicism is, of course, not an American invention. Nor was it particular to the modern age or confined to symbolic gestures. The Protestants of sixteenth-century Europe smashed Catholic devotional objects, burned churches, and massacred clergy – acts of violence that mingled with anger at economic and political oppression to take on a disturbingly bloody form. From the seventeenth century, this type of violence for the most part abated thanks to peace treaties that regulated confessional coexistence – though these transpired to be of little value in the face of mounting Catholic – secular conflict during the nineteenth century. East Asia, too, had long witnessed sporadic bouts of anti-Catholic violence, often targeting European missionaries. For while governments would tolerate religious orders for strategic reasons, they had no qualms about expelling or even killing their members if they felt they no longer acted in the government’s interest. Occasionally, this type of state persecution was complemented by acts of popular violence. But Catholics were never only the victims of violence; they were also its perpetrators. Early-modern inquisitors had persecuted Protestants in DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-1

2  Eveline G. Bouwers the most gruesome ways, burning them on the stake, cutting off their limbs, and slitting their throats. Later, during the French Revolutionary Wars, Catholics occasionally applied the same savagery to anticlerical groups. They were also complicit in the violence attending European colonialism – imposing Christianity on indigenous peoples, disciplining such behavior as they deemed “uncatholic”, and profaning the objects local communities worshipped. In short, if Catholics were the addressees of an exclusionary rhetoric that intimidated, oppressed, and excluded, they were also its masterminds. It was a rhetoric that fueled hatred to the point that, once it collided with political marginalization, economic exploitation, cultural exclusion, or colonial oppression, it would occasionally turn violent. The incidents discussed above have customarily been labeled acts of ‘religious violence’, a term that denotes a type of violence directed against religious persons or objects, perpetrated by believers, or justified by reference to concepts of faith (on which more below). This multifaceted connection between religion and violence forms the focus of this book – albeit in the narrower context of incidents involving Catholics and occurring in the nineteenth century. The volume discusses situations in which violence was used to defend a particular (religious) worldview, challenge a denominational other, or impose a secular order. But it also evaluates circumstances in which religion-related differences were the reason for sparking, fighting out, justifying, or interpreting conflict rooted in secular differences. Individually, the chapters testify to the ongoing significance of violence, both as an experience and an imagination, in conflicts pertaining to the Catholic religion in modern history; collectively, they offer a critique of the monocausal explanations offered by numerous social science theories on the nature of ‘religious violence’. By looking at Catholics’ interaction with other faith and ideological communities in different world regions, this volume challenges the idea that religion-related violence “disappeared” in the nineteenth century and rather illuminates the complex link between faith and violent action in the modern age.3 Although by no means the first contribution to deal with religion-related violence in modern history, the present volume stands apart from the previous literature in numerous ways.4 First, much scholarship examines violence in the context of war. As a result, we know quite a bit about the circulation of notions of holy war, salvation, and martyrdom on the battlefields of the Wars of Independence in Spanish America and World War I, among other conflicts, but much less about their potential to animate conflict beyond the context of military engagement. Research has, moreover, tended to focus on political and ecclesiastical authority. Unlike early modernists, historians of the modern period have rarely examined religion-related violent action among those with little or no power over decision-making processes. Thirdly, historiography often concentrates on one particular type of religion-related

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  3 violence involving Catholics, focusing for instance on sectarian, anticlerical, or antisemitic violence. This leaves the door closed on the possible entanglements between these different types of violence and the degree to which religion sui generis fueled violence. Similarly, the tendency to concentrate on a single locality makes it difficult to draw more general conclusions about the connection between faith and violent action. Finally, while the early-modern and contemporary periods have been extensively researched, the intermittent years have received far less attention, despite the plethora of conflicts occurring during this time – among Catholics, between Catholics and other faith groups, and between Catholics and secularists. The present volume attempts to address these anomalies. Offering a kaleidoscopic overview of situations in which the Catholic faithful discussed, resorted to, or became the victims of violence, it aims to stimulate scholarly debate on the interaction between religious belonging and violent action in the nineteenth-century world. In doing so, the book combines two academic traditions that have hitherto been treated separately. First, it engages with the history of violence. Pioneered by Marxist historians during the midtwentieth century and American sociologists during the 1970s, this branch of research has long prioritized the study of secular differences, especially socioeconomic issues. Secondly, the volume deals with the history of religion and Catholicism. Scholars in this field have tended to examine the conflictual nature of debates on church structures, popular piety, missionary work, education, and gender. But they have rarely examined the use of physical violence in relation to these discussions, as this volume sets out to do. By way of introduction, the following pages will sketch the key developments in nineteenth-century global Catholicism – beginning with developments within the Church and in Europe, which ran largely parallel, before broadening to consider other world religions. They will then evaluate existing theories on the nature of religion-related violence and related historiography. The introduction will conclude with an overview of the chapters in this book. Catholicism: Church and People in the Nineteenth Century At the dawn of the twentieth century, an estimated 266 million people across the globe belonged to the Catholic Church.5 Catholicism was the religion of many Europeans, especially those living in the southern and central parts of the continent where the Church had long covered the tracks of Protestantism and, more recently, mobilized believers against anticlerical attacks. Catholicism was the majority religion in Latin America, having arrived in the slipstream of the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and remained a potent force following independence, the only institution to successfully “transit[] from the colonial order to the new [republican] order”.6 Thanks to the steadily growing number of Catholics

4  Eveline G. Bouwers arriving from Europe, the Church had moreover significantly expanded its presence in North America, counting a little under one-fifth of the population among its members, principally people originally from Germany, Ireland, and Italy. In Africa, by contrast, Catholicism remained a minority religion. For although the restoration of the Society of Jesus and the re­ establishment of the Propaganda Fide in 1814 and 1817, respectively, had breathed new life into missionary activity, it was not until the European colonial expansion of the latter nineteenth century that Catholic proselytization really took off – several decades after Protestant missionaries had made their way to the continent. In Asia, the Catholic presence was very uneven: it was practically non-existent in Thailand, small in Japan, which had only recently been gunboated into accepting freedom of religion, significant in newly colonized French Indochina, and near-universal in the centuries-old Spanish colony of the Philippines. A century earlier, few would have bet on the Catholic Church achieving such a global presence. In Europe, the cradle of Roman Catholicism, mideighteenth-century rulers had seized on Enlightenment ideas to limit the clergy’s influence, cracking down on convent culture, restricting the Church’s rights to inherit property, and expanding the jurisdiction of secular courts, among other things. Some churchmen echoed these calls for reform. Confirming that the new thinking was “a product of religious debate and not merely a rebellion against it”, reform-oriented clergy advocated a more personal and purified religiosity, a reduction of the inequalities between higher and lower clergy, and a shift of decision-making power from the pope to the general councils and provincial synods.7 The French revolutionaries and their ideological brethren elsewhere would later revive these proposals, nationalizing church property, dissolving the monastic orders, and making civil servants of the clergy. In addition, they introduced freedom of religion and emancipated Protestants as well as Jews – political decisions that did not necessarily receive broad popular support, as Julie Kalman shows in her chapter on the Damascus and Dreyfus Affairs. Napoleon subsequently extended the State’s prerogative even further. But he also sought reconciliation with the papacy, restoring Easter Sunday and allowing the pope to invest bishops canonically. While the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies brought secularization and religious pluralization to the territories they conquered, the brutality of their civilizing mission – in which soldiers demolished devotional objects, sacked churches, attacked processions, and killed priests – prompted violent responses. Despite this opposition, the French and their allies never doubted “the appeal of their revolutionary ideals, and of secularism”, as Philip Dwyer writes below. The attacks on Catholicism symbolically culminated in the dismantling of the pope’s temporal power, first by Revolutionary and then by Napoleonic France. And it was not just in Europe that the Catholic Church was battling

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  5 its demons. Asia had been a Christian outpost since the sixth century, although Catholic missionaries had arrived there only during the late fifteenth century, on the heels of Portuguese explorers. The conversions they achieved were largely reversed during the following centuries, as a result of weakening European influence, the suppression of the Jesuits and Propaganda Fide, and state persecutions. The Church lacked the means to control events on the ground – much less to force a state such as Korea into tolerating Catholicism, as one contemporary hoped it would.8 With most of Asia now “closed to European missionaries”, the Church also had to fear for its position in Latin America.9 Angered by Spanish dominance and inspired by events in Europe, parts of the creole (New World-born but of European descent) and indigenous populations rose up to abolish the Bourbon monarchy. Aiming to place political power in the hands of the people, the rebels were supported by a lower secular clergy frustrated by the seizure of church funds during the financial crisis of 1804 and the privileges accorded to “European clergymen fresh from Spain” instead of to “native-born clergy”.10 Priestly involvement not only ensured that the independence movements in the Spanish Americas did not acquire an anticlerical edge but also made it easier for the Holy See to recognize the new republics – in spite of hefty opposition from King Ferdinand VII and the bishops who had fled to Spain. The Catholic Church that officially acknowledged the independence of Spanish America in the 1820s was a different institution from the one that had witnessed rebellion first break out. For one, it no longer found itself in a state of acute crisis. In appreciation of the resilience that Pope Pius VII had shown toward Napoleon, princes from across Europe had united at the Congress of Vienna (1814) in an “ecumenical spirit” to restore the Papal States.11 The return of its temporal power gave the Church a new lease of life, visible in the reestablishment of the Inquisition and the Propaganda Fide, among other things. For another, the Church underwent a process of centralization, popularization, and theological innovation. The secular clergy became in Roger Aubert’s words, “more disciplined […], more pious […], [and] more zealous”.12 Theological seminaries promoted the professionalization of the clergy and increasingly placed the emphasis on pastoral care rather than diplomatic finesse, allowing students from humble backgrounds to advance through the clerical ranks. The 1820s through the 1840s also saw changes with regard to the regular clergy. Unlike the contemplative and mendicant orders of the ancien régime who had lived on the periphery of society, the new congregations’ focus on teaching, nursing, and missionary work guaranteed them a prominent place in the communal fabric. The governments of Restoration Europe actively supported this development, keen to profit from the congreganists’ services. Their number exploded accordingly; in France, for instance, there were 13 times as many regular clergy in 1878 than at the time of the Congress of Vienna, a development that

6  Eveline G. Bouwers made these congreganists “not just the vanguard of the [Catholic] revival, but also its officer corps and its baggage train”.13 They also facilitated secular states’ colonial ambitions, as Katharina Stornig shows. At the same time, lay associations such as the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, which operated across national borders, helped spread the faith, defend church interests, and mobilize Catholics, often cooperating with the regular and secular clergy. As well as organizational renewal, the Church witnessed a spiritual rebirth. Revival piety emphasized emotions, highlighted “the need for redemptive suffering” to atone for sins, and championed “poverty, simplicity and humility” as ideals that every Catholic should aspire to.14 The new religion possessed a clear popular dimension, as shown by the spectacular rise in devotional practices across all strata of society: rosaries, frequent citations of the Angelus, the blessing of the congregation of the Host, pilgrimages, et cetera. Described as “rather sentimental and saccharine […] but aesthetically and emotionally accessible to all”, the new piety was highly gendered.15 It trumpeted “feminine virtues” in the cult of the Virgin Mary and in the emphasis on God’s loving and caring nature (previously, He had been characterized as angry and unrelenting), aspects that landed well with a Catholic community in which women were quickly becoming the majority. But Revival Catholicism also celebrated the masculine: in the veneration of male saints, in the papal zouave soldiers, and in the creation of confraternities. The new piety moreover emphasized bodily experience, especially ordeals and hardship. Suffering was described as “a punishment for sin, a trial from God, or a vehicle for transcendence”, while sacrifice was seen as essential for redemption and the expiation of sins.16 Both elements explain the popularity of the cult of the Sacred Heart – and, as Mary Vincent shows below, the celebrity status of its earliest promotor, French Visitation nun Margaret Mary Alacoque – as well as the many reported cruciform illnesses and stigmata throughout the century. Revival Catholicism was furthermore marked by an increased orientation toward the papacy, also known as Ultramontanism. In medieval times, a papa ultramontano had referred to a pope from “across the mountains” (ultra montanes), that is, from outside Italy – the mountains in question being the Alps. In the nineteenth century, however, Ultramontanism came to refer to a political conception according to which “in matters of Church polity papal authority trumps both the external claims of civil power and the internal claims of local bishops and even ecumenical councils”.17 Ultramontanism showed itself in the wave of papal encyclicals, in celebrations of the pope as a person, in the many papal-endorsed congregations, and – most spectacularly – in the dogmatization of papal infallibility (1870), which declared the pope unable to err in matters moral or religious when speaking ex cathedra. Despite anticlerical suggestions of a papal coup, the shift toward Rome was principally engineered by a lower clergy and laity aiming to put the

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  7 revolutionary experience behind them and curb the power of clerical elites, with the Vatican’s power being largely confined to endorsing specific candidates for episcopal sees, declaring new saints, sponsoring sites of pilgrimages, and subsidizing specific publications. Additionally, it developed a “press policy […] to drive back and marginalise liberal and statist elements within Catholicism”.18 However much its opponents insisted it pursued a reactionary agenda, the Catholic revival movement was above all a strategy to channel the “rapid political and social change” that was characteristic of the nineteenth century and closely linked to the process of modernization.19 In Europe, this meant staving off attempts to force “[t]he Roman Pontiff [to] reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization”, as the last statement of the Syllabus Errorum (1864) read.20 Countries with a Catholic majority witnessed the emergence of political Catholicism – a development that saw the laity seek emancipation from the clergy, as Tim Buchen shows for the Habsburg Empire. These countries also witnessed a rise in Ultramontane pageantry, prompting an anticlerical reaction and clashes with the liberal Catholics around Félicité de La Mennais. Relations between those who sought to uphold, or even expand, the Church’s influence in society and those who wished to curtail it now progressively deteriorated. The high-profile conflicts that ensued came to be known by the term “culture war”, from the German Kulturkampf (literally: “battle of culture”). First coined in 1840 to describe the conflict between liberal Swiss Catholics and the Roman Curia, the term was popularized by German parliamentarian Rudolf Virchow during the 1870s on the back of a string of anti-Catholic laws enacted by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.21 Historians have used the term “culture war” to also describe the Catholic– secular conflict of late nineteenth-century Europe.22 Subjects typically sparking disputes included education, divorce, burial practices, and the constitutional order – issues on which Catholics arguably disagreed as much with secularists and anticlericals as with each other, as my own chapter illustrates by considering the clashes between the episcopacy and Catholic Party parliamentarians in Belgium. The collapse of the Papal States in consequence of Italian unification brought some intra-Catholic reconciliation, prompting the formation of a transnational support network that donated Peter’s Pence, partook in Papal Jubilees, and prayed for the “Prisoner of the Vatican”, as Pope Pius IX styled himself following the fall of Rome in 1870. Even so, pluralism continued to characterize the Catholic world. Divisions among the (international) Catholic community were caused by differing opinions on religious equality and Church–State relations. They continued well into the pontificate of Leo XIII, who succeeded Pius in 1878. For although the new pope urged believers to accept the autonomy of the political sphere, embraced ecumenism, and rejected calls to latinize the Eastern

8  Eveline G. Bouwers Catholic Churches, not all Catholics agreed – as secularists, Protestants, and Jews would experience to their detriment. Under Pius X, who became pope in 1903, these cleavages deepened further, galvanized by his condemnation of modernism, a theological current that sought to “reform Catholicism from within” in order to ensure the Church’s survival in the modern age.23 Anti-modernism provided for fraught relations with states that pursued secularism, with countries where Catholics were a minority, and with lay organizations trying to emancipate the working classes. The history of the nineteenth-century Church was for a large part determined by developments in Europe, from the implementation of secularizing measures to anticlerical attacks, the advance of liberalism, and the collapse of the Papal States. Some of the changes introduced to Roman Catholicism had a global echo: the professionalization of the clergy, the turn to Rome, and the expansion of missionary work. But there were also marked differences across space.24 The Catholic community in the United States was so small that it lacked a network of churches, making new parishes a matter of lay initiative. Church officials criticized this practice, which they derogatively labeled “trusteeism”, and which also raised various practical questions with regard to ownership of the land on which the church stood and the money collected during Sunday service.25 But in a country where republicanism meant every citizen was to defend his own rights, it also enabled the laity to exert an influence they would be reluctant to renounce once a parish grew and got its own priest, with the question of who had the “right to hire and fire [] local pastors” a specially contested area. Over time, however, Catholicism in the United States underwent a process that James O’Toole describes as “churchifying”.26 The number of churches grew steadily, religious life became more organized (involving weekly attendance of Sunday Mass, the observance of baptism, the recital of prayers, et cetera), and the clerical hierarchy established itself as the central body for theological supervision. To accommodate the needs of the growing Catholic community, the Plenary Councils of Baltimore agreed that policies should apply to all dioceses, approved a new catechism, endorsed parochial schools, and decided to establish a Catholic university in the nation’s capital. But the meetings could not prevent mounting intra-Catholic divisions, especially over the question of “accommodating [the] American values” within the Church.27 Although Catholics could be found among the Native American population and the Hispanic communities in the Southwest, the Church in the United States was primarily a European immigrant church, its membership rising steeply over the century. It provided the Irish, Italian, German, and other Central European arrivals not only with solace but also with job opportunities, which sometimes prompted clashes between the different national communities. Protestants often resented this growing Catholic presence, criticizing the new arrivals’ tendency to condemn the Papal States’

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  9 collapse, send money to Rome, recite prayers that celebrated the pope, and endorse infallibility. They saw the parochial schools, church buildings, and convents sprouting up around the country as eerie signs of a “popery plot” as Cassandra L. Yacovazzi writes in her discussion of anti-Catholic violence during the Antebellum era. Often colliding with anti-migrant sentiment, the latter was also known as Nativism and grew in tandem with the waves of immigration. The same juxtaposition of religious and national–ethnic differences existed in Canada, although the historic presence of the Canadien community (French-speaking Catholics) ensured that conflict was mostly confined to cities and fueled by the ideological and commercial interests of the elites. As Dan Horner explains, the ordinary faithful often sought to maintain friendly relations across the confessional divide. The history of Catholicism in Spanish-speaking Latin America was characterized by severer conflicts. The wars of independence of the early nineteenth century lacked the anti-religious tenor accompanying conflicts in Revolutionary Europe. They rather were “conservative wars against the anti­clericalism” of the Cádiz Cortes, that is, the parliamentary assembly of Spain that was restored in 1810.28 Having pitted the pro-Spanish clergy against a reform-oriented priesthood, the two camps reunited after the wars under the new leadership of men born in the New World. Before long, Pope Gregory XVI recognized the new republics and paved the way for concordats aiming to place the Latin American Church, “which in colonial times was in reality a Spanish Church”, under Rome’s control.29 But this process of Romanization had mixed consequences on the ground. The Ultramontane clergy that took control of the Church was hostile to indigenous influences on popular religiosity, seeking to root out syncretic practices and impose a uniformized belief system. At the same time, they ostracized the liberal-leaning priesthood that had fought for independence, allying with the autocratic and populist governments of caudillos – the strong men who pitched themselves as the guardians of social order. If the Church, with the aid of the laity, had secured a powerful position in post-independent Latin America, it was by no means unassailable. Anticlericalism attended life in Latin America throughout the century, though its appearance changed over time. Historian Matthew Butler has explained how anticlericalism initially equaled resistance to “the reversion of authority over the American Churches to Rome as a corollary of Spain’s defeat” and strove for a “streamlined state Catholicism”.30 From mid-century, it became a political program designed to separate Church and State, while by the last quarter of the century, anticlericalism had developed into a fullblown attack, rooted in Positivist thinking, on religion itself: “instead of mocking clerical feet of clay, the attack switched to the Church’s basis in divinity, its last and greatest untruth”.31 Anticlericalism’s progressive radicalization ensured a hardening of ideological fronts that occasionally

10  Eveline G. Bouwers erupted in popular unrest, as Roberto Di Stefano shows. Even so, religious life in Latin America remained surprisingly pluralistic, with messianic movements, Protestant missions, and freemasonry existing alongside traditional Catholicism. Yet, the most effective forces for pluralism were indigenous cults. Guatemalans’ veneration of the Crucified Christ of Esquipulas and Cubans’ devotion to Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre illustrate how popular religiosity was “rooted within a general devotion of the Catholic faith [yet] particularized in the expression of nineteenth-century Latin America”.32 These syncretic practices ensured a spectacularly diverse religious landscape and paved the way for popular insurrections. As evidenced by Brian A. Stauffer’s chapter on the Mexican Religioneros, they saw believers revert to the support of local strongmen to protect their unique relation with the divine and defend localized devotional practices against external challenges, be they the secularizing measures of liberal governments or efforts to impose a uniform Romanized religiosity. In fact, the struggle over “which entity would have authority over the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the Americas” was a constant accessory to nineteenth-century Latin American Catholicism.33 In Asia, the Catholic Church could look back on a centuries-old tradition, but by 1800, it found itself in a state of “crisis”.34 The abolition of the Society of Jesus and suspension of the Propaganda Fide had obliterated missionary infrastructure and disrupted direct communication with Rome, leaving local Catholics on their own. Catholic proselytization was furthermore challenged by the dominance of Protestant Europe in Asia, with Britain and the Netherlands moreover more interested in commerce than in conversion. It was also hindered by rulers whose dynastic claims rested in part on their commitment to protect a specific belief system and who, with Europe in turmoil and the papacy on the defensive, had no qualms about persecuting the few remaining Catholics. With the exception of the Spanish Philippines, Portuguese Goa, and a few other territories, Catholicism in Asia was in the nineteenth century confined to a handful of marginal and persecuted communities who often lived in remote areas, practiced their religion in secret, and were reliant on itinerant priests and smuggled publications. Hence, Asian Catholicism evolved in a unique way, displaying an affinity to the dominant religious mindsets surrounding it and largely oblivious to the changes accompanying the Catholic Revival in Europe. The Korean Catholics discussed by Franklin Rausch, for instance, believed that the Roman religion nurtured loyalty, filiality, and compassion – precisely those values considered key in official Confucianism. The situation for Catholics in Asia improved from the 1830s on. The restoration of the Propaganda Fide allowed for the return of European missionaries, especially Jesuits, and gave support to local converts. The papacy itself sought greater control over existing Catholic communities; in the case

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  11 of India, for instance, Gregory XVI “asserted papal supremacy over all Catholics”, despite arrangements that granted Portuguese monarchs limited theocratic privileges.35 Many Asian rulers (again) accepted Catholics in their realms. But if some welcomed Christianity as a vehicle of modernization, promising new technologies, medicinal discoveries, educational programs, and publishing opportunities, their tolerance often depended on realpolitik. After the enforced opening of Japan, contacts with Europeans and North Americans convinced Japanese officials of the strategic benefits in embracing freedom of religion, and in 1889, the Chrysanthemum Throne lifted its ban on Christianity. More often, Catholic missionary activity was tied to imperialism and colonization, primarily by the French, which may explain why the new converts were mainly found among the urban intelligentsia with whom the colonizers primarily came in contact. As Lars Peter Laamann shows below, the Convention of Beijing (1860) forced Qing China to re-admit foreign clergy, tolerate missions in the Chinese interior, and return confiscated Catholic property. Similarly, treaties with the French compelled Imperial Vietnam to protect Catholics and crush revolts against them, marking a major shift in policy given the Nguyễn rulers’ repeated “attempt[s] to destroy Christianity at its roots”.36 While repression by the French initially caused anticolonial and anti-Catholic sentiments to converge, Asian nationalists later came to regard the well-educated Catholic community as “a valuable potential ally” in the anticolonial struggle.37 In the Philippines, divisions between the native clergy and those loyal to Spain ran so deep that a schismatic Philippine Independent Church was founded in 1902. While the African continent had a rich religious landscape, Christianity played only a minor role. This began to change with the onset of modern missionary activity around 1800. With kingship the dominant form of government in Africa, opportunities for evangelization depended on the support of local chiefs. Some kings were captivated by the lure of the gifts the missionaries brought, the technical skills they possessed, their ability to read and write, and their knowledge of and contacts with the world outside ­Africa. Xhosa chief Ngqika hoped to make “political use” of the Dutch missionary who in 1799 expressed an interest in evangelizing his people, illustrating how for African kings the “religious role of the missionary was rather subsidiary”.38 Other monarchs were less accommodating, the leaders of the highly organized and militarized Zulu Kingdom being one example. The spread of Christianity also depended on the presence of Islam in parts of Africa. For while in some areas Muslim communities would make it nearimpossible for Christian missionaries to operate, familiarity with a religion of the book made conversion easier elsewhere. Traditional belief in ­polygamy, circumcision, and spirit worship nonetheless endured, making African Christianity impressively diverse. Its heterodox nature owed much to the different roads of conversion.

12  Eveline G. Bouwers Some earlier contacts aside, the age of modern European missionary activity commenced with the arrival of Protestants in the 1830s. Catholics followed later, motivated by the prospect of discovering a religious terra incognita, a fear of losing out to Protestant proselytization, and papal interest in the evangelization of Africa – which some suggest was the real reason for Pope Gregory’s XVI condemnation of the trade in enslaved people and the institution of slavery.39 European missionaries introduced Africans to the Gospel, the most famous being the White Fathers (officially Missionaries of Africa); founded in 1868 by French Cardinal Lavigerie, they provided missionary and educational activities, though as Reuben A. Loffman shows for south-eastern Congo, they also harbored dreams of establishing a “Christian Kingdom”, guaranteeing conflict with local potentates. These missionaries were often torn between the demands of a Propaganda Fide driven by Ultramontanism on the one hand and European governments keen to assert control over ecclesiastical authority on the other hand. Relations between missionaries and Africans were redefined by the Berlin Conferences of 1884–1885. Ending with the partition of Africa by the European powers and an increase in colonial exploitation, there were occasionally violent responses on the ground, as in the case of the Benedictine Mission near Dar es Salaam discussed in Richard Hölzl’s chapter. But antiEuropean sentiment had many origins. Ugbu U. Kalu describes how colonial Christianity rejected African participation in missionary work and “embedded racism” in it.40 Attempts to silence local agency were, however, more effective in some regions than in others. In Western Africa, for example, Europeans faced stiff competition from a movement called Ethiopianism. Inspired by the freedom ideas of those returning from the United States, it called on Africans to “bear the responsibility to evangelise Africa, build an autonomous church devoid of denominations and break European domination of the church” and acquired a significant following among elites unwilling to cooperate with white missionaries.41 This example suffices to show that even if the nineteenth-century “papacy’s claim to global moral authority” is said to have rested on the missionary activities it promoted with such enthusiasm, both domestically and overseas, the trajectory of Catholicism was highly uneven, in Africa and elsewhere.42 That unevenness determined at least in part how the Catholic communities considered in this book responded to the challenges with which they were confronted. Religion-Related Violence: Theory and Historiography For a long time, the study of religion-related violence was a niche field of academia. For although the publication of René Girard’s anthropological study Violence and the Sacred (1972) – which explains how archaic societies overcame intracommunal violence by constructing a common enemy, or

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  13 scapegoat – garnered international attention, it long remained one of the few publications attempting a systematic analysis of the connection between religion and violence.43 The situation in the historiography field was not much better. Even studies of such famous episodes as the Wars of Religion in earlymodern Europe placed the focus on dynastic, political, or economic ­grievances. It was precisely this bias toward secular differences that led Natalie Zemon Davis to inquire into the religious origins of violence perpetrated by Catholic and Protestant crowds in sixteenth-century France. In an article that also reads as an appeal to take religion more seriously, she showed how both communities had used violent action to “defen[d] true doctrine” and “rid[] the community of dreaded pollution” and revealed how the expression of violence echoed religious rites.44 But although Zemon Davis’ analysis of “religious riots” found a considerable response among scholars of early-modern France, the historical profession at large remained for a long time reluctant to study the link between religion and violence in a more systematic way. Much has changed since Girard and Zemon Davis published their writings. Recent decades have seen a surge in scholarly – and popular – interest in religion-related violence, a rise that appears to have been sparked by the early twenty-first-century Islamist attacks on North American and European soil. The Library of Congress catalogue listings illustrate this increase well. Although a keyword search for “religious violence” shows 14 titles for the period 1945–2001, it lists 128 entries from the years 2002–2021; a Boolean search for “religion AND violence” returns a similar pattern, with 128 compared to 1,974 titles.45 But if the study of what is usually called ‘religious violence’ has clearly come of age, the current literature has two drawbacks. On the one hand, instead of examining how the relation between religious thinking and violent action played out, it often presupposes a causal link between the two and so downplays the importance of intersectionality for the outbreak, execution, and justification of conflict. On the other hand, there is a tendency to read the link between religious belonging and violent action in the light of personal ideological preferences or, as one scholar has quipped, “[e]veryone, it seems, has a pet theory as to the who and why of religious violence”.46 This book tries to sidestep these problems by analyzing examples of religion-related violence across different localities and concerning different issues as well as communities. The conclusions drawn from these observations provide a history-based testcase for theorizations on the relationship between religion and violence, of which a number are introduced below. A first group of scholars has underscored the violent potential of faith in general and of monotheism in particular. English literature professor Regina M. Schwartz, for instance, argued in her 1997 study on identity and violence in the Hebrew Bible that because God “excludes some and prefers others”, worshipping Him creates a group identity that is exclusionary

14  Eveline G. Bouwers because it exists in opposition to a religious other.47 In this process of identity formation lie the origins – and legitimation – of the violence that monotheistic communities use against those who believe differently.48 Another scholar to dialectically connect monotheism and violence is Egyptologist Jan Assmann. In his writings on the influence of Ancient Egypt on Judaism, he argued that the discursive differentiation between “true” and “false” – true or false religion as well as true or false God(s) – that shapes the Holy Book makes monotheism intolerant of alternative religious worldviews and therefore conducive of violence.49 Other scholars refute the existence of a causal link between faith and violence. Karen Armstrong, for example, maintains that any conceptual association of religion with violent action results from the former’s historic involvement with the affairs of state; when believers perpetrate an act of violence, they respond to forms of oppression rooted in the secular sphere, making fundamentalism a political rather than a religious phenomenon.50 Theologian William T. Cavanaugh even calls ‘religious violence’ a myth engineered by secular states to legitimate crackdowns on communities they consider backward because they are religious.51 Interventions in these (nonWestern and non-liberal) societies are justified by asserting their violent tendencies and the need to impose a secular order; violent counteractions are, then, not religiously motivated but based on anticolonial, antiliberal, or anti-imperial sentiment. Finally, a third group has charted a kind of middle way. For Rogers Brubaker, “particularizing stances” – which treat the impact of religion on political conflict as fundamentally different from that of secular markers – and “generalizing stances” – which deny that religious dimensions are unique – need not be mutually exclusive.52 Rather than religious ideas as such, it was religion’s particular sense of order that animated political conflict to the point of it turning violent. Other scholars who reject essentialist understandings of the relation between violence and religion emphasize the role of secular differences (political repression, economic marginalization, cultural subjugation, et cetera) in creating the conditions for religious belonging to precipitate violent action.53 They also point to the importance of symbolic action. Mark Juergensmeyer contends that every act of terrorism is a performance aiming to draw its victim into the mindset of the perpetrator; “religious terrorism” thereby draws on the idea of a “cosmic war” between “good” and “evil”.54 As this cursory overview shows, scholars disagree on the nature of the link between religious belonging and violent action, their insistence on a particular reading denying the messy reality of historical situations. An additional point of contention is the very definition of both religion and violence. Although Fernanda Alfieri and Takashi Jinno have warned that any “attempt to circumscribe the concepts of violence and religion […] brings in its train

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  15 the danger of wanting to arrive at a-historical, universally valid categories”, the chapters in this book share a specific understanding of both.55 Religion, here, is broadly understood as a socio-cultural system that establishes order by connecting humans to some form of supernatural, transcendental, or divine power, by means of sacred texts, sites, customs, rites, et cetera. Violence is seen in this book primarily as an act intended to cause physical harm, although the authors also look at the destructive impact of words, gestures, and images as well as the way in which uneven power relations reproduce exclusionary social orders. Historians have widely studied examples of religion-related violence in various periods and places. Few, however, have used these case studies to reflect on the link between faith and violent action sui generis.56 Classicist Harold Allen Drake, for instance, denies that the violence following Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity resulted from intolerance on the part of Christian believers. Instead, he writes, it was the product of “struggle[s] between emperors and bishops to control access to the divine”, that is, it resulted from a complex mix of religious and political arguments.57 Other historians of Roman Antiquity concur that religion-related violence had multiple origins, most of them unrelated to the faith community perpetrating it.58 Similar conclusions have been drawn with regard to medieval violence. Examining the place of religious minorities in the Crown of Aragon, David Nirenberg argues that experiences of violent action informed discourses about the religious other, creating a cultural distance that became constitutive of communal integration and, on the part of the majority group, political stability – while also encouraging violence against all those who were not community members.59 Focusing on Europe and Japan, Alfieri and Jinno have likewise pointed at how the integration of “sacred beliefs” into the political domain lent religion a violent potential. At the same time, they argue that faith was “a crucial factor in launching and legitimizing acts of violence” in its own right.60 This violence could be physical, as in the attacks perpetrated by the Knights of Saint Stephen on the Turks, or symbolic, as with the Jesuit endorsement of Spanish imperial expansion. The symbolic dimension of religion-related violence has also been addressed by scholars of the early-modern period. Zemon Davis’ contribution on “religious riots” has already been mentioned. As well as charting the religious arguments for crowd violence – that is, defending the faith and eradicating heresy – she highlights its confession-specific physiognomy; although Protestants would destroy Catholic imagery featuring saints, those loyal to Rome drowned “dissenters” to punish them for rejecting baptism.61 The editors of a comparative volume on faith and violent action during the period 1500–1800 have explained that religion indeed served as a “justification” for violence.62 But, as Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner write in their introduction, it also informed “patterns of perception and interpretation”,

16  Eveline G. Bouwers with much of the violence resting on a drive among secular and ecclesiastical authorities to achieve religious “conformity”. Ordinary people were not always receptive to provocation, though, and instead developed ways of living together peacefully with those professing different beliefs. “Tolerance”, Benjamin J. Kaplan writes, was “a form of behavior” that allowed dissenters to practice their religion, albeit in the confines of their own meticulously arranged space.63 Historians generally treat the seventeenth century as a turning point in the history of religion-related violence. Peace treaties had “institutionalized and legalized a rich pattern of religious diversity […] as the new normal in European culture”, reducing the importance of religion for political conflict; as a result, violent activity involving religious communities “dimin[ished] in frequency”.64 That is not to say that religion-related violence disappeared altogether. Historians have pointed to its survival in the sectarian clashes that saw Catholic–Protestant conflict collide with struggles over ethnic identity – the violence in Ireland, discussed here by Sean Farrell, being perhaps the most famous, and bloody, example.65 Violence also continued to attend relations between Catholics and non-Christian religious minorities such as Jews, for whom violent action acquired an “exclusionary” quality with fatal consequences.66 It furthermore accompanied conflicts between those wishing to curb the political or social influence of the Roman Church and those determined to maintain it, and shaped Catholic missionary work, both on the side of those conducting it and among the opponents of (enforced) evangelization. Finally, violent action occasionally attended disputes between Catholics, such as in relation to the imposition of Ultramontanism. This volume brings together these different types of violence involving Catholics in an attempt to better understand how violence attended conflicts over Catholic culture, and how Catholic religion structured and legitimized violent action and rhetoric. Various chapters analyze “violent action[s] undertaken against religious targets by people who are not acting officially and formally as agents of political and ecclesiastical authority”.67 But they also examine situations in which “members of a community acknowledge[d] the framing of their situation and the violent practice as in agreement with their worldviews and paradigms”.68 Thus, they echo French historian Claude Lang­lois by looking at “violence suffered because of one’s religious affiliation; violence provoked because of one’s religious convictions”.69 The authors deliberately focus on Catholics in order to probe the interplay between universalist claims – especially those emanating from Rome – and particularistic responses as well as for reasons of thematic coherence. All areas of the globe are considered, although for historic reasons the book is slightly biased toward Europe. In terms of period, the spotlight is on the nineteenth century, an era that saw international Catholicism change in important ways: its organizational base became centralized; it confronted secularizing impulses,

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  17 lost its worldly power, advanced missionary activity, and attained a truly global presence. Finally, while the contributions in this book look primarily at acts of physical aggression that Catholic believers either “administered” or “sustained”, they also reflect on symbolic actions and uneven power relations, examining institutional Catholicism’s role as a “moral authority” to which people referred when debating the legitimate use of violence.70 Chapter Overview The chapters of this book variously look at regions where Catholicism was the majority religion, a recognized minority confession, or a marginalized faith, in some cases lacking an official presence. They consider Catholic– secular and intra-Catholic conflict as well as clashes between Catholics and other faith groups, and incidents occurring in a specific state as well as in imperial and colonial contexts. Of special interest is the role of agency. The authors examine Catholics in their capacity as either perpetrators or victims of violence and look at how their faith motivated, was used to legitimize, or influenced the perception of physical action in either situation. But they also consider the discursive construction of religion-related violence, the creation of a theology of sacrifice and suffering, and the impact that fears of violence had on communal relations. The book consists of five sections; organized chronologically, they zoom in on specific contexts in which violence was perpetrated, provided the backdrop for the interaction between religious groups, or shaped the language for expressing difference. Section one, “Rejecting Secularization”, focuses on situations in which Catholics responded – in words and actions – to revolution and reform, which in the nineteenth century often implied attempts to separate ecclesiastical and political affairs. It opens with the armed altercations between French revolutionaries (and their European allies) and Catholic populations. Historians have described opposition to Revolutionary and Napoleonic anticlericalism as a form of counterrevolution. Charting developments in different European countries, Philip Dwyer shows that this categorization overlooks the role of religion in engendering popular hostility to French attacks on the clergy, devotional objects, and ritual. He concludes that one of the biggest mistakes of the French was their failure to appreciate the importance of religion for the social fabric of the communities they claimed to liberate from the clerical yoke. Indeed, Dwyer writes, Catholic violence was virtually provoked by the secularizing measures and anticlericalism that the French imposed on the territories they conquered. Opposition to revolutionary ideas also animated integrist Catholicism in Spain. This special strand of counterrevolutionary thought maintained that religion was the basis of everything, making political conflict by nature eschatological. As Mary ­Vincent explains, the focus of integrist Catholic theology on sacrifice and

18  Eveline G. Bouwers penance established a spiritual connection between faith and violence in the minds of Spanish conservatives, giving rise to expiatory cults that encouraged suffering for the salvation of others. But as Vincent shows, the link between religion and violence was not confined to conservatives only, for alongside the integrist Catholic theology of sacrificial violence there also existed an aggressively anticlerical culture. In a context of political crisis, as in Spain during the 1930s, both acquired a murderous potential, as evidenced by the outbreak of civil war. Even though the Spanish case was notoriously violent, opposition to secularization provoked physical clashes elsewhere, too. In Belgium, relations between Catholics and Liberals – allies at the time of the 1830 revolution – progressively soured as they debated the Church’s role in society. Antagonism reached a climax with the school law of 1879, which curbed clerical influence on primary education. Eveline G. ­Bouwers charts Catholic protest against the “ill-fated law”, unearthing the plurality of the positions defended. When the episcopacy denied supporters of reform access to religious rites, Catholic Party parliamentarians protested, fearing this stance would alienate believers. The laity was divided, too; while some adopted an exclusionary rhetoric and attacked proponents of the law, others condemned the actions of coreligionists. In the end, the Liberals’ ruthless implementation of the law brought the different Catholic factions together and so laid the foundations for the “pillarization” that characterized Belgian politics for much of the twentieth century. Violence could also attend efforts to challenge priestly rule. As section two, “Contending Clericalism”, shows, such violence could be a corollary to political emancipation or motivated by anti-Ultramontane sentiment. The waves of collective violence involving Catholic peasants in the Austrian crownland of Galicia are a case in point. During the Rabatz of 1846, the faithful murdered noblemen and members of the clergy supportive of the temperance movement; in 1898, they attacked Jews and their property. Tim Buchen probes the rationale for violence in each case, unearths its religious connections, and shows how individual clergymen contributed to this exclusionary violence by stereotyping nobles and Jews as enemies of “the Catholic people”. Even so, he argues that peasant violence was less the product of clerical activism than of a desire, common among rural Galicians, to throw off priestly influence and gain political emancipation from the Church. Faith was also a major element in the large-scale revolt that broke out in Mexico during the 1870s. Following a decision by the liberal government to enshrine a string of secularizing policies in the constitution, the Religioneros inhabiting the near-universally Catholic state of Michoacán began attacking government officials and their offices. But as Brian A. Stauffer explains, these armed rebels were not “foot soldiers” of the Church, however devout they were. Determined to preserve the link between their local community – which was itself a product of Catholic and indigenous culture – and the

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  19 pantheon of saints they traditionally worshipped, the Religioneros also directed their anger at an Ultramontane clergy keen to eradicate syncretic practices by imposing a uniform Catholicism. As Stauffer observes, popular hostility to the Church’s program of religious homogenization, for which it colluded with the liberal government, led to the internal diversity of modern Mexican Catholicism. In the absence of Church–State conflict, Argentina did not witness the same level of religion-related violence as Mexico. Even so, church property was sometimes demolished and clerical personnel assaulted. Roberto Di Stefano explains how, throughout the century, violence always occurred in the context of political and economic turmoil. This also applied to the 1875 anticlerical riots in Buenos Aires. Rejecting claims, by contemporaries and some historians, that immigrant workers were the driving force behind the violence, he shows that memories of earlier conflict were instrumental in sparking later clashes. Di Stefano also illuminates how symbols of Ultramontanism, Jesuitism, and Church–State cooperation were all targeted by violence, and how popular anticlericalism replicated ad verbatim elite arguments against the clergy’s political influence. Aside from attempts to reduce the clergy’s influence on lay Catholic life, the nineteenth century witnessed a multiplication of fraught encounters between different faith groups. Section three, “Resisting Religious Pluralization”, discusses examples of Catholics engaging with religious Others, either from a hegemonic position or from a situation of comparable powerlessness. One example is the treatment that the Jews of France received at the hands of their conservative Catholic countrymen. Julie Kalman explores how, despite having gained legal emancipation in the 1790s, Jews continued to be the target of popular animosity, rooted in centuries-old blood libel accusations. Thus, when a Capuchin friar and his servant went missing in the Ottoman city of Damascus in 1840, conservative newspapers quickly picked up on the French consul’s suggestion that the men had been killed by local Jews seeking blood for the unleavened dough of Passover bread. The same media then turned their ire to the Jews of France. By creating a new exclusionary vocabulary, so Kalman, the Damascus Affair contributed to a shift from antiJudaism to antisemitism, a development with lethal consequences for the future. The looming influence of history on contemporary events could also be observed in the sectarian conflicts of Ulster. Looking at the case of a derailed train carrying members of the Ultra-Protestant Orange Order, Sean Farrell explains how media coverage of the event was colored by and reinforced ideological positions. Ultra-Protestant media cited the presence of the Earl of Enniskillen, head of the Order, among the passengers as proof that the derailment was a carefully planned and religiously motivated attack; Catholic newspapers rejected these allegations by pointing to a lack of evidence and condemned Orange fanaticism. In the end, Farrell concludes, the religious thrust of reports on the train’s derailment served to perpetuate

20  Eveline G. Bouwers narratives of sectarian antagonism and pave the way for future violence. Catholic encounters with religious difference were even more fraught in regions where Catholics formed only a very small community, as in Korea. The Chosŏn State had initially tolerated Catholics but in 1801 ordered their execution on the grounds that their actions undermined the Confucian moral order, among other things. Franklin Rausch reveals how Catholics fled persecution, renounced their religion, or chose a martyr’s death; one Korean Catholic even drafted an appeal to the papacy to stage an insurrection to obtain religious tolerance. A century later, Catholics were massacred on an island off the Korean coast following conflicts over economic resources and government power. State persecution of the Catholic minority thus gave way to popular violence: a testimony, as Rausch explains, to the former’s loss of authority on the ground. The nineteenth century saw a renewal of missionary activity, including in world regions where Catholicism did not have a strong historical presence. Section four, “Imposing a Catholic Order”, looks at violence in relation to missionary work, whether as a companion to colonial expansion and Catholic evangelization or a reaction to it. The many European missionaries who assisted the colonization of Africa were inevitably complicit in the violence attending it. In 1889, however, German Benedictines based near the city of Dar es Salaam found themselves on the receiving end of violence when local bands murdered and abducted members of their mission station. Richard Hölzl charts the context in which missionaries became the victims of violent assault and shows how the onslaught was part of a larger conflict between Arab and Swahili traders on the one hand and the German East African Society on the other. He also examines responses to the attack by observers in Germany; focusing on the assailants’ Islamic faith, they reframed the trade conflict as a religious crusade. Hölzl shows that politicians embraced this view, citing Muslim violence against the Catholic–Christian civilizing mission as justification for imposing formal colonial rule on East Africa. Although missionaries could thus become the victims of violence, they were more often complicit in its perpetration. Reuben A. Loffman considers the power-broking ambitions of the White Fathers and Spiritans in south-eastern Congo. Inspired by the vision of Cardinal Lavigerie, the founder of the White Fathers, they sought to build a “Christian Kingdom” in Central ­Africa. While the missionaries’ claims to sovereignty beyond their stations inevitably brought them into conflict with local rulers, the violence attending these attempts at acquiring a state-like power in Central Africa was not specifically religious. As Loffman contends, it is better understood as a form of political action, albeit undertaken in pursuit of the congreganists’ dreams. But Catholic missionary violence could also be more explicit and perpetrated by nuns. The heavy-handed way in which one Sister Servant of the Holy Spirit tried to discipline indigenous girls on Tumleo Island, then part

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  21 of German New Guinea, is a case in point. Katharina Stornig revisits debates about the use of violence for disciplinary purposes among the sisters and between the mission and the religious authorities back in Germany. She explains how the nuns disagreed about the level of violence that was permissible, interpreting Bible passages as justification for corporal punishment. Despite such arguments, the nuns agreed that violence helped discipline sinful children and ensured their educational progress. It also regulated life at the mission station, Stornig shows, both among the sisters and in their relations with the indigenous population. Catholic engagement with the non-Catholic world was laden with difficulties and not only in the context of colonialism. The fifth and final section, “Opposing Catholic Invasion”, explores opposition to Catholics from both Christian and non-Christian groups. Montreal was a Catholic majority city that had not only an influential Protestant minority but also a reputation for raucousness. In a city familiar with sectarian strife, the annual Catholic procession accompanying Fête-Dieu (Corpus Christi) provided a litmus test for interconfessional tolerance. Dan Horner asks why despite the constant threat of violence, Fête-Dieu did not prompt riots. He explains how community leaders used the celebration as a platform to promote sectarian antagonism, while the ordinary faithful sought to negotiate confessional differences peacefully and shift the conversation to secular grievances. As a result, Horner argues, conflicts over electoral reform, among other things, were framed as sectarian violence. Sectarian conflict also stained the streets of the United States, partly in consequence of the arrival of increasing numbers of Irish, German, and Italian Catholics on its shores. Cassandra L. Yacovazzi examines the hostility shown toward these newcomers by the descendants of the nation’s Protestant founders, focusing specifically on the years 1820–1860. She explains that this nativist violence arose from fears of losing privilege and from “popery panic”, an unfounded belief that the new immigrants were foot soldiers of the pope plotting to take control of the United States. Discussing three occasions on which Protestant agitators attacked Catholic property and people, Yacovazzi explains how nativist violence was fueled by a combination of socioeconomic and religious grievances, as well as conspiracy theories implicating Catholics and migrants alike. Finally, accusations of foreign conspiracies also emerged in countries where Catholics were only a very small minority, as in China. For although the Qing State was generally tolerant of different faiths, the late imperial period saw sporadic outbursts of state repression and popular violence. Lars Peter Laamann outlines how the former was part of an anti-heresy campaign that mainly targeted Buddhist groups and was stimulated by fears of Catholics being agents of European states (the same thinking had earlier inspired the 1724 edict prohibiting all missionary activity). He also shows how anti-Catholic violence took on a new character after the Convention of Beijing (1860) allowed foreign clergy to establish

22  Eveline G. Bouwers mission stations in China. The subsequent shift in violent initiative to the rural population culminated in the Boxer Rebellion. Claiming that “Western Teachings” and churches with steepled roofs were responsible for an ongoing drought, the Boxers massacred thousands of Catholics. As this chapter overview outlines, the conceptual link between Catholics and violence in the nineteenth century was both extraordinarily complex and surprisingly messy. The arrangement in sections thus offers just one possible way of reading religion-related violence, with each chapter focusing on the experiences of specific actor groups only. The conclusions of the book return to this aspect of complexity, revisiting the many purposes of violence in relation to both Catholic and non-Catholic agency as well as the way in which religious factors shaped the culture of violent action. They emphasize the plurality of Catholic positions, underscore the role of secular differences in turning religious conflict violent, and highlight the importance of theology and rhetoric for unleashing, shaping, and legitimating physical conflict. Finally, by exploring the multitude of reasons behind religion-related violence as well as the arguments that helped maintain or reestablish peace, the conclusions offer a history-based critique of essentialist understandings of the connection between faith and violence. Notes 1 Timothy P. Carney, “It’s Time to Talk about the Outbreak of Anti-Catholic Violence and Vandalism,” American Enterprise Institute, July 20, 2020, accessed February12,2022, https://www.aei.org/op-eds/its-time-to-talk-about-the-outbreakof-anti-catholic-violence-and-vandalism/. 2 The Californian legislature voted in majority to replace the Serra statue with a monument to Native Americans. Dani Anguiano, “Archbishops Urge California Governor to Save Controversial Statue of 18th-Century Priest,” The Guardian, September 15, 2021, accessed June 27, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2021/sep/15/california-governor-save-statue-father-junipero-serra. 3 Claude Langlois, “La Fin des Guerres de Religion. La Disparition de la Violence Religieuse en France au 19e Siècle,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998). 4 The section “Religion-Related Violence: Theory and Historiography” includes a brief discussion of historiography pertaining to the subject of this book. Further references can be found in the individual chapters. 5 For figures, see Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, eds., World Christian Database (Leiden: Brill Publishers, accessed June 19, 2022). 6 Martin N. Dreher, “Latin America and the Caribbean in the 19th Century,” in History of Global Christianity, Volume II: History of Christianity in the 19th Century, eds. Jens Holger Schjørring and Norman A. Hjelm, trans. David Orton (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2017), 215. 7 John G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5. 8 See the letter by Korean Catholic Alexius Hwang Sayŏ ng, cited in the chapter by Franklin Rausch.

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  23 9 Klaus Koschorke, “Asia in the 19th and Early 20th Century,” in History of Global Christianity, Volume II: History of Christianity in the 19th Century, eds. Jens Holger Schjørring and Norman A. Hjelm, trans. David Orton (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2017), 268. 10 Mexican independence fighter Servando Teresa de Mier, quoted in Jeffrey I. Klaiber, “The Church and Latin American Independence,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, eds. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 233. 11 Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 163. 12 Roger Aubert, Le pontificat de Pie IX (1846–1878) (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1963), 451–453. 13 Vincent Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX (1831– 1859): Catholic Revival, Society and Politics in 19th-Century Europe (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 171. 14 Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1983), 95. 15 Mary Heimann, “Catholic Revivalism in Worship and Devotion,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, eds. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 70–83, 82. 16 Paula M. Kane, “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism,” Church History 71, no. 1 (2002): 87. 17 Ian A. McFarland, “Ultramontanism,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Ian A. McFarland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 525. 18 Vincent Viaene, “‘Wagging the Dog’: An Introduction to Vatican Press Policy in an Age of Democracy and Imperialism,” in The Papacy and the New World Order: Vatican Diplomacy, Catholic Opinion and International Politics at the Time of Leo XIII, 1878–1903, ed. Vincent Viaene (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005); Christopher Clark, “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 23. 19 Clark, “The New Catholicism,” 13. 20 Pope Pius IX, “Error Eighty,” in Syllabus Errorum (December 8, 1864), in https:// www.vatican.va/content/pius-ix/it/documents/encyclica-quanta-cura-8decembris-1864.html, accessed September 21, 2021. 21 For the genesis of the concept, see Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus. Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 11. 22 Clark and Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars. 23 Giovanni Vian, Il modernismo: la Chiesa cattolica in conflitto con la modernità (Rome: Carocci, 2012), 11. 24 The following summary concentrated on regions featured in this book. 25 James O’Toole, The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 52–53. 26 Ibid., 73. 27 Leslie Woodcock Tentler, American Catholics: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 150.

24  Eveline G. Bouwers 28 Matthew Butler, “Liberalism, Anticlericalism, and Antireligious Currents in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, eds. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 251. 29 Klaiber, “The Church and Latin American Independence,” 246. 30 Butler, “Liberalism, Anticlericalism, and Antireligious Currents,” 256. 31 Ibid., 255. 32 Douglass Sullivan-González, “Religious Devotion, Rebellion, and Messianic Movements: Popular Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, eds. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 274. 33 Ondina E. González and Justo L. González, Christianity in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 132. 34 Koschorke, “Asia in the 19th and Early 20th Century,” 267. It should be noted that the Christian presence in Asia is considerably older, including branches of East-Syrian Christianity dating back to the sixth century. 35 Robert Frykenberg, “Christians and Religious Traditions in the Indian Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, eds. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 480. 36 Peter Phan, “Christianity in Indochina,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, eds. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 520. 37 Mark W. McLeod, “Nationalism and Religion in Vietnam: Phan Boi Chau and the Catholic Question,” The International History Review 14, no. 4 (1992): 661. 38 Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 307–308. 39 Woodcock Tendler, American Catholics, 119. 40 Ogbu U. Kalu, “Ethiopianism and the Roots of Modern African Christianity,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, eds. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 577. 41 Ibid., 585. 42 Vincent Viaene, “Nineteenth-Century Catholic Internationalism and its Predecessors,” in Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, eds. Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 104. 43 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 44 Crowds not only “act[ed] out clerical rôles” but also “magisterial” ones, using violent action to correct official decision-making. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past & Present 59 (1973): 55–65. 45 Library of Congress, Online Catalogue: https://catalog.loc.gov/, accessed August 4, 2022. 46 R. Scott Appleby, “Religious Violence: The Strong, the Weak, and the Pathological,” Practical Matters (March 1, 2012), http://practicalmattersjournal. org/?p=231, accessed March 13, 2022. 47 Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3. 48 Ibid., 5.

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  25 49 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 50 Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 51 William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 52 Rogers Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence,” Sociological Theory 33, no. 1 (2015): 2. 53 Hans G. Kippenberg, Gewalt als Gottesdienst: Religionskriege im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008). 54 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religion Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 55 Fernanda Alfieri and Takashi Jinno, “Introduction,” in Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Perspectives from Europe and Japan, eds. Fernanda Alfieri and Takashi Jinno (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021), 1. 56 In line with the thematic focus of this book, the following literature discussion leans towards works considering acts of violence involving Christians and Catholics. It is furthermore biased towards European history, a consequence of the fact that Europe was the starting point for Catholic Christianity’s spread across the world. The overview concentrates mainly on overview works and is by no means exhaustive. 57 H.A. Drake, “Intolerance, Religious Violence, and Political Legitimacy in Late Antiquity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79, no. 1 (2011): 193–235. 58 A synopsis is provided by Wendy Mayer, “Religious Violence in Late Antiquity: Current Approaches, Trends and Issues,” in Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity, eds. Jitse Dijkstra and Christian Raschle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 59 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Updated Version (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 60 Alfieri and Jinno, “Introduction,” 2. 61 Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence”. 62 Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner, “Einleitung,” in Religion und Gewalt. Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800), eds. Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 12–13, and 19. 63 E.g., Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 8. 64 Wayne P. Te Brake, Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 352; Philipp Benedict, “Religion and Politics in Europe, 1500–1700,” in Religion und Gewalt. Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800), eds. Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 170. 65 For references, see the chapters in this book. 66 On this concept, see Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds. Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 67 Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” 52. 68 Hans G. Kippenberg, “Searching for the Link between Religion and Violence by Means of the Thomas-Theorem,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22, no. 2–3 (2010): 98.

26  Eveline G. Bouwers 69 Claude Langlois, “De la violence religieuse,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 115. 70 Silke Hensel and Hubert Wolf, “Einleitung: Die Katholische Kirche und Gewalt in Europa und Lateinamerika im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Die katholische Kirche und Gewalt: European und Lateinamerika im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Silke Hensel and Hubert Wolf (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2013), 14, 20–21.

Bibliography Alfieri, Fernanda, and Takashi Jinno. “Introduction.” In Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Perspectives from Europe and Japan, edited by Fernanda Alfieri and Takashi Jinno, 1–15. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021. Appleby, R. Scott. “Religious Violence: The Strong, the Weak, and the Pathological,” Practical Matters (March 1, 2012). Accessed March 13, 2022, http://practi calmattersjournal.org/?p=231. Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Aubert, Roger. Le pontificat de Pie IX (1846–1878). Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1963. Benedict, Philipp. “Religion and Politics in Europe, 1500–1700.” In Religion und Gewalt. Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800), edited by Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner, 155–174. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Borutta, Manuel. Antikatholizismus. Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Brubaker, Rogers. “Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence.” Sociological Theory 33, no. 1 (2015): 1–19. Butler, Matthew. “Liberalism, Anticlericalism, and Antireligious Currents in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove, 251–268. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Clark, Christopher. “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars.” In Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 4th ed., 11–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Drake, H.A. “Intolerance, Religious Violence, and Political Legitimacy in Late Antiquity.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79, no. 1 (2011): 193–235. Dreher, Martin N. “Latin America and the Caribbean in the 19th Century.” In History of Global Christianity, Volume II: History of Christianity in the 19th Century, edited by Jens Holger Schjørring and Norman A. Hjelm, translated by David Orton, 205–221. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2017. Frykenberg, Robert. “Christians and Religious Traditions in the Indian Empire.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, 473–492. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  27 Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. González, Ondina E., and Justo L. González, Christianity in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Heimann, Mary. “Catholic Revivalism in Worship and Devotion.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, 70–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Hensel, Silke, and Hubert Wolf. “Einleitung: Die Katholische Kirche und Gewalt in Europa und Lateinamerika im 20. Jahrhundert.” In Die katholische Kirche und Gewalt: European und Lateinamerika im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Silke Hensel and Hubert Wolf, 11–28. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2013. Hoffmann, Christhard, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds. Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Johnson, Todd M., and Gina A. Zurlo, eds. World Christian Database. Leiden: Brill Publishers. Accessed June 19, 2022. Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religion Violence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Kalu, Ogbu U. “Ethiopianism and the Roots of Modern African Christianity.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, 576–592. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kane, Paula L. “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism.” Church History 71, no. 1 (2002): 80–119. Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Kippenberg, Hans G. Gewalt als Gottesdienst: Religionskriege im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008. Kippenberg, Hans G. “Searching for the Link between Religion and Violence by Means of the Thomas-Theorem.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22, no. 2–3 (2010): 97–115. Klaiber, Jeffrey I. “The Church and Latin American Independence.” In The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove, 231–250. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Koschorke, Klaus. “Asia in the 19th and Early 20th Century.” In History of Global Christianity, Volume II: History of Christianity in the 19th Century, edited by Jens Holger Schjørring and Norman A. Hjelm, translated by David Orton, 267–300. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2017. Kselman, Thomas. Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1983. Langlois, Claude. “La Fin des Guerres de Religion. La Disparition de la Violence Religieuse en France au 19e Siècle.” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 3–25.

28  Eveline G. Bouwers Langlois, Claude. “De la violence religieuse.” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 113–123. Mayer, Wendy. “Religious Violence in Late Antiquity: Current Approaches, Trends and Issues.” In Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity, edited by Jitse Dijkstra and Christian Raschle, 251–265. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. McFarland, Ian A. “Ultramontanism.” In The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, edited by Ian A. McFarland, 524–525. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. McLeod, Mark W. “Nationalism and Religion in Vietnam: Phan Boi Chau and the Catholic Question.” The International History Review 14, no. 4 (1992): 661–680. Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Updated Version. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. O’Toole, James. The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Phan, Peter. “Christianity in Indochina.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8. World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, 513–527. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pocock, John G.A. Barbarism and Religion, Volume 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Schwartz, Regina M. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997. Sullivan-González, Douglass. “Religious Devotion, Rebellion, and Messianic Movements: Popular Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove, 269–285. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Te Brake, Wayne P. Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Viaene, Vincent. Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX (1831– 1859): Catholic Revival, Society and Politics in 19th-Century Europe. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001. Viaene, Vincent. “‘Wagging the Dog’: An Introduction to Vatican Press Policy in an Age of Democracy and Imperialism.” In The Papacy and the New World Order: Vatican Diplomacy, Catholic Opinion and International Politics at the Time of Leo XIII, 1878–1903, edited by Vincent Viaene, 323–348. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005. Viaene, Vincent. “Nineteenth-Century Catholic Internationalism and its Predecessors.” In Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, edited by Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene, 82–110. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Vian, Giovanni. Il modernismo: la Chiesa cattolica in conflitto con la modernità. Rome: Carocci, 2012. Vick, Brian E. The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Violence and the Negotiation of Difference  29 von Greyerz, Kaspar, and Kim Siebenhüner, “Einleitung.” In Religion und Gewalt. Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800), edited by Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner, 9–37. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Woodcock, Tentler Leslie. American Catholics: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Zemon Davis, Natalie. “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France.” Past & Present 59 (1973): 51–91.

Part I

Rejecting Secularization

1

Religion and Violence during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Between Tradition and Modernity Philip Dwyer

Resistance to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies by the peoples they conquered is often explained in terms of an ideological clash between revolution and counterrevolution, with little room left for responses that might lie somewhere between these two extremes. Of course, there were all sorts of reasons people opposed or resisted the French, and not all of them ideological. The forced requisitions and pillaging that occurred around 1800 on a vast scale – a form of legitimized looting – caused enormous resentment and sometimes sparked bloody revolts wherever the French went.1 So too did the strains of taxes, conscription, and economic exploitation. Local autonomy, dislike of outsiders, and fear of state intervention were all forces pushing regions occupied by the French toward revolt. Religiously motivated resistance to the French, on the other hand, is only ever seen as a secondary cause of revolt. Few scholars have examined the role of religion, or more specifically Catholicism, at a grassroots level in creating an opposition between those who supported and those who resisted the French military and the reforms that came in their wake.2 And when it is examined, religion, or at least the Catholic Church, is seen as being intimately tied to counterrevolutionary agitation, as it often was in the Vendée region, where Christian symbols such as the cross were adopted, “in the struggle against what they [locals] believed to be the atheism of their adversaries”.3 Catholicism was, however, one of the areas of greatest friction between the staunchly secular, anticlerical French armies and the populations they came into contact with, to the point that Jean-Clément Martin has suggested the Revolution was the last of the French “wars of religion”, and that an “understanding of the sacred is […] the central (and hidden) dimension” of the historiography of the Revolution.4 Crucial, then, to this study is to determine the extent to which post-revolutionary ‘religious violence’ was related to, or represented, a break with the violence of the Revolution. Caroline Ford’s study on ‘religious violence’ in nineteenth-century France

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-3

34  Philip Dwyer suggests that there were fundamental differences between the two pertaining to the sacred, and this in three ways: violence no longer took the form of sacrificial massacre and bodily mutilation; it was no longer an expression of confessional conflict between Protestants and Catholics, but directed at the anticlerical State; and it became regionalized and feminized.5 There is a good deal in Ford’s arguments, but they are applicable to the hexagon and begin to unravel when looking at the larger French imperial space in Europe after 1792. Although some clashes between Protestants and Catholics took place during the revolutionary era, they were no longer killing each other as they were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the other hand, as we shall see, ‘religious violence’ was still directed at the anticlerical State. In other words, when the French threatened to subvert established religious practices and ways of thinking about the spiritual world, violence could erupt, violence that was sometimes but not always sanctioned by ecclesiastical authorities. In those instances, contrary to Ford’s contention, massacres and bodily mutilations could occur, the type of raw violence that harked back to, but which as we shall see was different from early-modern religious wars. Finally, there are two aspects to ‘religious violence’ that are generally, but not always, linked: violence experienced because of one’s religion; and violence carried out because of one’s religious convictions.6 In contrast to recent scholarly trends to downplay the role of religion in war, this chapter argues that both elements played an important role in triggering as well as motivating resistance to the French. One of the reasons for this was that in many parts of Catholic Europe, again in contradistinction to what Ford maintains, religion was not yet viewed as a primarily feminine pursuit and showed a considerable capacity to adapt to the circumstances.7 Not only was the rhetoric against the French religious, but so too was the symbolism of the struggle, which often took the form of images of the cross, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart. In Calabria, insurgents crucified and tortured their victims in ways that can only be interpreted as religious.8 In keeping with Natalie Zemon Davis’ exhortation to think more carefully about the role of religion as a pattern of meaning in the lives of ordinary people, this chapter is an attempt to explain resistance to the French Empire in religious terms, and to explain religious practices in social terms.9 It first looks at the anticlerical nature of the French Revolution and the subsequent conquests that took place, as well as popular reactions among the faithful to what was in effect an assault on their beliefs and customs. In doing so, the chapter attempts to bring religion to the forefront of reflections on violence and resistance to the French occupying armies. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were, it argues, a transitional phase between the earlymodern and modern worlds, one in which violence was used both as a means by the Revolutionary State to attack religious traditions, as well as a means

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  35 used by the faithful to defend their religion. In this sense, ‘religious violence’ was in a transitional phase, between the early-modern Wars of Religion and modern ‘religious violence’. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the wider question of religion and violence beyond the revolution – counterrevolution paradigm. The Secularizing Impulse of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Armies Before exploring the uniqueness of ‘religious violence’ during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, we have to touch on the nature and origins of French anticlericalism and the manner in which it was exported to the rest of Europe. Ancien régime France was built on an understanding between the monarchy, the State, and the Church that had existed for hundreds of years. The relationship between the monarchy and the sacred was particularly important; the Church was entirely integrated into the State. The first instinct of the revolutionaries was to separate the temporal power of the sovereign from the spiritual power of the Church. It led to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which provided for the confiscation of all Church lands, and which required all clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Introduced in November 1790, it was designed to bring the Church under the control of the Revolutionary State.10 The reformist principles of the Revolution and the removal of ancien régime institutions and structures had led to enormous tensions in society between conservatives and reformists, but when the Civil Constitution was rejected by Pope Pius VI in the spring of 1791, its fabric was completely torn asunder.11 From that moment on, people had to declare for or against the Revolution, for or against the Church. In the minds of many revolutionaries, the Catholic Church thus became indissolubly associated with the counterrevolution. The flip side to that coin is that in the mind of many Catholics, the Revolution was indissolubly associated at best with anticlericalism, at worse with the beginning of the Kingdom of the Antichrist. During the 18 months between the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the outbreak of war in April 1792, the Revolution became increasingly radicalized and anticlerical, in part in reaction to the hostility of both the monarchy and the Catholic Church. Things came to a brutal head when, at the end of August 1792, the fortress of Verdun fell to invading Prussian troops, leaving the way open to Paris. Radical revolutionaries panicked and decided to eliminate their enemies from within, including refractory clergy, those who would not swear an oath to the Civil Constitution. A series of massacres began on September 2, in which hundreds of priests – among many hundreds more men and women – were hacked to death by revolutionary if not criminal mobs in urban centers throughout the country, the most notorious example of which took place in Paris.12 Priests were also prominent

36  Philip Dwyer among the 1800 victims of the noyades (drownings) in the Loire at Nantes, Angers, and Saumur at the height of the Terror when Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a deputy in the National Convention, following suggestions made by local Jacobins, had prisoners transported into the middle of the river in barges that were then sunk.13 It is possible to interpret the noyades in semi-religious terms; there is an obvious connection between water and the cleansing of the body, and revolutionary zealots used the metaphor with horrific consequence.14 These atrocities were spectacular performances, news of which spread quickly, as did horrendous stories of blasphemy and iconoclasm carried out by French troops that circulated in Belgium, the Rhineland, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and Spain, where 30–40,000 Catholic priests found refuge after fleeing France.15 When those neighboring countries were later invaded by France, the inhabitants already knew what to expect, or rather, there was an expectation that the French would behave in a particular way. They were rarely disappointed. In the Rhineland and in Belgium, regions that were eventually incorporated into the French Empire, the French mutilated crucifixes, trampled the host and holy relics on the ground, abused statues of the Virgin Mary, forced organists to play revolutionary songs during Church services, performed blasphemous parodies of religious processions, took prostitutes into church, lit their pipes from the eternal flame, attacked popular shrines, defecated into tabernacles, and organized mock religious processions that inversed established religious ritual.16 Take, for example, this report from the Prince-Bishop of Speyer to Pius VI: On March 12, 1794 a donkey was led through the streets in a kind of procession; on its head was placed a mitre bearing the motto: ‘The ass is mightier than the Pope’. Dressed up in priestly vestments, the French waved incense over the rear quarters of the donkey (also clad in clerical robes), while shouting the most hair-raising blasphemies and abuse of the clergy. They even pretended – oh, what a disgusting crime! – to stuff the consecrated host into the donkey’s anus. While this was going on, they kept up a frightful wailing from their hymn-books. First the procession went through the town, then out of the town through the Kuhtor to the Rhine, where the donkey and his mitre were thrown into the river.17 Atrocity stories that portrayed the French as anti-Christian and worse, soldiers of Satan, were often exaggerated or based on hearsay but founded enough on reality to be believable. Many of the reports from the Rhineland, Belgium, and Northern Italy were simply repeating rumors circulating about French outrages. On the whole, reports based on eyewitness accounts tended to be far less dramatic, even if they do speak of French soldiers “blaspheming” and of clerics being manhandled, but these reports were

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  37 usually mixed in with general accounts of pillaging, so that the two phenomena became confounded and intermeshed.18 Whether exaggerated or not, these accounts were designed to elicit both an emotional and a political response among the faithful.19 What is important is not their accuracy, but rather the vocabulary, the grammar of violence, used to describe atrocities. Anticlericalism in the French army seems to have developed its own momentum, although with varying degrees of intensity, according to commander, army, and region, and was pursued irrespective of the domestic political situation. The army remained one of the last bastions of early revolutionary values throughout the Consulate and into the Empire.20 Put another way, there does not appear to have been a direct link between the anticlericalism practiced inside France and that practiced outside it. For example, in 1794 in the Rhineland, and in 1795 in the department of the Ourthe (an annexed region in Belgium), at a time when anticlericalism in France was beginning to wane, the French became more exigent: monasteries were forbidden to take on novices, the tithe was abolished, religious processions were banned and were replaced with revolutionary festivals, and church property confiscated. In 1795 and 1796, in the annexed territories in Belgium, when there was a lull in anticlericalism in France, a sermon of fidelity resembling the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was imposed on priests, a sermon of hatred to royalty was introduced, and regular orders were abolished.21 It is impossible to know whether French troops carrying out these excesses were driven by a hatred of the Church or whether the anticlericalism of the French was simply an excuse for rapine, as one early twentieth-century historian, Henri Pirenne, argued in his history of Belgium.22 According to Horst Carl, the army pursued a policy designed to bring about the economic ruin of the Church “through requisitions and the sale of secularized church property”.23 Within a few months of the Convention declaring in October 1795 that Belgium and Liège were part of France, the ringing of church bells was prohibited, the observance of the décadi (the tenth day of the new republican week, which was meant to replace Sundays) was enforced, and divorce was introduced (although admittedly it had already been possible for some time in the Protestant territories of the Holy Roman Empire).24 In September 1796, religious orders were banned and their property nationalized. Similarly, the annexation of the left bank of the Rhine in 1797 saw the implementation of French laws relating to religious worship: religious toleration was introduced, something that offended many Catholics; all processions and ceremonies outside the church were prohibited; all external symbols of Christianity (shrines, statues, and crucifixes) were removed; civil marriage was made compulsory; Sundays were abolished as the Gregorian calendar was replaced by the Revolutionary calendar (something often

38  Philip Dwyer ignored by both German administrators and the local populations); priests were required to swear an oath of submission to the Republic; and parish vacancies were filled by election.25 (Interestingly, the French did not go so far as to impose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the Rhineland or in the Italian satellite states for that matter.) It is, therefore, not difficult to understand why the Church, and the clergy in particular, resented the arrival of the French, for hard on the heels of the military came the civilian authorities who set about secularizing local life. The influence and the status of the parish priest were accordingly diminished. This was part of the revolutionary process: revolutionaries appropriated many of the roles that had been the exclusive domain of the Church and incorporated them into their political system.26 In doing so, they created a system of symbols and rituals with which they hoped to educate the people and to replace Christianity. Anticlericalism continued, again with varying degrees of intensity, during the Empire. Admittedly, Napoleon’s troops were a little better disciplined than the revolutionary armies, and he saw the political advantage to be gained by mending bridges between the French State and the Church, which resulted in the Concordat of 1801. The truce between Church and State was only temporary. If Napoleon could see the use of reconciling with the Church, it had to be on his terms; Napoleon expected the Church to bend to his will and was in constant conflict with the ecclesiastical hierarchy both in France and in Rome. In the long term, the Concordat may have, as Claude Langlois argues, set in a century of religious peace in France.27 In the short term, relations between the Church and Napoleon deteriorated over the years, culminating in the confinement of Pope Pius VII in 1809, and Napoleon’s excommunication. Early on, Napoleon was seen to be anticlerical and anti-Christian, and in later years, was depicted as the Antichrist.28 Together with his administrators, he continued to implement religious reforms, which followed those that had been partially implemented by revolutionary governments; occupation troops continued to desecrate religious sites, and prefects continued to implement anticlerical policies, sometimes ignoring or riding roughshod over the Concordat in the process. As it had at the height of the Revolutionary Wars, religion was going to be a key component of patriotic inspiration during the Napoleonic Wars, including in Central Europe during the Wars of Liberation in 1813–1814. A War of “Religion and Justice” The popular reaction to French anticlericalism was predictable and understandable. French atrocities against all things religious created a “terrible sensation” among the faithful. Resistance, both passive and open, was generalized in many parishes.29 The simple act of taking away church bells could sometimes only be carried out by the use of military force, as was the case at

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  39 Waremme in Belgium. At Herschwiesen, in the Rhineland, when French soldiers attempted to destroy a shrine, they were attacked by a crowd of 4,000 people.30 This kind of crowd violence was directed against what the faithful saw as an abuse of power by those in authority. It falls in the long tradition of collective violence that dates back to the early-modern period and is part of what William Beik has called the “culture of retribution”.31 When crowds protested against a putative abuse, they were acting in the belief that (religious) tradition was being stymied. In a few instances, French anticlericalism contributed to not just local unrest but to popular uprisings. Depending on the region and the local conditions, these movements could either be centered on towns or the countryside. In France and in Southern Italy, resistance often flared up in the countryside. However, in Northern Italy and in Belgium, the impetus for revolt was more likely to come from the towns.32 This was the case for the Boerenkrijg (Peasants’ War) of 1798 in Northern Europe.33 This conflict, which originated in the towns between Ghent and Brussels, spread to the eastern border regions and into Luxembourg and parts of Germany. For those who both observed and took part in it, the uprising was about defending traditional religion, but as in the Vendée, it was also an expression of resentment against the introduction of conscription and the economic demands of the Revolution. The Sanfedisti in Italy in 1799, on the other hand, was largely a peasant movement. Peasants carried banners showing the cross and the inscription in hoc signo vinces (“by this sign you will triumph”), which Emperor Constantine had sported at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312.34 In 1799, the Sanfedisti, short for the “Armata della Santa Fede in nostro Signore Gesù Cristo” (Army of Holy Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ), a 17,000-strong peasant army led by Cardinal Ruffo, drove the French from Southern Italy and overthrew the short-lived Parthenopean Republic.35 In the town of Alatri, in what had become the Roman Republic, the population embroidered Our Lady of Victory on their flags. One priest called for a Holy War against the Republic.36 Bishop Giovanni Andrea Serrao, who had acted as the civil commissioner of Potenza in the Parthenopean Republic, was murdered in his bed. In Tuscany, in June 1799, peasants rallied to the banners of the Virgin Mary and to the cry of Viva Maria!, harassed the retreating French, killed suspected Jacobins, and laid waste to the Jewish ghettos in Livorno and Siena.37 When royalist bands took over Florence in 1799, they locked up all the ‘republican’ priests as probable French sympathizers. In Lombardy, a peasant named Viora Branda dreamed he had been summoned by Christ to punish the infidel invader. In a movement called the Massa Cristiana, he had his followers join the Austrians to drive out the French from Piedmont. When Catholics gained the upper hand, they could exact revenge on those who had been elevated to positions of authority by the French.

40  Philip Dwyer We can see that the clergy sometimes led these movements against the French, but it would be wrong to think of all clergy as counterrevolutionary. On the contrary, as in France where disaffected lower clergy made a decisive contribution to the National Assembly and the collapse of the ancien régime, so too in other parts of Europe, notably Italy, the clergy provided some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution. In Milan, for example, young seminarians planted a Tree of Liberty, a symbol of the Revolution.38 So too did seminarians in Genoa, where young mothers were encouraged to bring their new-born babies. At Taranto, Archbishop Giuseppe Capecelatro wore the republican cockade and called himself ‘Citizen Archbishop’. His colleague at Bari, Archbishop Gennaro Guevara Suardo, blessed the liberty tree erected by the local Jacobins.39 The Sanfedisti revolt was thus marked by the bizarre spectacle of seeing the faithful slaughter of ‘Jacobin’ clergy in the name of religion.40 In the Rhineland and Spain, on the other hand, clergy with revolutionary sympathies were few and far between (although there were exceptions). All of this was part of the war of ideas being fought, in part with religious–political symbols, between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces throughout occupied Europe. One can, for example, place the miracles the faithful claimed to have witnessed, often blinking or weeping Madonnas, and which were usually the prelude to uprisings against the French, in that ideological–spiritual struggle for the hearts and minds of the people.41 The miracles were imbued with political meaning by the faithful and can be seen as a reaction to the revolutionary symbols promoted by the French – trees of liberty, tricolor cockades, and Phrygian bonnets – which then became targets of anti-French sentiment. In Milan, the very day after the French had dragged away a statue of St. Ambrose in May 1796, a large crowd of protestors gathered at the cathedral square where they tore down the tree of liberty.42 The crowd only dispersed when a battalion of soldiers turned up. The French attempts to destroy religious traditions often resulted in stimulating a sort of local religious revival, which saw an increase in the number of miracles – weeping, blinking, talking statues, and crucifixes – all interpreted in a political sense that supported opposition to the French.43 Miracles and other divine manifestations could always be counted on to move populations against the invader.44 At Genoa, there was a talking crucifix, while Arezzo received a visit by the Virgin Mary.45 In the Walloon region, miraculous ‘letters from heaven’ fell from the sky, exhorting the faithful to attend Sunday mass. They were probably a popular reaction against Republican propaganda in favor of the décadi.46 Miracles were also reported in Gerona in Spain in 1809. As a result, the patron saint of the city, St. Narcissus, was named generalissimo of the town’s forces. On that occasion, a solemn and religious procession was held through the town comprised of most

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  41 of the town’s inhabitants, ending up in the church where the saint was given a military sword and had the rank conferred on him.47 A good deal of the resistance to the French was stirred up by local clergy. From the pulpits, priests urged their flocks to take up arms, and often they practiced what they preached. In Spain, in the province of Burgos, Father Jerónimo Merino led a guerrilla band that killed all prisoners in retaliation for French atrocities. Father Santiago Sas and Don Basilio Boggiero, both ‘warrior priests’, died defending the city of Saragossa. Scores of lower clergy died fighting, often in brutal circumstances that only kept the cycle of revenge and violence going. This kind of commitment to violence was not rare among the clergy. In every part of Catholic Europe – the Vendée, the Gard, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Tuscany, Genoa, Naples, Spain, and the Tyrol – priests and monks played an active role in fomenting, organizing, and even leading resistance to the French.48 In the Tuscan town of Pontremoli, an Augustinian friar by the name of Celestino Ferrari led the revolt against the French.49 In the Tyrol, Capuchin priest Father Joachim Haspinger became a renowned rebel leader and commander.50 In word and in action, clergy fought the Revolution, but they also fought to maintain tradition. In Italy, an intense counterrevolutionary propaganda was maintained and fed by the Church in Rome through periodicals like the Giornale Ecclesiastico di Roma or the Annali di Roma. Both contributed to reinforcing the perception of the Revolution as “satanic”.51 It was part of a veritable outpouring of works combined with an intense religious preaching against the French that made a strong impression on the faithful. The uprising in Spain against Napoleon and the French was inspired, in part, by a religious rhetoric that saw as its ultimate purpose the religious and political regeneration of Spain.52 The Church was meant to take the lead in this great regeneration, although much of the counterrevolutionary propaganda originated outside of the Church.53 The prior of the Carmelites in Logroño in the North of Spain exhorted his friars to become ‘religious warriors’ and to give up their lives in what was after all a Holy Crusade, in the course of which, if they happened to die, combatants would be assured to go to heaven, much like the Crusaders of previous centuries.54 No more so than in Spain was the war against the French portrayed as a war of “religion and justice”, on behalf of which all “good sons of the Holy Church” were incited to take up arms.55 French Violence and Religious Symbolism Let me ponder here two other aspects to these ‘religious’ wars: the manner in which the French responded to violent resistance; and how they were depicted by hostile propaganda. In Spain, the French quickly installed exceptional military tribunals in the wake of the occupation to deal with armed

42  Philip Dwyer resistance among the civilian population. The death penalty was often imposed, with a preference given to hanging, as well as the dismemberment of the body, which was then exposed in public on either trees or gallows near where the victim had once lived. There was not much Enlightenment here, even if in Spain, the garrotte was considered to be a relatively ‘benign’, or at least a more humane form of punishment than public hanging, which was thought of as a throwback to the days when torture and the gallows were used by the Spanish Bourbons as a dissuasive practice.56 More than that, however, the French profanation of the bodies of the condemned contained a religious symbolism that the local populations would very much have understood; the victim was obliged to renounce any hope of resurrection. Among a deeply religious people, where the sanctity of burial and of the tomb was important, the dismemberment of the body was the equivalent of damning someone to the eternal fires of hell. Similarly, in Southern Italy, where Calabrians believed that death by suffocation prevented the soul from reaching paradise, French generals were ordered to hang rather than shoot bandits in order to impress the population.57 The French were using these techniques in the hope that they would dissuade locals from resisting, but they were mistaken. To put it another way, what we would now consider to be extreme acts of violence could still contain within them religious symbolism in much the same way as they did during the seventeenth-century Wars of Religion. Elsewhere I have argued that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were a transitionary period between the often uncoordinated, retributive massacres of the ancien régime and the bureaucratized, purposeful massacres of the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries.58 With the advent of the French Revolution, we reach a watershed moment in the way violence was used and justified by the Revolutionary and then the Imperial State. Violence was carried out for ‘ideological’, that is, political, reasons, although the justification for it often carried ‘humane’ overtones – it was about ‘liberating’ people from their feudal past, about bringing the principles of the Revolution, civilization, and Enlightenment to the backward peoples of Europe. This, and the profoundly secular nature of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, often resulted in a religious backlash against the encroachments of the modernizing French State; the repression and the rhetoric surrounding it was pointedly secular, although as we have seen in France, Calabria, and Spain, some religious symbolism could still be employed, a leftover from the early-modern era. As we have also seen, the reactions to the French State were often religious in nature, which is underlined by the type of imagery used to demonize the French, and in particular Napoleon, in a bid to galvanize the Christians of Europe.59 Much of that imagery was religious as was the rhetoric surrounding the propaganda against France.60 It was common enough to portray Napoleon as Antichrist, or as Satan,

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  43 Lucifer, the Great Horned Serpent, or the Devil. These epithets may have had their origins in the innumerable odes, sermons, poems, and pamphlets that looked upon the struggle with Napoleon and France as a struggle between good and evil, between the powers of light and darkness.61 Religion and Violence in a Broader Context When it comes to the role of religion in violence at the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, historians have recognized its importance as ideology, though most give religious conviction a secondary role in explaining resistance to the Revolution.62 Indeed, religion has been largely taken out of explanations of war and violence, a trend that has occurred since the 1980s, so that the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Troubles in Ireland in the late twentieth century, and the conflicts in the Middle East are no longer about ‘religion’ but about ‘politics’. In that vein, William Cavanaugh argues that the idea religion is prone to violence is a Western myth, a myth that can be and is used to legitimate violence against non-Western others, particularly the Muslim world.63 This might be true, but it is a somewhat different thing to argue that religion causes violence than to argue that the faithful can react in violent ways to defend their religion or indeed to use religion to legitimate violence. Revolutionaries and French bureaucrats attempted to explain the violence by assuming a top-down approach. They wrote letter after letter complaining about “rebel priests” working to corrupt public opinion, “spreading the poison of fanaticism and rebellion”.64 The Commissioner of the Lower Meuse, for example, wrote to the Directory in 1798 to say that, “it has been noticed how much the opinions of the people are still directed by fanatical and refractory priests”.65 Similarly, French memoirists attempted to explain the excessive brutality with which resistance was put down in Spain by the fact that the locals had been “worked up into a religious frenzy” by priests and monks who had convinced their people they were fighting the forces of Satan. Priests were classically described as holding bibles in one hand and weapons in the other.66 Of course, the French tended to exaggerate the influence of the clergy as the origin of resistance but given that those who resisted often adopted religious symbols, or were indeed led by the clergy, it is time to put the role of religion in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in a broader context. Well before the secularizing impulse of the French Revolution, ancien régime Catholic Europe had witnessed a conflict between the reformers of the Bourbon and Habsburg states and the Church. The faithful rebelled against such authorities who challenged or attempted to reform long-established religious traditions, even when other Catholics were behind the reforms. Thus, in the 1780s, the peasants of the Vorarlberg, Tyrol, and Austrian

44  Philip Dwyer Netherlands rebelled against the reforms of Emperor Joseph II. In some regions at least, Catholicism by its very nature was deeply conservative and opposed to every aspect of modernization, regardless of the origins of the reforms. If Joseph failed so too did Napoleon when, in 1809, he tried to introduce similar reforms with the same disastrous results.67 Admittedly, the French State was more adept at introducing major reforms than its monarchical counterparts of the ancien régime had been, although this had as much to do with local conditions and responses as the efficacity of French bureaucrats. In the Rhineland, for example, in the decades leading up to the French invasions, the State had constantly intervened in religious practices by reducing the number of holy days, by forbidding processions and pilgrimages, and by reforming the liturgy. In the Rhineland, then, the faithful appeared to accept the interference of the State more readily than in other parts of Europe, where French administrators faced the same intractability as had other reformers before them. The peasants of Tuscany had rebelled against Grand Duke Leopold in 1790 when Austria tried to intervene in the Church. In Central and Southern Italy, Spain, and the Tyrol, resistance to reform and to interference in the daily lives of the faithful remained intractable. The popular reaction to French attempts to reform or repress religious practices throughout Europe highlight the enormous cultural divisions that existed between rulers and the ruled, between the center and the periphery, and between town and country.68 Put another way, the tensions between official and popular religion had always been pronounced, so that popular religion in Europe had always tenaciously resisted efforts to reform official religion.69 “Counterrevolution was strongest”, according to Michael Broers, “in environments where traditions of local independence were strongest”.70 This was certainly true, but one also finds a correlation between religiosity and violence. That is, resistance appears to have been strongest in those regions where traditional Catholicism was most practiced. It was somewhat ironic then that the same religious tensions that had plagued the rulers of the ancien régime now plagued the French.71 Conclusion If the French Revolution was able to extricate religion from politics, the reality of that disconnect would take a number of generations to achieve. It is evident that in some instances the violence of the occupied against the French was as much about religion as it was about economic and political considerations, but it is also evident that they fed into each other. That said, neither the Revolution nor the Church were monolithic blocks; they interacted with each other so that the one inspired the other to adopt political

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  45 methods, language, and techniques to further its own goals. The reality is that reactions could vary enormously from region to region and were in large part dependent on the local French commander or administrator; at times, French laws were rigorously enforced; at other times, measures were put in place to prevent or at the very least to delay the execution of anticlerical measures that were likely to meet with an adverse reaction from the population. Nor was the French army guilty of a uniform anticlericalism. Some commanders had the common sense to pay homage to local cults and to take part in popular feast days in the knowledge that religious convictions were strong and that an effort had to be made to win over both the population and the clergy.72 Nevertheless, a number of administrators and soldiers were anticlerical and saw in religion the inveterate enemy of the Revolution, while revolutionary governments, and later the Empire, tended to underestimate the vitality of religious sentiment in the populations they had conquered. In this respect, the Catholic Church and the revolutionary response to Catholic resistance, or counterrevolution if you will, took on a transnational dimension. There is little distinction to be made in that regard between French responses to (religious) resistance inside France and responses outside the hexagon. Violence, brutality, and intolerance were the general rule, although with varying degrees of intensity. The more interesting question though, pace Bernard Plongeron, is the extent to which the revolutionary moment in Europe was part of a larger process of European and even global secularization, in which Christianity was in a sort of dialectic with ‘modernity’, that is, the scientific, political, and cultural evolution of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In order to answer that question, it would be worth exploring, as some have done for other periods, the tensions between the Church and the State in the political and cultural universe of the ancien régime, and how those tensions created the preconditions for what occurred during the Revolution. There are two models that emerge from this period: one is of (religious and political) tolerance, both emanating from the American and French Revolutions; the other is of confrontation, of which Revolutionary France became the prototype.73 At some stages of that confrontation between the Revolution and the Church, the former seemed bent on destroying the latter. It was unable or unwilling to find a working arrangement between a strict secularism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, written in 1789 as one of the founding documents of the Revolution. Article 10 of the Declaration states that: “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”. A lot has been written about this particular article.74 Freedom of religion was exactly what upset the Church even if, as

46  Philip Dwyer historians have pointed out, the exercise of religious liberty was expressed in vague terms and was subordinated to “public order”. Not long after the Declaration had been published, this particular article was violated by revolutionary governments who interpreted public order to mean that the Catholic Church had to be subordinate to the State, opening up a chasm between the faithful and revolutionaries that was one of the main causes of the civil war in the Vendée. It also helps in part to explain the reaction of revolutionary republicans toward Christians outside of France. Although this attitude changed in the course of the nineteenth century, the use of force by the State in matters of religion was at the forefront of the revolutionary conception of public order. It is notable, for example, that after the Concordat, the French instituted a ministry of religion with a police des cultes (religious police) to control all religious hierarchies and writings (Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish); the objectives of the police were essentially secular.75 On occasion, the ministry arrested and imprisoned prelates and priests who fell out of favor with the State. What is striking is that the French, in the face of popular reactions to anticlericalism, never seem to have doubted the appeal of their revolutionary ideals, and of secularism, to the bulk of the population. Many, although not all, French revolutionaries were fundamentally hostile to what they viewed as ignorance, violence, and superstition, which is what they equated religion with.76 Their intractability toward religion in particular, especially when it was mixed with local customs and atavistic practices, compromised any appeal the ideals of the Revolution may have had, and this across all of Europe wherever the French armies ventured. The flip side to this coin, which is again something the French elites never fully comprehended, is the extent to which not only the Church but also conservative regimes rested on popular support. It is difficult not to see this period as one in which conservatism and reaction were opposed to radicalism and revolution (or at least liberalism), but really what dominates the entire period from say 1750 through to 1850 is not this clash of ideals, but rather the extent to which conservatism and religion dominated popular culture and beliefs. It is this profound cultural divide that led to some of the more violent clashes between the faithful and the secularizing State. Notes 1 See, e.g., Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 55–56. My thanks to Eveline Bouwers, Peter McPhee, and the anonymous reader for comments on drafts of this chapter. 2 The exceptions to the rule are T.C.W. Blanning, “The Role of Religion in European Counter-Revolution, 1789–1815,” in History, Society, and the Churches:

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  47 Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick, eds. Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Horst Carl, “Religion and the Experience of War: A Comparative Approach to Belgium, the Netherlands and the Rhineland,” in Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820, eds. Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann, and Jane Rendall (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 3 Blanning, “The Role of Religion,” 195. In Spain, the French were considered to be heretics. See, Scott Eastman, “Soldiers, Priests and the Nation: From Wars of Religion to Wars of National Independence in Spain and New Spain,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 22, no. 1 (2011): 17–19. 4 Jean-Clément Martin, “Martyrs et Révolution française, autour du sacré,” unpublished paper, 2013, accessed December 15, 2018, https://www.academia. edu/10051882/Martyrs_et_R%C3%A9volution_fran%C3%A7aise_autour_du_ sacr%C3%A9. Martin is not alone in thinking of the centrality of religion in the violence that characterized the period. Taking it beyond the hexagon, Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 281–291, has also argued that religion was an important motivating force in deciding people to take up arms against the French. 5 Caroline Ford, “Violence and the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 104–105. 6 Claude Langlois, “De la violence religieuse,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 115. 7 Ann Taylor Allen, “Religion and Gender in Modern German History: A Historiographical Perspective,” in Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography, eds. Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). 8 Nicolas Cadet, Honneur et violences de guerre au temps de Napoléon: la campagne de Calabre (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2015), 306–309, and 311–316. 9 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past & Present 59 (May 1973): 54. 10 Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 11 Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 12–18. 12 Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 210–214. 13 Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies: The Armées Révolutionnaires, Instrument of the Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to floreal year II, trans. Marianne Elliott (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1987), 400–403. 14 Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” 82–83; Edward J. Woell, Small-Town Martyrs: Religious Revolution and Counterrevolution in Western France, 1774– 1914 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006), 161. 15 On exiled priests see, Arnulf Moser, Die Französische Emigrantenkolonie in Konstanz während der Revolution: 1792–1799 (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1975); Bernward Kröger, Der französische Exilklerus im Fürstbistum Münster (1794–1802) (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 2005); Jean-Philippe Luis, “Une histoire de réfugiés politiques: le clergé français réfugié en Espagne pendant la Révolution Française,” in Exils, passages et transitions. Chemins d’une recherche sur les marges, eds. Anne Dubet and Stéphanie Urdican (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2008).

48  Philip Dwyer 16 For the Rhineland see, T.C.W. Blanning, French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792–1802 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 207–254. For Belgium see, L. Galesloot, Chronique des évènements les plus remarquables arrivés à Bruxelles de 1780–1827, 2 vols. (Brussels: Société de l’Histoire de Belgique, 1870–1872), vol. 1, 115–133; Paul Verhaegen, La Belgique sous la domination française, 5 vols. (Brussels: Goemaere, 1923–1929), vol. 1, 113. For Trier and Aachen see, Joseph Hansen, Quellen zur Geschichte des Rheinlandes im Zeitalter der französischen Revolution 1780–1801, 4 vols. (Bonn: Droste, 1931– 1938), vol. 2, 628, note 2, and 663, note 2. 17 Ludwig Stamer, Kirchengeschichte der Pfalz, 4 vols. (Speyer: Pilger Verlag, 1936– 1964), vol. 3–II, 200–201. 18 See, e.g., the eyewitness account by H. Schnock, “Aufzeichnungen eines Haarener Kirchenbuches aus den Kriegsjahren 1792–1795,” Aus Aachens Vorzeit. Mittheilungen des Vereins für Kunde der Aachener Vorzeit 10, no. 3 (1897): 36–37, cited by Blanning, “The Role of Religion,” 205. 19 For a similar paradigm in another war see, Barbara Donagan, “Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War,” Past & Present 118 (February 1988): 73–74. 20 Nigel Aston, The French Revolution, 1789–1804: Authority, Liberty and the Search for Stability (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 163–164. 21 Alfred Minke, Entre Meuse, Rhin et Moselle (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), 91–106, and 144–197; idem, “La vie religieuse dans le département de l’Ourthe de 1797 à 1802,” in Pratiques religieuses, mentalités et spiritualités dans l’Europe révolutionnaire (1770–1820), ed. Bernard Plongeron (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), 68. 22 Henri Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique des origines à nos jours, 7 vols. (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1920–1932), vol. 6, 41. 23 Carl, “Religion and the Experience of War,” 225–226. 24 For this and the following see, Alfred Minke, “Religion, révolution et contrerévolution en Belgique et en Rhénanie,” in Histoire du christianisme 10: Les défis de la modernité, 1750–1840, ed. Bernard Plongeron (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997), 435, and 437–438. 25 Hansgeorg Molitor, “La vie religieuse populaire en Rhénanie française, 1794– 1815,” in Pratiques religieuses, mentalités et spiritualités dans l’Europe révolutionnaire (1770–1820), ed. Bernard Plongeron (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), 62. 26 Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, 2. 27 Claude Langlois, “La fin des guerres de Religion: La disparition de la violence religieuse en France au 19e siècle,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 3–16. 28 See Philip Dwyer, Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 438–441. 29 Minke, “La vie religieuse,” 69. 30 Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 230; Blanning, French Revolution in Germany, 237. 31 William Beik, “The Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution,” Past & Present 197, no. 1 (2007): 77. 32 Michael Broers, Napoleon’s Other War: Bandits, Rebels and Their Pursuers in the Age of Revolutions (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 45. 33 L. de Lanzac de Laborie, La domination française en Belgique: Directoire–Consulat– Empire 1795–1814, 2 vols. (Paris: Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1895), vol. 1, 74–86; Robert Devleeshouwer, “Le cas de la Belgique,” Occupants, Occupés, 1792–1815: Colloque de Bruxelles 29 et 30 janvier 1968 (Brussels: Université libre de Bruxelles, 1969), 56–57. 34 Carl, “Religion and the Experience of War,” 227–228.

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  49 35 John A. Davis, “The Neapolitan Revolution of 1799,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4, no. 3 (1999); Dora M. Dumont, “Rural Society and Crowd Action in Bologna, c. 1796–c. 1831,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (2005). 36 Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 472. 37 Giovanni Assereto, “I ‘Viva Maria’ nella Repubblica Ligure,” Studi Storici 39, no. 2 (April 1998): 468; John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions (1780–1860) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 108. 38 For the following see, Aston, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 239–240. 39 Blanning, “The Role of Religion,” 204. 40 Antonio Lucareli, La Puglia nel Risorgimento: la rivoluzione del 1799 (Bari: Unknown Publisher, 1934), cited in: Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany, 214. 41 Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany, 235–239. 42 Félix Bouvier, “La révolte de Pavie (23–26 mai 1796),” Revue Historique de la Révolution française 2, no. 8 (1911): 534. 43 T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London: Arnold, 1996), 167. 44 Michel Molières, Guerra a cuchillo: La Guerilla pendant la guerre d’indépendance espagnole, 1808–1813 (Paris: Publibook, 2002), 35. 45 Gabriele Turi, Viva Maria: la reazione alle riforme leopoldine, 1790–1799 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1969), 310–312. 46 Alfred Millet, “Le culte clandestin en pays wallon et les ‘lettres tombeés du ciel’ (1797–1799),” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 84 (1989): 701. 47 Jacques Vital Belmas, Journaux des sièges faits ou soutenus par les Français dans la péninsule de 1807 à 1814, 4 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot Frères, 1836–1837), vol. 2, 493–494. 48 Marius Michaud, La Contre-Révolution dans le canton de Fribourg: 1789–1815: doctrine, propagande et action (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1978), 231–235; Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany, 226–230; Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy, 17; Cadet, Honneur et violences, 184–188. 49 Broers, The Politics of Religion, 17. 50 F. Gunther Eyck, Loyal Rebels: Andreas Hofer and the Tyrolean Uprising of 1809 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 14. 51 Mario Rosa, “Dans les Républiques-Sœurs d’Italie,” in Histoire du christianisme, ed. Plongeron, vol. 10, 453. 52 Callahan, Church, Politics and Society in Spain, 91. 53 Jean-René Aymes, “Le discours clérical contre-révolutionnaire en Espagne (1789–1795),” in Les révolutions ibériques et ibéro-américaines à l’aube du 19e siècle (Paris: Presses du CNRS, 1991). 54 William J. Callahan, Church, Politics and Society in Spain, 1750–1874 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 89. 55 Eastmann, “Soldiers, Priests and the Nation”. 56 Jean-Marc Lafon, “Justices d’exception napoléoniennes, militaire et civile, dans l’Espagne occupée: l’exemple de l’Andalousie (1810–1812),” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 13, no. 2 (2009): 74–75; Isabelle Renaudet, “Mourir en Espagne: ‘garrot vil’ et exécution capitale dans l’Espagne contemporaine,” in L’exécution capitale. Une mort donnée en spectacle XVIe–XXe siècles, eds. Régis Bertrand and Anne Carol (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Univesité de Provence, 2003); Robert Muchembled, Le temps des supplices. De l’obéissance sous les rois absolus, XVe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), 115–122.

50  Philip Dwyer 57 Cadet, Honneur et violences, 312. 58 Philip Dwyer, “Violence and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Massacre, Conquest and the Imperial Enterprise,” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 2 (2013). 59 Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2004), 83–90; Barbara Beßlich, Der deutsche Napoleon-Mythos: Literatur und Erinnerung 1800–1945 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2007), 92–97. 60 Hasko Zimmer, Auf dem Altar des Vaterlands: Religion und Patriotismus in der deutschen Kriegslyrik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Thesen Verlag, 1971), 11–70; Erich Pelzer, “Die Widergeburt Deutschlands 1813 und die Dämonisierung Napoleon,” in ‘Gott mit uns’: Nation, Religion und Gewalt im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Gerd Krumeich and Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); Ute Planert, Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg: Frankreichs Kriege und der deutsche Süden: Alltag, Wahrnehmung, Deutung 1792–1841 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 336–382. 61 Paul I. Trensky, “The Year 1812 in Russian Poetry,” Slavic and East European Journal 10, no. 3 (1966): 288–289. 62 For a brief resumé see, Blanning, “The Role of Religion,” 195–197. 63 William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 64 Blanning, “The Role of Religion,” 196–197. 65 De Decadaire, resp. maandelijkse rapporten van de commissarissen van het Directoire exécutif in het departement van de Nedermaas, 1797–1800 (Leuven: Nauwelaerts, 1955), 135–136 (April 30, 1798), and 144 (May 20, 1798). 66 The image dominated portrayals of the Spanish clergy. Examples can be found in Charles Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon Guerrillas, Bandits, and Adventurers in Spain, 1808–1814 (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2004), 93–94. The role of the clergy in the guerrilla has, however, been questioned by Gérard Dufour, “Pourquoi les espagnoles prirent-ils les armes contre Napoléon?,” in Les Espagnols et Napoléon. Actes du colloque international d’Aix-en-Provence (Aixen-Provence: Université de Provence, 1984), 318–320. 67 Jean Sévillia, Le chouan du Tyrol: Andreas Hofer contre Napoléon (Paris: Perrin, 2010), 83–89; Eyck, Loyal Rebels, 29–35. 68 A point picked up on by Broers, The Politics of Religion, 3, and 7–26. 69 Clarke Garrett, “Popular Religion in the American and French Revolutions,” in Religion, Rebellion, Revolution: An Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Collection of Essays, ed. Bruce Lincoln (New York: St Martin’s, 1985); Elisabeth Wagner, “Revolution, Religiosität und Kirchen im Rheinland um 1800,” in Franzosen und Deutsche am Rhein 1789–1918–1945, eds. Peter Hüttenberger and Hansgeorg Molitor (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 1989). 70 Michael Broers, “Revolt and Repression in Napoleonic Italy, 1796–1815,” in War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815, eds. Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2010), 203. 71 Blanning, “The Role of Religion,” 202–203. 72 See, e.g., Davis, Naples and Napoleon, 101. 73 See, Philippe Bourdin and Philippe Boutry, “L’Église catholique en Révolution: l’historiographie récente,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 355, no. 1 (2009): 11–12. 74 See, e.g., Claude Langlois, “Religion, culte ou opinion religieuse: la politique des révolutionnaires,” Revue Française de Sociologie 30, no. 3/4 (1989); Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 180–203.

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  51 75 Roger Price, The Church and the State in France, 1789–1870: ‘Fear of God Is the Basis of Social Order’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 23. 76 David Andress, “‘A Ferocious and Misled Multitude’: Elite Perceptions of Popular Action from Rousseau to Robespierre,” in Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson, eds. Malcolm Crook, William Doyle, and Alan Forrest (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Peter McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 174–176, on the other hand, points out that many Jacobins, including Robespierre, formally opposed dechristianization and intolerance.

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54  Philip Dwyer Muchembled, Robert. Le temps des supplices. De l’obéissance sous les rois absolus, XVe–XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Armand Colin, 1992. Pelzer, Erich. “Die Widergeburt Deutschlands 1813 und die Dämonisierung Napoleon.” In ‘Gott mit uns’: Nation, Religion und Gewalt im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Gerd Krumeich and Hartmut Lehmann, 135–156. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Pirenne, Henri. Histoire de Belgique des origines à nos jours, 7 vols. Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1920–1932. Planert, Ute. Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg: Frankreichs Kriege und der deutsche Süden: Alltag, Wahrnehmung, Deutung, 1792–1841. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007. Price, Roger. The Church and the State in France, 1789–1870: ‘Fear of God Is the Basis of Social Order’. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Renaudet, Isabelle. “Mourir en Espagne: ‘garrot vil’ et exécution capitale dans l’Espagne contemporaine.” In L’exécution capitale. Une mort donnée en spectacle XVIe–XXe siècles, edited by Régis Bertrand and Anne Carol, 83–106. Aix-enProvence: Publications de l’Univesité de Provence, 2003. Rosa, Mario. “Dans les Républiques-Sœurs d’Italie.” In Histoire du christianisme 10: Les défis de la modernité, 1750–1840, edited by Bernard Plongeron, 445–453. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997. Rowe, Michael. From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780– 1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Semmel, Stuart. Napoleon and the British. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2004. Sévillia, Jean. Le chouan du Tyrol: Andreas Hofer contre Napoléon. Paris: Perrin, 2010. Stamer, Ludwig. Kirchengeschichte der Pfalz, 4 vols. Speyer: Pilger Verlag, 1936–1964. Tackett, Timothy. Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Tackett, Timothy. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Taylor, Allen Ann. “Religion and Gender in Modern German History: A Historiographical Perspective.” In Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography, edited by Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert, 190–207. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Trensky, Paul I. “The Year 1812 in Russian Poetry.” Slavic and East European Journal 10, no. 3 (1966): 283–302. Turi, Gabriele. Viva Maria: la reazione alle riforme leopoldine, 1790–1799. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1969. Verhaegen, Paul. La Belgique sous la domination française, 5 vols. Brussels: Goemaere, 1923–1929. Vital, Belmas Jacques. Journaux des sièges faits ou soutenus par les Français dans la péninsule de 1807 à 1814, 4 vols. Paris: Firmin-Didot Frères, 1836–1837. Wagner, Elizabeth. “Revolution, Religiosität und Kirchen im Rheinland um 1800.” In Franzosen und Deutsche am Rhein 1789–1918–1945, edited by Peter Hüttenberger and Hansgeorg Molitor, 267–288. Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 1989.

Religion and Violence during Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars  55 Woell, Edward J. Small-Town Martyrs: Religious Revolution and Counterrevolution in Western France, 1774–1914. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006. Zemon Davis, Natalie. “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France.” Past & Present 59 (May 1973): 51–91. Zimmer, Hasko. Auf dem Altar des Vaterlands: Religion und Patriotismus in der deutschen Kriegslyrik des 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Thesen Verlag, 1971.

2

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”* Violence, Religion, and Counterrevolution in Restoration Spain Mary Vincent

The political fault lines of nineteenth-century Europe reflected the twin poles of revolution and reaction. After the French Revolution, religion served as both a revolutionary target and a counterrevolutionary cause, the flag around which the like-minded could rally. From the Vendée revolt to the Spanish Civil War, religion and counterrevolution were firmly intertwined, regularly invoking the language of ‘crusade’. Scholars such as Claude Langlois see this as part of “a transfer of sacrality” and the eventual subsuming of religious conflict into wider political affairs.1 Others, including the present author, find this collapsing of difference unconvincing. Theological and devotional developments do not necessarily mirror political change and – as this chapter argues – they should not be reduced to an instrumental politicization. There is no doubt that the struggles around secularization blurred the boundaries between the spiritual and the political. As delineated by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, conflicts between clericals and secularists dominated nineteenth-century European politics. The ‘culture wars’ developed techniques of mass mobilization, using meetings, demonstrations, and pilgrimages to show the sheer numbers of the devout or, indeed, their opponents.2 The use of religion for political ends is fundamental to the very notion of ‘culture wars’ and dominates the Spanish historiography, which emphasizes a bifurcated Catholic nation and its Republican counterpart.3 Religion had, of course, long been used as a means of expressing enmity. Under Joseph Bonaparte, for example, the defense of religion rallied Spaniards against an iconoclastic invader, though the liberal-Catholic division revived during the civil war of 1833–1840. The legitimist struggle of the pretender Don Carlos in this first Carlist War aided an easy identification between reaction and the clergy. Tales of monastic bomb-making fueled anticlerical feeling and, in July 1834, 78 male religious were massacred in Madrid and their convents were attacked.

*  The Letters of St Margaret Mary Alacoque, trans. Clarence A. Herbst SJ (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1954) 91.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-4

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  57 Such massacres were not seen again in Spain for a century. But during the Civil War of 1936–1939, anticlerical violence occurred on an unanticipated scale as the Church was singled out to bear the sins of the old order. Religious personnel were made into scapegoats in exactly the sense identified by René Girard.4 Though priest-killing was associated primarily with civil war, iconoclasm, arson, and attacks on property were more frequent. Physical assault and iconoclasm must be distinguished from legislative attempts at secularization, which often included the expropriation of property and the removal of religious symbols from public space. But periods of legislative radicalism, notably during the sexenio revolucionario or sexenio democrático (1868–1874) and the Second Republic (1931–1936) provoked physical assaults on church buildings, as a general strike did in the Barcelona Tragic Week (1909). Loss of life was rare during these episodes of ‘church-burning’ but the venting of radical anger was clear, whether directed against ‘friars’ in the 1840s, Jesuits as in 1868, or simply convents, as in 1873 and 1909. The Church had no shortage of champions. Religion was one of the fault lines of civil war, which punctuated Spain’s political life for over a century. Carlist rebellion broke out again in 1846 and, after another full-scale civil war in 1872–1876, the Carlist militias fought their final battles for General Franco. Like its close counterparts Portuguese Miguelism and French Legitimism, Carlism was characterized by nostalgia, reaction, and integrist Catholicism. It survived as, in Jordi Canal’s words, “a reactionary amalgam”, which allowed it to revive periodically, including in the 1930s.5 As heirs to a long tradition of antiliberal Catholic monarchism – often passed down, like the militias’ red berets, from father to son – Carlists had an unassailable sense of the past. Such patterning was strong – not for nothing was Carlism also called Traditionalism – but it was by no means unique. Protagonists in ‘religious violence’ – whether assailants or assaulted – were profoundly aware of earlier events. The past shaped both the present and the future, not least because eschatological and theological understandings of religious and iconoclastic violence persisted. Catholicism and Counterrevolution The theological underpinning of counterrevolution is not a subject that has received much attention in the historiography. But, as Carlism was only ever a minority position and the Church was everywhere divided between conservatives and liberals, it is curious that the notion of the Catholic nation so dominates the Spanish historiography. For some, religion came to be intrinsic to citizenship and co-terminous with patriotism; to others, it was part of a discarded national past. This historical emphasis on the parallel

58  Mary Vincent development of liberal and Catholic ideas of the nation echoes the ‘culture wars’ paradigm, which easily frames episodes of civil strife such as the sexenio. These turbulent years between the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1868, the First Republic (1873–1874) and the Bourbon restoration in 1875 were initially little concerned with religion. But the abdication of Queen Isabel II – an unpopular queen closely identified with the Church – was greeted with attempts at secularization, at both popular and parliamentary level. A Claretian priest was killed in Tarragona, though attacks on clergy were otherwise rare. Violence against property, including the desecration of images, was far more common, though always local in character. Many places, including Valencia, escaped entirely, while in Granada and the Canaries members of the clergy collaborated with the new authorities. In other areas, including Barcelona and Seville, revolutionary local juntas pushed through radical change, expelling the Jesuits and other religious orders, introducing civil marriage and burial, closing parishes, and secularizing, or even demolishing, church buildings. For some Catholics, these episodes were simply ‘proof’ of the Satanic nature of the atheist enemy and the cosmological nature of the underpinning struggle. A classic example is Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880–1882), which depicted the sexenio as a single “revolution”, driven by a desire to extirpate Catholicism from Spain.6 The enemy was timeless; the revolution recurring. Menéndez Pelayo had no interest in differentiating the reformist and republican periods or distinguishing the constitutional separation of Church and State from the ‘war on God’ waged by radical secularists. Rather, his conviction that the anti-Spanish enemy was on the march and that its target was religion – and, as a byproduct, social order, class harmony, and private property – set the tone for conservative nationalism in Spain. To him, the disorder of the First Republic ‘proved’ the antireligious intent of the ‘revolution’, now understood as a single, conspiratorial force. A scholar of great range but no particular originality, Menéndez Pelayo’s influence lay in his vision of Spanish history, which codified an understanding of Catholic unity as the essence of Spanish nationhood. His clear depiction of antagonistic Catholic and Republican national projects illustrates why the ‘culture wars’ paradigm has proved so popular in providing an explanatory model for the history of the Bourbon Restoration (1875–1923). But the latter’s constitutional system was parliamentary monarchy and Catholics were required to respect – or at least acknowledge – liberal institutions. Differences were apparent even during the sexenio, when freedom of worship, introduced in the short-lived 1869 Constitution, was excoriated by ‘integrists’, but supported as a ‘lesser evil’ by various conservative groups and Catholic thinkers.

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  59 Integrism lay behind the trenchant vision of the primacy of the Church promulgated by Pius IX (1846–1878). Although modified politically by Leo XIII (1878–1903), this broad integrist position remained definitional until Vatican II, despite the ‘accidentalist’ stance that maintained Catholics were ‘indifferent’ to the form of regime. This recognition of liberal constitutionalism under the defense of the ‘lesser evil’ represented a genuine attempt at accommodation with the secular authorities, and historians of the ‘Catholic nation’ are careful to delineate a variety of political and religious positions. However, the binary structure of the ‘culture wars’ is both polarizing and homogenizing, easily enveloping various historical positions to leave little space for the differences between and within them. The result is often simply to incorporate the religious question within a left–right paradigm, a problem exacerbated in the partisan nature of the Spanish case. Spain was not alone in having both ‘integrist’ and (comparatively) liberal forms of Catholicism. Struggles between liberals and conservatives characterized all confessional groups in the late nineteenth century. In Spain, however, the weakness of the State precluded any accommodation with parliamentary liberalism. Idiosyncratic political options persisted, notably anarchism on the one hand and Carlism on the other, both of which accepted violence as a means of controlling, purifying, and remaking society. Anarcho-syndicalism revived the revolutionary tradition; Carlism preserved an intransigent counterrevolutionary position. Unsurprisingly, the rhetorical and print-driven ‘culture wars’ were sporadically punctuated by urban conflict. Indeed, there was a relationship between violence and print. The anticlerical riots – a mobile, fluid form of protest – that spread across Spain in 1901 were triggered by the widely reported ‘Ubao Case’, which hinged on a young woman’s right to enter a convent without her mother’s consent. The febrile atmosphere was enhanced by Benito Pérez Galdós’s play Electra. On opening night, as the hero thinks of burning down the convent walls to rescue his girlfriend, a box of matches was thrown from the gallery, with shouts of “Do it now!” Riots followed, with arson attempts and anti-Jesuit protests, often including stoning the residencies, in cities throughout Spain. The clerical enemy, first seen as Carlist, was now, in a form that owed much to fiction as well as polemic, defined as Jesuit. The underlying logic of the ‘culture wars’ suggests rhetorical and symbolic conflict replaced physical confrontation, but the chronology of ‘religious violence’ was not linear. Episodes recurred, with different explanations – as in the shift from Carlist ‘friars’ to Jesuits – but similar patterns of action, specifically attacks on convents. The Barcelona ‘Tragic Week’ of 1909 was a spontaneous mass outbreak of anticlerical violence targeted on church property. Though it began as a general strike called in protest at the call-up to the colonial wars in Morocco, the Tragic Week spiraled into anticlerical violence against the

60  Mary Vincent wishes of the strike leaders. Forty-nine arson attacks affected at least 30 convents and 21 churches, though law courts, the houses of the rich, and financial institutions were left alone.7 Like churches, these were easy targets, undefended, easy to identify, and, in Marxian terms, ‘unproductive’. But the violence of the Tragic Week centered on church property, not on exploitative capitalism, and it confirmed arson as the anticlerical weapon of choice. Violence against objects and buildings characterized the Spanish sexenio and the Paris Commune, as well as the Portuguese, Mexican, and Russian Revolutions, and the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. ‘Religious violence’ persisted, and the intellectual and cultural origins of its explosion during the Tragic Week and Civil War require explanation. As the historiography shows, Spain is one of the countries most often understood in terms of the secular/liberal-Catholic divide. Yet, the experience of ‘religious violence’ was in fact symbiotic; neither side could have sustained their position – or the moral certainties that went with it – without the other. Menéndez Pelayo’s simplified and trenchant history of the sexenio is a clear example of how the representation of past events transmitted certain ideas and understandings. This ‘pattern of the past’ determined not only revolutionary praxis but also counterrevolutionary response. Violence drew heavily on patterns of the past, both the historical past of revolution and war and the transcendental past in the key tropes of integrist Catholic theology. The chronological pattern of such violence was not linear; religious belief must hold to ideas of the eternal and a cosmology beyond human time. This was intrinsic to the Catholic counterrevolution. There is no doubt that, after 1789, revolutionary iconoclasm factored into both anticlerical and Catholic behavior, but the transformation of nineteenth-century Catholicism with its emphasis on sin and sacrifice was equally important. This brand of integrist Catholicism was never politically dominant. But it transformed Catholic religiosity, producing the most popular and widespread devotions ever seen in the Catholic Church, within which the language and theology of sacrifice, violence, and mutilation was deeply embedded. Political Theology and the Primacy of Suffering According to Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853), “every political question always contains a great theological question”.8 This position exemplifies and explains ‘integrism’. What appeared to be secular or ideological struggles were, in fact, part of a permanent struggle between good and evil, the Church – operating through human obedience – and Satan – operating through human rebellion. The origins of political revolution were thus not political at all: the struggle was, in fact, eschatological. Such an interpretation was familiar to believers, for whom interactions with the supernatural were part of the human world. Whether spectacular events such as the

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  61 Lourdes apparitions (1858), or the ordinary ‘miracles’ that fueled a Catholic culture of vows, promises, and interactions with saints, all manifestations of divine power were demonstrations of immanence. Both the divine and the diabolic could manifest themselves in human history at any point. The actions of anticlericals were simple evidence of the continuing efforts of the forces of evil, a recurring battle in the struggle between good and ill. In political terms, the origins of ‘integrism’ lay in the French Revolution, which had as profound a transformative effect on its opponents as it did on those sympathetic to its cause. Among the counterrevolutionary traditions to come out of the French Revolution – the most prominent of which was Burkean conservatism – was that commonly labeled ‘theocratic’. This umbrella term encompasses both the conservative and broadly Thomist teachings of Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) and the radical Augustinian thought of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821). Both men held that the fundamental problems and questions of the day – and of any other – were, at base, religious. However, there were significant differences between the two thinkers, as there were between their pupils, Jaime Balmes i Upià (1810–1848) and Cortés. Balmes, a Thomist thinker and ordained priest, saw some need for toleration – that is freedom of worship – while Cortés trenchantly maintained the notion of Catholic unity. No matter how pressing or difficult the circumstances, the primacy of religion could not be compromised. In radical contrast to Bonald, de Maistre’s counterrevolutionary thought disregarded any theory of natural law and rested on an Augustinian notion of original sin. As humanity was intrinsically corrupt, violence was essential to social cohesion. This was sacrificial violence: blood must be met with blood and criminal, dissolvent violence combated by punitive, judicial violence. Only the executioner would ensure social cohesion. In essence, de Maistre and Cortés reworked the Augustinian theological tradition of the sinfulness of humanity: rationalism is an illusion; human society will only be saved from chaos by submission to an external authority. De Maistre’s theories of redemptive and sacrificial violence thus formed the basis of Cortés’s ‘political theology’. The sacrifice of Christ was both the culmination and the source of all others, repeated ceaselessly since ‘the just Abel’ accepted death at the hand of his brother ‘the fratricide Cain’. All men who came since belonged to one of two camps: “Namely the city of God and the city of the world”.9 This explicitly Augustinian framework, taken directly from The City of God, emphasized that original sin – the sin of Adam and Eve – was inescapable. Ultimately, the endless repetition of redemptive violence would lead creation back to unity and order in the Divine, purifying evil. Until this apocalyptic point, however, the cycle of sacrifice would continue, as “those imperfect and ineffective sacrifices contain virtually in themselves, on the one hand, the dogma of original sin, that of its transmission and that of solidarity and, on

62  Mary Vincent the other, that of reversibility and that of substitution”.10 Sacrificial violence rested on “intertwined notions of substitution and reversibility”; as in Christ’s passion, one life could be offered for another and innocence atone for guilt. Only blood would wash away original sin; the debts in this “sacred economy” were thus paid in blood, the “principle of exchange”.11 The effect on the contemporary theological imagination was profound. The expiatory cults that transformed European Catholicism over the nineteenth century, took the violence externalized in the de Maistrean figure of the executioner and sublimated it through the notion of “vicarious suffering” or “mystical substitution” whereby suffering was given freely for the salvation of another.12 The most familiar, and the most significant, of these devotions was that to the Heart of Jesus, which was the main vehicle for integrist Catholicism. The cult incorporated integrist ideas and values into mainstream devotional practice, so achieving a far wider purchase than integrism’s political forms. The movement cannot be understood simply as a political phenomenon, an unyielding current of Carlism, confined to the Partido Integrista (Integrist Party), founded by Ramón Nocedal (1842–1907) in 1885 from his position as editor of the daily newspaper El Siglo Futuro, established by his father Cándido (1821–1885). Uncompromising in its refusal to countenance any form of liberalism, cultural pluralism, or religious liberty, political integrism survived – nominally, in the party’s case – into the 1930s, but only as a minority current within a Carlist movement badly affected by dynastic splits. It remained, in effect, a stubborn minority group of aristocratic men. The influence of integrism is usually explained in terms of the press, primarily El Siglo Futuro, which survived until the Civil War with no noticeable change in editorial line. The Nocedals were profoundly influenced by the thought of Juan Donoso Cortés; only the religious authority of Catholic absolutism – including dictatorship – was capable of taming humanity’s corrupt and bestial nature. It is thus no coincidence that, when El Siglo Futuro adopted a graphic masthead in 1912, it did so on the feast of the Sacred Heart, emblazoning the image over the legend “I will reign in Spain”. Henceforth, the Sacred Heart would preside over Integrism’s struggle to restore the Catholic unity of the State and defeat “liberalism, the apocalyptic monster whose mouth opens […] to blaspheme”.13 The minority current of political integrism – a radical and intransigent reactionary monarchism – fed into a much wider but equally intransigent, devotional culture that became deeply embedded in mainstream Catholicism. The ‘reign of Christ’ symbolized the rejection of liberalism and modern error; it thus represented an uncompromisingly integrist position within a hugely popular and entirely mainstream devotion and it was avidly publicized by the Society of Jesus.14 The founder of the modern cult of the Sacred Heart, St Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690; beatified 1864, canonized 1920), belonged to a line of female mystics whose visionary experiences centered on the externalized

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  63 heart of Jesus. Vicarious substitution lay at the center both of Alacoque’s mystical experiences and of the cult she established. The Sacred Heart was her means of incorporation into Christ’s Passion; sharing pain would gratify Jesus and atone for the sins of humanity. Self-starvation, corporeal ‘discipline’, and visceral acts of mortification were her tools in a search for an annihilation of self, symbolized in the visionary experience when she exchanged hearts with Jesus. In this ‘heroic self-discipline’, she both emulated and joined earlier female mystics whose stories both denied the body and made it central: mortified flesh became ecstatic experience, rewarded by a deeply personal inter-relationship with Jesus, as when Christ placed her heart on his own, saying: “There my well-beloved […]. That will be your heart from now on […]. But I shall cast the shadow of my cross […] so deeply it will bring more humiliation and suffering than relief ”.15 Alacoque was the exemplar of a “victim soul”.16 The cult she founded was an invitation to partake in the suffering of Christ, with the crucifixion as the ultimate act of redemptive sacrifice. The somatic, affective spirituality it rested on was a female one, and the call to vicarious suffering – particularly at the heroic level epitomized by Alacoque – was similarly gendered.17 Both rested upon embodiment, not only the suffering experienced by bodily flesh but also the contemplation of the incarnate God. Indeed, Alacoque did not simply contemplate the Christ’s body; she entered it, ‘fetching’ his heart to the outside and manifesting its pain in her own flesh. Her visionary experiences were performative, joining with Christ in his passion because suffering was a means to personal knowledge of God. The “sufferer became an alterChristus” and their pain, because pleasing to God, was redemptive.18 The same tropes – even, perhaps, the same script – may be seen in the story of Spain’s own ‘prophet of the Sacred Heart’, the young Jesuit priest, Bernardo de Hoyos (1711–1735), whose story only became widely known when his Life was edited and republished by Eugenio de Uriarte SJ (1842– 1909).19 De Hoyos’s visions suited Uriarte’s times even more than his own. Famously, in the ‘great promise’ of May 1733, he saw the Heart of Jesus and heard the words: ‘I will reign in Spain and with more veneration than elsewhere’. From the 1880s, these words served as the clarion call for the “social reign of Jesus Christ”, the integrist vision of restoring the Church’s ‘rights’ and ensuring the primacy of religion in society, politics, morals, culture, in short in every area of life.20 While the ‘great promise’ was to eclipse virtually everything else about de Hoyos’s story, it was only one of his many ecstatic experiences. Invariably, he played a female role, feeling the Virgin Mary’s birth pangs or addressing Christ as a lover: “Hurry my friend, my dove, my beauty and come”.21 His was also the path of the victim soul, emulating Rose of Lima who, like Alacoque, used her own body as a tool of redemptive suffering. This sacrificial assumption of bodily pain was rewarded with a union of his heart with

64  Mary Vincent Jesus’s, just as Alacoque had experienced: “He enclosed and covered my miserable heart within his own” with “the sweetness, the joys, softness and heavenly delights that flooded in my poor heart submerged in that divine Heart, ocean of fire of love”.22 The mimetic elements of de Hoyos’s story are quite clear, as are the seers’ experiences of the “erotics of pain”, that is rapturous and ecstatic union with Christ’s corporeal presence.23 This was not lost on many of the Church’s adversaries who pathologized mystical experiences as ‘hysteria’, mobilizing the dichotomy of science and religion in a purportedly rational medical diagnosis. Hagiographers also found some elements of these stories troubling: even de Hoyos’s superiors had forbidden him from imitating Rose of Lima’s “more extraordinary penances”.24 His story remained problematic, and his beatification cause, opened in 1895, only succeeded in 2010. De Hoyos’s hagiographers emphasized his youth, purity, and piety; he never disobeyed a rule. Suffering simply attested to his sanctity; his mortified body, with its troubling ecstasies, became “the living tabernacle of divine adoration”.25 In the cases of both de Hoyos and Alacoque, visionary experiences were externalized to become a mode of religious practice, even though their stories ensured that a somatic and sensual spiritual femininity, focused on ecstatic communion with the body of Christ, persisted in the cult of the Sacred Heart. Indeed, that these stories existed enabled de Hoyos to follow Alacoque’s example so closely and allowed both of them to mimic previous mystics. The task of hagiography is not simply to commemorate the saint, or to record their spiritual lives; it is also to textualize and so tame them, “to reshape the dangerous real-life saints and align them with conventional models of sainthood”.26 Though the complexities of these stories persist in the texts – and so were available to those who cared to look – Aviad Kleinberg makes the point that the creation of a saint brings with it a new set of expectations and devotional norms. It is no coincidence that Alacoque’s beatification in 1864 inspired a new intensity in the cult of the Sacred Heart as well as a step-change to her own. The following year her body was taken from the Visitation convent for display in the chapel at Paray-le-Monial. In the same year, Pius IX rededicated the town church – now a basilica – to the Sacred Heart; organized pilgrimages began in June 1873, continuing under Jesuit direction until 1878. Centered on the “chapel of the apparitions”, they provided an immersive experience that played on the senses to create a sense of “deep emotion”.27 The focal point was Alacoque’s glass casket, which pilgrims were encouraged to touch with rosaries and other devotional objects. Unsurprisingly, then, the second high point of the Paray pilgrimage was the second centenary of Alacoque’s death in 1890. From 1889–1901, the numbers of pilgrims rivaled those seen in the 1870s, boosted by the tenth international Eucharistic congress, held at Paray in 1897.

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  65 The Paray pilgrimage had a markedly monarchist and legitimist character, as did the devotional practices around vicarious suffering more generally. The language of the Sacred Heart was that of kingship – though Alacoque’s own writings speak more of enslavement – and the cult’s monarchical underpinnings are well established. Promulgated by the Vatican, the devotion spread through the universal church in an Ultramontane age when the ‘kingpope’ was besieged on all sides. As in the Vendée, Carlist militias went into battle in the 1870s wearing the Sacred Heart on handsewn badges known as détentes. Such performative actions established the Sacred Heart as both badge and talisman and, like the pilgrimages, introduced a devotional practice that could be emulated by the ordinary faithful. Key to this was the Eucharist – the ‘king made sacrament’ – symbol and recreation of Christ’s original sacrifice. Union with Christ through the sacrament, worthiness to receive it, and offenses given to the consecrated host were constant themes. Alacoque’s visionary experience had introduced a series of devotional practices, some of which centered on the Eucharist. Easily repeatable symbolic actions – including consecrations, Holy Hours, and First Fridays – enabled devotion to the Sacred Heart to become a mode of being, a habitus, symbolized by vows. As Alacoque wrote: Belonging wholly to the Sacred Heart […] is the way to make sure of our salvation, which is so much in peril in this life of misery and corruption. But when we are completely consecrated and pledged to this adorable Heart […] Our Lord takes care of us […].28 Easily understood as a shortcut to heaven, these gestures were repeated and ritualized as the cult atoned for the sins of the world through mimetic pious practices and good works. In an age of mechanical reproduction, the cult served as a tally of expiatory acts, making amends for the offenses given to God. It also took familiar votive practices from the shrines and churches of rural Europe and modernized them, through the Apostleship of Prayer, a universal confraternity established in each parish, and its bulletin, the Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. First published in France in 1861 as the Messenger du Cœur de Jésus, it spread to 45 countries and appeared in 35 languages, invariably under Jesuit direction. In Spain, translations of the French edition appeared from 1866, and in 1883, it became an independent Jesuit bulletin.29 Like the other versions, each issue contained a “Treasury” that listed the number of “acts of love”, “acts of patience”, masses heard, rosaries said, acts of mortification, and other quotidian pious acts their readers had accomplished. These lists recorded hundreds of thousands of such acts in any individual issue, illustrating how, as Catholic orthodoxy insisted, grace could be earned and salvation worked for. Freed from the geographical mooring of specific shrines

66  Mary Vincent and images, these votive practices and spiritual offerings created an “economy of grace”, established through promises and intercession.30 In contrast to Maistrean thought, where the debts in this ‘sacred economy’ were paid in blood, the devotional apparatus of the Sacred Heart cult substituted expiatory gestures and small acts of piety, usually of mortification. But these mechanical practices popularized an understanding of substitutionary violence as the principal means of reparation throughout Catholic society. The nature of the Sacred Heart devotion thus reinforced the Augustinian emphasis on the corrupt and fallen nature of the world, acting as a vehicle for Maistrean ideas of sacrifice. The Messenger made the Sacred Heart the most familiar Christological cult in the Catholic world. In marked contrast to the seers, the cult emphasized ordinary, unremarkable acts, amassing them in great quantity as a means of sanctifying the world. Its ubiquity made it a potent vehicle for the transmission of an integrist world view, while the emphasis not just on the hurts but on the wounds of Jesus’s heart gave a Christological emphasis to a Catholic culture already “awash with redemptive blood”.31 The effect was not only to preserve but also to transform integrism, which, through the cult of the Sacred Heart, transcended its narrow, legitimist, and monarchist origins. The preface to the 1890 Spanish biography of Alacoque, for example, referred to the “Satanic efforts” made by the French Revolution “to smother the devotion”, a time when, “simply wearing the sacred image on your breast was enough to condemn to death those who wore it” as by a “mysterious instinct the Revolution recognized this cult as its greatest enemy”.32 The Enemy at the Gates: Anticlerical Violence and its Effects Integrist Catholicism fed off conspiracy theories, shadowy antagonists, and tales of occult forces, but so too did anticlericalism. Each needed an enemy whose nefarious deeds fueled an imaginary popularized by print culture. Saints’ lives, newspapers, and serial fiction preserved and repackaged older narratives and cultural forms in an age of mass circulation. The chronological shifts and ellipses of both clerical and anticlerical action were driven by text, as shown by both the hagiographical tradition of vicarious suffering and the anticlerical fantasy that fueled attacks on convents in Barcelona in July 1909. The Tragic Week marked a new phase in the history of anticlericalism in Spain, but it mobilized much older forms of violence. At least nine contemplative female convents were targeted, including the Hieronymites, setting for Jaume Piquet’s highly successful theatrical melodrama, La monja enterrada con vida (1886). Old ways of thinking were transmitted in various ways, including rumor, political rhetoric, and cheap print. At the Hieronymites, as elsewhere, corpses were removed from the crypts and displayed in the street as ‘evidence’

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  67 of torture and imprisonment, a common trope in the ‘nunnery tales’ that provided stock plots in the pulp fiction available in every town and city in Spain. These were not new; nunnery tales had been popular from the late eighteenth century. A century of anticlerical and anti-Catholic fiction eroticized concealment and spatial confinement; indeed, much of it was simply pornographic. Cheap print established the convent as an object of prurient fascination, and it determined not only what would be found there but also the male gaze that would reveal it. It was no coincidence that firebrand politicians exhorted their followers to “raise the veils of nuns and turn them into mothers”.33 Both popular fiction and anticlerical political rhetoric dehumanized priests – particularly Jesuits – and presented the clergy as a ‘sect’, perverse and secretive, plotting behind high convent walls. This ‘sect’ preyed on impressionable women, who were susceptible to the emotional appeal of religion, at least in the eyes of ‘rational’ Republican men. Anticlericalism was a highly gendered discourse. Anticlerical stereotypes, caricature, and melodrama migrated across urban narratives and popular fiction, to become the stock in trade of stories across the left-wing press.34 Familiarity and repetition led to this anticlerical imaginary becoming engrained. It is no coincidence that the catalyst for the 1901 riots was a stage production, or that convent tales patterned the violence of the Tragic Week. Even more strikingly, the contents and interiors of the convents were presented as ‘evidence’ of wrong-doing and perversion. To the assailants, they simply confirmed what the tropes and stereotypes of anticlerical print culture had already told them to be true. After 1909, the shattered churches and convents of Barcelona became symbols of a struggle waged between abstract forces. To some, they were clear evidence of the on-going revolutionary onslaught against religion, to be combated by expiation and an intransigent defense of the ‘rights’ of the Church. As the Messenger warned in September 1909: “Be in no doubt; this is not the first, nor will it be the last”.35 The remedy was penance, with First Fridays and special cults to the Sacred Heart offered all over Spain. A decade later, in July 1919, when King Alfonso XIII dedicated Spain to the Sacred Heart at the Cerro de los Angeles outside Madrid, these same integrist values were on full display. To others, however, the burned-out churches symbolized the struggle between progress and reaction. A series of photographic postcards by Angel Toldrà i Viazo (1857–1956) under the title ‘Sucesos de Barcelona [Events in Barcelona]’ captured this well.36 The visual tropes he employed showcase light streaming though the apertures made by collapsed roofs, melted ironwork, and shattered windows. The images are at once both descriptive and metaphorical, revealing how the act of iconoclasm lay in the ‘breaking open’ of the churches. The visual depiction of light streaming into ‘opened’ churches narrated it as a story of progress, the light of reason illuminating superstition and obscurantism. Photographs of the Tragic Week created an

68  Mary Vincent iconic memory of the incendiarism, using photography’s apparent ability to capture ‘reality’ to ‘freeze’ particular moments and so separate them from the linear pattern of events within which they had occurred. In contrast to the fulminating position of the integrists, this violent encounter through the walls of the building was seen by a few within the Church as having redemptive possibilities, most famously Joan Maragall (1860–1911) who wrote, after attending mass in a burned-out church in 1909: “Come enter in, the door is wide open! You have opened it yourselves with the fire and iron of hatred; and here you are inside the greatest Mystery of revived Love”.37 Though this was very much a minority voice, it found a resonance in the Catalan and, especially, Basque Churches, and is a useful reminder of the plurality of Catholic voices. Both regional churches remained more tolerant of cultural pluralism – preaching and providing catechesis in the local vernaculars for example – than their Castilian counterpart. A variety of positions thus persisted, even among the clergy. Bilbao was a center of Jesuit activity, particularly education and publishing, and so the very heart of integrism, but the diocesan priests tended to have a very different profile, even during the Civil War of 1936–1939. Conclusion The Tragic Week confirmed the integrist conviction that atheist revolution was the child of Satan and the destruction of religion was the end point of secularism. Menéndez Pelayo made similar arguments about the sexenio, which he blamed on the Masonic press, characterizing the parliamentary deliberations as “not a political debate but a fist fight of ungodliness and blasphemies”.38 Neither was a reasoned position. Both then and later, the disorder of the First Republic ‘proved’ the antireligious intent of the ‘revolution’, always understood as a single, conspiratorial force. But anticlerical violence, too, was driven at least as much by rumor and urban myth as by rational secularism. Throughout this rational age, older narratives and cultural norms were recirculated through cheap print and genre writing: nunnery tales on the one hand, saints’ lives on the other. The actions of both integrist Catholics and their anticlerical assailants reflected older, multilayered imaginaries. As neither the clerical nor the anticlerical position was homogenous, or even coherent, this plethora of voices continued, in print and via oral tradition, into the twentieth century. Among these voices were intransigent and irreconcilable ones. Integrism preserved a set of violent apocalyptic beliefs and familiarized them through a new set of devotional practices. Such beliefs were not, in and of themselves, sufficient to bring about violence. There is no direct causal link. Violence against – or in defense of – religious targets occurred in times of

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  69 political instability – of which Spain had many – and became murderous only under conditions of revolution and civil war. In these circumstances, politics and religion became inextricably intertwined. The political instrumentalization of religion or ‘culture wars’ is, however, only part of the story. Historians routinely ignore theology, but it is fundamental to religion; eschatological beliefs inform a religious world view. Thus, while historians no longer look to explain away the religious elements in the counterrevolutionary revolt in the Vendée, Arno Mayer depicts it as “the collision of two fanaticisms” while Simon Schama explains it in terms of “mutual demonologies” which replace “reason”.39 Essentially, religion ups the temperature, contributing to spiraling – and primordial – mechanisms of revenge, described by Mayer in mythic terms as “furies”. These analyses recognize and engage with the passions of religion but they fail to provide a means of distinguishing any one ‘religious’ – or, more accurately, politicoreligious – conflict from another. The relationship religion has with the mythic is complex, including not only ideas of the transcendent but also, in Christianity, a defined eschatology. Though contemporary rationalists denied any sense of mythic power – and so blinded themselves to religion’s most potent force – apologists made much of it. At one level, this was seen in nineteenth-century religion’s appeal to the senses, the sumptuous decoration of church interiors with their use of music, scent, and light, for example, or the mise-en-scène employed in pilgrimage sites such as Paray-le-Monial. At a deeper level, however, the imaginary power of religion resonated in origin myths around the Fall of Man, human nature, and the notion of sacrifice. These were particularly potent in calls to ‘holy war’ as taking up arms in the defense of religion demanded sacrificial violence. All crusades valorized the dead as martyrs. It is impossible to explain either the appeal or the persistence of the Maistrean world view without addressing Augustinian theology. Original sin explained the grievous and troubled state of the world in terms of immanence, while the metaphor of the ‘two cities’ was easily transposed to antagonists, whether opposing political groups or armed camps. The chronology was not linear. While the need for order and strong government theorized by Cortés and de Maistre resonated among those fearful of rapid social change, it assumed a wider appeal during episodes of disorder or conflict. These were also times of spectacular prophetic events – most famously the apparitions of the Virgin Mary – which asserted both immanence and divine power. God’s purpose was worked outside historical time and human reason. The struggle against evil was never-ending; the words of Mary were eternal truths. Despite the fame of Lourdes, the great majority of apocalyptic visions and ‘miraculous’ events remained marginal, even when not condemned by the Church. If they were to become mainstream, not only did they have to

70  Mary Vincent appeal to popular faith but they also had to be controlled. Even where pilgrimage sites became clearly associated with counterrevolution – as at Paray – the theology had to be orthodox. In doctrinal terms, and particularly after the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), this meant Thomism, and Vatican-endorsed ideas of the ‘lesser evil’ were increasingly prevalent. But the Church’s unchanging position on the primacy of religious values allowed integrism to remain in plain sight. Legitimism was a minority current in mainstream politics, but integrism dominated popular devotional culture. Augustinian reaction survived as a latent force in European politics, coded as penitence, and devotion to the Sacred Heart. Despite the suspicion of political integrism, the cult of the Sacred Heart was endorsed by the Vatican and tirelessly promulgated by the Society of Jesus. Saints are often disruptive – and mystics invariably so – but official devotion tamed their stories in such a way that the fundamental notions of penance and expiation were available to all. This normalization of sacrificial violence, and its incorporation into everyday devotional life for millions of Catholics, not only meant that Augustinian reaction survived but also that it could be accessed in extremis, as during the 1930s. These ideas – which centered on substitutionary violence as a means of ensuring the common good – were fundamental in transforming socio-political conflict into a war of religion – or crusade – when conditions were right, which, in Spain in 1936, they were. The human race was only redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice and its corrupt nature made restraint by repressive violence necessary, even imperative. At moments of crisis, the Augustinian emphasis on original sin, which was crucial to the expiatory ideas that lay ‘at the core’ of legitimism, found real resonance. Such ideas were by now highly familiar, embedded in the discourses of integrist Catholicism and repeated through the nineteenth century. Invariably, antagonists insisted that theirs was a binary struggle, homogenizing their adversary into a monstrous force that had to be expunged. There are clear parallels with Girard’s scapegoat, an element chosen to bear the sins of wider society so as to relieve – or perhaps to express – community tensions. Girard’s ideas are intentionally ahistoric, as befits a study of originary myth, and the same is also true of devotional texts. Saints may have lived their lives in historical time but their stories contained eternal truths and revelations that came directly from God. A violent rhetoric, reliant on both sacrifice and self-immolation, persisted within modern Europe’s counterrevolutionary tradition and, indeed, contributed significantly to it. Though it had only a narrow purchase in times of peace, violent attacks on religion gave it real force. The defense of religion – the call to crusade – could be accessed in time of need. Once the anticlerical massacres began in July 1936, the Spanish Civil War’s baptism as a ‘crusade’ was inevitable.

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  71 Notes 1 E.g., Claude Langlois, “La rupture entre l’Eglise catholique et la Révolution,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture: Vol 3 The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford and New York: Pergamon, 1989). 2 Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3 José Álvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2003); Manuel Suárez Cortina, Entre cirios y garrotes: política y religión en la España contemporánea, 1808–1936 (Santander and Cuenca: Ediciones Universidad Cantabria and Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2014). 4 René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 5 Jordi Canal, El Carlismo (Madrid: Alianza, 2000), 9–27. 6 Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 2 vols. (Madrid: CSIC, 1992 [1880–82]), vol. 2, 1335–1359. 7 Joaquín Romero Maura, La Rosa de Fuego: Republicanos y anarquistas: La politica de los obreros barceloneses, 1899–1909 (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1975) 515–516, 74; see also Joan Connelly Ullman, The Tragic Week: a Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 8 Juan Donoso Cortés, Ensayo sobre el Catolicismo, el Liberalismo y el Socialismo in his Obras Completas, 2 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1946), vol. 2, 347–552, at 347. 9 Cortés, Ensayo, 518–519. 10 Ibid., 521. 11 Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 36–50, 42. 12 Richard Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) esp. 106–147 and 212–218; and Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 13 El Siglo Futuro (June 14, 1912). 14 Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 15 The Autobiography of St Margaret Mary, ed. Vincent Kerns (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 44–45. 16 The English translation of her life used the phrase as a chapter heading, The Autobiography, 57–64. 17 Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood, 73–75, 197–204 and 247–250. 18 Wendy M. Wright, “Inside My Body is the Body of God: Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Tradition of Embodied Mysticism,” in The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honour of Mary Giles, ed. Robert Boenig (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 188. 19 Vida del P. Bernardo de Hoyos, de la Compañia de Jesús, ed. José Eugenio Uriarte SJ (Bilbao: El Mensajero, 1888). 20 Luis Cano, “Reinaré en España”: La mentalidad católica e la llegada de la Segunda República (Madrid: Alianza, 2000), 29–101. 21 J.B. Couderc and J.M. Tiedra SJ, El Venerable Padre Bernardo de Hoyos SJ 1733– 1933: Primer Apóstol del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús en España (Vigo: Unknown Publisher, 1933), 58.

72  Mary Vincent 22 Ibid., 176–177. 23 David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 111– 136, 117. 24 Courderc and Tiedra, El Venerable P. Bernardo de Hoyos, 164. Similarly, Alacoque’s act of eating vomit was described as “[e]lle triomphe de sa délicatesse naturelle par des actes héroiques” in a French edition (Vie de la Bienheureuse Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. Écrite par elle-même (Paray-le-Monial: Monastère de la Visitation de Sainte-Marie, 1918), and “[s]u admirable mortificación” in a Spanish one (Vida de la Bienadventurada Margarita Maria Alacoque (Madrid: Unknown Publisher, 1890), but Father Kerns left the details untranslated and in endnotes, The Autobiography, 108. 25 Guillermo Ubillos SJ, Vida del P. Bernardo F. de Hoyos de la Compañía de Jesús: Segundo centenario, 1735–1935 (Madrid: Unknown Publisher, 1935), 115. 26 Aviad Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2008), 134–141, 138. 27 Philippe Boutry and Michel Cinquin, Deux pèlerinages au XIXe siècle: Ars et Paray-le-Monial (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1980), 171–299, 204; see also Jonas, France and the Cult, 9–12. 28 Letters of St Margaret Mary, 43–44. 29 In 1915, circulation was 16–17,000, though readership was significantly higher. 30 Jonas, France and the Cult, 9–33. 31 Burton, Blood in the City, 315; Frances Lannon, Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 36–46. 32 Vida de la bienadventurada Margarita María Alacoque, xvi–xvii. Tellingly, the source given is the French Messenger of July 1879. 33 Alejandro Lerroux in 1906, cited in José Álvarez Junco, El emperador del Paralelo: Lerroux y la demagogia populista (Madrid: Síntesis, 1990), 401–404. 34 There was less coverage in the Republican press, which claimed indifference to religion, than in Socialist and Aanarchist papers, which looked to combat ‘superstition’. I am grateful to Dr James Yeoman for this analysis. 35 Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús y del Apostolado de la Oración (September 1909), 269, 277–78; Ibid. (October 1909), 365–371. 36 Ajuntament de Barcelona-Arxiu Municipal, Setmana Tràgica: crònica documental reproduces the postcards on an interactive map, accessed January 21, 2020, http://www.bcn.cat/setmanatragica/mapa.html. 37 Joan Maragall, ‘L’església creamada,’ La Veu de Catalunya (December 18, 1909). 38 Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 1339–1340, 1340. 39 Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 206–207 and 323–370, quote at 324; Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: Penguin, 1989), 693 and 697.

Bibliography Álvarez, Junco José. El emperador del Paralelo: Lerroux y la demagogia populista. Madrid: Síntesis, 1990. Álvarez, Junco José. Mater Dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus, 2003.

“To Be Consumed in Suffering for His Love”  73 Boutry, Philippe, and Michel Cinquin. Deux pèlerinages au XIXe siècle: Ars et Parayle-Monial. Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1980. Bradley, Owen. A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Burton, Richard. Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Burton, Richard. Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Canal, Jordi. El Carlismo. Madrid: Alianza, 2000. Cano, Luis. “Reinaré en España”: La mentalidad católica e la llegada de la Segunda República. Madrid: Alianza, 2000. Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Connelly, Ullman Joan. The Tragic Week: A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875– 1912. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Cortés, Juan Donoso. Ensayo sobre el Catolicismo, el Liberalismo y el Socialismo in his Obras Completas, 2 vols. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1946. Couderc, J.B., and J.M. Tiedra SJ. El Venerable Padre Bernardo de Hoyos SJ 1733– 1933: Primer Apóstol del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús en España. Vigo: Unknown Publisher, 1933. Girard, René. The Scapegoat, translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Jonas, Raymond. France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: an Epic Tale for Modern Times. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Kleinberg, Aviad. Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008. Langlois, Claude. “La rupture entre l’Eglise catholique et la Révolution.” In The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture: Vol 3 The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, 375–390. Oxford and New York: Pergamon, 1989. Lannon, Frances. Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Mayer, Arno. The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 2 vols. Madrid: CSIC, 1992 [1880–1882]. Morgan, David. The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Romero, Maura Joaquín. La Rosa de Fuego: Republicanos y anarquistas: La politica de los obreros barceloneses, 1899–1909. Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1975. Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. London: Penguin, 1989. Suárez, Cortina Manuel. Entre cirios y garrotes: política y religión en la España contemporánea, 1808–1936. Santander and Cuenca: Ediciones Universidad Cantabria and Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2014. The Autobiography of St Margaret Mary, edited by Vincent Kerns. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961.

74  Mary Vincent The Letters of St Margaret Mary Alacoque, translated by Clarence A. Herbst SJ. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co, 1954. Ubillos SJ, Guillermo, Vida del P. Bernardo F. de Hoyos de la Compañía de Jesús: Segundo centenario, 1735–1935. Madrid: Unknown Publisher, 1935. Vida de la Bienadventurada Margarita Maria Alacoque. Madrid: Unknown Publisher, 1890. Vida del P. Bernardo de Hoyos, de la Compañia de Jesús, edited by José Eugenio Uriarte SJ. Bilbao: El Mensajero, 1888. Vie de la Bienheureuse Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. Écrite par elle-même. Parayle-Monial: Monastère de la Visitation de Sainte-Marie, 1918. Wright, Wendy M. “Inside My Body is the Body of God: Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Tradition of Embodied Mysticism.” In The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honour of Mary Giles, edited by Robert Boenig, 185–192. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.

3

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium Catholics in Defiance of State Legislation, 1857–1884 Eveline G. Bouwers

Camiel De Meerleer was gravely ill. Believing him to be on death’s door, his wife Philomena sent for the vicar of Herzele, a small town in the Belgian province of East Flanders, to administer the last rites. The curate appeared instead. Knowing that the couple’s child was attending the local state school, Father Geltmeyer made his provision of the Eucharist and ritual prayers conditional on Camiel promising to either enroll the child in the new Catholic school or keep him at home. Appalled at his suggestion, Philomena retorted on her husband’s behalf: “If Our Lord has to serve in this way to coerce people, then I do not care to die this way”.1 With her defiant response to Father Geltmeyer’s threat of a death without the consolation of eternal life, Philomena challenged the subservience to the clergy shown by many of her coreligionists. Later, when to everyone’s surprise Camiel had recovered, he gave evidence to a parliamentary commission investigating public opposition to the school law of July 1, 1879, which had aimed to improve the quality of primary education in Belgium. A liberal reform project, the Law on Primary Education sought to curtail clerical influence and shift supervisory powers from the local authorities to the central government. Philomena and Camiel were not the only lay Catholics to resist clerical pressure to send their offspring to one of the 3,385 Catholic or state-independent schools set up in response to the above-mentioned law, also known as the Van Humbeeck Law after Minister of Education Pierre Van Humbeeck.2 Nor were they alone in turning away from the Church following its harsh course of action during the period between late 1878 and the end of 1880. Indeed, leading members of the Catholic Party criticized the Belgian episcopacy for alienating the faithful with directives that marked out supporters of educational reform as renegades and heretics. Few warnings were clearer than that issued by parliamentarian Charles Woeste, a Catholic convert who had cofounded the Federation of Catholic Associations. On July 4, 1882, he wrote to Archbishop Victor Dechamps of Mechelen-Brussels:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-5

76  Eveline G. Bouwers You have no idea about [the people’s] state of mind. You live at the back of your episcopal palace, detached from the people, surrounded by the pious who kneel before you without realizing what is being said in the world of the living. Well, this world is exasperated.3 Woeste would reiterate his appeal to the episcopacy to consider the feelings of lay Catholics in several other letters. The Catholic pluralism that came to the fore during the dispute over the Van Humbeeck Law reflected nineteenth-century Belgium’s political landscape. In 1830, an alliance of Catholics and Liberals had secured independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands.4 Known as Unionism, this political cooperation had promised to stabilize the fledgling nation and legitimize its existence. The alliance grew, however, increasingly unstable. While most Liberals respected the social function of religion and recognized Catholicism as integral to Belgian identity, they criticized traditional Church structures and opposed clerical influence on politics. Catholics, in turn, supported the principle of freedom as a device for protecting the Church from state intervention but they disagreed over how to deal with Liberals, with Ultramontanists opposing Unionism outright. Catholics also debated how to organize the country politically and administratively, with Constitutional Catholics seeking to consolidate local and regional authorities, in opposition to both the episcopacy and King Léopold I. Initially, the liberal–Catholic coalition had been cemented by a common adversary: The Netherlands. But when Belgium gained international recognition in 1839, a crucial pillar of Unionist policy crumbled. The parties fell to ongoing wrangling over the constitution and by the early 1840s, during the first school-reform debates, deep divisions surmounted. It came to a first split when the Liberal Party won the elections in 1847. Its ministers subsequently strove to strengthen the parliamentary system and limit the political influence of the clergy, aided by freemasonry and a burgeoning press that spread liberal ideas. Catholics followed suit with their own mobilization efforts. Unionism finally collapsed in follow up to conflicts surrounding the Law on Charitable Institutions of 1857, which permitted religious institutions and actors to accept donations, inheritances, and bequests. Aggravating the conflict over the boundaries of the Catholic–clerical sphere were two major rifts running through Belgian society: the social-economic divide, that is, the gulf between urban and rural society or between the property-owning and working classes, and the cultural–linguistic divide between the Flemishspeaking and the French-speaking populations. While nineteenth-century Belgium’s flourishing Catholic scene and the political antagonism between Catholics and Liberals have both been the subject of much inquiry, little has been published on the public’s role in religious–political conflicts, including the use of crowd action – Gita

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  77 Deneckere’s study of anticlerical violence in the four largest Belgian cities being an exception.5 Such an inquiry has great merits, though, since crowd action was a potent force for political change in the young country.6 Below, then, this chapter examines Catholic protest in defense of the Church’s social presence. The temporal focus is placed on the period between the collapse of Unionism in 1857 and the early 1880s, especially on the period 1878–1880; the thematic emphasis is on lay resistance to the Van Humbeeck Law; geographically, the focus lies on the provinces of East and West Flanders where the Catholic Party won sweeping election victories during this period – a success that can partly be explained by the provinces’ rural character and by their conservative outlook. First, the chapter will consider religiously motivated acts of violence prior to 1879. Next, a tumult in the village of Heule near Kortrijk will serve as a lens to study popular responses to the Van Humbeeck Law. The chapter concludes by examining the role of violent action in conflicts pertaining to public religion in modern Belgium as well as the relationship between belief and violence in general. Overall, the chapter proposes a new periodization of the Belgian school conflict, which in historiography is commonly referred to as a “school war” and is regarded as the archetypical Belgian “culture war”.7 Both terms stress the conflictual nature of the education controversy. But they also suggest a bipolarity of positions where, so this chapter shows, in fact there was a plurality of Catholic reactions. Violence in Relation to the Catholic–Clerical Sphere before 1879 Even before the clash over primary education, which went down in history as a “civil war”, controversy over the Church’s influence on society had sparked public disturbances.8 The adoption of the afore-mentioned Law on Charitable Institutions (“Convent Law”) of 1857 was the first event to precipitate unrest on a larger scale. Adamant to stop the dead hand of the Church from expanding, predominantly lower-middle-class Liberals joined marches, shouted abuse at Catholics and praise for Liberals and occasionally used violence. According to Deneckere, these demonstrations served to challenge policies “that severely disadvantaged public initiative[s]”.9 Initially confined to Belgium’s largest cities, Catholic protest later spread to rural areas too, taking on a more hostile dimension that was indicative of a germinal anticlericalism or anti-Catholicism. The conflicts over cemetery use and during elections are examples. Under the French imperial decree of 23 Prairial XII (June 12, 1804) on funerary practices, which was extended to the Southern Netherlandish departments and continued by post-1830 Belgian lawmakers, mayors were responsible for cemeteries and all the deceased were to be buried in the same place – provided there was no other denomination or religion registered with the local

78  Eveline G. Bouwers authority. Until 1857, this regulation seems to have been observed largely without argument. In 1848 in the town of Ninove, for instance, Charles Demol, a day-laborer who had refused the last rites, received a regular burial in the churchyard, as did Philippe Berlamont, who had committed suicide, a few years later.10 But after the collapse of Unionism, the clergy increasingly practiced compartmentalization, burying those who were not Church-going Catholics, who had observed a different religion, or had committed suicide, in a separate part of the churchyard, known as the “trou des chiens”. Consequently, Modest De Deyn, a local benefactor but no practicing Catholic, found his last resting place in Ninove’s “dogs-hole”.11 In Ronse, plans were made to put a fence around the graves of the “faithless [and] maligned”, what the mayor condemned as “machiavéllisme”.12 Liberals were outraged at the construction of such posthumous pariah groups, especially since Catholic action occasionally extended to desecrating graves and attacking “godless” mourners. In response to the “symbolized violence” with which Catholics were encountering the funerary wishes of non-Catholics and freethinkers, they embarked on plans for secular, state-run cemeteries.13 The conflict escalated after 1879, when there were several incidents of the government ordering deceased persons consigned to a “dogs-hole” to be exhumed and reburied. Mid-century Catholic–liberal antagonism was especially pronounced in the run-up to and aftermath of elections. Although the Belgian electoral system was generally susceptible to manipulation, it was the Catholic side that made the most conspicuous use of intimidating and bribing voters, and even resorted to fraud.14 Occasionally, elections were attended by riots. In Aalst, for instance, there were disturbances following the liberal election victory of 1866, when Catholics disrupted a celebration, made a cacophony, and beat up some liberals.15 Two years later, there was post-election fighting in Dendermonde, as a result of which three liberals were seriously injured.16 Convinced that clerical actors were behind such disturbances, the government changed the law to prohibit the clergy from criticizing the State’s authority. Since this did not end the attacks, Charles Woeste and other leading Catholic figures cofounded the Federation of Catholic Associations, hoping to prevent such outbreaks by offering legal forms of mobilization. Historians have largely overlooked this anti-liberal violence, which mostly erupted in smaller, regional hubs. Instead, they have focused on urban acts of violence by anticlerical actors, which mounted when the proCatholic D’Anethan government came to power in 1870, and often occurred in conjunction with protest marches and cacophonies.17 It is true that hereafter, attacks on Catholic Party supporters increased. In the East Flanders capital Ghent, following elections, the windows of numerous Catholic-associated buildings were repeatedly smashed, including the episcopal palace, the seminary, several monasteries, the editorial office of the Ultramontane newspaper Le Bien Public, and the homes of prominent Catholics.18 The

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  79 nation-wide attacks on processions in spring 1875 are further examples of violent acts directed against symbols of Catholicism and especially of Ultramontanism.19 Liberals saw in processions re-enactments of archaic religious topographies that undermined the right to freedom of religion and conscience by visually imposing Catholic culture on those who thought or believed differently.20 But their heavy-handed protests were at times physically opposed by Catholics. Catholic figures and buildings were not only targeted by physical violence; the very idea of Catholicism itself was also linked with (a history of) violence. The tricentenary celebration of the Pacification of Ghent – commemorating an anti-Spanish alliance between the seventeen Netherlandish provinces at the time of the Eighty Years’ War – featured a flamboyant portrayal of the conceptual marriage of Roman religion and violence. Among the displays making up the historical pageant crossing the city in September 1876 was a “Holy Inquisition” float, complete with heretics awaiting execution, inquisitors, a stake, gallows, and a skeleton in clerical robes.21 Despite the display equating the Church with intolerance, fanaticism, and violence, Catholic onlookers were not provoked into offering active resistance. Their restraint was likely thanks to the warning words of the Bishop of Ghent but also to Catholic control of government, as street violence often occurred in anticyclical relation to political power. It is no surprise, then, that the 1878 inauguration of a homogenously liberal government coincided with a Catholic initiative toward (violent) protest. An “Ill-Fated Law”: Catholic Responses to the Van Humbeeck Law In preparation of the parliamentary elections of 1878, the various wings of the Liberal Party had agreed on a program to defend national institutions and constitutional liberties against intransigent Catholics. A prime focus was the school system. In January 1879, Minister Pierre Van Humbeeck presented a draft to replace the school law of 1842 with legislation based on secular principles. Following much debate, parliament passed a distinctly attenuated bill that still allowed religious instruction on the curriculum, unlike the draft had envisaged. Nonetheless, the law made provisions for freeing moral education of dogmatic ideas, abolishing clerical school supervision, increasing the number of state-school inspectors, and establishing secular school committees. Moreover, it required that every community had a public primary school and only holders of a state diploma were to be employed as teachers – placing state-independent education at a disadvantage. Yet, prayers could be still said during schooltime, religious symbols continued to be allowed, and teachers were prohibited from criticizing religious belief or the Church. The new school law was indubitably anticlerical, but it was not antireligious; Jacques Lory even speaks of a case of “confessional

80  Eveline G. Bouwers neutrality”.22 Ultramontane Catholics, however, saw the legislation as a “work of de-Christianization”.23 In response to the draft law, the episcopacy wrote a pastoral letter in fall 1878 asserting its prerogative to educate the young and threatening advocates of the school reform with divine retribution. In a second letter of late January 1879, it warned of the danger in which the planned school reform placed the Christian faith and the public peace, forbade attendance of public schools, and called for the establishment of state-independent schools, to be financed by the faithful. Having attempted in vain to convince King Léopold II that the school reform was unconstitutional, the bishops warned in a third pastoral letter, published immediately before the Senate discussed the draft, of the imminent violation of the “religious rights of the Belgian people”; furthermore, they forbade Catholics attending or supporting the community schools established under the new law.24 Bishop Bracq of Ghent felt this blanket condemnation was too extreme; likewise, Nuncio Serafino Vannutelli feared that such a rigid stance could have negative repercussions. Even the Secretary of State of the Holy See appealed for more reserve, which ultimately convinced politically more moderate Catholic senators to vote in favor of the bill. Despite these appeals for restraint, most bishops in Belgium were unrelenting in their rejection of the Van Humbeeck Law. The episcopal Instructiones Praticae pro Confessariis (Practical Instructions for Confessors) of September 1879 described the public schools as “ex se malae […] ac noci vac” (that is, inherently bad […] and harmful) and banned Catholics from attending, furnishing, and supervising them – all on pain of being denied absolution. As a result, an individual’s support of state education automatically led to their religious – and in rural areas, social – marginalization. This did not go uncriticized. Leading Catholic politician Jules Malou feared that “the thousands of Catholics who have already left the Church will be joined by thousands more, and they will never return”.25 Still the episcopacy maintained its stance, and even went on to ban teachers, members of school committees, and school inspectors from receiving the sacraments. To spare themselves such a humiliation, many churchgoers chose not to attend services anymore. The bishops’ refusal to compromise had far-reaching consequences. First, it led to a break in diplomatic relations between the Belgian government and the Holy See. Second, the Catholic Party lost the elections of 1880 and 1882 – to an extent, because of its widely perceived failure to moderate the bishops’ polemics. Lastly, the number of practicing Catholics fell drastically, and this permanently; in 1880, the number of nonpracticing Catholics doubled, and the percentage of nonchurchgoers remained unusually high in the following years.26 As Jan Art writes with regard to this period, “openly nonchurchgoing [people] appeared in the farthest-flung corners of Flanders”.27 But there

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  81 were also glimmers of hope, especially in the commitment shown by lay groups working toward instituting “free” primary education. In early 1879, they founded a committee to organize petitions to continue the school law of 1842. Meanwhile, others set up a network, arranged around church structures, for advising Catholics on how to approach the school reform and pushing for the establishment of state-independent education. Local school committees, with a priest on each, set about acquiring premises and materials and hiring teaching staff. The work paid off. By the end of 1880, 60% of all Belgian children were enrolled in nonstate primary schools – in some districts, such as Kortrijk, near Heule village, the percentage was over 90%. Opposition to the Van Humbeeck Law was shown not only in the founding of almost 4,000 state-independent schools but also in numerous protest acts. Catholics practiced various forms of administrative boycott or “legal resistance”.28 Facilitated by the Belgian system of government, which conceded local authorities considerable powers, municipal councils tried to circumvent the law by cutting funds for community school education (teachers’ salaries, building grants, school awards), preventing the furnishing of school buildings, or stopping the payment of education allowances for needy children. Similarly, provincial administrations overturned local-council rulings made in compliance with the law. The national government attempted to halt these initiatives. Decisions were annulled by royal decree, countermeasures taken to remedy financial discrimination, and commissioners dispatched to monitor the reform’s implementation. But the reform lacked popular support in large parts of the country. Belgians not only objected to the anticlerical thrust of the Van Humbeeck Law; they also disapproved of the central government’s increasingly authoritarian approach to ensure the law’s implementation. East and West Flanders saw the most unrest. In B­ruges, the dismissal of the Catholic governor and his replacement by Théodore Heyvaert, a diplomatically gauche, convinced liberal, bred further resentment. But more than the reactions of Catholic elites, it is the protest acts by Catholics who were largely excluded from political decision-making processes that are of interest. The women and men involved in the disturbances surrounding the law of 1879 in Heule and elsewhere were not authorized to vote under Belgian census suffrage. Hence, their protests were a form of alternative political participation. Mobilization against the Van Humbeeck Law: The Violent Protest in Heule

The village of Heule had medieval origins and retained its pastoral character until well into the modern age. Situated close to Kortrijk and with reacquired access to the River Schelde, several flax-processing factories were built here in the mid- and late nineteenth century, and population growth surged. Buoyed by a dynamic economy, the municipal council set up a

82  Eveline G. Bouwers training workshop, run by the welfare office, in a building on Peperstraat – at a junction known as Krakeelhoek (quarrel corner). As the workshop foundered, the premises were inexpensively let to Father Van Dorpe, who used them for a Sunday School and Youth Congregation. Such clerical use of government-owned buildings was among the first targets for the Liberals when they came to power in 1878. Consequently, Minister of Justice Jules Bara ordered Heule’s Sunday School to vacate the premises.29 The welfare office soon reported that it had done so but refrained from mentioning the ongoing presence of the Youth Congregation. Heule’s mayor, the indecisive Auguste Lagae, waited until mid-1880 to inform the district commissioner of this situation, despite the latter’s repeated requests to stay updated. The correspondence conveys undertones of irritation and antagonism, reflecting growing animosities within the village. While the liberal-supporting mayor Lagae disapproved of the clerical use of the building, his estranged cousin Auguste Aloïse Lagae (Prefect of the Youth Congregation) and Edmond de Quinnemar, husband of a niece of both Lagae men and a driving force in the welfare office, were intent upon allowing the Church to use the building in the future. On September 20, 1880, Governor Heyvaert signed a decree authorizing the dispatch of a special commissioner to Heule to end the “misuse” of the building in Peperstraat. The commissioner, Florentin Bouez, subsequently informed the local authority that the building was to be vacated on October 1. At 8 a.m. that day, he reported to the mayor, who had not told the welfare office about the eviction order for fear of public disturbances. Lagae assured the commissioner, he had nothing to fear, gave him his set of keys and sent him on his way. On arrival, none of the keys fit the keyholes and Bouez resorted to climbing over the wall of the neighboring premises, entering the building through the back door. In the meantime, news of the visitor had spread like wildfire through the village and a considerable crowd gathered in front of the building. After a short while, a small group of men stormed it, seized Bouez and literally threw him out. Outside, the crowd and the tension grew to fever pitch. The protesters shouted down Minister Van Humbeeck and Governor Heyvaert (now called Levaart, meaning “herring” in West Flemish), while threatening to attack Bouez and lunging ever closer to him. With the help of the two gendarmes who had escorted him to the village, he reentered the building and declared it confiscated. Amid the confusion, the benches were smashed, the curtains torn down, a crucifix removed, and the effigy of a government official – a theatrical prop that resembled Governor Heyvaert – destroyed. While Bouez and the gendarmes were still inside, the church bells started to ring, followed soon after by the factory whistle announcing the textile workers’ morning break. It was not long before some 1,000 people had gathered at the Krakeelhoek. Some of them shouted threats and tried

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  83 again to enter the building, singing battle songs against the Van Humbeeck Law. They responded to Bouez’s appeals for calm by whistling and hurling stones, lumps of coal, pieces of wood, and clods of grass. When the crowd ignored an order to desist, one gendarme fired a warning shot into the air. It caused a brief interruption, but then a group of protesters pushed behind the officials into the house. The gendarmes responded immediately: the first bullet mortally hit 20-year-old Adolf Couckuyt in the face; a second bullet pierced the belly of Charles Duyck, who was severely injured but survived. Protesters now grabbed sticks and called for weapons until suddenly Vicar Iserbyt appeared on the scene. He managed to calm the crowd, albeit not enough to prevent them accusing the mayor’s mother, who lived next door on Peperstraat, of being a “murderess” and threatening more violence on their way home. Indeed, the ensuing days saw further attacks, despite the heightened police presence. Madame Lagae’s maid was assaulted and the mayor’s house daubed with sinister slogans, such as “The great beast must go” (meaning Governor Heyvaert) and “Mayor must die”. To prevent further disturbances, Couckuyt was given an unceremonious burial. The press ensured that the “murder at the Krakeelhoek”, as the Catholics soon referred to the incident, was not forgotten. Church-associated newspapers organized a fundraising campaign in aid of the victims, which raised almost 1,000 francs. Furthermore, a booklet was published describing the developments leading to the Heule “attack” and containing a picture of the crime scene, with details of the movements of the “murderers”.30 Another picture illustrated the Catholic perception of the episode. [See Figure 3.1] Above, in the foul liberal sky, there is Levaart the fish (Governor Heyvaert); below, there are flags emblazoned with the heads of fish and two bayonets. Below that, Peperstraat is shown, with the training workshop on the left and the house of the mayor’s mother and the church tower further right. Women and small children can be seen in front of the contested building, in prayer and mourning. The right half of the picture shows a throng of men and women of various social backgrounds – elegantly dressed gentlefolk as well as workers, sailors, and maids – in a bid to portray the incident as a cross-class protest. In the foreground, two men are hurriedly carrying a stretcher to tend the victims, who are lying on the ground. Facing forward, we see the deceased Couckuyt; behind him, Duyck, whom a gendarme is threatening to spear with his bayonet. Standing in the door of the training workshop is the second gendarme, pointing his bayonet at Duyck, and Commissioner Bouez, who is calling for calm. But the unmistakable hero of the piece, at centerstage, is Vicar Iserbyt. Personifying circumspection, he symbolizes the Church as a guarantor of the public peace – an image that is reinforced by the fact he is holding a Bible, visually juxtaposing divine will against state authority.

84  Eveline G. Bouwers

Figure 3.1 Cernay Gillon, “Drama and Shooting in Heule, under the Government of ‘Procureur’ LEVAART [Heyvaert – E.G.B.] Pants Down, Baron of Heule / Happy Greetings, 1880. Civilized Belgium under the Ministry of the Seven Freemasons.” Photo courtesy of Rijksarchief Kortrijk.

The picture tells a story of arbitrary state brutality versus Catholic martyrdom, and refutes liberal accusations that the protesters had provoked the police into firing the shots. But it is a story contradicted by the evidence. In fact, the shooting occurred inside the building because the gendarmes panicked, faced with a rampaging group of men prepared to use violence. Certainly, there was no evidence of anyone being speared with a bayonet. Nonetheless, the two conflicting interpretations of the Heule incident endured. Any coverage of the State legitimately exercising its authority would be countered by reports of Catholic self-defense. To Le Bien Public, Couckuyt and Duyck were “victims of masonic rage”, who had ended up inside the building by mistake.31 This and other pro-Catholic newspapers largely cleared the two gendarmes of blame, reporting them as having merely carried out orders, and the true “murderers” as being ensconced in the ministry in Brussels. Van Humbeeck was said to have initiated a “terrible conflict”, making him the “author of this moral civil war”, and the incident likened to the fratricidal story of Cain and Abel.32 Other newspapers, too, claimed that the State had intended to incite Catholic protest actions by its “abuse of power”.33 At the same time, several

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  85 admitted that the protesters had been unruly, thrown projectiles, and forced their way into the building, but played these actions down as “silly pranks”.34 The government-loyal press, in contrast, unanimously held that the clergy and the board of the Youth Congregation had encouraged public resistance by months of raging against the school reform. It too described the dispute as a “civil war” or “revolution”.35 However, in this version, the culprits were to be found in the presbytery and the welfare office. Staff there had deliberately withheld the information that the premises were being used for religious purposes, and so necessitated the officials’ intervention. With respect to the shooting, the gendarmes had only fired, according to L’Étoile Belge, in order not to be “massacred” themselves.36 Other liberal newspapers agreed that the use of arms had been a “legitimate defense” against hostile Catholics.37 The ideological antagonism – one side seeing state brutality; the other, Catholic aggression – also impacted on the parliamentary debates concerning the violence in Heule, and the hearings in the Kortrijk and Ghent courts. The district court in Kortrijk challenged the legitimacy of Bouez’s mission, finding it within the welfare office’s power to select its own tenants, and stressing that the Sunday School had vacated the building as required (unlike the Youth Congregation, which, however, eluded the provisions of the school law). The court treated the protest as a matter of secondary importance and passed sentences of 8 to 15 days imprisonment (plus fines of 26 to 50 francs) to those it found guilty of abusing the State’s authority. Liberal newspapers likened the verdict to an “episcopal amendment” since it disregarded the corporeal assaults on Bouez and the gendarmes.38 In contrast, the appeals court in Ghent – the next highest authority – underlined the role of the protest’s ringleaders, whose actions it condemned as an illegal revolt against the authority of the State. As a result, it imposed considerably tougher penalties. It cracked down hardest on Vicar Iserbyt, whom it alleged to have called on the faithful to prevent the training workshop’s confiscation and to have ordered the church bells to be rung, and Auguste Aloïse Lagae, chairman of the Youth Congregation, whom it found to have incited a confrontation with the officials. As the “instigators” of the protest, they were imprisoned for 7 and 8 months, respectively, and each ordered to pay a fine of 100 francs; a further eight offenders were sentenced to jail for up to 4 months.39 The court based its decisions on witness statements claiming that protesters had said: “Another one [referring to the mayor’s brother] who we have to kill for the faith tomorrow”.40 The trope of the fighting faithful shared in Catholic media recalled heroic notions of martyrdom, which soon prevailed in Heule and the surrounding area. When the offenders were imprisoned, many residents kept their windows closed as a sign of mourning; a black flag bearing the initials of the incarcerated was flown from the mill.41 Pilgrimages were organized, mostly

86  Eveline G. Bouwers to sites of Ultramontane Marian devotion. Residents sent the prisoners financial aid as well as numerous letters, which point to the deep religiosity and strong sense of local loyalty not only among the protesters but also their families and friends. From Kortrijk prison, Auguste Lagae wrote to his mother that “the cross with which God has burdened you is large and heavy to carry”, yet if she would bear it with fortitude and patience “eternal rewards” would await her.42 Similar to his other prison correspondence, this letter reiterated the need for sacrifice, humility, and patience, with the aid of which Lagae presented himself – and was presented by his friends – as a paragon of Christian virtue who had fought to halt the anticlerical tide. The same religious purity and sacrifice for the common good reverberated in the celebrations organized upon his release, the last offender to leave ­Kortrijk prison. The black flag was exchanged for a white one and inhabitants adorned their houses with banners showing messages such as “Long live all those genuinely respected convicts of Heule. The Almighty will reward them for the trials they have been through”.43 Special Masses were celebrated, also by Vicar Iserbyt, wearing a chasuble that Lagae had embroidered while in prison. Yet, despite the religiously and emotionally charged mood, there were no further disturbances in Heule. This was due to several factors: not only had the local curate urged residents to stay calm, but police presence had been increased. As it transpired, the calm heralded a new phase of resistance against the school reform in which street protest came less and less into play. Catholic Resistance against the Van Humbeeck Law: A Typology

Heule was one of the few places where opponents and executors of the law of July 1, 1879 fatally clashed. But demonstrations, expressing the Catholics’ “indisputable unease” about liberal education policy, occurred in many places.44 Indeed, there was such a widespread uproar that the Belgian parliament launched an inquiry in order to ascertain, among other things, “the methods” that had “prevented” the implementation of the Van Humbeeck Law.45 Opponents of the law were consulted as well as advocates, albeit only occasionally. Reading their statements in parallel with other sources, a picture of Catholic resistance emerges that, despite its diversity, can be divided into three categories. These consist of what contemporaries described as “liturgical pressure”, “material compulsion”, and “violence”. Another aspect that emerges from an analysis of testimonies is the chronology of the protest acts. It shows that physical violence was generally confined to the period between early 1879 and late 1880, that is, the time from when the draft law was discussed to when state-independent primary education became operative. Resistance of the first category, “liturgical pressure”, entailed priests condemning the school law as bad, dangerous, or diabolical, and the clergy withholding sacraments from supporters of the reform, including from

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  87 children who attended public schools. Not only communion, confession, and anointing of the sick were refused as a means of coercion but also marriages and baptisms. But the sacraments were only refused up to a point; a willful Catholic on the point of death would still be given the last rites. Evidently, it was one thing to threaten, intimidate, and condemn unruly Catholics as schismatic or heretic but allowing them to die outside Catholic rite, and so be lost to the Church forever, was to be avoided at all costs. The second category, “material compulsion”, involved various forms of pressure and coercion. It was practiced by charitable institutions, when they withheld alms and food baskets from needy families with children at the “wrong” school; by local authorities refusing to renovate school buildings or award school grants and cutting teachers’ pay; and by the faithful, when they boycotted the businesses of supposed opponents. Catholics by no means had a monopoly on this style of conduct; the correspondence of the Bruges clergy contains plenty of examples of Liberals who acted similarly.46 But financial might, especially in rural areas, was mostly in the hands of pro-Catholic forces, who were therefore better able to constrain support for the primary school education they sanctioned. The violence of the third category was often of a symbolic nature. Supporters of the school law were said to have various afflictions, such as scabies and “gnawing and stinking worms in the brain”.47 (When a Catholic fell ill, in contrast, it was regarded as a “divine trial”). Like branding reform supporters traitors, asses, swine, thieves, murderers, monsters et cetera, attributing those with a different worldview with vile illnesses served to humiliate them and recalled Bible stories. Catholics also destroyed images of stateschool teachers. But there was physical violence, too. In Bruges, minor disturbances erupted when the authorities tried to evict regular clergy from their premises. The same thing occurred in Langemark – where the priests and local authorities were able to avoid “worse misfortunes” caused by a “rancorous” crowd – and in Veurne, where “bloody riots” had also been threatened.48 Elsewhere, protest got out of hand. To mark the opening of the state-independent primary school in Hof­ stade, the priest had announced a solemn procession. His plans were frustrated, however, by the mayor, who had already prohibited the hanging of flags on houses and demonstrations by visitors.49 Consequently, Catholics turned on the local council, attacking the government-loyal patrolman’s house and overpowering a gendarme, who lost his rifle in the fracas. A short time later, two shots were fired into the patrolman’s house and an effigy of the state-school teacher was burned. The protest spilled over to neighboring Aalst, where the school inspector and members of the parliamentary commission were physically attacked.50 Incidents were reported of schoolreform supporters and schoolchildren being spat at, pursued on the street, threatened with murder, having mud and stones thrown at them, and being

88  Eveline G. Bouwers beaten up. The windows of homes, stores, and school buildings were smashed, schoolbooks defaced and shredded, school materials misappropriated, and blackboards demolished – hindering education under the Van Humbeeck Law. As well as lay Catholics, the clergy showed considerable pluralism in their conduct. Chaplains emerged as the target of most complaints. Their aggressive behavior was unfavorably compared with the greater restraint shown by more senior priests. This was perhaps due to their comparative youth as well as their training in a militant Ultramontanism. The inner-clerical distinction is also reflected in the reactions of some priests, who distanced themselves from their junior colleagues by sanctioning their conduct. Other priests denounced any form of support for the school law and insisted that “God’s law” prevail over “the government’s law”; still others denied only the “gratuitous” supporters of the school law the sacraments.51 Lay responses spanned a wide spectrum. Some parents admitted being coerced into sending their children to a different school. Others said they resisted the pressure, for instance, by pointing out that neither their child’s school nor teacher had changed under the new law. Some were openly defiant. One churchgoer reported it was “all the same to him” if he was refused absolution. Another accused the local priest of greed-motivated hypocrisy when he gave the man’s wealthy father a church funeral despite having claimed that his death was “a consequence of his grandson attending the local state school”. A teacher criticized the clergy for taking King Léopold’s Easter confession when it had been denied him, the king’s “servant”.52 These actions recall the stand taken by Philomena De Meerleer, described above, and testify to inner-Catholic differences. In some cases, dissatisfaction with clerical regulations caused people to become alienated from the Church. The outcome feared by Charles Woeste and Nuntius Vannutelli, among others, that thousands would leave the Church, did indeed materialize. Catholics and Violence in Belgium: A History of Pluralism In fall 1881, there was renewed mention in the press of some “leaders from Heule” protesting the expulsion of a male congregation.53 But before it could come to blows, a clergyman holding a crucifix appeared in the doorway, prompting the crowd to bow their heads, kneel down, and pray. It was not only the skilled action of a lone clergyman that ensured violence was avoided. The story of violence narrowly avoided showed that the dispute over the Van Humbeeck Law had entered a new phase, even before the Liberals were voted out of government in 1884. Indeed, after a period during which violent Catholic crowd action had concreted, contemporaries noted a

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  89 “relaxing” of the antagonism surrounding the primary school issue from the moment state-independent primary education had been established in winter 1880–1881.54 As this chapter shows, violence had been an integral part of Catholic mobilization practices well before the mass demonstration of September 7, 1884, when tens of thousands famously gathered in Brussels to show their support for Catholic education.55 This challenges the historiographical view that 1884 marked a major turning point not just in Belgian political history but in the country’s relationship with contentious politics too. Indeed, a toorigid focus on the year 1884 obscures the degree to which crowd action mitigated political decisions that lacked popular support, and this at a time that only a limited number of Belgian males could vote. An emphasis on 1884 also disguises Catholic pluralism. During the early phase of the school dispute, the Catholic camp had fragmented into diverse positions, ranging from capitulation before the bishops and extreme aggression toward the State to criticism of the clergy and rejection of the Church. But from late 1880 on, following a succession of violent disturbances, of which the Heule incident marked the climax, a conciliatory tendency within the Catholic camp could be observed, attended by a newly moderate stance on the part of the bishops. They now agreed to Catholics attending state teacher-training schools, offering religious education at community schools, and working as school inspectors. And all children were again eligible to receive their first Holy Communion. The case of Heule not only marks a definitive point in the periodization of the school dispute; it also illustrates the diversity of Catholic reactions to the conflict over primary education in Belgium. It shows that men and women alike resisted the law of 1879, which not only challenges the theory of nineteenth-century Catholic feminization but also presents an antipole to the gender-specific order of secular protest forms.56 Second, the Heule incident sheds light on the role of secular differences in protest acts ostensibly performed on religious grounds. Socio-economic and lingo-cultural divides were key additional factors: in Heule, they are evidenced by the factory workers mobilizing others to protest while singing The Flemish Lion, an antifrancophone battle song. Without these additional differences, religious conflicts rarely precipitated violence in nineteenth-century Belgium and indeed elsewhere in Western Europe. Heule also exemplifies developments in a region where resistance against the school law was especially strong: the provinces of East and West Flanders. The fiercest fighting took place in the arrondissement capitals (Aalst, Kortrijk, Zottegem, et cetera) and the villages immediately surrounding these regional hubs (Heule, Hofstade). Interestingly, the comparatively strong geographical concentration of Catholic protest in the former County

90  Eveline G. Bouwers of Flanders points to a spatial continuity with the Peasants’ War of 1798, when the population in the newly French-annexed territory revolted against the introduction of conscription and anticlericalism, among others. Many of the districts that displayed a “pronounced” or “strong willingness to take action” at that time were hotbeds of conflict in 1880.57 This fact underlines the significance of the historical experience of violence for constructing violent protest acts in later periods. The final remaining question is how belief and violence were interconnected in Belgium at the time of the Frère-Orban II government, and how the two phenomena are linked in general. Until 1879, disputes over the reach of the Catholic–clerical sphere had often been storms in teacups; any supra-regional protest that occurred was urban and anticlerical. Thanks in part to Catholic participation in government, which reduced the need for protest, as well as to Catholic pluralism, Belgian faithful were not quick to mobilize. This changed when Pierre Van Humbeeck’s school law was introduced. Crowd action was then also embraced by those in favor of clerical influence on society, with the law serving as a device upon which to focus anti-liberal hostility. Referring to its advocates as devils and heretics, opponents charged their hostility with religious significance and embedded it in a history of Catholic martyrdom. Akin to the process described by René Girard, the creation of a liberal scapegoat acted as a catalyst for inner-Catholic reconciliation.58 The conceptual pairing of religion and violence, meanwhile, impacted on liberal conduct. As the example of the historical pageant commemorating the tricentenary of the Pacification of Ghent shows, Catholicism – as a religion and especially as a Church – was inextricably linked in many liberal minds with histories and narratives of violence. It is true that, as this chapter has shown, violence played a part in Catholic resistance to the school law of 1879, as did practices of exerting liturgical and financial pressure. Yet, it should also be noted that the extent of the violence was often exaggerated in order to legitimize secularization measures, of which the Van Humbeeck Law was one. Liberals, then, constructed what William T. Cavanaugh in another context has called the “myth of religious violence” to preserve the cohesion of their community and to realize their political vision of a secular society.59 This strategy became even more imperative after the Catholic Party’s election victory of 1884 and the introduction of a new school law beneficial to the Church. To some extent, the Jacobs Law marked a return to the law of 1842; it enabled the local authorities to support stateindependent primary education and offer religious instruction in public schools. But even if the Catholics emerged victorious from the dispute over primary school education, it was not without losing thousands of believers from the fold and imprinting a renewed association with violence on the liberals’ mental map.

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  91 Notes 1 Camiel De Meerleer, Herzele (September 22, 1881), in: Chambre des Représen­ tants, Enquête scolaire, 2 vols. (Brussels: F. Hayez, 1881–1883), vol. 2–III, 1239. 2 Jules Malou, Recensement de la population des écoles primaires et gardiennes au 15 décembre 1880 (Brussels: Gobbaerts, 1881), 29. 3 Charles Woeste to Archbishop Victor Dechamps of Mechelen-Brussels (July 4, 1882), in: Algemeen Rijksarchief Brussel (hereafter ARB)/I 255 (Archief van Charles Woeste) 666. Emphasis in the original. 4 The term ‘Liberals’ here denotes those who sought to limit the domain of the Church and religion, conceding greater power to the State. ‘Catholics’ stands for those who wished to maintain – or even extend – the influence of the Church. The distinction was, then, between socio-political attitudes rather than religious beliefs (most Liberals were baptized Catholics). 5 Gita Deneckere, Geuzengeweld: antiklerikaal straatrumoer in de politieke geschiedenis van België, 1831–1914 (Brussels: VUB Press, 1998). 6 Jan Dhondt, “Parlementaire werking en agitatie in onze eigen hedendaagse geschiedenis,” in Machten en mensen: de belangrijkste studies van Jan Dhondt over de geschiedenis van de 19de en 20ste eeuw (Ghent: Jan Dhondt Stichting, 1976), 573– 577; Gita Deneckere, “Nieuwe geschiedenis van België, 1878–1905,” in Nieuwe geschiedenis van België I, eds. Els Witte, Jean-Pierre Nandrin, Eliane Gubin, and Gita Deneckere (Tielt: Lannoo Uitgeverij, 2005), 519. Other historians have insisted on the importance of elections. See, e.g., Frans Van Kalken, Commotions populaires en Belgique (1834–1902) (Brussels: Office de Publicité, 1936), 49. 7 Henk De Smaele, Rechts Vlaanderen: religie en stemgedrag in negentiende-eeuws België (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2009), 202–208; Els Witte, “The Battle for Monasteries, Cemeteries and Schools: Belgium,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 118–126. A detailed history of the school-reform law of 1879 provides Jacques Lory, Libéralisme et instruction primaire, 1842–1879: Introduction à l’étude de la lutte scolaire en Belgique, 2 vols. (Leuven: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1979), esp. vol. 2, 583–785. 8 Jan De Maeyer, Arthur Verhaegen, 1847–1917: de rode baron (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 1994), 156; Karel Van Isacker, Werkelijk en wettelijk land: de katholieke opinie tegenover de rechterzijde, 1863–1884 (Antwerp: Standaard, 1955), 177. 9 Deneckere, Geuzengeweld, 39. For opposition to the law see also Van Kalken, Commotions populaires, 38–49. 10 Mayor of Ninove to the Governor of East Flanders (February 17, 1859), in: Rijksarchief Gent [hereafter RAG]/Provincie Instellingen [hereafter PV] 1851–1870, 1591/1. 11 Sylvie Veys and Hercule Bouchez to the Governor of East Flanders (March 12, 1881), in: RAG/PV 2/6537/6. 12 Mayor of Ronse to the Governor of East Flanders (December 1862), in: RAG/ PV 1851-1870 1596/12. 13 Jeffrey Tyssens, “Funerary Culture, Secularity and Symbolised Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belgium,” Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2018). 14 Deneckere, Geuzengeweld, 87. 15 Aalst alderman to the Governor of East Flanders (June 18, 1866), in: RAG/PV 1851–1870 1404/5.

92  Eveline G. Bouwers 16 Report by the Dendermonde Gendarmerie (August 6, 1868), in: RAG/PV 1851–1870 1307/2. 17 Deneckere, Geuzengeweld, 63–97. 18 Episcopal seminar in Ghent to the Governor of East Flanders (August 4, 1870), in: RAG/PV 1851–1870 1404–14; Stadarchief Gent/Reeks R Politie/377; Deneckere, Geuzengeweld, 87–97. 19 See my “Oostakker,” in On Site, in Time: Negotiating Differences in Europe, eds. Joachim Berger, Irene Dingel, and Johannes Paulmann (Mainz: Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte, 2016), accessed August 11, 2021, http://en.iegdifferences.eu/on-site-in-time/eveline-g-bouwers-oostakker/. 20 See, e.g., Michel Lagrée, “Processions religieuses et violence démocratique dans la France de 1903,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 92. 21 Paul Frédéricq, Album van den historischen stoet der Pacificatie van Gent / Album du cortège historique de la Pacification de Gand (Ghent: E. Todt, 1876), 13–21. 22 Jacques Lory, “La résistance des catholiques belges à la ‘loi de malheur’, 1879– 1884,” Revue du Nord 68 (1985): 730. 23 Pierre Verhaegen, La lutte scolaire en Belgique (Ghent: Siffer, 1905), xiii. 24 Cited from Lory, “La résistance,” 734. 25 Cit. from ibid., 735. 26 Ibid., 738. 27 Jan Art, Herders en parochianen: kerkelijkheidsgegevens betreffende het bisdom Gent, 1830–1914 (Ghent: Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, 1979), 105. 28 Lory, “La résistance,” 743–747. 29 On the following episode, see also ‘Heule,’ in: Bisschoppelijk Archief Brugge [hereafter BAB] B 365 bis; Arrondissement Commissioner of Kortrijk to the Municipal Council of Heule (October 28 and December 12, 1879), in: Stadsarchief Kortrijk [hereafter SAK] / Modern Gemeentearchief Heule [hereafter MGAH], 384. See also Gazette van Kortrijk (October 2, 1880); Le Bien Public (esp. October 2–9, 1880); Het Handelsblad van Antwerpen (October 2–10, 1880); L’Écho du Parlement (esp. October 3–8, 1880). For further information, see E. Verheust, “Episode de la guerre scolaire dans le Courtraisis (1880): le drame de Heule,” Handelingen van de Koninklijke Geschied- en Oudheidkundige Kring van Kortrijk 31 (1959–1960). 30 Le grand jour sur le drame de Heule: récits des faits accompagné d’un plan topographique et de tous les documents officiels (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1880). 31 Le Bien Public (October 2, 1880). 32 Ibid. (October 3, 1880); Le Tournaisien (October 10, 1880). 33 Journal de Bruxelles (October 3, 7 and 12, 1880). 34 L’Indépendance Belge (October 8, 1880). 35 Ibid. (October 3, 1880); L’Écho du Parlement (October 3, 1880). 36 L’Étoile Belge, cit. from Journal de Bruxelles (October 3, 1880). 37 L’Écho du Parlement (October 3, 1880); L‘Indépendance Belge (October 4, 1880). 38 Cit. from Le Bien Public (January 23, 1881). 39 On the court verdicts, see SAK/MGAH 1784. 40 Cit. from Verheust, “Episode de la guerre,” 145. 41 On the following information, see also Het Handelsblad van Antwerpen (September 15, November 15, and December 2 and 3, 1881; L’Indépendance Belge (December 2 and 6, 1881); L’Écho du Parlement (December 6, 1881). 42 Auguste Aloïse Lagae to his mother (June 19, 1881), in: Jean Lagae Archive, Kortrijk. 43 L’Indépendance Belge (December 6, 1881).

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  93 44 Journal de Bruxelles (October 10, 1880). 45 Letter from the Belgian parliament (June 16, 1880), printed in: Chambre des Représentants, Enquête scolaire, vol. 1, vi. For testimonies, see Chambre des Représentants, Enquête scolaire, vol. 2. Below, footnotes only refer to the enquête scolaire in the case of quotations. 46 See especially ‘Adinkerke’, ‘Dixmuide’, and ‘Iseghem’, in BAB B 365 bis. 47 Camiel Delaruelle, Oosterzele (February 27, 1882), in: Chambre des Représentants, Enquête scolaire, vol. 2–IV, 371–373; Jozef Mertens, Herzele (September 15, 1881), in: ibid., vol. 2–III, 1217–1222; Jozefina Ruynaert, Herzele (September 22, 1881), in: ibid., vol. 2–III, 1248–1249. 48 On Bruges: L’Indepéndance Belge (October 4, 1880). On Langemark: Verhaegen, La lutte scolaire, 300–301; BAB B 365 bis. On Veurne: Ibid. 49 Report by the Gendarmerie of Hofstade (October 7, 1880), in: RAG/PV G/38/3. See also Le Bien Public (October 11, 1880); Het Handelsblad van Antwerpen (October 5, 1880); L’Écho du Parlement (October 5, 1880). 50 Het Handelsblad van Antwerpen (October 5, 1880); L’Écho du Parlement (October 5, 1880); L’Indépendance Belge (October 6, 1880). 51 Pieter Wille, Zottegem (January 7, 1882), in: Chambre des Représentants, Enquête scolaire, vol. 2–IV, 123–124; Antoon De Buyst, Herzele (September 15, 1881), in: ibid., vol. 2–III, 1228–1229; Lodewijk Geltmeyer, Deinze (December 6, 1880), in: ibid., vol. 2–II, 235–236. 52 Sophia van der Beken, Oosterzele (February 27, 1882), in: ibid., vol. 2–IV, 379; Florent ‘t Kindt, Nevele (December 20, 1880), in: ibid., vol. 2–II, 252–253; Theofiel Cools, Eekloo (January 4, 1882), in: ibid., vol. 2–IV, 99–101. 53 Het Handelsblad van Antwerpen (September 15, 1881). 54 Pieter Waterschoot, Oosterzele (February 27, 1882), in: Chambre des Représentants, Enquête scolaire, vol. 2–IV, 376–379; Octaaf Buyse, Zottegem (January 7, 1882), in: ibid., vol. 2–IV, 126–127. 55 See e.g. Luc Keunings, “Le maintien de l’ordre en 1884. Les manifestations d’août et de septembre à Bruxelles,” in 1884: Un tournant politique en Belgique / De machtswisseling van 1884 in België, eds. Emiel Lamberts and Jacques Lory (Brussels: Publications des Facultés Universitaires de Saint-Louis, 1986). 56 For a critique of the feminization theory, see, e.g., Tine Van Osselaer, The Pious Sex. Catholic Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in Belgium, c. 1800– 1940 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), 15–20. 57 On the geography of the Peasants’ War, see, e.g., Annelies Lernout and Olivier Van Rode, “De Boerenkrijg in het Leie- en Scheldedepartement,” in De Boerenkrijg. Twee eeuwen feiten en fictie, ed. Luc François (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1998), 72–74. 58 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 59 William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Bibliography Art, Jan. Herders en parochianen: kerkelijkheidsgegevens betreffende het bisdom Gent, 1830–1914. Ghent: Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, 1979. Bouwers, Eveline G. “Oostakker.” In On Site, in Time: Negotiating Differences in Europe, edited by Joachim Berger, Irene Dingel, and Johannes Paulmann. Mainz:

94  Eveline G. Bouwers Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte, 2016. Accessed August 11, 2021. https://en.ieg-differences.eu/on-site-in-time/eveline-g-bouwers-oostakker/. Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Chambre des Représentants, Enquête scolaire, 2 vols. Brussels: F. Hayez, 1881–1883. De Maeyer, Jan. Arthur Verhaegen, 1847–1917: de rode baron. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 1994. De Smaele, Henk. Rechts Vlaanderen: religie en stemgedrag in negentiende-eeuws België. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2009. Deneckere, Gita. Geuzengeweld: antiklerikaal straatrumoer in de politieke geschiedenis van België, 1831–1914. Brussels: VUB Press, 1998. Deneckere, Gita. “Nieuwe geschiedenis van België, 1878–1905.” In Nieuwe geschiedenis van België I, edited by Els Witte, Jean-Pierre Nandrin, Eliane Gubin, and Gita Deneckere, 443–664. Tielt: Lannoo Uitgeverij, 2005. Dhondt, Jan. “Parlementaire werking en agitatie in onze eigen hedendaagse geschiedenis.” In Machten en mensen: de belangrijkste studies van Jan Dhondt over de geschiedenis van de 19de en 20ste eeuw, 561–582. Ghent: Jan Dhondt Stichting, 1976. Frédéricq, Paul. Album van den historischen stoet der Pacificatie van Gent / Album du cortège historique de la Pacification de Gand. Ghent: E. Todt, 1876. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Keunings, Luc. “Le maintien de l’ordre en 1884. Les manifestations d’août et de septembre à Bruxelles.” In 1884: Un tournant politique en Belgique / De machtswisseling van 1884 in België, edited by Emiel Lamberts and Jacques Lory, 99–149. Brussels: Publications des Facultés Universitaires de Saint-Louis, 1986. Lagrée, Michel. “Processions religieuses et violence démocratique dans la France de 1903.” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 77–99. Le grand jour sur le drame de Heule: récits des faits accompagné d’un plan topographique et de tous les documents officiels. Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1880. Lernout, Annelies, and Olivier Van Rode, “De Boerenkrijg in het Leie- en Scheldedepartement.” In De Boerenkrijg: twee eeuwen feiten en fictie, edited by Luc François, 61–94. Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1998 Lory, Jacques. Libéralisme et instruction primaire, 1842–1879: introduction à l’étude de la lutte scolaire en Belgique, 2 vols. Leuven: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1979. Lory, Jacques. “La résistance des catholiques belges à la ‘loi de malheur’, 1879– 1884.” Revue du Nord 68 (1985): 729–747. Malou, Jules. Recensement de la population des écoles primaires et gardiennes au 15 décembre 1880. Brussels: Gobbaerts, 1881. Tyssens, Jeffrey. “De schoolkwestie tijdens de regering Frère-Orban (1878–1884).” Tijdschrift van het Gemeentekrediet 50, no. 195 (1996): 97–111. Tyssens, Jeffrey. “Funerary Culture, Secularity and Symbolised Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belgium.” Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2018): 62–88. Van Isacker, Karel. Werkelijk en wettelijk land: de katholieke opinie tegenover de rechterzijde, 1863–1884. Antwerp: Standaard, 1955.

Anti-Liberal Violence in Belgium  95 Van Kalken, Frans. Commotions populaires en Belgique (1834–1902). Brussels: Office de Publicité, 1936. Van Osselaer, Tine. The Pious Sex: Catholic Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in Belgium, c. 1800–1940. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013. Verhaegen, Pierre. La lutte scolaire en Belgique. Ghent: Siffer, 1905. Verheust, E. “Episode de la guerre scolaire dans le Courtraisis (1880): le drame de Heule.” Handelingen van de Koninklijke Geschied- en Oudheidkundige Kring van Kortrijk 31 (1959–1960): 121–154. Witte, Els. “The Battle for Monasteries, Cemeteries and Schools: Belgium.” In Culture Wars. Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 102–128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Part II

Contending Clericalism

4

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants on the Habsburg Periphery Rabatz and Antisemitic Riots in West Galicia, 1846–1898 Tim Buchen

In the nineteenth century, two waves of violence swept over multi-ethnic Galicia, the largest crownland of the Habsburg Monarchy. Each one was characterized by several thousand Roman Catholic peasants attacking members of antagonistic social and religious groups. The outbreak known as the rabatz (ruckus or rumble) of 1846 targeted the Christian elite, nobility, manor administrators, and priests, claiming many lives.1 The violence in 1898, described at the time as “riots”, was directed against Jews, especially traders and innkeepers. It rarely had fatal consequences.2 It might seem surprising that Galicia was the scene of violent riots, since it has been widely regarded as a paragon of peaceful multi-ethnic coexistence.3 This picture was to a large extent retrospectively painted by authors writing under the traumatic impact of World Wars I and II. Nonetheless, in comparison to the neighboring Russian Empire, Galicia was indeed a safe place, especially for Jews. But the image of divergent, tradition-rooted groups living in harmony together should not obscure the fact that tensions and conflicts arose due to the upheavals of modernization in various spheres of (peasant) life. One sphere was politics, in which a rising number of the male population was becoming involved. The rival political parties and the programs they offered polarized the farthest flung village communities and translated social, religious, and linguistic differences into modern issues of political identity. Meanwhile, the crownland’s reorientation toward monetary economy and inclusion in superregional markets caused further insecurity and conflict. Periods of socio-economic adjustment and shifting status coincided with both waves of violence examined here. Another crucial factor in the disturbances was the politicization of the peasant underclasses by the Roman Catholic clergy. By mobilizing the faithful, that is, organizing mass gatherings at places of religious significance on feast days in the name of the Catholic Church, priests aimed to alloy religious identity with the new socio-political codes. DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-7

100  Tim Buchen To improve the lot of their flock, they pursued political strategies designed to change the public’s behavior as well as asserting religious principles and practices. As a result, however, they intensified conflict to the point of it erupting into physical violence, albeit mostly unintentionally. This chapter considers the influence that religious conceptions and clerical mobilization strategies had on precipitating, steering, and interpreting the violence during the disturbances of 1846 and 1898. It inquires into the religious ideas that were expressed in these acts of violence and the speech acts that attended them.4 Which religious norms justified or constrained the violent uprisings against Christian elites and Jews? Which differences within Catholicism found expression in the violent dynamics and which new ones emerged? The relatively long span of the inquiry allows light to be shed on the continuities and changes in the relationship between lay and clerical actors as well as in their joint envisioning of the enemies of ‘the Catholic people’. Viewed in the context of the Catholic Church first becoming a political force and the dawn of modern mass politics in the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1867, this inquiry into religion-related violence in Galicia can also contribute to a better understanding of the politicization of religion as well as the ethnic and national currents within religious difference that emerged in the latter nineteenth century. Below, a brief survey of the religious, social, political, economic, and ethnic conditions in Galicia prior to the revolutions of 1848 will be followed by an account of the rabatz of 1846 and its religious dimensions. A third section will consider the Galician clergy’s response to the violence and the agents of violence as well as the development of a Catholic antisemitism in Galicia from the 1880s on. Subsequently, the essay will focus on the variety and character of attacks on Jews in 1898 and inquire into the influence of clerical anti-Jewish mobilization, the inner logic behind peasant conduct, and the religious dimension of the antisemitic riots. Multi-Ethnicity and Neo-Feudalism in Galicia during the Age of Metternich The crownland of Galicia and Lodomeria was created by the Habsburg Monarchy from the territory it had annexed during the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century.5 As landowners with numerous privileges, the Polish nobility was the politically, socially, and economically dominant force in the crownland. In the neo-feudal social order that was typical of East Central Europe’s ‘second serfdom’, the majority peasant population was dependent upon the manorial lords. They owned no land themselves and had limited personal liberties. In the West of the crownland, most peasants spoke Polish and were Roman Catholic. In the East, they were predominantly Ukrainian-speaking and belonged to the Uniate Greek Orthodox Church, which recognized the pope but held to Orthodox rite.6 Class, religion, and local origins were crucial points of selfidentification; national categories, in contrast, did not factor into peasant

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  101 identity.7 Jews, making up some 10% of the population, formed another social group in between the nobility and the peasants. Middlemen of society, they worked in trade, moneylending, transport, and crafts. While co-reliant, Christian peasants and Jewish service providers tended to approach each other with reserve.8 The landowning nobility held a monopoly on manufacturing and selling alcohol but issued licenses to run bars mostly to Jews.9 Wishing to modernize the new province, Emperor Joseph II set about building a bureaucratic system to break the power of the nobility. Peasants who felt unjustly treated now gained the opportunity to file complaints about their landlords. Among the Galician peasantry, this greatly boosted the popularity of the Austrian State in the period prior to 1848.10 The reverse was the case, however, among the nobility, whose supremacy was now threatened, as well as among democratic opponents of Absolutism. They sought to recreate a Polish State by means of a succession of military uprisings. The first, in 1794 under Tadeusz Kościuszko, who promised the abolition of serfdom, succeeded in this way to mobilize thousands of peasants to fight against Russia. Galician Slaughter or a Mere Rumble? Extreme Acts of Peasant Violence in Winter 1846 In 1846, another uprising was planned by Poles in exile. As the various other revolts and revolutions of the years 1846–1849 were to show, the European monarchies lacked the law enforcement personnel to maintain control if disturbances broke out in the country.11 The Austrian government officials in Galicia therefore encouraged empire-loyal peasants to assist in suppressing the uprising, by detaining its (Polish-sympathetic) supporters and seizing their weapons. As the peasants had seen a slight improvement in their circumstances since the introduction of the Josephine reforms and feared a return to Polish rule as a potential reversion to their less favorable legal and economic situation prior to the partitions, many responded to the imperial appeal for help.12 They interpreted the offer of payment for any transport services performed, weapons seized, or insurgents arrested as a bounty, motivating countless of them to hunt down members of the nobility. Peasants also empowered themselves by repeating the rumors of official circulars containing the emperor’s permission for ‘his’ peasants to plunder manorial estates and murder members of the nobility within a three-day period.13 In this way, peasant involvement in suppressing the uprising soon gathered momentum and intensified into a terrific display of peasant self-empowerment. Individual acts of vengeance on hated administrators and manorial lords combined with opportunist pillaging, the consumption of looted alcohol, and the demolition of signs and symbols of the patriarchal system and peasant dependence. Rabatz was the peasants’ euphemistic term for the orgy of violence that was sparked by rumors and accounts told by those on the run. It was a bloody carnival in the middle of the Lenten season, in which

102  Tim Buchen established local hierarchies and orders were turned on their heads.14 Between 1,200 and 2,000 people were murdered, many of them brutally slaughtered. Many of the ringleaders asserted they had the explicit authorization not only of the emperor but also of the pope to punish the nobility and the clergy. A peasant in Tarnów, for example, is recorded as saying at the start of the rampage, on February 22: “The emperor has ordered, the Holy Father allows [us to kill the lords of the manors]”.15 Those targeted, however, saw the events as “Galician slaughter”.16 From the clerical point of view, the violence did not serve to maintain the order of Church and State but rather marked a mass rejection of the God-willed social hierarchy, as the following priest’s account shows: When I returned to Laczki 5 weeks after the said looting and murdering, and the people were still in such a state of dazzlement after committing these murders and robberies that they did not even consider a return to Christian morality, and did not feel any remorse for their shameful deeds, but had rather taken a liking to this life of crime, […] spending each day drinking […] I preached […] what they are and what they will soon become if they do not truly return to God, and discard the despicable opinion, unworthy of sensible human beings, that the government had ordered all these injustices and atrocities. […] These words so angered the murderers and thieves that […] they began to grumble and whisper and finally to shout out loud: ‘If the priest wants to stay in one piece, he should keep quiet and not badmouth us.’17 This account vividly illustrates the situation in Western Galicia in winter 1846 and points to the widespread desire among the peasantry to make the most of and even perpetuate the chaotic conditions.18 Eventually, the military restored order and peace was secured when the governor of Galicia abolished servitude in 1848. But the bloody February of 1846 would not be forgotten. It changed relations between the nobility, clergy, and peasants, and each group’s perception of the other. It divided the Polish nation that the elites envisaged and was remembered differently by each class, as the diverging descriptions indicate: rabatz on the one side and “slaughter” on the other. The peasantry composed songs and poems to remember the highpoint of their self-empowerment and prove the physical force they possessed, and that they could unleash again if treated unjustly.19 On the nobility, in contrast, 1846 left a traumatic impact. They marked anniversaries and commemorated the victims of the ordeal in solemn memorial publications and paintings. The events were similarly traumatic for the Catholic clergy. They had been forced to realize that publicly branding the peasant demands behind the mobilizing rumors as sinful and unworthy placed their own safety at risk. Priests were often partly – though

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  103 unwittingly – responsible for violence erupting and escalating, as the rioters turned on them. The “rumble” had a significant religious dimension. In spring 1845, the clergy had started organizing pilgrimages on which the faithful would be convinced to renounce alcohol.20 This attempt to combat the proverbial ‘Galician misery’ marked a drastic intervention in the economic and social structures of rural peasant life. The pilgrimages were a resounding success. They satisfied a need among peasants for their concerns to be taken seriously and acknowledged the far-reaching changes affecting village life. Ultimately, they helped place the social changes and peasants’ plight on the political agenda.21 Yet, the undeniably huge impact of the sobriety movement was not uniform. On the one hand, there were many peasants who kept their vows and remained abstinent. Through them, renouncing alcohol became an integral part of the new, religion-based model for identification of the responsible peasant. But on the other, there were many peasants who soon returned to regular, heavy drinking. They were likely to articulate the anger and contempt for priests described above so long as the clergy continued to promote sobriety and publicly denounced relapsed drinkers. The diverging responses caused rifts to appear within village communities, between scorners and advocates of the sobriety movement. In brief, the sobriety movement, and the public’s response to it, marked the rise of the phenomenon described by Abigail Green as the politicization of religious identities in the nineteenth century.22 Communities of faith turned into communities of opinion. Attitudes to alcohol became the new religious and cultural codes. Many residents of Western Galicia interpreted the impending uprising in winter 1846 against the background of this new potential for identification and conflict, based on attitudes to alcohol, rather than in terms of abstract, national categories. The tavern was a place where information was exchanged, patronized predominantly by opponents of the sobriety movement. They tended to link the news of unrest with the temperance-versus-traditionalmerrymaking dispute, which impacted on them personally. In taverns, the rumor spread that the uprising was a ruse designed to enforce abstinence by violent means. Many innkeepers were said to have advanced this conspiracy theory.23 Supporters of the new temperance, in contrast, maintained that the nobility, for whom alcohol was a major source of income, had instigated the unrest to thwart the achievements of the sobriety movement. Both sides used mechanisms of orally organizing collective violence that portrayed the victims as threats and the true aggressors, in a bid to legitimize the attacks as self-defense or just punishments.24 Peasants countered the uncertainty caused by news of the emperor – remote and mythologized – being deposed by the szlachta – the familiar but disliked Polish nobility – by filling the gaps in their information with improvised tales. These combined old demands to take the manorial lords

104  Tim Buchen to account with new positions on the controversial issue of sobriety.25 Consequently, opponents and proponents of the Catholic temperance campaign found themselves fighting on the same side – against the nobility. Their acts of violence situationally restored the cohesion within the peasant class that had been damaged due to the temperance campaign. Incidents were reported of peasants destroying alcohol stocks to symbolically eradicate the root cause of their plight.26 Yet, at the same time, many rioters got drunk on looted alcohol, acting as if the riots marked the end of the temperance movement. Some attacks on priests were also styled as physical or symbolic punishment for peasant-hostile conduct regarding the temperance question. A priest in Jastrzębie, for example, was forced under threat of violence to kneel – mimicking the oaths sworn on sobriety pilgrimages – and pledge allegiance to “the revolution”, as his assailants termed the rabatz.27 Priests wrote countless letters to their bishops to express their shock and outrage at the congregation members who had become so alienated from the Church that they were committing these bloodthirsty acts. The clergy could no longer control the faithful by their patriarchal demeanor. Eloquent sermons, asserting the authority of God and the emperor, rarely inspired contriteness, or remorse: rebellious churchgoers refused the offer to repent by whispering, grumbling, and uttering threats as the priest spoke. With the Benefit of Hindsight: The Clergy and the Political Mobilization of Peasants, 1846–1898 The “rumble” of 1846 marked a turning point in the history of the Galician peasantry’s religious mobilization as well as in the Catholic clergy’s role on the Habsburg political stage. Appalled at the peasant brutality, and aware that the sobriety campaign had played a substantial role in the tragedy, priests subsequently refrained for decades from any conspicuous efforts to change the peasant way of life.28 Indeed, the Galician clergy became a crucial support for the neo-absolutist course taken by Emperor Franz Joseph, who ascended the throne in 1848. Reformist efforts, up to the abolition of serfdom, were now left to higher authorities. Instead, the clergy focused on bolstering the power of the monarchy, military, and Church to prevent a revolutionary dynamic such as in the crisis years 1846–1849 from recurring. The Church’s position within the Habsburg State was in turn consolidated when the liberal Kremsier Constitution was abandoned and the Concordat of 1855 adopted.29 Vindicated by these developments, the high clergy in Galicia urgently warned of the unforeseen consequences of peasant emancipation and ‘sedition’ against the established order. Liberal and democratic demands to change the status quo were regularly – and effectively – countered by the argument that the underclasses could not be trusted as they

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  105 possessed a latent dark side, were controlled by unpredictable “instincts”, and easily provoked into using violence.30 The consequences of treating the uneducated peasants in such a patronizing manner – as exotic, primitive, impulsive creatures – became tangible when the neo-absolutist decade gave way to the era of liberalism. Liberal anticlerical rhetoric and calls for the separation of Church and State began to challenge the governmental and social privileges of the Catholic Church. The Austrian-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 spelled the end of the Concordat. The liberal constitution introduced the same year curtailed many of the Church’s rights. It was condemned in turn by Pope Pius IX in the Vix Dum a Nobis encyclical, which called on the clergy to resist liberal policies such as state school supervision and civil marriage. Meanwhile, the abolition of censorship, the establishment of the parliaments in Vienna and Budapest, and the gradual extension of suffrage in the individual crownlands ensured that an ever-growing proportion of the male population became involved in politics. Catholic commentators warned of the incalculable repercussions of breaking up the Church’s extensive care of the uneducated sections of the population and leaving it to parties who they believed to bedazzle the inexperienced voters with reckless promises. Many members of the clergy recalled the rabatz of 1846 to demonstrate the underclasses’ volatility and immaturity.31 In contrast to the sobriety campaign of the 1840s, the objective of this culture war was not to persuade Catholic peasants to cast off harmful habits. This time, the clergy shifted the thrust of its rhetoric toward combating an external adversary, beyond the Catholic sphere. Sermons and articles in the Catholic press railed against liberalism, quoting papal sources such as the Syllabus Errorum to portray it as ‘godless’, and painted threatening scenarios to mobilize believers to resist the State’s intervention in their way of life. Issues such as civil marriage, equality among religious beliefs, and statecontrolled education sparked fierce resistance in Ultramontane circles. Perceiving Jews as a visible force in the liberal press and parties, they interpreted the advances against church authority as a Jewish conspiracy to undermine Christendom. Eventually, the Ultramontane influence in Habsburg politics was a key factor in precipitating a turnaround from liberalism to a new wave of conservatism. For two decades, throughout the 1860s and 1870s, German-speaking liberals had been the dominant force in the Austrian government. But in 1879, Eduard Taaffe became the first Minister-President to be backed by a conservative majority of clerical and Slavic parliamentarians in the lower house of the Viennese Reichsrat. For the first time, provincial votes outweighed those of the imperial elites. A new political camp opposing both socialism and liberalism was formed in the Habsburg empire, based on Catholic ideas on social policy, not only by newcomer conservative opinionmakers but also by experienced politicians

106  Tim Buchen who had become disillusioned with liberalism.32 The Catholic press published a constant flow of invective against the allegedly Jewish-led campaign to desecrate marriage and education as well as shock reports on the barbaric, anti-Christian practice of ritual murder. Individual Catholic political actors consciously shifted the sayability rules concerning Jews. While Viennese priest and antisemite Josef Deckert promoted antisemitism in his writings, influential Galician Jesuit Marian Morawski declared “asemitism”, implying the complete economic boycott and social ostracism of Jews to be a Christian duty.33 Such commentators regarded Jewish emancipation, which had resulted in increasing interaction between Christians and Jews, as a threat to Christian values. Their call to boycott Jews can be regarded as an extension of Christian efforts in previous decades to gain a foothold in once exclusively Jewish spheres – by establishing Christian-run stores, cooperatives, and lending societies. A driving force in this movement was Morawski’s fellow student and religious order member Stanisław Stojałowski, who published peasant newspapers and ran agricultural circles.34 The movement started after 1867, when Jews gained the right to work in fields from which they had previously been barred, such as land acquisition and government service, and Christians were encouraged to take up occupations formerly the domain of Jews. This blurred the once clear distinction between Jewish and Christian fields of activity. Areas of life once separated by religion now became divided by ethnic rivalry. Instead of temperance being the defining feature of modern Catholic identity, it was opposition to the Jews – individuals and the supposedly Jewish forces of socialism and liberalism alike. Following the election of antisemite Karl Lueger to the post of Mayor of Vienna in 1895, and facing the possibility of a Social-Democratic victory in the Reichsrat elections of 1897, political Catholicism completed an antisemitic turn.35 Newspapers such as Prawda, Grzmot, and Pochodnia sustained notions of an eschatological battle between Catholics and Jews. But unlike in previous decades, it was not conceived of as a conflict between Christian values and Jewish traditions, that is, between religious beliefs. Ever more publications now referred to distinctions between Aryans and Semites, that is, ethnic concepts. The Catholic newspaper Antysemita was established in Krakow in 1897, the same year that the Catholic labor association changed its name to the “Union of Antisemites”. The Catholic press also circulated thousands of inflammatory anti-Jewish pamphlets, such as the notorious Jewish Secrets by Father Mateusz Jeż.36 Rural Galicians took a keen interest in the Reichsrat elections, interpreting them as a chance to communicate directly with the emperor via the representatives they might dispatch to the parliament in Vienna. Indeed, tensions ran so high that even rivalry between peasant parties struck rifts through Christian village communities. Both Stojałowski’s Christian Social People’s Party (SChL) and the secular,

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  107 nationalist People’s Party (SL) agitated massively against Jews. Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories were even advanced to discredit equally antisemitic opponents. The Catholic party-associated newspapers accused their secular rivals of planning to crush religion. Following months of intense campaigning to mobilize the Galician peasants, violence erupted again in early summer 1898 in Western and Central Galicia. Although this wave was far less deadly than the “ruckus” of 50 years previously, it was comparable in terms of geographical extent and perpetrator numbers. However, this time, the victims were not the antagonistic elites, the nobility, and the clergy, but the Jews. New Wave of Peasant Violence: Anti-Jewish Riots in Spring 1898 An incident in the week before Easter in the salt-mining town of Wieliczka triggered the second wave of disturbances. A rumor had begun to circulate that the priest and Christian Social member of the Reichsrat Andrzej Szponder had been abducted and murdered by Jews.37 With his dual function, Szponder embodied the fusion of religion and politics that emerged in Galicia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Verbal and physical attacks on Jews were common around Easter, when Christians were evocatively reminded of the Passion of Christ and consequently associated any Jews with Christ’s betrayal and murder. When Szponder failed to arrive on the expected train from Krakow, his alarmed supporters went to throw stones at the local synagogue before being dispersed by the gendarmes. When the priest finally arrived on a later train, he spoke to his supporters gathered in the station to calm them. The next morning, he referred to the incident in a sermon, stressing that it was forbidden to commit acts of violence on Jews or their property. Yet, in the same breath, he repeated his party’s antisemitic slogans about the danger posed by Jews and the need to completely boycott Jewish businesses. A short time later, the death of two parliamentarians necessitated a byelection and the rival Peasant and Social Democratic parties resumed intensive campaigning. There was a resurgence of antisemitic agitation, and many more issues of Jewish Secrets were circulated. Theoretical antisemitism was now linked in oral communication among rural populations with the events in Wieliczka. In several places, rumors spread that the Jews were to be punished or receive a ‘proper’ reckoning. The rumors intensified prior to the many Catholic holidays in the early summer, when pilgrimages, processions, and fairs were held, attracting large crowds. On these occasions, Galician peasants visited towns with substantial Jewish populations. Expectations of the imminent punishment of the Jews were now shored up by the story of a failed Jewish attack on the emperor.38 As a penalty, Franz Joseph had allegedly permitted his (Catholic) subjects to beat and rob the Jews within a fixed

108  Tim Buchen timeframe. Alternatively, permission was said to have come from the longsince deceased Crown Prince Rudolf or even the pope. The – mostly illiterate – peasants sought and found confirmation of the rumors in various notices and bulletins from authorities beyond the village world. For example, signs announcing a memorial celebration for the poet Adam Mickiewicz in a place of pilgrimage named Kalwarya Zebrzydowska were printed on red paper: this was interpreted as hinting at imminent bloodshed, and so as confirmation of the rumors.39 The town had already witnessed another strange phenomenon around that time. A short time previously, residents had rushed to obtain handbills advertising a stain remover that a traveling salesman had left in a local store. In their anticipation of an official order to help the emperor mete punishment, they were convinced that the advertisements symbolized permits to beat Jews.40 On May 25, 1898, the collective mood of expectancy erupted into actual disturbances. Hundreds of peasants taking part in the procession in honor of Mickiewicz smashed the windows of Jewish-occupied houses along the way. The next day started peacefully but ended in bloodshed when a mob tried to repeat the attacks of the previous day. Stopped by the reinforced units of gendarmes, the angry peasants started throwing stones at the gendarmes. A gendarme fired a shot into the crowd, killing one peasant. The news of the incident in Kalwarya spread across the entire land. The antisemitic Catholic newspaper Prawda commented: “On the day of the Mickiewicz celebrations Christian blood was shed to protect Jews”.41 Eyewitnesses gave accounts of the events in the surrounding villages. These were perceived as concretizing the vague talk of an imminent reckoning with the Jews, while the bloodshed was regarded as justification for further punishment. A few days later, on May 28, Jewish taverns in the districts Myślenice and Podgórze were looted and demolished; no gendarmes were on the scene to prevent the attacks. Concluding that they had a real prospect of not only symbolically punishing the Jews but also obtaining free alcohol and groceries, and going unpunished, several thousand men and women were motivated to take part in similar attacks in the following weeks. In almost 500 places, Jewish stores and taverns, and occasionally homes, were ransacked and plundered. The wave of attacks spread like wildfire from village to village, from one day to the next, and especially on the evenings before a holiday or a Sunday. Many of the victims knew their attackers as customers and were therefore able to report them to the police and give evidence against them in court. Of the dozens of local outbreaks of violence that can be reconstructed from witness statements and court records, there is only one case that was started not by oral agitation but by a notice legitimizing violence in writing.42 The text of the notice, which originated in Brzesko and survives in the inquiry files, was apparently written by a peasant “pogrom specialist”.43 It is

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  109 cited below in full as it illustrates the key significance of religious ideas and framings in the conflict and provides rare insight into rhetorical mobilization strategies aiming to instigate violence. Hurrah! Hurrah! Get the Jews. If it is so all over Galicia, we shall not shame ourselves but also beat up the foul lot and run them out of here, let’s go! Threshing flails, scythes, and picks aboard, make them work like everybody else. Until now the Jews have given nothing. You spilt the blood of our savior, you spilt our blood, you stole from our land, our people, got rich on our work, it is crawling with your lot everywhere. – Go off to Palestine, that is where your Messiah is. And so away with Passover, we despise you the way God dammed you. We will not stop striking out and starting fires until you have disappeared. We will blow you up with dynamite and you will fall out of the air like frogs. Hurrah, brothers, tally-ho for the Jews, hurrah!!! The Holy Father has issued permission for anything that drives the Jews out from among the Catholics! We will meet, you know when, do not forget the fair. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!44 With its rallying tone and rapid changes between appeals, demands, and claims, the notice reads like an improvised, emotional speech, put down in writing. It addresses both the author’s Christian brethren, that is, potential co-perpetrators, and the future victims – local Jews. The accusations of deicide, and Jews being non-productive and parasitic, were recurring themes of an old, religion-based hostility. The references to Palestine and the Jewish Messiah are further evidence of the primacy of a religious world view among the peasants. The author was likely familiar with the political program of Zionism, which was regularly explained and applauded in peasant newspapers and could be incorporated into the traditional, popular-religious narrative.45 Palestine being the Jewish country of origin was a familiar concept among the peasantry, as was the theme of the wandering Jew and the fact that Polish kings had allowed Jews to immigrate in the Middle Ages. All these notions sustained the view that despite having been in the country for several centuries and many generations, Jews were only temporarily among the Christian peasants. Another crucial aspect of the notice’s agitation is its reference to authorization from the pope. It translated the oral rumor into text, raising its importance in many perpetrators’ eyes and declared the pope to be an advocate of the emigration and expulsion of Jews. The fantasies of dynamite explosions and raining frogs seem to fuse Alfred Nobel’s contemporaneous scientific innovation with biblical visions of the apocalypse. William W. Hagen has found comparable remarks made around 1918–1920 – years of radical change – to be expressions of the Polish peasants’ “magic world-view”.46 The desire to break the imagined supernatural power of the Jews and their influence on the peasant world motivated many

110  Tim Buchen to participate in the deadly pogroms of the postwar era. The notice quoted above conveys a similar scenario with its fantasy of violence combined with biblical images. But contrary to the rhetoric, no threshing flails or scythes were used during the antisemitic riots in 1898. A total of 22 people were fatally injured. All of them were Christians, killed by the bullets of the Habsburg law enforcement officers, as in Kalwarya. This was no frenzy of violence, no killing spree, as in 1846. Talk of murder and arson served to scare Jews and raise the peasants’ status to that of masters over life and death. It endowed them with a sense of power over the others. But the State had considerably increased its military capability since 1846, both in terms of personnel and technology. Thanks to the telegraph system and mounted police units, it could now intervene far quicker if trouble broke out in remote areas. Unlike in 1918, the State in 1898 was an operative force with an integrative figurehead, Emperor Franz Joseph, who was not only living but a ubiquitous presence – in imagery and rhetoric celebrating the 50th anniversary of his coronation. A key motive for the unrest was to symbolically relegate the Jews to their ‘rightful’ place outside what the majority conceived of as a Christian society. The social standing of many Jews had improved since emancipation and the introduction of market economy. Peasants resisted this change by constantly referring to their endorsement by the two highest authorities – the emperor and the pope – and so recalling the idea of a Christian imagined order from which Jews were excluded. They also performatively enacted the intimidation and exclusion of Jews. Christians in many towns and villages made cacophonies and held carnivalesque processions, during which they sang defamatory songs and threw stones at Jewish houses – not only to damage them but also to mark them out as belonging to the other and so exclude them from their society.47 Peasant troublemakers did not threaten and intimidate Jews, or appropriate tobacco and alcohol, only to wield power. Many were also eager to acquire goods for free from the others. In some villages, the entire community participated in the looting. After surrounding a tavern and all throwing stones at it, some of the children, and men under the influence of alcohol, would come forward from the singing and shrieking crowd to ensure the windows were broken. Men armed with sticks or axes would then enter the tavern, smashing glasses and furnishings, and proceed to grab booty and bring it outside. Women and children would carry the loot home. In the village of Lutzca, a local policeman led the carnivalesque proceedings, signaling to the crowd when to move to their next target by blowing his trumpet. In Nowy Sącz, where the most devastating attacks and lootings occurred in late June, inhabitants of other villages arrived in coaches to transport all the booty they expected to seize back home. There were dozens of incidents of individuals or small groups taking advantage of the chaos to drink their fill in a tavern without paying. Often, it

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  111 was enough for guests to mention an attack that had occurred in the area, and the possibility of it being repeated in that village, to be given a mollifying drink on the house. Some would bring the violence to the tavern when inebriated. Certainly, alcohol consumption and the prospect of attaining free beer or vodka were important factors in the riots. Since most Jews consumed alcohol only on religious feast days, unobserved by Christians, many peasants believed that Jews hoarded alcohol but did not indulge in it and were therefore not entitled to it. The two groups’ diverging approaches to drinking marked another religion-based difference between them. The riots and the perpetrators’ subsequent justification and rationalization of the violence in court show that despite the changes that market economy had brought to numerous spheres of everyday life, peasants still adhered to archaic concepts of economy, property, and entitlement. The events in Galicia, and especially the resulting state of emergency and crackdown on peasant parties, were debated at length in the Reichsrat in Vienna. But apart from Emil Byk, a Jewish parliamentarian and member of the conservative Polish Club, nobody addressed the damages suffered by the Galician Jews. The Social Democrats criticized the military’s excessive use of force in restoring law and order, and the antisemitic parliamentarian Father Stojałowski claimed that the Jews, by exploiting the peasants, had ultimately initiated and, during the state of emergency, benefited from the riots: “Whenever riots broke out, then, it was not our party that encouraged or incited the people to [violence] but the national and religious brethren of Dr Byk himself ”.48 His sentiments were echoed by the antisemitic Vienna-based satirical magazine Kikeriki, which ran caricatures portraying rapacious Jews preying upon innocent peasants.49 Overall, antisemitic Catholic publications used the anti-Jewish mood to intensify their campaign for a complete and permanent separation of Jewish and Christian spheres. The antisemitic press coopted the wave of violence to serve its own goals and stressed the ethnic difference between Christians and Jews. Conclusion Inquiry into the major outbreaks of violence in nineteenth-century Galicia sheds light on the significant role that religious mobilization played in them. The clergy and its recoding of religious identity were key factors in both waves of violence. A comparison of the two shows that new cleavages within the peasant community and conflicts over the legitimacy of the new, clericaldesigned political programs had crucial impacts. Both in 1846 and in 1898, the collective violence served to overcome these rifts by targeting a common enemy. Moreover, in both waves, the violence was rationalized as being necessary to defend the imperiled emperor, constructing a sense of unity between the ruler and his subjects. Yet, in 1846, the peasants were not simply

112  Tim Buchen obeying orders from above but also pursuing their own interests. They used the theories and interpretations of the events in circulation to realize their personal and genuinely peasant goals. By 1898, the violence was primarily propelled by moments and motives of peasant self-empowerment. Rumors and alcohol were again major catalysts. Religious mobilization was a key factor; that is, priests assembling crowds at religiously connotated places or in the name of the Catholic Church. The latter wave of 1898 was also distinguished by the fact that, by targeting Jews, the violence was directed at religious ‘others’. By demeaning this enemy collective, the peasants’ performance of power and unity underlined an ethnic difference rather than a class difference, as in 1846. Religion and politics were inextricably interwoven in the antisemitic riots. Both waves were preceded by intensive clerical efforts to alter the everyday behavior of the rural Catholic target group. Like the clergy’s war on alcohol of 1846, its agitation toward a boycott of Jews 50 years later was an attempt to enhance religious identification with new socio-political codes. By politicizing religion in this way and transforming a community of faith into a community of opinion, the clergy unwittingly created new cleavages within peasant village communities that traditionally strove for unity. Violence then fulfilled the function of restoring the lost unity of the Catholic peasants by means of joint action and in united opposition to the victims, whom they categorized as ‘others’ and ‘enemies’. Another precondition for collective violence in Galicia was the uncertainty generated by changes in social status and the upheavals they were anticipated or feared to cause. In this context, the revolutionary uprising of 1846, which threatened to deprive Galicia of the emperor’s protection, seemed a far more existential threat to the peasantry than the possibility of a liberal election victory and secular forces assuming power in 1897. Hence, the less brutal nature of the violence in 1898, when the State’s authority and order remained stable and visible. During both waves, the perpetrators rationalized their actions as a defense of the – decidedly Christian – order represented by the emperor and the pope. Not only the organization of the violence and its carnivalesque character but also its occurrence during the Lenten and Easter period recalled and consolidated long-standing popular-religious practices and knowledge. All these points testify to a deep entrenchment of violence in the religious sphere. But in what sense did the Galician peasants’ collective violence serve religious purposes? To what extent did it try to assert or defend religious ideas? There was little evidence of it in 1846. But by 1898, clerical actors had politicized religion to such an extent that religious belief and party-political support seemed synonymous. The rhetoric of election campaigns and newspaper articles brought the Manichean conflict of good versus evil into the world of politics. The apocalyptic tales and magic world view of the

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  113 peasants, who believed they could break the perceived omnipotence of the Jews with physical violence, illustrate the religious dimension of the disturbances. That is not to say that the ‘troublemakers’ were implementing an agitators’ agenda; the clergy, certainly, had never called for the use of physical force. Rather, they responded to various contingencies and stimuli to satisfy their own demand to call Jews to account, degrade them, and obtain goods and consume intoxicants at their expense. Material interests were an important motive, even if they were often embedded in notions of a Christian moral economy. The second wave of violence indubitably contributed to translating religious difference into a political and ethnic distinction and so, ultimately, to nationalizing people’s life-worlds. However, it would be hasty to conclude that the peasants’ shift in targets from class ‘others’ in 1846 to religious and ethnic ‘others’ in 1898 equaled a direct route toward ethno-nationalism. In 1918, when the emperor was indeed deposed and a ‘godless’ regime – that of the Bolshevists – assumed power, there was another outbreak of peasant violence, which displayed similarities both with that of 1846 and with that of 1898.50 As the state order collapsed, peasants again attacked Jews to degrade and, in some cases, murder them. But this time, they also targeted large landowners and Polish representatives of the government. Galician peasants appropriated forests, pastures, and fields and declared peasant republics, now also echoing the right of nations to self-determination, Vladimir Lenin, and Woodrow Wilson as well as reviving the local tradition of peasant self-empowerment.51 They also continued to integrate their magic world view and ideas of moral economy as well as cite clerical horror stories of Judeo-Bolshevism to rationalize the violence.52 The impact of the World War and civil war on this violent dynamic, however, locate it clearly in an era that falls beyond the scope of this volume and in the twentieth century – the century of extremes.53 Notes 1 See, e. g., Arnon Gill, Die Polnische Revolution 1846: Zwischen Nationalem Befreiungskampf des Landadels und antifeudaler Bauernerhebung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1974). 2 The Austrian administration referred to the disturbances as “antisemitische Exzesse” (antisemitic riots). The press then adopted the term, reporting that between 18 and 22 “Exzendenten” (rioters) had been shot by the authorities. See, e. g., Daniel L. Unowsky, The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Tim Buchen, Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy (New York: Berghahn, 2020). 3 See, e.g., Dietlind Hüchtker, “Der, Mythos Galizien‘: Versuch einer Historisierung,” in Die Nationalisierung von Grenzen: Zur Konstruktion nationaler Identitäten sprachlich gemischten Grenzregionen, eds. Michael G. Müller and Rolf

114  Tim Buchen Petrie (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2002); Kerstin S. Jobst, Der Mythos des Miteinander: Galizien in Literatur und Geschichte (Hamburg: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde, 1998). 4 On the connection between violence and speech acts, see Helmut Walser Smith, “Vom Spiel zur Handlung,” in Fluchtpunkt 1941: Kontinuitäten der deutschen Geschichte, trans. Christian Wiese (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2010). 5 See Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Hans-Christian Maner, Galizien: Eine Grenzregion im Kalkül der Donaumonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: IKGS Verlag, 2007). 6 See, e.g., Andreas Gottsmann, Rom und die nationalen Katholizismen in der Donaumonarchie: Römischer Universalismus, habsburgische Reichspolitik und nationale Identitäten, 1878–1914 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010). 7 See Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien: Über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). 8 Rosa Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town (New York: Berghahn, 2001). 9 See, e.g., Hillel Levine, Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and its Jews in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 10 Cf. Zbigniew Fras, “Mit dobrego cesarza,” in Polskie mity polityczne XIX i XX wieku, ed. Wojciech Wrzwsinski (Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1994). 11 See, e.g., Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann and Robert John Weston Evans, eds., The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 12 See, e.g., Roman Rozdolski, Untertan und Staat in Galizien: Die Reformen unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II. (Mainz: Von Zabern, 1992). 13 Cf. Buchen, Antisemitism in Galicia, 28. 14 “Rabacja” was the Polish term, derived from the German “rabatz”. Cf. Andrzej Chwalba, Historia Polski: 1795–1918 (Krakow: Wydawnictow Literackie, 2007). 15 Cited from Jan Kracik, W Galicji trzeźwiejącej, krwawej, pobożnej (Krakow: Salwator, 2008), 48. 16 Tim Buchen, “Das, Galizische Schlachten‘ 1846: Die Ermordung Adliger durch polnische Bauern und die Rolle der Habsburgischen Herrscher im Gemälde Jan Lewickis,” in Bilder kollektiver Gewalt – kollektive Gewalt im Bild: Annäherungen an eine Ikonographie der Gewalt, eds. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Ulrich Wyrwa, and Michael Kohlstruck (Berlin: Metropol, 2015). 17 Father Wrzesniewski, in Memoiren und Actenstücke aus Galizien im Jahre 1846: Gesammelt von einem Mähren (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1847), 19. 18 See, e.g., Gill, Die polnische Revolution; Krzysztof Karol Daszyk et al., eds., Rok 1846 w Krakowie i Galicji: Odniesienia, interpretacje, pamięć (Krakow: Historia Iagellonica, 2016); Michał Śliwa, ed., Rok 1846 w Galicji: Ludzie, wydarzenia, tradycje (Krakow: WSP, 1997). On the current state of research, see also Buchen, “Das, Galizische Schlachten’ 1846”. 19 One popular song went: “Do you remember, my lord, the year 46? How the peasants chased you away with clubs?” Translated from the Polish original cited in Roy F. Leslie, The History of Poland since 1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 8. 20 See, e.g., Kracik, W Galicji trzeźwiejącej. 21 Cf. Struve, Bauern und Nation.

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  115 22 Cf. Abigail Green, “Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c. 1840–1880,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (2008): 536. 23 Cf. Kracik, W Galicji trzeźwiejącej, 50. 24 See, e.g., Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 25 See, e.g., Hans-Joachim Neubauer, Fama: Eine Geschichte des Gerüchts (Berlin: Matthes Seitz, 2009). 26 The county captains of Wadowice and Neu-Sandez reported cases of distilleries being demolished and barrels of liquor being smashed and emptied, which they attributed to sobriety movement activists: State Archives, Krakow / Archivum Państwowe w Krakowie [hereafter ArPKr], B2, tc5, p. 26. 27 Cf. Kracik, W Galicji trzeźwiejącej, 31. 28 Around the turn of the century, Governor of Galicia Alfred Potocki called on the Archbishop of Lemberg to prevent peasant gatherings in case they escalate into another rabatz: Franciszek Kącki, Ks. Stanisław Stojalowski I jego działalnosc społeczno-polityczna (Lemberg: Unknown Publisher, 1937), 109. 29 See, e.g., Laurence Cole, “The Counter-Reformation’s Last Stand: Austria,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. Christopher M. Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 30 See, e.g., Franciszek Ziejka, Złota legenda chłopów polskich (Warsaw: Państwowy Inst. Wydawn, 1984). 31 See, e.g., Józef Ryszard Szaflik, O rząd chłopskich dusz (Warsaw: Lud. Spółdz. Wydawn, 1984). 32 See, e.g., Gottsmann, Rom und die nationalen Katholizismen. 33 Josef Deckert, Darf ein Katholik Antisemit sein? (Vienna: Unknown Publisher, 1982). See also Olaf Blaschke, “Wie wird aus einem guten Katholik ein guter Judenfeind? Zwölf Ursachen des katholischen Antisemitismus auf dem Prüfstand,” in Katholischer Antisemitismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Ursachen und Traditionen im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Olaf Blaschke (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 2000). 34 See, e.g., Anna Staudacher, “Der Bauernagitator Stanisław Stojałowski: Priester, Journalist und Abgeordneter zum österreichischen Reichsrat,” Römische Historische Mittelungen 25 (1983). 35 See, e.g., Tim Buchen, “‘Learning from Vienna means Learning to Win’: the Cracovian Christian Socials and the ‘Antisemitic Turn’ of 1896,” Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 3 (2012), accessed September 23, 2021, http://www. quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=302. 36 Cf. Daniel Unowsky, “Peasant Political Mobilization and the 1898 anti-Jewish Riots in Western Galicia,” European History Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 420–421. 37 Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien, 176–186. 38 This echoed the popular justification of the 1881 pogroms in Tsarist Russia as well as that of an incident in Galicia in 1872, see Alexey Miller, “Do charakterystyki wsi pouwłaszczeniowej w latach siedemdziesiątych XIX wieku: Panika galicjska 1872 roku,” Przegląd Historyczny 79 (1988). 39 Central Historical State Archives, L’viv / Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv [hereafter: CDIAL] 146/4/3117, p. 40. 40 In colloquial speech, ink stains were also referred to as “Jews”. The said advertisement claimed the product could remove ink stains with ease. Central Archives of Historical Records, Warsaw / Archiwum Glowne Akt dawnych [hereafter: AGAD], Min. Spraw. 307/3. 41 Prawda (June 5, 1898).

116  Tim Buchen 42 CDIAL, 146/4/3124. 43 Paul Brass coined the term “pogrom specialist” to denote actors who effect the transition from speech to act and so contribute to gathering a crowd of potential marauders and motivate individuals to inflict physical violence. See, e.g., the introduction in Paul R. Brass, ed., Riots and Pogroms (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 1–55. 44 CDIAL, Fond 146 opis 4 sprawa 3124. 45 See, e.g., Kai Struve, “Galizische Verflechtungen – die ‘Judenfrage’ in der Lemberger Zeitschrift Przegląd Społeczny 1886–87,” in Die, Judenfrage‘-ein europäisches Phänomen?, eds. Manfred Hettling, et al. (Berlin: Metropol, 2013). 46 See William W. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland: 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 47 These were then “exclusionary riots”. Cf. Christhard Hoffmann, et al., eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 179–182. 48 Stenographische Protokolle des Abgeordnetenhauses des Wiener Reichsrats, Sten. Prot, AH 21. Sitzung der XV. Session am 22. November 1898, 1481. 49 See, e.g., Unowsky, The Plunder. 50 See, e.g., Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence. 51 See, e.g., Jakub S. Beneš, “The Green Cadres and the Collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918,” Past & Present 236, no. 1 (2017): 231–232, 235. 52 See, e.g., William W. Hagen, “The Moral Economy of Ethnic Violence: The Pogrom in Lwów, November 1918,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31, no. 2 (2005). 53 See, e.g., Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe 1918–1921: The Reconstruction of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Bibliography Beneš, Jakub S. “The Green Cadres and the Collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918.” Past & Present 236, no. 1 (2017): 207–241. Blaschke, Olaf. “Wie wird aus einem guten Katholik ein guter Judenfeind? Zwölf Ursachen des katholischen Antisemitismus auf dem Prüfstand.” In Katholischer Antisemitismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Ursachen und Traditionen im internationalen Vergleich, edited by Olaf Blaschke, 77–110. Zurich: Orell Füssli, 2000. Böhler, Jochen. Civil War in Central Europe 1918–1921: The Reconstruction of Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Brass, Paul R., ed. Riots and Pogroms. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Buchen, Tim. “‘Learning from Vienna means Learning to Win’: the Cracovian Christian Socials and the ‘Antisemitic Turn’ of 1896.” Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 3 (2012). Accessed September 23, 2021, http://www.questcdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=302. Buchen, Tim. “Das, Galizische Schlachten 1846: Die Ermordung Adliger durch polnische Bauern und die Rolle der Habsburgischen Herrscher im Gemälde Jan Lewickis.” In Bilder kollektiver Gewalt – kollektive Gewalt im Bild: Annäherungen an eine Ikonographie der Gewalt, edited by Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Ulrich Wyrwa, and Michael Kohlstruck, 243–250. Berlin: Metropol, 2015. Buchen, Tim. Antisemitism in Galicia: Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020.

Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of Peasants  117 Chwalba, Andrzej. Historia Polski: 1795–1918. Krakow: Wydawnictow Literackie, 2007. Cole, Laurence. “The Counter-Reformation’s Last Stand: Austria.” In Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher M. Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 285–312. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Daszyk, Krzysztof Karol, et al., eds. Rok 1846 w Krakowie i Galicji: Odniesienia, interpretacje, pamięc.́ Krakow: Historia Iagellonica, 2016. Deckert, Josef. Darf ein Katholik Antisemit sein? Vienna: Unknown Publisher, 1982. Fras, Zbigniew. “Mit dobrego cesarza.” In Polskie mity polityczne XIX i XX wieku, edited by Wojciech Wrzwsinski, 139–152. Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1994. Gill, Arnon. Die Polnische Revolution 1846: Zwischen Nationalem Befreiungskampf des Landadels und antifeudaler Bauernerhebung. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1974. Gottsmann, Andreas. Rom und die nationalen Katholizismen in der Donaumonarchie: Römischer Universalismus, habsburgische Reichspolitik und nationale Identitäten, 1878–1914. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010. Green, Abigail. “Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East, c. 1840–1880.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (2008): 535–558. Hagen, William W. “The Moral Economy of Ethnic Violence: The Pogrom in Lwów, November 1918.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31, no. 2 (2005): 203–226. Hagen, William W. Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland: 1914–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hoffmann, Christhard, et al., eds. Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Horowitz, Donald L. The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Hüchtker, Dietlind. “Der, Mythos Galizien: Versuch einer Historisierung.” In Die Nationalisierung von Grenzen: Zur Konstruktion nationaler Identitäten sprachlich gemischten Grenzregionen, edited by Michael G. Müller and Rolf Petrie, 81–107. Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2002. Jobst, Kerstin S. Der Mythos des Miteinander: Galizien in Literatur und Geschichte. Hamburg: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde, 1998. Kącki, Franciszek. Ks. Stanisław Stojalowski I jego działalnosc społeczno-polityczna. Lemberg: Unknown Publisher, 1937. Kracik, Jan. W Galicji trzeźwiejącej, krwawej, pobożnej. Krakow: Salwator, 2008. Lehmann, Rosa. Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town. New York: Berghahn, 2001. Leslie, Roy F. The History of Poland since 1863. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Levine, Hillel. Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and its Jews in the Early Modern Period. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Maner, Hans-Christian. Galizien: Eine Grenzregion im Kalkül der Donaumonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: IKGS Verlag, 2007.

118  Tim Buchen Memoiren und Actenstücke aus Galizien im Jahre 1846: Gesammelt von einem Mähren. Leipzig: Engelmann, 1847. Miller, Alexey. “Do charakterystyki wsi pouwłaszczeniowej w latach siedemdziesiątych XIX wieku: Panika galicjska 1872 roku.” Przegląd Historyczny 79 (1988): 103–107. Neubauer, Hans-Joachim. Fama: Eine Geschichte des Gerüchts. Berlin: Matthes Seitz, 2009. Pogge Von Strandmann, Hartmut, and Robert John Weston Evans, eds. The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rozdolski, Roman. Untertan und Staat in Galizien: Die Reformen unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II. Mainz: Von Zabern, 1992. Śliwa, Michał, ed. Rok 1846 w Galicji: Ludzie, wydarzenia, tradycje. Krakow: WSP, 1997. Smith, Helmut Walser. “Vom Spiel zur Handlung.” In Fluchtpunkt 1941: Kontinuitäten der deutschen Geschichte, translated by Christian Wiese, 132–188. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2010. Staudacher, Anna. “Der Bauernagitator Stanisław Stojałowski: Priester, Journalist und Abgeordneter zum österreichischen Reichsrat.” Römische Historische Mittelungen 25 (1983): 165–202. Struve, Kai. Bauern und Nation in Galizien: Über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Struve, Kai. “Galizische Verflechtungen – die ‘Judenfrage’ in der Lemberger Zeitschrift Przegląd Społeczny 1886–87.” In Die, Judenfrage – ein europäisches Phänomen? edited by Manfred Hettling et al., 95–126. Berlin: Metropol, 2013. Szaflik, Józef Ryszard. O rząd chłopskich dusz. Warsaw: Lud. Spółdz. Wydawn, 1984. Unowsky, Daniel. “Peasant Political Mobilization and the 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Western Galicia.” European History Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 412–435. Unowsky, Daniel L. The Plunder: The 1898 Anti-Jewish Riots in Habsburg Galicia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Wolff, Larry. The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Ziejka, Franciszek. Złota legenda chłopów polskich. Warsaw: Państwowy Inst. Wydawn, 1984.

5

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas Catholic Pluralism and Religionero Violence in Michoacán, Mexico, 1873–1877 Brian A. Stauffer

In January 1874, Encarnación Farfán, a former municipal official of Coalcomán, Michoacán, worried that he might soon become the latest victim of the Catholic rebels known to historians as the Religioneros. It was not unusual for Religionero bands to attack local functionaries: indeed, rebels often sought to punish those who served the government under the terms of the Reform Laws, a raft of anticlerical legislation meant to shore up the moderate Constitution of 1857. In addition to various secularizing provisions, they required that all public officials take an oath of fidelity (called a protesta) to the reformed Constitution under penalty of losing their posts; and Religioneros responded by attacking those who complied, often labeling them protestantes. Yet, Farfán was no anticlerical, much less a Protestant. In fact, since the 1860s, he had proved an ambitious ally of the diocesan Church headquartered at Zamora, regularly submitting detailed reports on religious restoration projects to the bishop and backing local efforts to establish a new Catholic school. He was also the principal author of a bid to create a new parish in the nearby hamlet of Chinicuila, where he lived.1 As for his government service, Farfán had refused to take the protesta without verbal reservations, insisting during the oath-swearing ceremony that he would only enforce the Reform Laws “insofar as they d[id] not prejudice the rights and liberties of the Church.” As a result, district officials removed him from office. Nevertheless, he complained to the bishop, many locals considered him “protested, in the heretical sense.” Farfán even wrote to the editors of a regional conservative newspaper to explain his actions, but he still worried that the rebels would come after him.2 Why should such a loyal Catholic fear rebels who had taken up arms in defense of the Church? Farfán’s predicament underlines the complexity of the Religionero rebellion in Mexico, a conflict which – when it has received any attention at all – is often portrayed as a straightforward jurisdictional dispute between a secularizing State and an intransigent Church. Mexico’s liberal historiographical

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-8

120  Brian A. Stauffer tradition has painted the Religioneros as simple foot soldiers of a backwardlooking Church; their movement a last gasp of reactionary violence that soon proved unequal to the task of rolling back the secular order.3 Yet, such a view distorts the meaning of Religionero violence. First, Mexico in 1874 was overwhelmingly Catholic. The country had only overturned its constitutional mandate for Catholic exclusivity in 1862, and the first batch of Protestant missionaries who arrived in 1872 made very little headway initially.4 As such, the victims of pro-Church violence would be other Catholics – sometimes even devout allies of the hierarchy, as the case of Farfán makes clear. Many conservative laypeople declined to take up with the Religioneros, preferring to work against state anticlericalism in less bellicose ways – joining a devotional association or establishing a new Catholic school. Catholic resistance to anticlericalism, then, cannot be equated with rebellion. In fact, the ecclesiastical hierarchy itself roundly rejected violence as a means for confronting the anticlerical politics of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, the president who oversaw the incorporation of the Reform Laws to the Constitution; and priestly involvement in the violence itself was almost non-existent.5 Why did the Church abandon its supposed foot soldiers, then? Simply put, if we are to understand why parts of Mexico erupted in ‘religious violence’ in 1873, we need to move beyond the Church– State framework and turn our attention inward, toward an analysis of Catholic pluralism. The Religionero revolt clearly merits categorization as an episode of ‘religious violence’. Though a tangled web of material and political factors complicated the revolt, religious tensions best explain the roots of conflict.6 Religioneros explicitly fought to preserve Catholic exclusivity and Mexico’s tradition of public religion, and some died with the names of their patron saints on their lips. The rebels’ battle cry, “Death to the protestantes! Long live Religion!” even conjures images of a sectarian conflict, since the word “protestante” also refers to the followers of Luther and Calvin. Yet, images can be deceiving: direct Catholic–Protestant contact was virtually nonexistent in the central-western state of Michoacán where the rebellion took root. Moreover, even where Religionero violence directly targeted anticlericals, it ended up exposing the deepening rifts within Catholic conservatism over the nature of the faith and the best ways to defend it. The Mexican Church was simply not a monolith. Its diverse parish clergy included oldfashioned mendicants, young European-trained reformers, and liberals who flirted with schism; its cultural power varied widely across Mexico’s fragmented landscape; and ordinary believers arguably forged as many distinct religious cultures as there were parishes.7 Moreover, at the time of the revolt, the Mexican Church was undergoing significant internal changes related to shifts in the global Church’s engagement with liberal, nationalist movements across the Atlantic world. As in

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  121 Europe, internal reform efforts in Mexico fostered new approaches to faith and society: a “New Catholicism” that married an emotive Marian devotionalism to modern associational structures and the intransigent antiliberalism of Pope Pius IX’s Rome.8 Yet, if such Ultramontanism had increasing purchase in high clerical circles in Mexico after mid-century, it made more halting progress in the indigenous countryside, where the syncretic religiosity of Spanish colonial vintage often retained its preeminence.9 Such was particularly the case in Michoacán, the state at the forefront of the Church’s Romanizing strategy. A historic bulwark of Catholicism, it was also home to widely divergent kinds of Catholic communities, from strongly clericalized parishes in mestizo-dominated cities to indigenous (Purépecha) villages and Afro-mestizo sodalities that practiced a more autonomous (and less orthodox) Catholicism.10 Such diversity and internal tension meant that the Church could not speak against state anticlericalism with a singular voice. Indeed, as this chapter will show, Mexican Ultramontanism fostered a more interiorized religious style and – ironically – an accommodationist approach to the State that made violence unnecessary and even counterproductive. If the Religioneros were avatars of Catholic violence, then, their violence affirmed and constituted a particular kind of popular Catholicism, one at odds with both state secularism and modern Ultramontanism. The Religioneros and Mexico’s Stalled Nineteenth-Century Secularization The Religionero revolt began as a rash of village riots in late 1873, but it quickly swelled into a more threatening – if often amorphous and stubbornly localist – challenge to the liberal government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Lerdo himself had arrived in the presidency after a season of serious upheaval and Church–State conflict. His predecessor, Benito Juárez, had spearheaded the secularizing reform legislation of the 1850s and led the armies that put down the conservative, Church-backed rebellion that followed. He had also faced down the Austrian monarch installed by Napoleon III and the Mexican hierarchy during the short-lived Second Empire (1862– 1867). Yet, the political instability that plagued the post-French Intervention government made strict enforcement of the Constitution of 1857 and the wartime anticlerical measures impractical. As Juárez’s successor, Lerdo hoped to finally complete Mexico’s secularization by giving the Reform Laws permanent, constitutional force.11 Decreed by Juárez’s government-in-exile during the civil wars, the Reform Laws represented the most radical secularizing measures in Mexico’s history, going much farther than the Constitution of 1857 to reduce the Church’s civil powers and material wealth. Among other things, they nationalized church property not directly used for religious services, secularized marriage

122  Brian A. Stauffer and burial practices, prohibited the celebration of religious acts outside church walls, extinguished religious brotherhoods, and decreed freedom of worship and the separation of Church and State, thus clearing the way for Protestant proselytizing. If they curtailed the powers of the clergy, the Reform Laws were also experienced as a frontal attack on the religion of ordinary people. The prohibition on public religiosity imperiled more traditional (rural, indigenous, and plebeian) communities’ relationship with the divine by prohibiting the processions, collective pilgrimages, and saints’ day festivities that characterized popular religion. The prospect of Protestant infiltration threatened the village solidarity that made collective festive culture possible. The ban on communal religious life meant the dissolution of the Vincentian Daughters of Charity, upon whom much of the country depended for hospital care. Perhaps even more problematically, the Lerdo government’s protesta requirement made public functionaries complicit in this attack, forcing them to implement the reformed constitution or risk losing their jobs. In short, what the Lerdo government regarded as the “perfection” of a flawed constitution was experienced as a profound religious crisis on the ground.12 Not surprisingly, then, the constitutionalization of the Reform Laws in late 1873 provoked a wave of popular discontent. The Mexican hierarchy condemned the legislation and forbade the faithful from adjudicating nationalized church property, using the civil registry, or taking the protesta, under threat of excommunication. Groups of Catholics penned furious letters to congress demanding that it reverse course. Scores of newly elected civil officials renounced their posts rather than take the oath, sending state and district officials scrambling to staff local governments with unelected appointees. Other Catholics took up arms, attacking civil officials who had taken the protesta and rallying to the cry of “Death to the protestantes! Long live religion!”13 The first stirrings of the revolt took the form of small-scale, spontaneous riots – often in indigenous communities – in the states of Mexico, Michoacán, and Jalisco. In Zinacantepec (Mexico State) in November 1873, indigenous rioters sacked government offices and killed all but one of the municipal officers appointed by district officials after the elected leaders had refused to take the protesta.14 In December, 30 indigenous villagers in Patamban (Michoacán) rose up against local officials who had taken the protesta, attempting to break down the doors of their offices.15 The riot was quickly suppressed, but within weeks, similar uprisings were underway in other parts of Central Western Mexico. Government officials and liberal journalists dismissed early Religionero riots as the work of a few ignorant fanatics. However, a rash of more organized uprisings in the state of Michoacán in the spring of 1874 proved

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  123 harder to ignore. These often took the form of the pronunciamiento, a mainstay of popular politics in nineteenth-century Mexico consisting of a written or verbal declaration of intent to rebel against the government for specific grievances.16 Under a new crop of leaders hailing from a middling stratum of rural life (artisans, smallholders, indigenous community leaders), Religionero bands attacked local functionaries, sacked and burned municipal offices, and in some cases, looted the homes of presumed “protestantes.”17 As in the early riots, such actions aimed to paralyze local governments by depriving them of personnel. By the summer of 1874, more formally organized bands (dubbed “Religioneros” by contemporary observers because their battle cry acclaimed “religion”) had proliferated throughout the state of Michoacán, which soon established itself as the center of the storm. A historic bulwark of the Church, Michoacán had also been the scene of strong liberal movements during the Reforma, and its liberal government took a particularly hardline approach to enforcing the Reform Laws after 1873. This, coupled with the stresses brought by the Church’s own reformism (discussed below), made it a powder keg. The government deployed state troops and local volunteer units, but the rebels’ hit-and-run style of guerrilla warfare made them hard to pin down. Reports of new rebel bands seemed to arrive every day.18 By late 1874, Michoacán governor Rafael Carrillo grudgingly acknowledged that the rebels were becoming a serious threat. He had earlier requested emergency powers from the state congress, and when these failed, Carrillo began asking for federal military aid. Five hundred federal troops were in Michoacán by February 1875, but by then, the rebellion had already metastasized. The Reform Laws had gone into effect in January, and the Sisters of Charity began leaving for exile rather than face exclaustration. Both events triggered widespread outrage, new pronunciamientos, and the swelling of existing bands, some of which now numbered hundreds of rebels strong. In the spring of 1875, at the height of the liturgical year, emboldened Religionero bands carried out a series of audacious attacks on fortified towns, sacking and burning Tancítaro, Taretan, Los Reyes, Paracho, and Zacapu and drawing hundreds of indigenous peasants and rural laborers into the movement. Equally troubling for the government, the Religioneros had also begun developing a more explicit political program and attempting to organize their autonomous bands into a rebel army. March saw the publication of the Plan of Nuevo Urecho, a document that called for the abrogation of the Constitution of 1857 and the Reform Laws, the reestablishment of an exclusively Catholic republic, and the appointment of a special emissary to Rome to negotiate a concordat.19 Soon after, military observers noticed that the rebels seemed more organized and disciplined than before; and indeed, they had attracted a handful of new leaders hailing from elite conservative

124  Brian A. Stauffer families.20 Reports of scorched-earth atrocities carried out by government troops in summer 1875 – including the burning of civilian settlements – gave Catholic editorialists plenty of ammunition against the government.21 Facing a snowballing crisis, President Lerdo showed himself amenable to authoritarian remedies, including the imposition of emergency war taxes, the suspension of constitutional protections (free speech and assembly, freedom from arbitrary arrest), and summary executions for accused rebels. Yet, these steps were pilloried by influential figures within his own increasingly fragile coalition who lamented both the president’s illiberalism and his army’s apparent incompetence.22 By the fall of 1875, the Religionero crisis had reached a tipping point. Rumors of a conspiracy against the president by liberal dissidents within his own circle compounded the more definite news of an impending uprising by General Porfirio Díaz, Lerdo’s rival in the presidential elections of 1872.23 Desperate to shore up his coalition, Lerdo sent General Mariano Escobedo, hero of the republican victory over the French imperialists in 1867, to Michoacán at the helm of 5,000 federal troops. Escobedo soon proved the wisdom of this move. Abandoning the scorched-earth tactics of the army’s summer campaign, he instead emphasized the use of the indulto, or battlefield pardon, to thin rebel ranks.24 This tactic quickly bore fruit, and government newspapers began running daily lists of rebels who had laid down their arms in Michoacán in return for clemency. Yet, before the State could definitively turn the tide, the Religioneros began to defect to Porfirio Díaz’s Tuxtepec Revolution, which had broken out in January 1876. Díaz had sent agents to Michoacán months before to court Religionero chiefs, but these overtures had been rebuffed on ideological grounds. Now, facing Escobedo’s more effective campaign, the Religioneros reconsidered joining Díaz, whose diverse coalition went on to depose Lerdo in November 1876.25 In Díaz’s name, Religionero leaders assumed command of various Michoacán localities in the chaotic months that followed Lerdo’s downfall. However, under pressure by liberals in the state, Díaz ultimately turned his back on his Catholic allies, gradually killing or co-opting the remaining Religionero chieftains by early 1878. If the rebels were defeated, though, many of their goals had already been obtained. Díaz adopted a conciliatory policy toward the Church, tolerating infractions of the Reform Laws and allowing the clergy to recoup some of its material and political losses.26 In return, the hierarchy softened its stance on the protesta, permitting Catholics to swear a private “counter-protest” in front of their priest before assuming civil office.27 Such Church–State détente brought significant political stability. Indeed, Díaz’s nearly 35-year reign of “order and progress” only collapsed with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1911, a phenomenon partly propelled by liberal disgust over Díaz’s betrayal of the Reforma’s secularizing promises.28

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  125 Spiritual Intransigence, Political Accommodation Laicism in Mexico thus proved to have definite limits, and the Religioneros helped to delineate them. Yet, we should not assume that Religionero violence represented the will of the Church. True, rebel manifestos and battle cries make clear they believed they were fighting for the universal Church. Yet, the faithful remained far from united on the question of rebellion. In fact, by 1873, the hierarchy had conclusively turned away from violent conflict, marking a notable shift from its open support of conservative rebellions in decades past. In pastoral letters and other public declarations, Mexican prelates decried the Reform Laws and attempted to keep Catholics from serving the government; but they explicitly condemned armed rebellion, too. Instead, the faithful were enjoined to seek spiritual solutions to the crisis and offer only passive resistance. The bishop of Zamora, José Antonio de la Peña, ordered his priests in 1873 to avoid conflict with civil officials, cooperating with them “in all of those places where local authorities demand punctual compliance with the Reform Laws.”29 León’s bishop, the staunch Ultramontane José María de Jesús Diez de Sollano, struck a conciliatory tone in his December 1874 circular, directing his clergy to use “prudence” when discussing controversial topics from the pulpit.30 More notably, Bishop Rafael Sabás Camacho of Querétaro attempted to defuse the conflict by issuing a special notice to his flock addressing the confusion around the use of the epithet “protestante” to refer to those who had taken the protesta. In the document, which won him the praise of liberal editorialists, Camacho distinguished the religious heresy of Protestantism from the civil heresy of the protesta, and he explained that repentant Catholics could return to the fold through a public retraction of the oath. Moreover, if their consciences mandated civil disobedience against the Reform Laws, Catholics should accept punishment resignedly, “rather than provoking scandals and disorder which religion condemns.”31 Other pastoral letters encouraged the faithful to emulate Pope Pius IX’s stoic suffering in the face of the Risorgimento, suggesting that spiritual solidarity with the pope, not political agitation, was the antidote to the global march of liberalism.32 The Church’s national leadership amplified these sentiments in the spring of 1875, when the country’s three archbishops (Mexico, Michoacán, and Guadalajara) issued a joint pastoral instruction meant to guide Catholic responses to the deepening crisis. Indeed, although it opened with a brief refutation of the anticlerical legislation, the text’s main theme was conciliation and accommodation to the secular order. Fearing that clerical silence in the face of the spiraling Religionero conflict would be interpreted as collusion with the rebels, the prelates raised their voices to “corroborate the faith of the people” but also to

126  Brian A. Stauffer impede them from being dragged and impelled by their religious susceptibility into hostile demonstrations and threats of violence, which we are far from desiring and positively condemn as contrary to the peace and public order, and, as such, contrary to the doctrine of the Church and religion.33 The archbishops even condemned the “injurious” and “sarcastic” language used by the Catholic press in its missives against the Reform Laws.34 Partly, the clergy’s turn away from partisan politics was pragmatic. Still reeling from the fall of the Church-backed Second Empire, the hierarchy had little appetite for another civil war. Yet, pastoral admonishments against violence also reflected larger shifts underway within Mexican Catholicism, as its leaders imbibed the Ultramontane trends of Europe and sought to direct Mexicans’ spiritual energies inwards, toward a reform of the faith. Several high-profile Mexican clergymen had spent much of the 1850s and 1860s in European exile, where they steeped themselves in the new Marian devotionalism spreading from Lourdes and Pontmain and strategized the restoration of the faith back home. In fact, after cultivating a close friendship with Pius IX, future archbishop of Mexico Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos won approval in 1862 for the restructuring of the Mexican episcopate, creating seven new dioceses and promoting Michoacán and Guadalajara to episcopal provinces.35 The diocesan restructuring heralded the ascension of a new crop of Ultramontane bishops, especially in the new Central Western dioceses of Zamora (Michoacán) and León (Guanajuato). A historical stronghold of the Church, Michoacán and the greater Center West soon became a laboratory for Romanizing reforms. Its bishops revamped seminary education and discipline, tightened their pastoral oversight, and attempted to streamline and Europeanize the faith. This meant frequent exhortations to spiritual solidarity with the embattled Pius IX; the promotion of devotions such as Our Lady of Lourdes and the Sacred Heart of Jesus; and cultural reforms that replaced the raucous, communal spirituality of Mexican popular religion with more interiorized and clerically controlled practices. Indeed, some prelates seemed to see the liberal prohibition of public religion as an opportunity to reform popular practices. In León, Bishop Diez de Sollano used the prohibition of Eucharistic processions as a pretext for denying permits for other, more popular processions in 1867. As he explained: In the present circumstances we will not permit any type of processions, since this would mean deceiving the people, making them think that more veneration is owed to [saints’] images than to the Most Holy Sacrament, since the latter is not allowed to be carried in procession during the festival of Corpus Christi, which belongs to the Dogmatic Liturgy, and since

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  127 it is only being carried secretly in the Viaticum. [We] cannot concede any licenses for processions of images until the Church recovers its canonical liberty.36 The bishop thus subordinated the myriad popular cults of rural Mexico to the clerically controlled mystery of the Eucharist, all while blaming liberal legislation. The country’s three archbishops adopted a similar stance, urging the faithful in their 1875 pastoral letter to use the crisis to stamp out popular customs like feast-day dancing, drunkenness, and gambling.37 Ultramontane reformers envisioned a more private, regimented religion, one less tethered to the collective, public celebrations of the colonial past. Here, ironically, they sometimes echoed liberal arguments that Mexican Catholicism was excessive, irrational, and overly externalized.38 Mexican Ultramontanism also empowered the laity through new devotional, charitable, and educational associations, which exploded across Mexico between 1840 and 1877.39 Adopting a modern, voluntary structure, such associations offered middle-class, urban, and especially female Catholics new routes to local religious leadership. Devotional groups such as the Vela Perpetua (a female-led organization dedicated to perpetual Eucharistic vigil) and associations with a social and educational mission (especially the Sociedad Católica) fared well in many Mexican parishes, where they sometimes supplanted the indigenous confraternities and Franciscan hospitals of colonial vintage.40 Their activities also received the backing of the hierarchy, which had essentially ceded the political arena in order to refocus its energies on re-Catholicizing civil society. Indeed, in their 1875 joint pastoral, the archbishops championed what they called “collective action” as a means to overcome anticlericalism. For example, Catholics should join associations like the lay conferences of St. Vincent de Paul to counteract the exclaustration of the Sisters of Charity; they should contribute to private Catholic schooling projects as an antidote to secular education; and they should step up voluntary remittances to the Church in response to the end of the mandatory tithe. Not coincidentally, all these activities were protected by constitutional writ (freedom of association, freedom of education).41 The Church thus sought to turn the tools of liberal republicanism against the Lerdo administration, all while propagating a more streamlined, internalized, and regimented religiosity that could withstand the prohibition of the public cult. In place of public processions, it prescribed exercises of quiet Eucharistic vigil or modern forms of mental pilgrimage borrowed from Italy.42 Instead of raucous local saints’ day feasts, it recommended quiet acts of expiation in spiritual solidarity with Pius IX. Where liberal law attacked the entailed lands that funded local cults, the Church suggested voluntary, individual remittances to the hierarchy itself. This was the new face of Mexican Catholicism. It was well equipped to survive state anticlericalism, since

128  Brian A. Stauffer it offered the middle-class laity new avenues for reviving the faith without running afoul of the government. Rather than despair or resort to violence, the archbishops’ joint pastoral declared, Catholics should “fortify [themselves] and work; but work within the circle we have traced.”43 Such a “circle” clearly excluded armed mobilization. “Ready to Spill All Our Blood with God's Aid”: Rhetoric and Violence in Michoacán The Mexican Church’s growing Ultramontanism helps contextualize the various non-violent strategies employed by the Catholic laity in the face of the Reform Laws. On the one hand, the Church’s new approach globalized the fight against anticlericalism, aligning Mexico’s struggles with those of Pius IX and prescribing spiritual remedies. On the other hand, it accommodated itself to the liberal order, encouraging Catholics to avail themselves of constitutional protections in order to re-Catholicize civil society. Crucially, the hierarchy itself accepted the underlying logic of popular sovereignty, since its joint pastoral encouraged Catholics to exercise “the legitimate right of petition.”44 If it could be shown that the Reform Laws contravened the will of the people, they would have to be overturned. Appeals to the “will of the people” were already a mainstay of the “letters of protest” submitted by groups of Catholic men and women to conservative newspapers beginning in 1874. Typically signed by dozens of Catholic “citizens” and “ladies” from a given locality, they condemned the Reform Laws as injurious to the faith of the majority and often employed a liberal discourse of constitutional rights in its defense. The men of Chalchicomula (Puebla), for example, demanded that the Sisters of Charity be allowed to stay in Mexico, “since they have a right of association enshrined in the general Constitution of the republic.”45 A group of women from Guadalajara denounced the Reform Laws as “antiliberal attack” on the faith and vowed to convert themselves into “apostles of Christian education” rather than send their children to secular schools.46 The women of Guanajuato declared that since the female half of Mexico’s population opposed the Reform Laws, and since many men also opposed them, the will of the people clearly lay with the Church. Yet, they would not depend on men to defeat anticlericalism, either: And now that fear has turned many men who still call themselves Catholics into Quakers, we the women swear to disobey the edicts of the modern Julians in whatever manner possible […] we swear not to recognize as brothers, husbands, or sons those who have participated in the iniquitous expatriation of the Sisters [of Charity], and we swear finally to suffer with pleasure and valor the persecutions that this frank manifestation may bring us.47

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  129 Echoing this call for civil disobedience, and drawing on Catholic martyrology, the women of Maravatío (Michoacán) dared the government to “use violence if you want; we, far from resisting force with force, will follow the example of the seven-times martyr Saint Felicitas, teaching our sons to prefer to lose their lives rather than betray God.”48 The petitioners of Zamora (Michoacán), meanwhile, blurred the lines between stoic martyrdom and violent resistance, declaring themselves “ready to spill all of our blood, with God’s aid” in defense of the Church.49 Liberal editorialists took such rhetoric as proof that the Church was behind the Religioneros, whom they sometimes referred to as “soldiers of Pius IX.” Conjuring images of bloodthirsty Catholic hordes from the European past, Mexico City’s El Siglo Diez y Nueve warned that the clergy was preparing a “new Crusade.”50 Other papers spread vague rumors about priests orchestrating local uprisings or accused specific bishops of funneling aid to Religionero leaders.51 Yet, liberals could point to very little hard evidence of clerical collusion with the rebels, and the Church’s own public pronouncements directly contradicted the claim. The 1875 joint pastoral had even drawn applause from liberal editorialists.52 Clearly, it was neither the hierarchy nor the middle-class laity that menaced the State. Indeed, notwithstanding the rhetorical pyrotechnics of some petitioners, the well-heeled Catholics who organized such letter-writing campaigns generally proved unwilling to spill blood. For these Catholics, violence was unnecessary, since they could counter state anticlericalism by dedicating themselves to the “collective action” prescribed by the hierarchy. As we saw, lay activists like Coalcomán’s Encarnación Farfán chose to channel their energies into Catholic schooling rather than rebellion. Others formed new devotional organizations meant to moralize their communities, like the Association of Our Lady of Sorrows formed by Sahuayo resident Crisóforo Villarreal.53 Hundreds of Catholic laywomen across Michoacán joined the Vela Perpetua, the Vincentian Mothers of Charity, or the Sociedad Católica’s female auxiliary, which promoted Catholic schooling initiatives.54 Some Catholics even worked to blunt the laicizing edge of the Reform Laws from within the government. In Jiquilpan (Michoacán), several leading Catholic laymen who won election in 1873 plotted with their parish priest to avoid taking the protesta by absenting themselves from town on the day of the ceremony.55 When it became impossible to dodge the protesta requirement without surrendering their posts, some, like the Jiquilpan civil judge Jesús Ordónica, complied temporarily and simply retracted the oath after the conflict had begun to wane in 1876.56 Though not directly approved by the hierarchy, such strategies complemented the broader clerical accommodation to a rights-based liberal order. Crucially, since these middle-class Catholics increasingly eschewed public, collective religion in favor of a more

130  Brian A. Stauffer interiorized and individualized spirituality, such an accommodation did not fundamentally threaten their religious worldview. The stakes were much higher for the plebeian and indigenous Catholics who made up the Religionero rank-and-file.57 Long skeptical of Catholic reformism, Michoacán’s popular sectors largely rejected the internalized piety and associational innovations favored by the hierarchy. Theirs was above all a religion of divine immanence: one where the sacred inhabited earthly objects and landscapes and saints took up residence with communities, for whom they advocated before God. Originating in the sixteenth-century evangelizing campaigns of the mendicant orders, such relationships with divine intercessors were collective and localistic, ritually maintained through frequent, public celebrations and other forms of externalized worship. Even in the nineteenth century, popular religion often continued to be organized by village corporations, ethnicized confraternities, or artisan guilds. Indeed, in Mexican indigenous communities, particular cults were maintained by collectively farmed “saints’ lands” whose products funded annual celebrations.58 In short, the very intimate bonds connecting traditional Mexican communities to their divine patrons could not be maintained without public religion. Tensions over public religious life played an important part in the initial outbreak of violence in Michoacán, whose leaders had proven eager to enforce the Reform Laws. After 1873, the governor’s office repeatedly rejected petitions for exemptions to the law and often prosecuted priests for leading public religious acts, wearing religious garb in public, or defying civil registry regulations.59 Sometimes, lay people themselves were targeted. In June 1874, the state government prosecuted the indigenous leader of Nurio for permitting Holy Week processions.60 In Zinapécuaro district, Prefect Jesús Corral arrested 32 men from a local confraternity in February 1875 for carrying three images in procession, explaining that the “fanaticism” of the locals required preemptive action.61 In several cases, such attempts to suppress public religious acts or perceived attacks on beloved priests triggered local revolts. In April 1874, for example, the prefect of Zitácuaro sparked a violent clash in Angangueo when he attempted to detain a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Atotonilco.62 Sahuayo’s powerful Religionero revolt exploded after the arrest of the parish priest, the beloved Miguel del Castillo, for carrying the Viaticum in procession in the spring of 1874.63 Rumors about impending government action against the priest of Huaniqueo, Pedro Arroyo, inspired uprisings there.64 In Zamora, Good Friday 1875 descended into violence when the prefect attempted to disperse the scores of men and women who were processing through the streets in defiance of the Reform Laws.65 The springtime festival season, it seems, brought heightened tensions. [See Figure 5.1] Attempts to privatize properties used for celebrating or funding local cults also triggered violence. Legislation dating from 1856 had mandated the

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  131

Figure 5.1 “El Padre Cobos,” February 24, 1876. Reprinted in El Padre Cobos y La Carabina de Ambrosio. Mexico City: Cámara de Senadores de la LVII Legislatura, 2000. Photo courtesy of Daniel Alonzo.

disentailment of both church lands not directly used for religious services and indigenous communal holdings.66 In some places, such as the Nahua communities on Michoacán’s Pacific coast, agrarian conflict brought on by rapid privatization of the commons fed directly into the Religionero revolt.67 Much more widespread in Michoacán, however, were attempts by municipal corporations run by non-Indians to appropriate the more low-hanging fruit of communal religious properties. In Huaniqueo, cradle of the powerful Socorro Reyes revolt, the municipal council seized an urban plot in front of the old parish church in 1873, a space the local Purépecha Indians had long used for their “customs of religious feasts and processions.”68 When indigenous leader Antonio Cilagua complained to the governor, municipal leaders responded flatly that the Reform Laws had rendered the Indians’ traditions moot.69 The state government referred the matter to the courts, but Cilagua and other local Indians soon joined the Religioneros. In nearby Huango, the local government seized the indigenous community’s ancient Augustinian hospital as payment for taxes owed on communal lands that had evaded

132  Brian A. Stauffer privatization.70 Franciscan hospitals and confraternity lands in Jiquilpan and Sahuayo, both major Religionero zones, also passed into private hands or were destroyed in the 1860s and 1870s.71 Sometimes, such conflicts were internal to communities, too. In the Purépecha town of Chilchota, indigenous leader José María Reyes Constantino sold confraternity lands to fund liberal movements in 1871, generating a bitter intra-communal rift that ultimately found outlet in a local Religionero uprising.72 Perhaps most tellingly, Religioneros demonstrated a zeal for devotions that betrayed little of the Ultramontane spirit promoted by the Mexican hierarchy. The rebels who attacked Purépero in December 1874 invoked the Virgin of Remedies of Totolan, patroness of a small indigenous community nearby. The more well-heeled rebel chief Felix Venegas, meanwhile, placed his 1875 revolt under the protection of the Virgin of Guadalupe.73 Captured and sentenced to death in April 1876, Religionero titan Socorro Reyes left his last nine reales to buy candle wax for the Lord of Health, an image of Christ Crucified that hung in the local Franciscan hospital.74 Other rebels demonstrated a baroque preference for sacred objects. Rebels in Tlazazalca reportedly wore “relics” around their necks as they went into battle; others wore scapulars emblazoned with the image of their local saints.75 Religioneros operating near Zipiajo carried “printed prayer books that they call[ed] relics to prevent them from dying without confession.”76 In short, the Religioneros fought and died to preserve a faith that was eclectic, intensely localistic, and sometimes outright heterodox. Furthermore, the cosmovision upon which it was based proved vulnerable to the Reform Laws and elicited little support from the reformist hierarchy. The Religioneros seem to have favored performative and public forms of violence. In some cases, local officials were dragged through the town plaza behind horses. Other officials suffered public execution by machete blow or rifle shot in the town square.77 The incineration of local archives housing the protesta paperwork was a constant throughout the conflict, though, as was aggression against oath-takers. That premeditated attacks on particularly hated local officials also occurred with some frequency suggests that Religionero violence was partly vindictive in nature. Yet, the evidence reviewed above points to otherworldly logics in rebel actions. The Religioneros’ “relics” and saintly standard-bearers removed their fight to a higher plane, where the stakes of the ban on the public cult were not simply jurisdictional but existential. The Reform Laws closed the human lifeline to God, so the Religioneros called on their divine patrons to help them reopen it. Indeed, since the surge in local uprisings in 1875 corresponded closely to the climax of the ritual year (December through April), we might even postulate that collective violence against functionaries and the destruction of archives stood in for the communal ritual of public religion – a march on the municipal hall taking the place of the banned Holy Week procession; rifle fire substituting for saints’ day fireworks. Certainly,

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  133 accounts of the January 1875 assassination of Sahuayo municipal president Sabás Osio, a committed anticlerical who had suppressed the local custom of reciting the rosary in public, support this hypothesis. Local Catholics reportedly celebrated Osio’s death with music and festivities outside his home.78 Conclusion If Religionero violence was “Catholic,” then, it aimed at preserving (indeed rescuing) a certain kind of Catholicism that was both imperiled by the liberal ban on public religion and falling out of favor with Mexico’s Catholic elite. Indeed, to the Catholics who carried the Religionero banner, the Reform Laws represented not simply an unpleasant jurisdictional dispute but an existential crisis, since they threatened to sever the bonds that tied Mexican communities to their divine intercessors. Without saints’ lands to fund the patron saint’s fiesta or Church atriums upon which to celebrate it, without the freedom to regale their saint with music, processions, and fireworks, the very cosmos promised to unravel. Worse still, perhaps, the clergymen and local lay elites who might have been expected to defend their traditions declined to do so. From the latter’s perspective, of course, violence was unnecessary: their more modern, cosmopolitan Catholicism relied less on splendorous external worship and provided a variety of non-violent strategies for reviving the faith. Yet, the hierarchy’s new approach – appropriating the liberals’ discourse of constitutional rights and turning the faith inward – must have been particularly galling to the Religioneros, since it made even loyal Catholics complicit in the attacks upon the faith. In this light, the Religioneros’ targeted violence against cooperating civil officials – even devout Catholics – makes more sense, since it served to negate the reformist notion that the Church could cede the public square to the State without endangering the more fundamental relationship between heaven and earth. In that sense, Religionero violence drew its targets into the rebels’ religious cosmovision, as Mark Juergensmeyer would have it.79 Not only did the rebels reject the “foreign” worldview of secularism, they rhetorically cast those who would serve the liberal State out of the Catholic communion altogether. Only “Protestants,” they seemed to say, would comply with the State’s attacks on public religion; and “Protestants” deserved death. Since the other half of their symmetrical battle cry acclaimed “Religion” (read: Catholicism), the Religioneros were thus dividing the world up into two warring camps: heretics who endangered the faith versus Catholics who defended it. That many of the Church’s most steadfast Ultramontane supporters would have fallen into the former camp complicates our understanding of the revolt. The Mexican case also underlines the importance of Catholic modernization in shaping nineteenth-century ‘religious violence’. If the Religioneros rejected state secularism, their actions also served to affirm a religious culture

134  Brian A. Stauffer under increasing pressure from their own Ultramontane priests. More than “soldiers of Pius IX,” the Religioneros were defenders of the saints – martyrs in a cosmic war in which the Catholic hierarchy played a distinctly ambiguous role. Notes 1 Residents of Coalcomán to Diocesan Secretary, Zamora, October 24, 1868, and Encarnación Farfán and other residents of Coalcomán to Diocesan Secretary, Zamora, March 4, 1869, Archivo Diocesano de Zamora (Zamora, Michoacán) (hereafter ADZ), DGPD 33. 2 Encarnación Farfán, Coalcomán, to Diocesan Secretary, Zamora, January 18, 1874, ADZ, DGPD 33. 3 See, e. g., Francisco Cosmes, Historia general de México, T. XXII, vol. 20 (Mexico City/Barcelona: Ramón de S.N. Araluce Editor, 1902); Daniel Cosío Villegas, Historia moderna de México: La República Restaurada, La vida política (Mexico City: Editorial Hermes, 1955). Ulises Iñiguez Mendoza’s recent dissertation, “¡Viva la religión y mueran los protestantes! Religioneros, catolicismo, y liberalismo, 1873–1876” (PhD diss., El Colegio de Michoacán, 2015), is a more nuanced treatment of the revolt, though it overestimates the power of the hierarchy to shape Catholic mobilization. 4 Jean Pierre Bastian, Los disidentes: sociedades protestantes y revolución en México, 1872–1911 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1989). 5 Iñiguez Mendoza, “¡Viva la religión y mueran los protestantes!,” 337–339; Brian A. Stauffer, Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019). 6 Conflict over land privatization, especially, colored the revolt in the coastal sierra of Michoacán, as did partisan and clan rivalries. See Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapter 5. 7 Benjamin T. Smith, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750–1962 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012), 12. 8 Christopher Clark, “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 9 Brian A. Stauffer, “The Routes of Intransigence: Mexico’s ‘Spiritual Pilgrimage’ of 1874 and the Globalization of Ultramontane Catholicism,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History 75, no. 2 (April 2018). 10 Cecilia Bautista García, “Entre México y Roma: la consolidación de un proyecto de educación clerical a fines del siglo XIX,” in Catolicismo y formación del estado nacional en la Península Ibérica, América Latina, e Italia, siglos XIX–XX, eds. Yves Solís and Franco Savarino (Mexico City: ENAH/INAH/Mil Libros Editorial, 2017); Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927–29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 11 Frank Knapp, Jr. The Life of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, 1823–1889: A Study of Influence and Obscurity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), 122–124 and 214–215. 12 On popular religion, see William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  135 Mexico Press, 2011); Edward Wright-Ríos, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Terry Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 13 Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapter 1. 14 T.G. Powell, “Los liberales, el campesinado indígena, y los problemas agrarios durante la reforma,” Historia Mexicana 21, no. 4 (April–June 1972): 671–672; Romana Falcón, “El estado liberal ante las rebeliones populares: Mexico, 18671876,” Historia Mexicana 49: no. 4 (2005): 994–995 and 1021–1024. 15 El Progresista (December 25, 1873); El Pájaro Verde (January 5, 1874). 16 Will Fowler, ed., Forceful Negotiations: The Origins of the Pronuciamiento in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). 17 Prefect of Coalcomán to Interior Minister, Morelia, November 11, 1873, Archivo Histórico Casa de Morelos (Morelia, Michoacán) (hereafter AHCM), Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, Secretaría de Gobierno, Policía y Guerra, Aprehensiones, caja 27, exp. 13; El Progresista (October 14, 1875 and November 9, 1876). 18 Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapter 1. 19 “El Plan de Nuevo Urecho,” March 3, 1875, Archivo General e Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Michoacán (Morelia, Michoacán) (hereafter AGHPEM), Guerra y Ejército, caja 3, exp. 28. 20 Jesús Camarena, Guadalajara, to Secretary of Defense, Mexico City, May 3, 1875, Archivo Histórico de la Defensa Nacional (Mexico City) (hereafter AHDN), Operaciones Militares, XI/481.4/9211. 21 La Voz de México (June 3, 5, 8 and 27, July 18, 1875); El Pájaro Verde (June 6 and 8, 1875). 22 Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapter 1. 23 Cosío Villegas, La república restaurada, 625–627. 24 Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapter 1. 25 Ibid., chapters 1 and 6. 26 Karl M. Schmitt, “The Díaz Conciliation Policy on State and Local Levels, 1876–1911,” Hispanic American Historical Review 40 (November 1960); José Roberto Juárez, Reclaiming Church Wealth: The Recovery of Church Property after Expropriation in the Archdiocese of Guadalajara, 1860–1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004). 27 Circular Concerning Instructions for the Protesta, April 19, 1877, AHCM, Diocesano/Gobierno/Mandatos/Circulares, caja 190, exp. 279. 28 Bastian, Los disidentes, 173–175. 29 “Circular número 26,” September 19, 1873 (Publisher unknown), 8–9, in “Cartas pastorales del primer obispo de Zamora, 1864–1875” (unpublished compilation), Biblioteca Luis González, El Colegio de Michoacán (Zamora, Michoacán), Fondo Especial, 253.5 MIS-c. 30 Vigésima prima carta pastoral que el Ilmo. y Rmo. Sr. Obispo de León, Dr. y Maestro. D. José María de Jesús Diez de Sollano y Dávalos dirige a su Ilmo. y v. cabildo, señores curas, y v. clero… (León: Imprenta de J. M. Monzón, 1879), 27–34. 31 Ramón Camacho, “Advertencia a todos los fieles de la Diócesis,” November 13, 1873, in Colección de cartas, edictos, e instrucciones pastorales del ilustrísimo señor doctor D. Ramón Camacho y García, dignísimo segundo obispo de la santa iglesia de Querétaro, precedida de apuntes biográficos sobre el mismo ilustrísimo señor (Mexico City: Tipografía Berrueco Hnos., 1886), 61–65. For the liberal response to Camacho’s warning, see El Progresista (December 18, 1873).

136  Brian A. Stauffer 32 Segunda carta pastoral que el Ilmo. Sr. Don José Ignacio Árciga, dignísimo Arzobispo de Michoacán, dirige a todos sus diocesanos con motivo de las encyclicas expedidas por S. Santidad el Sr. Pio IX en 15 mayo y 4 de junio del presente año (Morelia: Tipografía I. Arango, 1871), 10–11; Pastoral número cinco del Obispo de Zamora, que con motivo del Vigésimo Quinto aniversario del pontificado de Nuestro Santísimo padre el Señor Pío IX, dirige a su Venerable Cabildo, a todo el clero y demás fieles de su diócesis (Zamora: Teodoro Silva Romero, 1873), 1–2. 33 Instrucción pastoral que los Ilmos. Sres. Arzobispos de México, Michoacán, y Guadalajara dirigen a su Venerable Clero y a sus fieles con ocasión de la Ley Orgánica expedida por el Soberano Congreso Nacional en 10 de diciembre del año próximo…, March 19, 1875, reprinted in Episcopado y gobierno en México: cartas pastorales colectivas del episcopado mexicano, 1859–1875, eds. Alfonso Alcalá and Manuel Olimón (Mexico City: Ediciones Paulinas, 1989), 293–338. 34 Ibid., 300. 35 Cecilia Bautista Garcia, Clérigos virtuosos e instruidos: un proyecto de romanización clerical en un arzobispado mexicano: Michoacán, 1867–1887 (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2017). 36 Vigésima prima carta pastoral, 31–32. 37 Instrucción pastoral, 313–314. 38 Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapter 2. 39 Cecilia Bautista García, Las disyuntivas del Estado y de la Iglesia en la consolidación del orden liberal: México, 1856–1910 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2012), 231–286; Silvia Arrom, Volunteering for a Cause: Gender, Faith, and Charity in Mexico from the Reform to the Revolution (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016). 40 Margaret Chowning, “The Catholic Church and the Ladies of the Vela Perpetua: Gender and Devotional Change in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” Past & Present 221, no. 1 (November 2013); Dinorah Velasco Robledo, “Institución bendita por Dios: la Sociedad Católica de México, 1868–1878,” in Política y religión en la Ciudad de México, siglos XIX y XX, eds. Franco Savarino, Berenise Bravo Rubio, and Andrea Mutolo (México: IMDOSOC, 2014). 41 Instrucción pastoral, 321–332. 42 Chowning, “The Catholic Church”; Stauffer, “The Routes of Intransigence.” 43 Instrucción pastoral, 336. 44 Ibid., 335. 45 M. Villanueva y Francesconi, El libro de protestas: recopilación de las manifestaciones y protestas de los mexicanos católicos, contra la ley anticonstitucional orgánica de la Reforma, que ataca la libertad del culto y las inmunidades de la Iglesia de Jesucristo (México: Imprenta Cinco de Mayo, 1875), 167–168. 46 Ibid., 225–228. 47 Ibid., 249–251. 48 La Voz de México (January 20, 1875). 49 Ibid. (January 9, 1875). 50 El Siglo Diez y Nueve (February 1, 1875). 51 El Correo del Comercio (November 19, 1875). 52 El Progresista (April 25, 1875). 53 Macario Saavedra, Sahuayo, to Diocesan Secretary, Zamora, August 7, 1875, ADZ, DGP 971. 54 Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapter 2. 55 Pascual Bayllac, Jiquilpan, to Diocesan Secretary, Zamora, October 20, 1875, ADZ, DGP 505.

Between the Soldiers of Pius IX and the Sons of Saint Felicitas  137 56 Francisco Tejada de León, Jiquilpan, to Diocesan Secretary, Zamora, June 12, 1876, ADZ, DGP 505. 57 On the ethnic and class makeup of the Religionero movement, see Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapters 3–5. 58 Stauffer, Victory on Earth; Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). 59 Stauffer Victory on Earth, chapter 1. 60 Interior Minister, Morelia, to Prefect of Uruapan, June 8, 1874, AGHPEM, Secretaria de Gobierno/Gobernación/Religión, caja 1, exp. 13. 61 Jesús Corral, Zinapécuaro, to Interior Minister, Morelia, February 26, 1875, AGHPEM, Guerra y Ejército, caja 2, exp. 27. 62 El Progresista (April 2, 1874). 63 Luis González y González, Sahuayo (Morelia: Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 1979), 114; El Radical (January 10, 1874); El Pájaro Verde (March 9, 1874); La Voz de México (March 7, 1874). 64 Pedro Arroyo, Huaniqueo, to Luis Macouzet, Morelia (June 24, 1874), AHCM, Diocesano/Gobierno/Correspondencia/Secretario, caja 118, exp. 565. 65 Andrés Villegas Rendón, Zamora, to Interior Minister, March 29, 1875, AGHPEM, Guerra y Ejército, caja 3, exp. 46. 66 Brian A. Stauffer, “Community, Identity, and the Limits of Liberal State Formation in Michoacán’s Coastal Sierra: Coalcomán, 1869–1940,” in Mexico in Transition: New Perspectives on Mexican Agrarian History, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries/México y sus transiciones: reconsideraciones sobre la historia agraria mexicana, siglos XIX y XX, eds. Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Matthew Butler (Mexico City/Austin: CIESAS/LLILAS, 2013). 67 Stauffer, Victory on Earth, chapter 5. 68 Antonio Cilagua, Huaniqueo, to Interior Minister, Morelia, January 28, 1873, AGHPEM, Hijuelas, District of Puruándiro, vol. 2. 69 Albino Fuentes Acosta, Puruándiro, to Interior Minister, Morelia, December 14, 1873, AGHPEM, Hijuelas, District of Puruándiro, vol. 2. 70 Antonio Vargas and the Indigenous Community of Huango to Interior Minister, Morelia, June 11, 1872, Interior Minister, Morelia, to Albino Fuentes Acosta, Puruándiro, July 25, 1872, Interior Minister, Morelia, to Albino Fuentes Acosta, Puruándiro, February 23, 1873, Albino Fuentes Acosta, Puruándiro, to Interior Minister, Morelia, March 18, 1873, and José María Real, Villa Morelos, to Interior Minister, September 10, 1902, AGHPEM, Hijuelas, District of Puruándiro, vol. 3. 71 Inventory of the Parish of Sahuayo, March 4, 1875, ADZ, DGP 972; Julián Pulido and the Indian Community of Jiquilpan to Diocesan Secretary, Zamora, February 2, 1871, and Pascual Bayllac, Zamora, to Diocesan Secretary, Zamora, June 19, 1871, ADZ, DGP 505; José Guadalupe Romero, Noticias para formar la historia y estadística del obispado de Michoacán (Mexico City: Imprenta de Vicente Torres García, 1862), 102; Ramón Sánchez, Bosquejo estadístico e histórico del distrito de Jiquilpan de Juárez (Morelia: Imprenta de E. I. M. Porfirio Díaz, 1896), 150–158. 72 Rafael Paz Romero, Zamora, to Interior Minister, Morelia, November 3, 1871, and José María Reyes Constantino, Chilchota, to Interior Minister, October 23, 1872, AGHPEM, Hijuelas, Zamora, vol. 10; La Idea Católica (April 25, 1875). 73 El Pájaro Verde (June 9, 1875); Cosío Villegas, La república restaurada, 611. 74 La Voz de México (April 26, 28 and 29, 1876); La Iberia (April 30, 1876).

138  Brian A. Stauffer 75 Andres Villegas Rendón, Zamora, to Interior Minister, Morelia, March 29, 1875, AGHPEM, Guerra y Ejército, caja 3, exp. 46. 76 El Progresista (January 24, 1876). 77 See, for example, Albino Fuentes Acosta, Puruándiro, to Interior Minister, Morelia, January, 27, 1875 AGHPEM, Guerra y Ejército, caja 2, exp. 13; and Albino Fuentes Acosta, Puruándiro, to Interior Minister, Morelia, 19 March, 1875 AGHPEM, Guerra y Ejército, caja 3, exp. 38. 78 La Bandera de Ocampo (January 31, 1875). 79 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Oakland: University of California Press, 32003).

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140  Brian A. Stauffer Stauffer, Brian A. “The Routes of Intransigence: Mexico’s ‘Spiritual Pilgrimage’ of 1874 and the Globalization of Ultramontane Catholicism.” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History 75, no. 2 (April 2018): 291–324. Stauffer, Brian A. Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Taylor, William B. Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011. Velasco Robledo, Dinorah. “Institución bendita por Dios: la Sociedad Católica de México, 1868–1878.” In Política y religión en la Ciudad de México, siglos XIX y XX, edited by Franco Savarino, Berenise Bravo Rubio, and Andrea Mutolo, 151– 170. México: IMDOSOC, 2014. Vigésima prima carta pastoral que el Ilmo. y Rmo. Sr. Obispo de León, Dr. y Maestro. D. José María de Jesús Diez de Sollano y Dávalos dirige a su Ilmo. y v. cabildo, señores curas, y v. clero … León: Imprenta de J. M. Monzón, 1879. Villanueva y Francesconi, M. El libro de protestas: recopilación de las manifestaciones y protestas de los mexicanos católicos, contra la ley anticonstitucional orgánica de la Reforma, que ataca la libertad del culto y las inmunidades de la Iglesia de Jesucristo. México: Imprenta Cinco de Mayo, 1875. Wright-Ríos, Edward. Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

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Religion and Violence in NineteenthCentury Argentina Teachings from the 1875 Anticlerical Riots Roberto Di Stefano

Unlike most Latin American countries, Argentina never legally separated Church and State. Nor did the country witness religiously motivated armed conflicts during the nineteenth century, as happened in Mexico and Colombia. Despite this absence of a structural conflict pertaining to religious matters, archival records from both colonial times and the post-independence period contain numerous references to violent attacks on religious buildings and images as well as on members of the clergy. By and large, these were individual actions and random outbursts of a kind of underground hatred of the clergy, the Church, or even religion. The absence of a more general conflict over religion gave these outbursts an episodic character and prevented them from turning into large-scale violent struggles. Yet, there were also times in which specific political conditions triggered violent clashes. This happened at the time of the May Revolution in 1810, which toppled colonial rule and went hand-in-hand with the military levy of many men from the subaltern classes. This also happened in 1875, when economic and political unrest in Argentina itself as well as developments in global Catholicism contributed to the outbreak of violence. The collective violence that shook Buenos Aires between late February and early March 1875 manifested itself in attacks on church buildings, religious symbols, and Catholic priests. Drawing on both the behavior of rioters and the statements some of them made following their incarceration – which can be found in two thick files held in the Archivo General de la Nación – the present chapter argues that this episode of anticlerical violence was an example of religious riot.1 Historian Natalie Zemon Davis defines religious riots as “any violent action, be it with guns or words, aimed against religious targets by people not officially and formally acting as agents of political or ecclesiastical authority”.2 Those involved in such violent actions “bring their rage to bear on the existing bonds of men with sacred matters”.3 By observing the behavior of Catholic and Protestant crowds in sixteenth-century France, Zemon Davis concludes that a religious riot “is likely to occur when it is believed that religious and/or political authorities are failing in their DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-9

142  Roberto Di Stefano duties or need help in fulfilling them”.4 It therefore cannot be explained with reference to material causes only, such as an increase in the price of grain. From his side, Manuel Delgado Ruiz has applied the concept of religious riot to anticlerical violence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain, pointing to “the similarity running through the iconophobic arguments of our anticlerical heralds and those that are the heart of reformist and parareformist Late Medieval, modern, and even contemporary currents”.5 Insisting on the religious causes of the 1875 riots challenges the interpretation offered by among others Ricardo Falcón, who has claimed that the anticlerical violence in and around Buenos Aires resulted both from political conflicts progressively tearing local elites apart and from social unrest fueled by economic crisis.6 It also defies Leandro Gutiérrez’ argument that the violence erupting on February 28, 1875, “was neither religious nor political […] but had a social nature. It was an independent action of the popular layers staging a violent protest”, that is, an expression of a “primitive kind” of movement.7 By contrast, a close reading of contemporary documents shows that the riots of 1875 had a clear religious dimension insofar as they targeted religious property and personnel. At the same time, these attacks were neither an assault on the Catholic Church nor on Roman Catholicism per se, even though this was the prevailing view in the contemporary Catholic press and has colored Catholic historiography ever since.8 In fact, there is a clear difference between the violent anticlerical protests of 1875 and those of 1955, when the clash between Peronism and the Church led to the destruction of many churches and the metropolitan curia, where the ecclesiastical government was based.9 Because historians have read the events of 1875 either as the result of political, economic, or social conflict, or interpreted them as an assault on the Church and Catholicism as a whole, they have failed to account for the reasons that led protesters to use physical action in the first place and appreciate the nature of the protest itself. This is problematic because the anticlerical revolt of 1875 was the only significant event of its kind in nineteenth-century Argentina. It was moreover triggered by the only public demonstration that turned into a riot – this at a time when street protests in Buenos Aires were so common that one historian even speaks of a “culture of demonstration”.10 In other words, of all protests that occurred in the city, it was precisely the one concerned with religion that was accompanied by physical violence. To explain this anomaly, the present chapter argues that the revolts of 1875 were symbolic actions bearing a specific message: to reject the legal union between Church and State, and to discard the religious and social influence of Ultramontanism, as embodied by both the figure of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and the Society of Jesus. This chapter connects the riots of late February and early March 1875 to a long-standing anticlerical current running through the Argentinean

Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina  143 subaltern classes, which under specific (secular) conditions could be activated to the point that it occasioned violence. These revolts may have revisited socioeconomic and political grievances, but they were nonetheless fundamentally religious in nature. Since a structural conflict over religion was lacking in Argentina, anticlericalism had fewer opportunities to manifest itself than was the case in other countries. That is why it sporadically occurred in the form of blasphemy, as verbal abuse against the clergy, or in the shape of vandalism against religious images and churches. When, however, differences over religion intersected with secular differences, individual violence could become collective. This was the case during the civil and international wars waged across the nineteenth century as well as during the conflict between Catholicism and Peronism in 1955. It was also the case in 1875, as this chapter shows. Catholicism and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina In 1810, the cities and territories that would soon make up Argentina rebelled against the authorities that controlled the Spanish peninsula in the name of King Fernando VII of Spain; six years later, they declared their independence. In 1820, in the course of a civil war that pitted centralists against defenders of provincial autonomy, the central government collapsed. From then on, each of the 14 provinces was governed separately. A reunification attempt during the second half of the 1820s failed due to the autonomists’ rejection of the centralist constitution of 1826. In 1831, a “federal pact” brought the provinces together in a confederation that assigned the governor of Buenos Aires the power to oversee foreign relations. Juan ­Manuel de Rosas, who ruled Buenos Aires dictatorially between 1829 and 1833 and again between 1835 and 1852, strongly influenced the internal politics of other provinces, without however altering the confederal character of the political system. After the overthrow of Rosas, Buenos Aires, which was the richest province, left the Confederation in order to defend its commercial interests. The reunification of the country did not take place until 1862, when General Bartolomé Mitre, whose Buenos Aires army had one year earlier defeated the Confederation army, was elected President of the Republic. At the end of the presidency of his successor, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Mitre sought reelection but was defeated by Nicolás Avellaneda. It was then that, citing fraudulent practices, he tried to militarily take control of the government during the “revolution” of 1874. From a religious–political point of view, Argentina is almost unique among Latin American countries for never having separated Church and State. Moreover, the close links between religious (in this case Catholic) and political life in Argentina defy the idea that modernization, urbanization, and industrialization automatically lead to secularization. In fact, early

144  Roberto Di Stefano twentieth-century Argentina was one of the most modern and richest countries in Latin America, despite the close collaboration between Church and State as well as the important role that Catholicism played in public life. In order to explain this apparent paradox, we need to realize that the ruling elite embraced a moderate form of liberalism that saw nation-building as a triumph of civilization, which even the most ardent anticlerical paired with Christianity. That is why Argentinean liberals did not regard the Catholic Church so much as a hurdle to than as an instrument for nation-building. To a large extent, this view was conditioned by the inability of state officials to control the country’s vast territory. It also owed much to the ravages that 50 years of political upheaval and armed conflict had caused before the country was unified in 1862. The emerging State needed the Church to ‘civilize’ Argentineans, with governing elites considering churches just as much pillars of its grassroots civilizing mission as schools and municipalities. Problematically, however, ecclesiastical institutions had been weak and penniless since colonial times. Church and State hence found a tacit arrangement that suited them both; although the Church carried the concept of statehood to Argentina’s many remote and scarcely populated regions, the State provided the economic resources and logistics to expand clerical power. To illustrate this point, we need look no further than to the liberal governments of Bartolomé Mitre (1862–1868) and Domingo F. Sarmiento (1868–1874), which founded theological seminaries in a bid to create a ‘national clergy’.11 This is not to deny the existence of conflicts between the political and religious spheres. Lay actors occasionally tried to subordinate the Church to state- and nation-building processes, and to curb its influence on education, family life, burial practices, and the registration of births as well as deaths. At the same time, Ultramontanism hardened the clergy’s view on such attempts to limit its power. On the whole, however, the relationship between Church and State lacked the animosity seen in other Catholic countries. After the implementation of a series of secularizing laws – on public education and civil registration in 1884, and on civil marriage in 1888 – cooperation between the two bodies progressively intensified; and it remained by and large harmonious for most of the twentieth century. One reason why lay elites and clergy joined forces was to tackle the challenges posed by mass immigration; in 1914, almost a third of Argentina’s population was made up of foreigners, most of them from Catholic countries. Another explanation would be mounting social conflict and the threat of left-wing radicalism. That violent anticlerical outbursts were quite rare in Argentina followed from this cooperation; when popular criticism of the clergy manifested itself, it managed to differentiate between ‘true’ Catholicism and Ultramontane ‘fanaticism’.

Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina  145 And yet archives contain numerous documents referencing violent actions against priests, shrines, and religious images. By questioning the religious legitimacy of the colonial order, the May Revolution provided an opportunity to voice dissent of traditional religion, which occasionally led to violent actions. Furthermore, the militarization of a vast number of adult males led to the emergence of a new political agency, the army, in which anticlerical manifestations blossomed. During the occupation of Upper Peru in 1811, “some army officers grabbed a cross […] and destroyed it with their swords”.12 In his Memorias curiosas, Juan Manuel Beruti reported that in 1815, a priest who criticized the revolutionary cause was arrested by the Commander of the Hussars, who spoke to him “with words that insulted his person and demeanor”. Confronted with this rise in unholy behavior, General José de San Martín tried, in 1816, to discipline the Army of the Andes by sanctioning any assault against God, the Virgin, religion, sacred images, shrines, and priests: 1 He who commits blasphemy against the sacred name of God, [or] his beloved mother, or [who] smears religion, shall, on the first offence, be punished by spending four hours gagged and tied to a stake in public for a period of eight days, and, on the second, shall have his tongue pierced with burning iron, and be dismissed from his unit. 2 He who physically damages sacred images or attacks a consecrated place, by breaking into churches, monasteries or similar, shall be hanged. 3 He who insults a priest shall be beaten a hundred times; and if he were to inflict slight injuries he shall lose his right hand; if he slices a limb, or kill them, he shall be hanged.13 During the 1820s, controversies surrounding the ecclesiastical reforms implemented by some provincial governments as well as tolerance of nonCatholic cults coincided with armed clashes between so-called Federalists and Unitarians, that is, opponents and supporters of centralization. This resulted in violent demonstrations between people with opposing views on public religion. Thus, in early 1823, a riot broke out in Buenos Aires in opposition to a string of laws recently issued by the provincial legislature that included the suppression of tithes and the reform of the regular clergy. Three years later, caudillo Facundo Quiroga took up arms against the failed centralist constitution of 1826, waving a flag that read ‘Religion or Death’. In 1827, a parishioner in the province of Buenos Aires denounced the mistreatment and mockery that the local church had received at the hands of soldiers who had used the building for war maneuvers.14 Three years later, the newspaper El Federal from Santa Fe urged readers to fight back against these kinds of assaults on religion:

146  Roberto Di Stefano Fellow Federalists, to arms! You are the people of God, your land is the promised land, annihilate those Canaanites, slice them with a keen blade, stab them with its point, chase them, finish them off, set fire to their dens and drown them in blood; confront the beasts, stare them in the eye and then you shall reckon them […] We shall prevail; THE DESTROYING ANGEL is with you.15 Even though the Federalists have traditionally been regarded as pro-Catholic, this contrary to the Unitarians’ association with heterodoxy and impiety, anticlerical views were rife among both groups. In 1842, a parishioner of San Miguel del Monte in the province of Buenos Aires was found in the sacristy with the back of his neck slit and wounds in his face as well as on his chest; one of his fingers was almost cut. Although the main reason for his murder was political, the records also cite other motives, including his abuse of parochial dues and relationship with a female churchgoer.16 The gruesome murder took place in the context of a conflict between Juan Manuel de Rosas, the Federalist governor of Buenos Aires, and the Jesuits – fostering an anticlerical and anti-Jesuit mood among different political factions. In his Historia secreta (1843), the community’s superior, Father Berdugo, recalled “the menacing and coarse expressions” as well as the pamphlets glued on the doors of his church of which one “depicted a gun firing at a cross”. Berdugo added how also the police had insulted the Jesuits; one officer had even warned the fathers that “if we [the Jesuits – R.D.S.] should dare respond to his insults, he would rip us apart with his bayonet”.17 The conflict between Rosas’ Federalists and the Jesuits is particularly relevant for us since it contained criticism of the Society of Jesus that returned in the following decades, including in the statements produced by some of the protesters arrested in 1875. Take this article published in La Gaceta Mercantil, a mouthpiece of Rosas’ Federalist Party, in 1846: The history of the Jesuits is a string of offenses against the social and political order of the nations, and impious and atrocious abuse against Religion designed to incite blind and brutal zeal, corrupt divine precepts, and gain control of individual consciousnesses, passions and all means in pursuit of an ultimate goal, which is most selfish and criminal: wealth and power for the Society of Jesus.18 In the 1850s, violent clashes pertaining to religion mainly occurred in the context of conflicts between Ultramontane and masonic Catholics – a phenomenon that occurred in some countries and led to serious conflicts with the episcopacy, which declared membership of the Church incompatible with affiliation to a masonic lodge. In Concepción del Uruguay, in the

Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina  147 Entre Ríos province, the town’s masonic lodge was attacked with firearms “by a mob made up of men enrolled from the lowest, most immoral people in town” who tore down its doors and windows.19 In 1858, Víctor Chirino took up arms in Buenos Aires to defend religion against the government of “freemasons”.20 The following decade saw the Federalist caudillos Ángel Vicente “Chacho” Peñaloza and Felipe Varela lead an uprising against the national government, triggering a return to the tropes of ‘Catholic Federalism’ and ‘impious Unitarianism’. During the first revolt headed by Chacho in 1862, soldiers of the national army denied the wife of one of his most senior fighters permission to remove an image of Saint Joseph from her house before setting fire to the building; when the insurgents retaliated, they proclaimed to act on behalf of the saint. Five years later, a pamphlet urged the population to resist the national army. It included quotes from a letter by caudillo Facundo Quiroga and references to biblical episodes that drew a parallel between his fight on behalf of the Federalists and Moses’ battle against idolatry. It also recalled Mattathias Maccabeus’ campaign against the Hellenization of Israel. Finally, it called for the armed defense of religion. A particularly violent episode occurred in 1872 in the town of Tandil in the Buenos Aires province. After cholera and yellow fever epidemics had ravaged the region in 1868 and 1871, with natural disasters (droughts, harsh winters, and locust plagues) spelling further disaster, a millenarian movement emerged under the leadership of Gerónimo Solané (“Tata Dios”). On January 1, his followers killed 37 people, most of them foreigners. The statements that the detainees later made neither referenced social or political conflicts nor did they mention other contemporary ‘evils’. On the contrary, those incarcerated for the killings were convinced that the Last Judgment was imminent and that salvation would be granted to those who would join in the massacre of foreigners and freemasons – both groups being considered the cause for Argentineans’ recent misfortunes and a threat to religion. In fact, the attackers identified themselves explicitly as Argentineans and used Federalist symbols such as a red ribbon, which they attached to their hats and that were said to make them immune to the bullets fired by freemasons. The examples cited thus far are important for a number of reasons. First, they show how, despite an absence of major Church–State conflicts in nineteenth-century Argentina, religion occasionally inspired violent actions on the ground, which either aimed at defending or attacking Catholic symbols and institutions. Secondly, although the particular set-up of the country ensured that tensions pertaining to religion remained mostly latent, their juxtaposition to political, military, or economic factors occasionally allowed them to flare up and trigger a violent response. Thirdly, at least some of the religiously motivated violence that erupted from the 1820s onwards drew on the rivalry between Federalists and Unitarians – that is, between a party that saw itself as

148  Roberto Di Stefano defending the Catholic faith and a faction that pledged to fight religious “fanaticism”. Although this typecasting is misleading – as the hatred displayed by Rosas’ Federalist supporters toward the Jesuits shows – contemporaries made effective use of it. So did the rioters of 1875, both the ringleaders of the protest and some of those charged with violent action. They claimed, in turn, to be the heirs of the May Revolution and more especially of Bernardino Rivadavia, a prominent Unitarian who had promoted both the 1822 ecclesiastical reform in Buenos Aires and the introduction of religious tolerance. Of course, it remains difficult to trace the precise motives behind anticlerical violence, also because the sources at our disposal hint at its complex origins. Political differences played a role as did religious arguments. Another important element was the rigid separation between clergy and laity, with the sacrament of ordination creating unequal power relations between them. For instance, priests were accused of exerting undue influence over women, even sexually abusing them; indeed, the many denunciations of sollicitatio ad turpia (solicitation of shame) show that gender relations were a returning factor in anticlericalism.21 The asymmetry between clergy and laity also manifested itself in the fact that priests belonged to the literate elite, which, especially in rural areas, set them apart from the majority of the population. Clergymen perpetuated this position of privilege by requesting monetary contributions – not always voluntary – from the faithful, trying to influence family relations, or controlling communal life, thus going well beyond the domain of spiritual care. All these factors nourished a resentment toward the clergy that, in addition to political and ideological factors, paved the way for the anticlerical revolts that shook Buenos Aires in late February and early March 1875. The 1875 Riots in the Province of Buenos Aires Like in other parts of the world, the 1870s saw a sharpening of tensions between Catholics and anticlericals in Argentina; thus, the convention that met between 1870 and 1873 to reform the constitution of the province of Buenos Aires even debated a legal separation of Church and State. Several pamphlets addressed the status that religion – particularly Catholicism – should be granted in the new constitution. At the same time, the press reported a rise in incidents occurring in or near church buildings that ranged from tumultuous scenes during Easter celebrations and insults of priests, to the derision of churchgoers and sexual harassment of girls attending religious service. To make matters worse, the economic crisis that unfolded from 1873 onwards fueled popular discontent, above all among the poor. Political developments created further trouble. As mentioned above, the presidential election of 1874 sparked a revolt that included an armed conflict between the supporters of president-elect Nicolás Avellaneda and those of

Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina  149 Bartolomé Mitre. Mitre was the leader of the Liberal Party, considered to be the political heir of the Unitarians. Even if the clash was not about religion, the fact that Avellaneda was regarded an advocate of church interests ensured that religious issues entered into the debate. This development was furthermore aided by the election of Archbishop León Federico Aneiros of Buenos Aires as national congressman (he had already held a seat in the provincial legislature between 1870 and 1873). Many denounced the appointment, emphasizing the hypocrisy of a staunch advocate of the Syllabus Errorum and papal infallibility getting himself elected to the parliament of a country whose constitution proclaimed the sovereignty of its people. It was in this context that Aneiros’ decision to attach the parishes administered by the Buenos Aires churches of La Merced and St. Ignatius to the Metropolitan Cathedral provoked a public outcry. Much of this indignation drew on Aneiros’ plan to return both churches to their former owners: the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy and the Society of Jesus. In the eyes of their critics, the Ultramontanism of Aneiros and the Jesuits made them enemies of republican values. In fact, whereas anti-Catholicism was marginal in Argentina, anti-Jesuit feelings were widespread and opponents of the Society of Jesus were able to criticize the order without being branded impious or anti-Catholic. Criticism of the Jesuits and Ultramontanism also came primarily from the ranks of the Catholic faithful themselves, not from atheists or other faith groups.22 If those opposed to the Jesuits had been opposed to Catholicism, as religious historiography often claims, they would have been great pretenders! Newspapers published lengthy protests against Archbishop Aneiros’ plan to attach the two churches to the Metropolitan Cathedral, yet the parishioners of St. Ignatius were divided. Although one group petitioned provincial authorities to stop the archbishop alienating the church from public use, others supported the move. Aneiros responded with a pastoral letter that he addressed to the parishioners and in which he praised the virtues of the Society of Jesus, branding his critics not only “impious” and “wicked” but also “non-believers”. Journalist Luis V. Varela responded with a stridently anticlerical “counterpastoral”, published in La Tribuna, in which he stated that any popular reaction, no matter how violent it would be, was justified in the face of widespread “social miasmas” and Jesuit influence. In this context of increasing societal turbulence, a group of young men decided to organize a public meeting to officially denounce the archbishop’s decision and condemn the Jesuits. After the restrictions imposed by the national government following the 1874 revolution had been lifted on February 24, they convened a rally for the following Sunday, to be held in the Variedades theater. In the run-up to the meeting on the afternoon of February 28, El Nacional reported about the possibility of violent clashes.

150  Roberto Di Stefano Although the organizers briefly contemplated canceling the event for fear of escalation, they ultimately decided to go ahead as planned. The program of the meeting resembled that of other manifestations organized in those days. Demonstrators first signed a petition that was then submitted to the National Congress. Thereafter, they heard speeches in the theater before marching to Plaza de la Victoria for a final closing speech. Plaza de la Victoria, the Western section of present-day Plaza de Mayo, was already then a lieu de mémoire. It was the location where Buenos Aires had been founded and where major political developments had unfolded. Important public buildings that lined the square included the Metropolitan Cathedral and the archbishop’s palace, while in the center stood the Pirámide de Mayo, which had been erected in 1811 to mark the first anniversary of the May Revolution. As to the speakers, they hailed from a variety of backgrounds. Adolfo Saldías was a young lawyer – and disciple of Francisco Bilbao, a renowned anticlerical – who, under the name of “Faust”, had authored an anti-Catholic pamphlet published five years earlier. Pascual Beracochea, Antonio Balleto, and Telémaco Susini were all students, with the former also a military officer. Emilio Castro Boedo was a former priest, freemason, and leader of the local Old Catholic community that rejected the dogma of papal infallibility. The primacy of students connects to the fact that the protest had been organized on the premises of the University of Buenos Aires. Despite meticulous planning, events unfolded in unexpected ways. Toward the end of the meeting on Plaza de la Victoria, some protesters hurled stones at the façade of the episcopal palace. Beracochea and Saldías, who were the last speakers, tried in vain to stop the crowd. Seeing that things were getting out of control, they headed to the Police Department – its headquarters were located in the Cabildo building, which had during colonial times housed the municipal council and was located on the square too – and returned with the head of the force, Enrique Moreno, and numerous police officers. The latter were however unable to prevent the protesters from removing the national emblem placed over the entrance of the episcopal palace or from breaking into the building, looting it, and destroying furniture as well as other objects. The rioters did not meet any resistance; both the siesta and rumors of pending unrest had kept locals at home. After sacking the archbishop’s palace, protesters attacked numerous nearby churches, all of which belonged (or were symbolically linked) to religious orders: St. Ignatius’ Church, which had been a hotspot of trouble ever since Archbishop Aneiros had transferred it to the Jesuits, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary (part of a Dominican convent), and St. Francis’ Church (owned by the Franciscan order); only the latter building was successfully defended by the police. Other protesters meanwhile headed to the Colegio del Salvador, a Jesuit school located on the outskirts of Buenos

Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina  151 Aires. After hurling stones at it, they smashed a door and broke into the building, destroying religious images and furniture alike. Additionally, they verbally and physically assaulted individual Jesuit fathers as well as set fire to the chapel and to part of the school building. When they left, they took valuable objects with them: money, books, small religious images, et cetera. Accounts produced of these violent protests often omitted that the riots had an echo in both the city itself and its hinterland. On the night itself, the house of the parish priest of San José de Flores was attacked. It was said that the attack took place because “the malefactors believed the Archbishop was staying in this house, and the quantity of stones hurled at the door and windows was such that they were all smashed to pieces”.23 On March 3, El Nacional reported about the same building that it “was the night before last once again battered; a group of around twenty men broke its windows and then tried to climb into it”.24 In the town of Morón, the Justice of the Peace received anonymous threats warning that the parochial church and one of the archbishop’s properties would be the target of arson attacks; at night, shots were fired at the church. On February 29, two episcopal officials had already been assaulted on the streets of Buenos Aires by people shouting ‘Death to the Jesuits!’ There were widespread rumors of new attacks and some Catholic institutions received threatening letters, inspiring the Irish Sisters of Charity to send their boarders home by way of precaution. Rumors circulated about a pending attack on a parish church located in La Boca, a neighborhood with a strong Italian working-class presence – including numerous followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini (popularly known as carbonarios) as well as freemasons, who had attended the Sunday rally in large numbers. The government responded by deploying police and military forces on strategic points of the city, including in La Boca itself. Police records contain important information on the attacks as well as on the profile of those involved in them. The press and even some police officers agreed that immigrant crowds, composed especially of Italian and Spanish protesters, were to blame for the assaults. The head of the police described those who stormed the episcopal palace as “a group of foreigners carrying the Spanish flag”, while a police chief claimed that the men who had set fire to the Jesuit school were “1,500 individuals, all of them foreigners, this is to say, Italians and Spaniards carrying their nations’ flags”. La Tribuna likewise blamed “groups of unknown strangers, fueled with anti-religious fanaticism” for the mayhem. Catholic historiography has embraced this view that depicts anticlericalism as a foreign import and intrinsically ‘alien’ to Argentinean society. For the Jesuit scholar Guillermo Furlong, the protesters were “helots enslaved to alien quarters [that is, subjected to foreign influence – R.D.S.]; both Italian and Spanish flags were waving high up in the air, to the shame of our country”.25 In reality, Argentinean-born protesters were

152  Roberto Di Stefano overrepresented among the arrested.26 Similarly to other demonstrations at the time, the foreign flags merely had an iconic value: they had to show that ‘civilized’ nations were united in their fight against Ultramontane and Jesuit ‘fanaticism’. In addition to this, the archival records reveal the working-class background of many protesters, among whom we find typographers, smiths, shopkeepers, office workers, cobblers, mattress makers, bakers, butchers, and street vendors. Most of them were comparably young, that is, under the age of 30 (this applied to 67 of the 99 arrests of which we know the age). In other words, what had started as an anti-Jesuit crusade by elites had triggered an anticlerical revolt among young and low-income groups with little education. That most of those coming from poor backgrounds had joined the demonstration individually rather than as part of an organization confirms the interconnectedness between literate anticlerical circles and working-class protesters. The same goes for the reproduction of arguments originally published in liberal-leaning newspapers in the rioters’ testimonies. A further point worth noting is the absence of women from the protests. As stated above, the parishioners of St. Ignatius submitted two petitions, one against and one in favor of the archbishop’s decision to return the church to the Jesuits. Although the first petition was exclusively signed by men, the latter contained many signatures by women.27 This gender bias returns in the absence of accounts that describe women expressing support for the demonstration, for example, on balconies or from behind windows, as routinely happened. The only women mentioned in police records are those who either rescued the wafers that protesters had scattered in the streets or helped the Jesuits escape from an approaching anticlerical crowd. The targeted destruction of confessional booths in the school chapel, which were open to public use, points in the same direction. This is an important observation in view of the reputation that Jesuits, as confessors and spiritual directors, had for using women to infiltrate family life. According to a work published in 1860, Jesuits sneak into family households, as snakes do, scrutinizing the domestic life of families, examining the enfeebled consciousness of the weak, seizing upon the inexperienced youth, fostering the verbosity of women and children alike, using the simple-minded servants for its own purposes.28 A few days before the riots, the Revista Masónica Argentina had warned its readers: “Beware of the Jesuits that consort with our families. Beware of the confessional booth”.29 Of greatest interest is perhaps that protesters in early 1875 did not randomly attack churches, images, and symbols. Instead, they chose their targets

Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina  153 carefully: buildings associated with Archbishop Aneiros as well as churches and symbols related to the regular clergy, especially the Jesuits. In other words, the protests were not aimed at the Catholic Church or at Catholics at large – as some historians would have it – but targeted the Ultramontanism associated with the archbishop and the religious orders. Thus, protesters did not take on the Metropolitan Cathedral but focused on the archbishop’s residence next door. They did not assault churches overseen by secular clergy – though they did demonstrate near there – but attacked the ones belonging to religious orders: the churches of St. Ignatius, St. Francis, and St. Domingo, as well as the Colegio del Salvador. The only churches served by secular clergy subjected to attacks were those in Flores, where Archbishop Aneiros was staying for a pastoral visit, and Morón, where he owned property. Another focal point for attack was the legal connection between Church and State. Protesters carried signs calling for “a free Church in a free State” and took down the national coat of arms that hung over the entrance to the archepiscopal palace, which symbolized the legal union between Church and State. That the anticlerical riot was neither an irrational nor a random act is confirmed by what happened inside the targeted buildings. The protesters entering the Colegio del Salvador mainly destroyed Jesuit symbols and symbols associated with Ultramontanism, using great violence. A witness told how in the chapel, they smashed and damaged many relics and the two bodies of the Holy Martyrs Aurelio and Fidel, precious gifts from Our Holy Pope Pius IX to his beloved Jesuits; they [protestors – R.D.S.] tore and stabbed several paintings and depictions of the Saints. A large, life-size picture of Jesus praying in the garden exhibits two lengthy slits across his face, and a huge stabbing next to his heart. They subjected an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to a vicious onslaught, setting its altar on fire, as they also did to the portraits of Saint Francis Xavier and Saint Francis Borgia and many others. But they saved particular sacrilegious wrath and depravity for [the image of] of Our Father Saint Ignatius of Loyola, driving a knife into his throat and lips.30 In other words, the symbols that were destroyed bore a connection either to Pope Pius IX (the relics) or to Ultramontanism (the cult of the Sacred Heart). They also linked to Jesuit culture: again, not only the Sacred Heart – a typical Ignatian devotion – but also the images of Saints Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Francis Borgia, who had all been prominent Jesuits. In the case of the founder of the Society of Jesus, rioters displayed an almost sacrilegious wrath. The knife that pierced his mouth and throat can be read as a rejection of the Jesuits’ preaching, and perhaps even as a desire to silence them through (symbolic) murder.

154  Roberto Di Stefano All this brings us to an interesting conclusion. Despite many protesters being comparably young and in possession of little education, they were perfectly able to target symbols and images that represented a specific element of Catholic culture and this with striking precision. These were the same symbols and images that the anticlerical press associated with Ultramontanism in general and with Pope Pius IX, Archbishop Aneiros, and the Jesuits in particular. The fate of images of the Sacred Heart illustrates this bias well. Both the Society of Jesus and Archbishop Aneiros were great supporters of its devotion, which was fundamentally antimodern.31 In 1874, Aneiros had consecrated the archdiocese to the Sacred Heart and had urged Pius IX to do likewise with the universal Church, which he felt was being ruthlessly persecuted.32 The cult’s liturgical celebration quickly spread across Buenos Aires, to a large extent thanks to the work of the Apostolate of Prayers through their monthly bulletin El Mensajero del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús (The Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus).33 In short, the events of early 1875 cannot be adequately explained by pointing at a state of economic and political crisis only. Nor were they the product of a “blind” wrath and “foolish misconduct by the crowd”, as Adolfo Saldías, one of the main organizers of the meeting, put it some years later.34 Rather, they expressed clear opposition against the legal union of Church and State, and against the influence of Ultramontanism, represented by the archbishop and the Jesuits, in Argentinean public life. Conclusions Right from the start, the riots of 1875 raised a question that greatly worried Argentina’s ruling elite. As thinker and one-time Argentinean president Domingo F. Sarmiento eloquently put it: “How could […] the peaceful demonstration of an idea, or to speak frankly, of a hostility that is common in most Catholic countries [anti-Jesuitism – R.D.S.], lead to looting, arson, homicide, desecration?”35 Since those days, many answers have been put forward. Given the protesters’ behavior, the statements of those arrested, and the nature of other violent incidents, we might conclude that these riots reflected a deep-rooted anticlericalism. The rioters of 1875 were men who, at a time of worldly trouble, saw in Archbishop Aneiros and the Jesuits the embodiment of specific aspects of Catholicism that were anathema to them. The political and economic circumstances merely handed them a suitable occasion to show this hatred publicly. Both the riots and the testimonies of the accused reveal how widespread ideas were that one might rather consider the domain of literate elites. In reality, low- and middle-income groups consisting of mostly illiterate men had recourse to the same anticlerical discourses that circulated among the elites and in the liberal press.

Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina  155 The aforementioned testimonies also carried interesting references to the history of Argentina, particularly to the Revolution and the role that the Jesuits had allegedly played in it, as well as to the legendary figure of former president Rivadavia. It is irrelevant that many of these remarks were historically inaccurate. What matters is that a string of eclectically retrieved memories helped trigger an anticlerical demonstration that involved a broad spectrum of the local male population. The testimonies but also the specific buildings and symbols that were attacked moreover confirm that, far from using violence in an erratic way and attacking Catholics or the Catholic Church indiscriminately, the rioters chose their targets carefully and in a rational manner. They focused on symbols associated not only with the legal union between Church and State but also with Archbishop Aneiros, Pope Pius IX, and the regular clergy. The Jesuits were a favorite target. Protesters knew perfectly well which saints represented the hated order, just as they were very much aware that the Sacred Heart was a devotion to which both the Society of Jesus and Archbishop Aneiros attached great value. In the rationality of their actions, the protesters of 1875 in Buenos Aires resembled both the rioters of sixteenth-century France studied by Natalie Zemon Davis and the insurgents in Civil War Spain researched by Manuel Delgado Ruiz. What this shows us is that we should refrain from explaining the anticlerical riots of 1875 exclusively in terms of political or socioeconomic grievances. There were many factors that shaped the violence, including stereotypical ideas on gender, memories of past conflicts between Federalists and Unitarians, as well as diverging belief systems. Secular differences cannot account for the type of violence displayed by those storming the Colegio del Salvador and raging against the images of the Sacred Heart. Nor can they explain why rioters mainly assaulted churches ran by – or related to – regular clergy and discarded the parishes administered by secular clergy. At the same time, we should avoid seeing in all violent anticlerical action an attack on the Church, on Catholicism, or even on religion as a whole. Rather, the violent incidents that occurred in Buenos Aires in late February and early March 1875 showed a desire to influence ongoing debates about secularization in Argentina. Demonstrators rejected the legal connection between Church and State as well as the Ultramontane ethos. With their riotous actions, they responded to the way in which the religious and secular spheres related to one another in Argentina. The working-class population of Buenos Aires did not have access to the political power and rhetorical instruments that elites could use to intervene in debates about the religious sphere and instead resorted to rioting. Still, the violent nature of popular protest should not deny its rationality and the complex string of motives behind it. Among these, so this chapter argues, religious arguments were omnipresent.

156  Roberto Di Stefano Notes 1 “Torres Jose, Jose de la Serna y Santiago Ferro insidente sobre sus escarcelaciones bajo de fianza,” in Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires [hereafter AGN], Tribunal Criminal P-10; “Sumario criminal por los asaltamientos, robo, incendio y heridas cometidos en esta Ciudad el 28 de Febrero del corriente año,” in AGN, Tribunal Criminal P-11. 2 See Natalie Zemon Davis, “Los ritos de la violencia,” in Sociedad y cultura en la Francia moderna (Barcelona: Crítica, 1993). Italics mine. 3 Ibid., 150. 4 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past & Present 59 (May 1973): 70–71. 5 Manuel Delgado Ruiz, La ira sagrada. Anticlericalismo, iconoclastia y antirritualismo en la España contemporánea (Barcelona: Humanidades, 1992), 9–10. 6 Ricardo Falcón, Los orígenes del movimiento obrero (1857–1899) (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1984), 44–48. 7 The work of Gutiérrez remains unpublished. The quotations are taken from Hilda Sábato, La política en las calles. Entre el voto y la movilización. Buenos Aires, 1862–1880 (Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2004), 218. 8 There is an extensive bibliography on the subject. Here, I only cite Guillermo Furlong, Historia del Colegio del Salvador y de sus irradiaciones culturales y espirituales en la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1617–1943, vol. II (Buenos Aires: Colegio del Salvador, 1944), 72–80. 9 For both events and for anticlericalism in Argentina more generally, see Roberto Di Stefano, Ovejas negras. Historia de los anticlericales argentinos (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2010). 10 Hilda Sábato, “La vida pública en Buenos Aires,” in Liberalismo, Estado y orden burgués (1852–1880), Nueva Historia Argentina, ed. Marta Bonaudo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1999), 167. 11 There is an extensive bibliography on Church–State relations in Argentina. See Roberto Di Stefano and Loris Zanatta, Historia de la Iglesia argentina. De la conquista a finales del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Grijalbo, 2000). 12 “Proceso al Doctor Juan José Castelli. Su conducta pública y militar desde que fue nombrado representante hasta después del Desaguadero, 1811–1812,” in Biblioteca de Mayo. Colección de Obras y Documentos para la Historia Argentina, Tomo XIII (Buenos Aires: Senado de la Nación, 1962), 11.796, 11.799, and 11.819. 13 Biblioteca de Mayo, Tomo XVI, primera parte (Buenos Aires: Senado de la Nación, 1963), 14.218, and 14.219. 14 AGN X 4–8–6, Culto 1827–1830. 15 El Federal (January to March 12, 1829). 16 Sandro Olaza Pallero, Historia de la parroquia de San Miguel del Monte (1774– 1939) (Buenos Aires: Parroquia San Miguel Arcángel, 2007), 118–126. 17 “Historia secreta de la supresion de la Compañía de Jesus en Buenos Aires, en 10 de Octubre de 1841, escrita dos años despues por el Supr. de la misma R.P. Mariano Berdugo,” in Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu (Rome), Arg-Ch. 1001, 1836–1847, II, 9. 18 La Gaceta Mercantil (June 20, 1846). 19 Los franmasones y el jesuitismo […] Opúsculo escrito por un franc mason que hace 37 años que lo es dedicado a los habitantes de las repúblicas sud-americanas (Montevideo: Imprenta Tipo-Litográfica de L. Mège, 1859), 89. 20 “La revolucion reformista estalló!!!,” La Tribuna (October 31, 1858).

Religion and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Argentina  157 21 On gender stereotypes in anticlericalism see Manuel Delgado Ruiz, Las palabras de otro hombre: anticlericalismo y misoginia (Barcelona: Muchnik, 1993). 22 Roberto Di Stefano, “El antijesuitismo porteño del siglo XIX”, in Antijesuitismo y filojesuitismo. Dos identidades ante la restauración, eds. Sabina Pavone, Susanne Monreal, and Guillermo Zermeño (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2014). 23 “San José de Flores… El Juez de Paz da cuenta de lo ocurrido en la Iglesia del pueblo en la noche anterior [1875],” in Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, La Plata [hereafter AHPBA], Archivo del Ministerio de Gobierno, Leg. 4, exp. 140. 24 El Nacional (March 3, 1875). 25 Furlong, Historia del Colegio del Salvador, 78. 26 Hilda Sábato, “Un episodio violento,” in La política en las calles. Entre el voto y la movilización. Buenos Aires, 1862–1880 (Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2004), 234. 27 “Arzobispo Dr. Aneiros. Sobre Anexion de dos parroquias á la Catedral,” in AHPBA, Archivo del Ministerio de Gobierno, Leg. 3, exp. 94. 28 Clemente Marica, La caridad, la filantropía, y el Jesuitismo en la República Oriental del Uruguay. Carta esplicativa a la Comunidad Cristiana (Buenos Aires: Unknown Publisher, 1860). 29 Quoted in Furlong, Historia del Colegio del Salvador, 71–72. 30 Valentín Francolí, “Relación de los atropellos del 28 de Febrero de 1875 en el Colegio del Salvador en Buenos Aires,” Estudios 28 (1925): 187. 31 For the anti-modern overtones of this devotion see Daniele Menozzi, Sacro Cuore. Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della società (Rome: Viella, 2001). 32 El Católico Argentino (October 17, 1874 and January 9, 1875). The pastoral letter on the consecration of the archdiocese to the Sacred Heart was extensively commented by the anticlerical press. See for example “Paráfrasis de una pastoral,” El Correo Español (June 13, 1874). 33 See, e.g., El Católico Argentino (August 1–8, 1874). 34 Adolfo Saldías, “La reunión del 28 de Febrero,” in Civilia (Buenos Aires: Félox Lajouane Editor, 1888), 43. 35 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, “La grande avería. Incendio del Salvador,” La Tribuna (March 6, 1875), and Obras de D.F. Sarmiento, volume XLII (Buenos Aires: Imprenta y Litografía “Mariano Moreno”, 1900), 6.

Bibliography Delgado, Ruiz Manuel. La ira sagrada. Anticlericalismo, iconoclastia y antirritualismo en la España contemporánea. Barcelona: Humanidades, 1992. Delgado, Ruiz Manuel. Las palabras de otro hombre: anticlericalismo y misoginia. Barcelona: Muchnik, 1993. Di Stefano, Roberto. Ovejas negras. Historia de los anticlericales argentinos. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2010. Di Stefano, Roberto. “El antijesuitismo porteño del siglo XIX.” In Antijesuitismo y filojesuitismo. Dos identidades ante la restauración, edited by Sabina Pavone, Susana Monreal, and Guillermo Zermeño, 167–190. Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2014.

158  Roberto Di Stefano Di Stefano, Roberto, and Loris Zanatta. Historia de la Iglesia argentina. De la conquista a finales del siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Grijalbo, 2000. Falcón, Ricardo. Los orígenes del movimiento obrero (1857–1899). Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1984. Francolí, Valentín. “Relación de los atropellos del 28 de Febrero de 1875 en el Colegio del Salvador en Buenos Aires.” Estudios 28 (1925): 161–260. Furlong, Guillermo. Historia del Colegio del Salvador y de sus irradiaciones culturales y espirituales en la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1617–1943, vol. II. Buenos Aires: Colegio del Salvador, 1944. Los franmasones y el jesuitismo […] Opúsculo escrito por un franc mason que hace 37 años que lo es dedicado a los habitantes de las repúblicas sud-americanas. Montevideo: Imprenta Tipo-Litográfica de L. Mège, 1859. Marica, Clemente. La caridad, la filantropía, y el Jesuitismo en la República Oriental del Uruguay. Carta esplicativa a la Comunidad Cristiana. Buenos Aires: Unknown Publisher, 1860. Menozzi, Daniele. Sacro Cuore. Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della società. Rome: Viella, 2001. Olaza, Pallero Sandro. Historia de la parroquia de San Miguel del Monte (1774– 1939). Buenos Aires: Parroquia San Miguel Arcángel, 2007. Sábato, Hilda. “La vida pública en Buenos Aires.” In Liberalismo, Estado y orden burgués (1852–1880), Nueva Historia Argentina, edited by Marta Bonaudo, 161– 216. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1999. Sabato, Hilda. La política en las calles. Entre el voto y la movilización. Buenos Aires, 1862–1880. Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2004. Sábato, Hilda. “Un episodio violento.” In La política en las calles. Entre el voto y la movilización. Buenos Aires, 1862–1880, 213–254. Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2004. Saldías, Adolfo. “La reunión del 28 de Febrero.” In Civilia, 41–54. Buenos Aires: Félox Lajouane Editor, 1888. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. “La grande avería. Incendio del Salvador.” In La Tribuna (March 6, 1875), and Obras de D. F. Sarmiento, volume XLII, 7–13. Buenos Aires: Imprenta y Litografía “Mariano Moreno”, 1900. Zemon Davis, Natalie. “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France.” Past & Present 59 (May 1973): 51–91. Zemon Davis, Natalie. “Los ritos de la violencia.” In Sociedad y cultura en la Francia moderna, 148–185. Barcelona: Crítica, 1993.

Part III

Resisting Religious Pluralization

7

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred French Catholic Responses to the Damascus and Dreyfus Affairs Julie Kalman

What causes rhetorical violence to become physical? When does violent language provoke people into forming a violent mob? Two events in nineteenthcentury France, separated by half a century, allow for a consideration of this question. In 1840, France was gripped by events in Damascus, where members of the Jewish community were accused of having undertaken the ritual murder of a Catholic monk and his assistant. In 1898, France was rocked by violent antisemitic riots that took place around the country as the Dreyfus Affair dragged on. The two events have much in common. Both exposed deep fissures in French society, as different parties maintained their hold on competing ideals of the nation. Both revealed Catholics in France, beleaguered, and yet holding on stubbornly to a dream of a world that was no longer. Both occurred in a context of recent violence in France: the failed attempt at revolution of 1832, and the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune of 1870–1871. The rhetoric around both events focused on violent acts, but only in 1898 did this rhetoric send people out into the streets. How can the events of 1898 shed light on why the hateful, angry, and antisemitic writings in response to the Damascus Affair did not result in physical violence? The Damascus Affair On February 5, 1840, a monk named Father Thomas, who was living in Damascus, disappeared along with his servant. Father Thomas belonged to the Capuchin order, protected by the French government. In Damascus, this meant that his disappearance was the concern of the newly appointed French consul, the Count de Ratti-Menton, who was directly responsible for the safety of French nationals. Ratti-Menton approached his role in the investigations with great seriousness. He was closely involved from the outset in finding and prosecuting Father Thomas’s presumed killers. The last known sightings of Father Thomas were in the city’s Jewish quarter where he had gone to put up a poster, and so suspicion quickly came to settle on the Jews. Ratti-Menton, certain of the Jews’ guilt, became convinced that this had DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-11

162  Julie Kalman been a so-called blood libel killing; that the chief rabbi of the community – who was subsequently arrested – had in fact ordered the murder of a Christian, in order to mix his blood for the unleavened bread for the Jewish Passover. The French consul pursued this theory assiduously. All of those arrested were tortured; four died. Ten remained in prison for some months while the case dragged on. One of the dead – killed in prison by flogging – was a Jewish witness who had come forward to state that he had seen Father Thomas outside the Jewish quarter on the night he disappeared. By the time this man presented his testimony, the authorities were certain of the truth of the ritual murder story and were doing all in their power to prove it. These events were to become known as the Damascus Affair. The Damascus Affair is one episode in the long history of blood libel accusations. By the nineteenth century, the blood libel – the idea that Jews committed ritual murder against a Christian victim in order to make use of their blood – had been developed and refined over centuries. Historians believe that the first accusation of ritual murder against Jews was the case of William of Norwich in England in 1144.1 From there, the charge spread, through Central and into Eastern Europe. Key to the myth was that the victim was nearly always a young boy. As an innocent and pure Christian, he was supposedly chosen by his Jewish captors to sacrifice his blood for their use. While blood libel cases were not uncommon in the Middle Ages, by the eighteenth century, cases were reaching the courts less often. At the same time, those claims of ritual murder that were tried in the courts, particularly in Central Europe, were becoming less uniform, so that as well as boys, Jews were accused of killing girls, and adult men and women. Even so, the Damascus case was unusual, both in that it involved two adult men, one of them sixty-two years old, and because it was the first of its kind to occur in a Muslim country.2 Jonathan Frankel’s exhaustive examination of testimony and transcripts of the interrogations of arrested Jews in Damascus led him to conclude that two issues were vital: first, no-one among the Christian population opposed the charges, and second, once they supposedly discovered the motive for Father Thomas’ death, the details of the case were largely invented. Thus, he argued, what occurred was “not the invention of a tradition, but rather its reinvention or reinvigoration” in the collective memory of Damascus’ Christian population.3 The French consul, Ratti-Menton, was central to this process. The Damascus Affair received a great deal of attention in France, because of Ratti-Menton’s close involvement, but also because of geopolitics. The affair was rapidly to take on an importance greater than the question of the veracity or plausibility of the accusations. It was swallowed up by international diplomacy, and the tussle between the European powers for influence in the Middle East. In the region, Egypt was fighting Turkey for control of Syria and Lebanon. Damascus was occupied by the Egyptians and under

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred  163 their de facto rule. The English, Austrians and Russians had formed a loose coalition to back the Turks. The French, motivated perhaps by their original links with Egypt through Napoleon, had decided to stand alone and back the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali. The blood libel accusation in Damascus took place as Ali was building up his armies in Syria, and the ensuing tension that this caused between France and other European powers played out in the affair. For while Father Thomas was a French national, some of the accused held Austrian or British citizenship. Yet, despite the protestations and efforts of other European governments, the French were the only ones to have any real influence over Ali and the fate of the Jews. Thus the Damascus Affair assumed great importance in France, and it certainly caused a stir in the French press, eager for news. For the Catholic press in particular, the idea that Jews still committed ritual killings was as important as the question of France’s role as a power in the region. Was it possible that Jews would brutally kill a Catholic priest and his assistant, and use their blood to make unleavened bread? Catholic newspapers spared readers no detail and no theory in their quest for the truth. They delivered graphic details of the supposed manner of Father Thomas’ death, and they backed up the case with information about other blood libels throughout history. Violence permeated all aspects of the Damascus Affair. It was unspoken, and thus imagined, in the alleged murder of Father Thomas and his assistant; it was graphic, in the torture of the Jewish witnesses; and it was vitriolic, in the response of the Catholic press in France. Father Thomas – Tommaso – was originally from Sardinia, but had lived in Damascus for more than three decades at the time of his disappearance. He was an elderly man, known throughout the different Damascus communities for his work vaccinating children. The population of Damascus, like the rest of the Ottoman Empire, was a patchwork of different peoples and different religious traditions. The Jewish community comprised original inhabitants, who had settled throughout the Middle East during the time of Roman expansion, and who had Arabized under Ottoman rule. They had been joined, in the sixteenth century, by Jews fleeing the persecutions on the Iberian Peninsula, and who had been made welcome by the Sultan. This community had its very poor, but it also had a well-connected, wealthy, trading elite who were central to the dynamic of the affair. As well as Jews, there were several Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire: Greek, Nestorian, Assyrian, Armenian, and Coptic, among others. In general, the Ottomans were pragmatic in their rule. Rather than impose Islam by force, they accommodated diversity, through the Pact of Umar, which established the principle of dhimmitude. The purpose of dhimmitude was to define the status of non-Muslim minorities in the Muslim state. Jews, and the many branches of Christianity in the Middle East, were seen as People of the Book: monotheistic people who had received

164  Julie Kalman divine revelation, but before the coming of Islam. They occupied a middle ground between savagery and full enlightenment. The Pact of Umar was observed more or less strictly in different regions, and at different times. While the pragmatism of Ottoman rule allowed for co-existence, resentments could also spill over into violence. The fate of individuals, or entire communities, could depend on the whim of a ruler. Violence could be top-down, but it could also be inter-communal, generally a manifestation of ongoing tensions. In Damascus, and throughout much of the Ottoman Empire, elite Jewish traders competed with Christians, and particularly Greeks and Armenians, for trade concessions and privileges. Rivalries could be fierce, and the crowds that gathered very quickly in Damascus after Thomas’s disappearance, threatening the Jews with destruction, must be understood in that context. This context, perhaps, also helps to explain how the investigation advanced so rapidly. One of the first to be arrested was a Jewish barber, whose shop was located near where the poster had been placed. The barber confessed after torture and inculpated several other Jews. Those of the accused who had the means to do so, hid, or sought refuge in a foreign consulate. Those unfortunates who remained were arrested and held for questioning. At the alleged scene of the crime – revealed under torture by one of the accused men to be the home of another of those arrested – investigators discovered fragments of bone and bloodstains, although these were later found to be those of an animal. Father Thomas himself simply disappeared, and his remains were never found. Why did Ratti-Menton pursue the prosecution so assiduously, turning a blind eye to violence and torture? Benoît Ulysse-Laurent-François de RattiMenton (1799–1864) was a career diplomat. He had worked his way through a number of fairly routine appointments, until he was sent to Damascus. This was a clear promotion: Ratti-Menton was the first diplomat to represent France in the city, which was becoming ever more central to French strategic interests. French – and indeed, European – diplomats had, of course, been present in the Ottoman Empire for centuries, because of the capitulations, or trade agreements, signed from the sixteenth century onwards. Initially, the work of consuls was to protect and promote trade. However, as nationalism grew in Europe, following the French Revolution, the work of consuls also came to encompass the protection of their own citizens. France had signed an agreement with the Ottomans in 1740, giving France’s agents the right to extend protection over Roman Catholic clergy in the Empire, including Capuchin churches. Thus, Ratti-Menton was in charge of the investigation surrounding Father Thomas’ disappearance. Historians of the Damascus Affair, such as Heinrich Graetz, have tended to depict Ratti-Menton as an antisemite, and the sole driving force behind the arrest and torture of the Jews of Damascus.4 It is possible that the consul was motivated by hatred of Jews, but this cannot be proven. It is more likely

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred  165 that Ratti-Menton, newly appointed and promoted to Damascus just as tensions over a diplomatic dispute were reaching their climax, was anxious to prove himself as a worthy servant of his nation by reaching an outcome, and was possibly too weak to go against the tide of local Christian animosity toward the Jews. He was, after all, appointed to represent French interests, and in part, this meant ensuring Christian support for France in Damascus.5 Certainly, the consul received vociferous support from the Catholic press back in France. The Damascus Affair occurred at a time of upheaval and challenge for Catholics in France, and gave many a narrative with which to make sense of their times. The Catholic Press in France

Of course, French Catholics were not a monolithic group, by any means. Indeed, the three major newspapers upon which this review of contemporary journalistic opinion is based – La Quotidienne, L’Univers, and L’Ami de la Religion et du Roi – reflect their diversity. The Quotidienne, created during the Revolution, was unapologetically Legitimist. For this journal, only a king, one of the Bourbon line, could truly and legitimately rule France. By 1840, this was a minority position, but one held stubbornly throughout the century, largely by members of the aristocracy. From 1840, the section on diplomatic affairs in the Quotidienne was the responsibility of Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, who was to become known later in the century as a theorist and proponent of the inequality of races. The Univers, also Catholic, was strongly Ultramontane, believing in the supreme authority of the Pope in questions of faith, and of worldly life. For the Univers, “all enlightenment came from Rome”.6 The Univers was edited by the Catholic polemicist Louis Veuillot, known for the violence of his rhetoric. The Univers took on political battles on behalf of Catholicism. But unlike the Quotidienne, it believed that the reign of Louis-Philippe, the cousin of the Bourbons and of the house of Orléans, was also legitimate. This made the journal Orléanist, supporting a regime that was very much for the middle class. The highly conservative Ami de la Religion et du Roi, a mouthpiece for “Catholic propaganda”, was edited by the lawyer Mathieu Henrion, an Ultramontane writer, aristocrat, and journalist.7 However different in their politics, all three newspapers assumed that the Jews of Damascus were guilty of ritual murder. The Univers took a great interest in the affair and reported every facet of it in great detail. It accepted the accusations without question, and even went to some trouble to find examples to support its belief in the guilt of the Jews. The Ami de la Religion, on the other hand, claimed to be disinterested in the Affair, and to be “sincerely seeking the truth”.8 Indeed, all of these newspapers prided themselves on their impartiality, although ultimately this signified different things. The Ami de la

166  Julie Kalman Religion self-consciously noted its impartiality by printing a letter of complaint from a Jew regarding the inclusion in the previous edition of the Ami de la Religion of certain extracts from the Talmud, that purportedly proved Jewish hatred for Christians.9 The Ami de la Religion firmly believed in Jewish guilt, finding it difficult to understand how the crime could be more easily explained by as yet unknown causes, than by this hatred, characteristic, or so the journal believed, of Jews.10 The newspaper used emotive language to entrench this notion. Thus the Jews were described as having been accused of “traitorously killing the venerable monk known as Father Thomas”.11 For the editors of the Univers, impartiality meant, as it proudly pointed out, that it was the only newspaper to have refused to publish only documents provided by Jews (in fact this meant that the Univers, like the Ami de la Religion, published only material that assumed the guilt of the Jews of Damascus).12 The Quotidienne prided itself on its impartial stance, stating that “in this affair, as in all affairs enveloped in mystery, the first duty of the press is to abstain from taking sides”.13 The Quotidienne criticized high-profile Jewish lawyer Adolphe Crémieux for maintaining his position that the Jews must be innocent of the murder of Father Thomas. For what were the alternatives? “If one wishes to show that the Jews are innocent of the refined strangling of Father Thomas”, the Quotidienne pointed out, blithely inventing the circumstances of the monk’s murder, “it will be necessary to accuse either the Muslims or the Christians. That is a sad alternative. Mr Crémieux will permit us to say that the Christians did not strangle Father Thomas”.14 The newspapers also bickered among themselves. Impartiality for the Legitimist Quotidienne, still awaiting the return of the Bourbons, was not quite the same as it was for the Univers and, indeed, both papers lost no opportunity to point out one another’s weaknesses. When those behind the Quotidienne were denounced by their colleagues at the Univers as “bad Christians”, the Quotidienne responded to this accusation with the comment that “[the Univers] had better not denounce us as Jews, because we would seek to avoid violence or reprisals”.15 In fact, the newspapers were more consistent in their approach than either would perhaps have liked to admit. For both newspapers, a vital element in the supposed plausibility of the charges was the fact that the murders had taken place in Damascus. It would most probably have been challenging – even for the most hardened Legitimist – to find French Jews, emancipated for nearly fifty years, guilty of the brutal murder of a priest and his assistant. Even a highly conservative newspaper such as the Ami de la Religion allowed that the Jews of France had benefited from their long exposure to European culture and that this had “softened their morals”.16 Ritual murder might have become defunct in civilized Europe. Nonetheless, making the contrast between their enlightened, Christian civilization, and the other, these newspapers were fully prepared to believe that such an act could still take place in what they regarded as the backward, and

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred  167 mysterious Orient. This was, after all, the region where, as the Univers reported, all religions were practiced “with the greatest fanaticism”, and the Jews of Damascus, “five hundred years behind [European Jews] in all knowledge and all moral notions”, still had “the morals and all the barbarism of their ancestors”.17 For the Quotidienne, this was a drama that took the reader “back to the Middle Ages” and its protagonists “surpassed all their coreligionists with their fanaticism”.18 Another element lent strength to the belief in Jewish guilt. Conservative French Catholics could draw on a long tradition that taught that the Talmud was full of violent hatred and blasphemy.19 These charges were confirmed for them by men such as the high-profile apostate, and former rabbi, David Drach. On the authority of figures such as Drach, these newspapers found proof in the Talmud that Judaism authorized – or even encouraged – crimes such as ritual murder. In an article entitled “Translations of the Talmud that authorize the murder of Christians by Jews”, the Univers published a letter from their special correspondent which alleged that the Jews of Damascus were trying to hide a translation of the Talmud that would reveal to the nonJewish world “the horrible blasphemies that the Jews vomit against the Savior”.20 L’Univers concluded that if one considered all circumstances of this case, it was not impossible to conceive “that a fanatical rabbi could have preserved the former traditions, and that he wanted to put them into practice”.21 In a book he wrote shortly after the Affair, Drach also hinted at a Jewish conspiracy: “The assassins of Father Thomas in Damascus, convicted of their crime, were shielded from the vengeance of the law by the united efforts of Jews of all nations. […] Money played the main role in this affair”.22 And while the opinion of Drach added weight to their arguments, apostates who challenged the Church, or who expressed sympathy for Jews, were greeted with mistrust at best, but more generally, with derision and disdain. Thus for example, George Wildon Pieritz, a Jewish convert to Protestantism, went to Damascus and spoke out in support of the accused Jews. Ratti-Menton, writing to the Univers, called Pieritz “a false apostate, an avowed slanderer”, who belonged “in petto to the sect of dissembling Jews”.23 Pieritz was described by another writer as “another ex-Jew, currently a Protestant missionary, a man worthy of no esteem, and who is described in letters from respectable personages with these two words: banker-missionary; did he not receive a banknote from the grateful Jews of Alexandria for a letter he had had placed in a Levantine newspaper?”24 Catholics and Jews in France

On the surface, such rhetoric suggests that these newspapers were not targeting the Jews of France. Drach and Ratti-Menton’s references to conspiracies, money, and shadowy sects, however, tell us otherwise. In the eyes of the

168  Julie Kalman Catholic press, the Jews of France were to become guilty of what was just as great a crime as that committed by their coreligionists in Damascus. At the news of the accusations, prominent Jews in France sought to come to the aid of the arrested Jews in Damascus. They undertook a high-profile letter-writing campaign in the press, and at the same time, they lobbied those in power. Their actions made them targets for criticism, in particular, for their alleged use of wealth and influence in an attempt to wield power. For many, it was a crime simply that French Jews should publicly show sympathy for the accused Jews of Damascus. Their identification with coreligionists in a foreign country was seen to be a public statement of affiliation: France’s Jews were choosing publicly to be Jews before they were Frenchmen. Catholic newspapers criticized these men, both for their inappropriate use of their power and wealth, and their equally inappropriate identification with men who were not French. The Ami de la Religion warned the Jews of France to recognize their good fortune in not being judged by the French population on the behavior of the Jews in Damascus. The same newspaper noted that several Parisian and departmental journals “rightly” stated that “the defenders of the Jews of Damascus make their speeches with much too much fervor and passion for them to do any great good in the cause of their clients”.25 The Jewish community in France, like that in the Ottoman Empire, was made up of different populations. France had two main Jewish communities. At the outbreak of the Revolution, approximately 15,000 Sephardic Jews lived in the south-west. Originally from Spain and Portugal, they had settled around Bordeaux and practiced Judaism secretly for centuries, making their Jewishness public in a very slow, measured way.26 They were emancipated in a straightforward process, becoming citizens in 1790. It took a further eighteen months for the second, larger group to be granted the same privilege. These were the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine. Numbering approximately 25,000, they had lived in the region since Roman times, and were scattered throughout the many villages that populated the countryside. They were overwhelmingly poor, generally acting as middlemen, a practice which attracted hostility, and which led to a more complex process of emancipation, as well as the re-imposition of restrictions on their actions in 1808 by Napoleon.27 Paula Hyman showed that Alsatian Jews were slow to change after emancipation.28 Nonetheless, in the first half of the nineteenth century, Jews did urbanize, moving to Paris in particular, and taking up prominent positions in the arts, politics, and finance.29 By 1840, a half century since being received into the nation, Jews in France had the confidence to speak publicly for their coreligionists.30 Not all were ready to be receptive to their stance, however. The choices French Jews made during the affair meant that they were singled out in the public eye. When Crémieux and other prominent Jews in France criticized their government’s actions, they were not joined by a chorus of similar complaints. The sole Jewish deputy, Benoit Fould, rose

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred  169 (reluctantly) to censure Ratti-Menton in the French parliament and was castigated by the Ami de la Religion for “complaining bitterly”, not about Father Thomas’ murder, but rather, about the treatment of the accused.31 Indeed, not only the newspapers, but president Adolphe Thiers himself defended the consul. Seeking to shore up domestic support, and to make a dramatic gesture in the arena of foreign policy at that time of tension over events in the Middle East, Thiers chose to play the nationalist card; he vigorously protected Ratti-Menton as the servant of the nation, and the representative of France’s interests in the region. Thiers’ policy certainly appears to have worked where the Catholic press was concerned. The Quotidienne congratulated him on his declaration that Ratti-Menton would be energetically defended “against all the interests and passions, political or not, that are stirring around him. Until proof to the contrary”, the newspaper maintained, “the cause of this agent is the cause of justice; the cause of France”.32 This was the Catholic France that the Quotidienne so longed for. As the representative of this France, Ratti-Menton could do no wrong. Both the Quotidienne and the Univers claimed that it was the zeal of Ratti-Menton that brought the Jews to justice.33 RattiMenton, the incorruptible representative of an incorruptible Catholic nation that was under attack, was almost to become a martyr. In June the Quotidienne reported that the fanaticism of the Jews had been excited against Ratti-Menton to such a point that his very life was threatened. He was alone against the other European consuls, themselves “almost all Jewish”. However, the paper trusted that the government would intervene, actively and energetically, against any maneuvers directed at the French consul.34 Thiers was not to disappoint. As France stood alone in support of Muhammad Ali, it suited a beleaguered Thiers to make the Jews of France the enemy within. Once again, the newspapers agreed. In the Quotidienne, it was claimed that the Jews had tried to “stifle” the Affair with money, making offers to RattiMenton.35 However, it was the Univers that observed that while the Jews were “powerful” and “enormously wealthy”, “in the authorities of Damascus, the French consul and his secretary, they have found honest men that no offer has been able to corrupt”.36 For once, those at the Univers and Thiers were in agreement, and it was Jewish power that united them. For in the eyes of Thiers, “the Jews” were “more powerful than they wish to appear”.37 Jewish power: this was the new danger that Jews in French society presented. If the Jews in faraway Damascus could be found guilty of a medieval crime, those in France were found to be practicing an evil that ultimately threatened to do much more damage. By the middle of 1840, the newspapers had shifted their focus from events in Damascus, to the actions of Jews in France. Thiers’ reference to the Jewish desire to dissemble became significant, for if power was potentially dangerous, in the hands of untrustworthy and manipulative figures such as Jews it became a tool for evildoing. This

170  Julie Kalman Jewish power manifested itself in the coverage of the Affair in France. Jews were supposedly active in influencing newspapers, particularly the moderate Journal des Débats. This paper published the initial report that came out of Damascus, in which it was stated that a number of Jewish families were suspected in Father Thomas’ disappearance, without comment. However, once it became clear that this was to be seen as a case of ritual murder, those at the Journal des Débats made the cause of the Jews of Damascus their own. Readers of the conservative Catholic newspapers were outraged “at the shameful connivance of certain Paris newspapers, and especially of the Journal des Débats, with the Jewish intrigues and ranting”.38 For the Univers, the Journal des Débats made itself the “Moniteur of Judaism”, outraging both Christian and national honor in its championing of the Jews.39 If national honor was Christian, then this was a nation where Jews could not belong. All of these newspapers proudly exposed Jews as a fifth column. They brought their focus to bear, most particularly, on James de Rothschild. In a system where wealth could translate into power, none was potentially more powerful than the fabulously wealthy Jewish baron. James was the youngest of the five sons of the patriarch, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, and the founder of the family’s French branch. He became the main focus of the press’s attentions. In the government’s “regrettable” initial silence on the Affair, the Ami de la Religion saw the influence of an “all-powerful man”. He protected the Jews with his “immense credit”, and was treated by the cabinet with “consideration”, due to his “considerable funds”, of which France’s politicians “often” had need.40 Crémieux was cast as Rothschild’s henchman. If Rothschild was an “opulent individual”, he was seconded by the “clever” Crémieux.41 The Ami de la Religion alleged that Crémieux admitted to using his “energy and activity” to buy column space in French and English newspapers.42 In reference to Jewish efforts to obtain a full pardon for the accused, the Ami de la Religion noted that “the Jewish side brought out all its heavy artillery”, a reference to Rothschild’s great wealth.43 The Quotidienne pitted Rothschild against the nation: the paper alleged that he had spent a great deal of money, something Jews were “not in the habit of doing”. Rothschild, the paper believed, sought to use his money to intimidate, and to have Ratti-Menton sacked. But these actions compromised him, and “with him his coreligionists in France”. The Quotidienne sent Rothschild a warning: public opinion could not be bought.44 The Damascus Affair, rekindling as it did the age-old religious charge of blood libel against the Jews, gave the Catholic press a strong platform from which to criticize the Jews of Damascus. Traditional Christian criticism of the Jews was a major theme in their coverage of the affair. However, while it was possible to level such accusations at Jews in a far-flung and little-known country, almost impossible to reach, the issues surrounding the Jews in France were much more immediate. Thus, it was that the affair took on yet

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred  171 another dimension. It was not only an issue in the political power play in the Middle East, nor another installment in the long saga of Jewish-Catholic relations. For newspapers such as these, it was also an occasion to return to an important question: what was the place of the Jew – and indeed, the Church – supposed to be in this new France? By mid-1840, tensions in Europe over Ali’s actions in the Middle East had risen to the point where war was expected. On July 15, Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia signed the Treaty of London, in which they agreed to mediate in the Turco-Egyptian conflict militarily. This threat of war ultimately drove the affair from the papers. But the Univers and the Ami de la Religion still saw fit to inform their readers of the accused Jews’ eventual release. It is not surprising that the conservative journals such as these continued to return to the Damascus Affair as they thought through the question of the place of Jews and Catholics in 1840s France. Well after the affair had disappeared from its front page, the Univers took advantage of a book review of a translation of the Talmud to remind its readers of the eternal foreignness of Judaism, a notion with which this newspaper was clearly comfortable. Jews, the author wrote, might adopt “the political opinions and social customs of the nations that have received them into their bosom”, but this should not be seen as proof of identification. As long as Jews continued to profess a secret and impenetrable religion, they would be foreign, and it would be natural to view them with suspicion.45 In France, the Damascus Affair seeped deeply into the public consciousness. In 1842, a contributor to the Jewish paper, the Archives Israélites, complained bitterly of “friends”, during the “sad episode in Damascus” who would say, “with the laugh that offends the soul: ‘I do not wish to lunch with you, for fear that you would serve me a Father Thomas cutlet!’”46 Some twenty years later, in the 1863 general elections in France, the high-profile Jewish banker Isaac Pereire stood for a seat in the Pyrenees-Orientales against the incumbent, Justin Durand, a pillar of the Church. Those who did not wish to see Pereire elected made use of antisemitic propaganda, including references to the Damascus Affair, as one example of the terrible things to be expected if a Jew were elected.47 Two decades further on again, in April 1881, the semi-official Vatican and Jesuit periodical Civiltà Cattolica quoted from apostate David Drach’s work, De l’Harmonie entre l’église et la synagogue, as proof of the veracity of the 1840 charge. Significant in the Damascus Affair was the criticism of those Jews in France who were seen to be helping their coreligionists, who, these papers believed, maintained violent hatred against Christians, and were fully capable of enacting this violence. While the Jews of France might no longer commit blood libel killings, they nonetheless maintained the same violent hatred, and expressed it in a different, and possibly even more dangerous way. Catholic belief in the veracity of the blood libel accusation, and ensuing accusations against French

172  Julie Kalman Jews for their alleged partisan stance, allowed Catholics to imagine themselves as the nation once again, and, in an act of metaphorical violence, to tear Jews out of the nation’s heart. In the Catholic commentary around the Damascus Affair, narratives of Jews as fanatical, dangerous, and untrustworthy – foreigners in the nation – were rehearsed and honed. But they were not acted upon. 1898: The “Antisemitic Moment”48 Almost fifty years after the Damascus Affair, in 1898, France was rocked by antisemitic riots. In January and February of that year, as the trial of Emile Zola approached, protestors filled the streets in towns across the country, as well as in Algeria, shouting “Death to the Jews”. Zola was accused of libel for his article J’accuse, in which he had accused the French army of the wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus. His trial was set for February 7, 1898. Throughout January, following the publication of Zola’s article, there were riots across France and in Algeria, “a pogrom without fatalities”.49 The riots varied, from a handful of drunken conscripts shouting anti-Jewish slogans, as at Montbéliard on January 17, or a dozen students throwing stones at the house of a Jewish professor, as at Tournon on January 23, to fullscale riots lasting several days and involving several thousand people.50 Demonstrators gathered in public squares and major thoroughfares to chant slogans and throw stones. They attacked Jewish property, including businesses, synagogues, and homes. They smashed windows and pillaged. On a few occasions, they attacked Jews. The demonstrations could last for days. In Paris, they took place over more than a week. The attacks, following the publication of Zola’s article, were revealing of the competing visions of the nation, a century after the Revolution. The rioters did not agree with Zola. But the target of rioters was Jews. Jews, clearly, represented this France which, to them, was anathema. Edouard Drumont, the author of the wildly successful La France Juive (Jewish France), has generally been seen as the instigator of the riots. Vicki Caron has shown the deep links between Drumont and the Catholic writers and organizations who mimicked his violent rhetoric. Police reports reveal conclusively that Catholic organizations incited much of the violence. The prefect of Alès, in the South of France, reported that the young people rioting belonged “to the royalist youth organization, and the younger ones to the schools of the religious orders”.51 Catholic publications commonly used words such as ‘annihilation’ and ‘extermination’.52 Catholic writers continued, also, to insist that Jews committed ritual murder – perhaps a legacy of the Damascus Affair.

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred  173 That the events of 1898 around the Dreyfus Affair resulted in such widespread violence in France is due, in part, to the high stakes of the time. By the end of the nineteenth century, conservative Catholics had taken up a defensive position against what they saw as an onslaught against the values they espoused. Anticlericalism reached a peak in France during the Third Republic (1870–1940). In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, the Third Republic government introduced a swathe of anticlerical laws, including public education for girls and boys, a ban on displays of religious symbols in state schools, and the exclusion of unauthorized religious congregations from teaching. It was in this context that statesman Léon Gambetta famously declared “Clericalism? There’s the enemy!” For the Catholics among Drumont’s supporters, this was nothing short of a war, and their enemies in the regime were freemasons and Jews. These were the “culture wars”, sodescribed by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, where struggles over the soul of France became militant, both in language and in action.53 For the Catholics who took to the streets and attacked Jews and their property, shouting “Death to the Jews!”, the Zola trial crystallized this war. In 1840, in contrast, when the Damascus Affair occurred, many Catholics felt alienated from the France around them, but they not did feel that they were under direct and sustained attack by the current regime. Conclusion Context is just one factor in helping to understand the link between rhetoric and the mob. Claude Langlois, one of the great historians of religion in France, has argued that the notion of ‘religious violence’ “confuses two phenomena that should be separated”: violence experienced by virtue of one’s religion, and violence caused by one’s religious convictions.54 Arguably, this distinction separates the two events, and also brings to light the dynamic internal to each, that served to determine the outcome. In 1898, religious convictions in the context of a perceived war of high stakes were sufficient to provoke violent riots. In 1840, violence was enacted against Jews as Jews, in a far-off place. In this case, the focus of the rhetoric was on the nature of Jews. Would they have committed the terrible killing of Father Thomas? That this rhetoric ultimately circled back around to Jews in France, and their response to the affair, did not change this internal dynamic. The rhetoric was violent, perhaps motivated by a violent hatred, and Jews were depicted as a danger to the nation, but the danger that they posed was not immediate, and thus there was no need to act. As conservative Catholics made their way through the nineteenth century in France, they constantly adapted, modified, and renegotiated the place of the Jew. They did this to create new narratives for themselves; narratives that gave them a central place in the nineteenth-century world. The violent

174  Julie Kalman nature of the rhetorical attacks on Jews around the Damascus Affair tells us that here was a Church that was struggling to maintain the place it sought in French society. But this was not a Church that felt a sense of immediate threat. The Church lost everything with the Revolution, and one of its outcomes was, of course, the emancipation of Jews. Many Catholics adapted to this new world. The subjects of this chapter did not. The conservative Catholics in this chapter were caught between trying to re-impose the place of the Jews in traditional Catholicism and attempting to adapt this to what was clearly a new world. The violence of their rhetoric, their full preparedness to believe that Jews would always nurture violent hatred against them, makes clear their sense of rootlessness, and their deep longing and nostalgia for a world lost; a world in which Jews were not their equal citizens. By the end of the century, this longing had become a war. Notes 1 See Gavin Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder,” in The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 2 Jonathan Frankel covered the Damascus blood libel thoroughly in his The Damascus Affair; “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See the discussion at 29. 3 Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 30 and 52. 4 Heinrich Graetz, “The Year 1840 and the Blood Accusation at Damascus,” in History of the Jews, Vol. 5 From the Chmielnicki Persecution of the Jews on Poland (1648 C.E.) to the Period of Emancipation in Central Europe (c. 1870 C.E.) (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1941). 5 See Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 55; Yaron Harel, “Le consul de France et l’affaire de Damas à la lumière de nouveaux documents,” Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique 113, no. 2 (1999). 6 Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou, Histoire générale de la presse française. Vol. 2: De 1815 à 1871 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 267. 7 Bellanger, et al, Histoire générale, 82. 8 L’Ami de la Religion (May 19, 1840). 9 Ibid. (August 25, 1840). 10 Ibid. (June 11, 1840). 11 Ibid. (September 1, 1840). 12 L’Univers (July 21, 1840). 13 La Quotidienne (May 7, 1840). 14 Ibid. (April 9, 1840). 15 Ibid. (May 11, 1840). 16 L’Ami de la Religion (June 11, 1840). 17 L’Univers (July 5, 1840); Ibid. (May 29, 1840). 18 La Quotidienne (March 28 and May 7, 1840); letter published in ibid. (June 6, 1840). 19 See Gavin Langmuir, History, Religion and Antisemitism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred  175 20 L’Univers (July 23, 1840). 21 Ibid. (July 5, 1840). 22 Cited in Paul Catrice, “L’Harmonie entre l’église et le judaïsme d’après la vie de Paul Drach,” (PhD diss., University of Lille, 1978), 219. 23 Letter from Ratti-Menton, L’Univers (July 6, 1840). Original emphasis. 24 Achille Laurent, Relation historique des affaires de Syrie depuis 1840 jusqu’en 1842: statistique générale du Mont-Liban et procédure complète dirigée en 1840 contre des juifs de Damas à la suite de la disparition du Père Thomas, 2 vols. (Paris: Gaume Frères, 1846), vol. 2, 366. Original emphasis. 25 L’Ami de la Religion (June 11, 1840). 26 On the Sephardic Jews of South-West France, see Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 2–6. 27 On the emancipation of the Jews, and Napoleon’s so-called Infamous Decree, see Ibid., chapters 2 and 3. 28 Paula Hyman, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1991). 29 Christine Piette, Les Juifs de Paris (1808–1840): La marche vers l’assimilation (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1983). 30 Lisa Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 31 L’Ami de la Religion (June 6, 1840). 32 La Quotidienne (June 6, 1840). 33 Ibid. (April 7, 1840). See also L’Univers (July 1, 1840). 34 La Quotidienne (June 12, 1840). 35 Ibid. (June 7, 1840). 36 L’Univers (July 1, 1840). 37 Reported in L’Ami de la Religion (June 6, 1840). 38 L’Univers (July 3, 1840). 39 Ibid. (October 8, 1840). Original emphasis. See also La Quotidienne (May 13, 1840). The Moniteur Universel, a newspaper founded in the Revolution, was, for a long time, the official journal of the French government. 40 L’Ami de la Religion (May 19, 1840). 41 M.P.-N. Hamont, L’Egypte sous Méhémet-Ali, 2 vols. (Paris: Léautey et Lecointe, 1843), vol. 2, 369. 42 L’Ami de la Religion (November 12, 1840). 43 Ibid. 44 La Quotidienne (June 7, 1840). On James de Rothschild, and stereotyping of Jews in nineteenth-century France, see Julie Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 5. 45 L’Univers (October 10, 1840). 46 Les Archives Israélites (March 1842), quoted in Maxmilien Charles Alphonse Cerfberr de Medelsheim, Ce que sont les Juifs de France (Strasbourg: Dérivaux et Drach, 1843), 111. 47 Helen Davies, Emile and Isaac Pereire: Bankers, Socialists and Sephardic Jews in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 206–207. 48 Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011). 49 Ibid., 1. 50 Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 110.

176  Julie Kalman 51 Cited in Ibid., 111. 52 Vicki Caron, “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale,” The Journal of Modern History 81, no. 2 (June 2009), 340. 53 Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 54 Claude Langlois, “De la violence religieuse,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 115.

Bibliography Bellanger, Claude, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou. Histoire générale de la presse française. Vol. 2: De 1815 à 1871. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969. Birnbaum, Pierre. The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011. Caron, Vicki. “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale.” The Journal of Modern History 81, no. 2 (June 2009): 294–346. Catrice, Paul. “L’Harmonie entre l’église et le judaïsme d’après la vie de Paul Drach.” PhD diss. University of Lille, 1978. Cerfberr de Medelsheim, Maximilien Charles Alphonse. Ce que sont les juifs de France. Strasbourg: Dérivaux and Drach, 1843. Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Davis, Helen. Emile and Isaac Pereire: Bankers, Socialists and Sephardic Jews in Nineteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Dundes, Alan, ed. The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Frankel, Jonathan. The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Graetz, Heinrich. “The Year 1840 and the Blood Accusation at Damascus.” In History of the Jews, Vol. 5 From the Chmielnicki Persecution of the Jews on Poland (1648 C.E.) to the Period of Emancipation in Central Europe (c. 1870 C.E.), 632– 666. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1941. Hamont, M.P.-N. L’Egypte sous Méhémet-Ali. 2 vols. Paris: Léautey et Lecointe, 1843. Harel, Yaron. “Le consul de France et l’affaire de Damas à la lumière de nouveaux documents.” Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique 113, no. 2 (1999): 143–170. Hyman, Paula. The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CO: Yale University Press, 1991. Hyman, Paula. The Jews of Modern France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Kalman, Julie. Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

From Violent Acts to Violent Hatred  177 Kselman, Thomas. “Turbulent Souls in Modern France: Jewish Conversion and the Terquem Affair.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32, no. 1 (2006): 83–104. Kselman, Thomas. Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France. New Haven, CO: Yale University Press, 2018. Langlois, Claude. “De la violence religieuse.” French Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 113–123. Langmuir, Gavin. History, Religion and Antisemitism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Langmuir, Gavin. “Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder.” In The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes, 3–40. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Laurent, Achille. Relation historique des affaires de Syrie depuis 1840 jusqu’en 1842: statistique générale du Mont-Liban et procédure complète dirigée en 1840 contre des juifs de Damas à la suite de la disparition du Père Thomas. 2 vols. Paris: Gaume Frères, 1846. Leff, Lisa. Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth Century France. Stanford, NJ: Stanford University Press, 2006. Piette, Christine. Les Juifs de Paris (1808–1840): La marche vers l’assimilation. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1983. Wilson, Stephen. Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.

8

The Trillick Railway Outrage The Politics of Atrocity in Post-Famine Ulster Sean Farrell

On September 15, 1854, a train carrying approximately 800 men and women derailed as it approached the station outside of Trillick, a small village in north-western Ireland. The crash occurred in the early evening, as the ‘monster train’ returned from a partisan celebration in the town of Derry. After the train smashed into a huge stone that lay on the tracks, two steam engines and a carriage slid down a 30-foot embankment. Two railway workers were killed: John Mitchell, a fireman crushed between the engines, and Michael Griffin, a stoker who died after having his leg amputated. Most contemporaries were certain that this was no accident. The Board of Trade’s incident report stated that the derailment had been caused by the deliberate placement of three large coping stones on this recently opened section of the Londonderry and Enniskillen Railway.1 Only the fact that the chain attaching the first and second carriages had snapped upon impact prevented further tragedy. The incident received widespread attention across the British and Irish press. Newspapers published articles on Trillick and its legal aftermaths for months, as readers grappled with the story’s lethal mix of nineteenth-century progress and seemingly outdated Catholic–Protestant antagonism. Most commentators immediately assumed that this was a sectarian crime; an attempt to assassinate William Willoughby Cole, the Third Earl of Enniskillen, one of the region’s most powerful landowners. Enniskillen was the head of the Loyal Orange Order and one of the controversial anti-Catholic organization’s most prominent public faces. The Earl had organized the excursion to Derry and was standing near the front of the train when it crashed. The collision threw the Orange leader from the train, but he escaped with minor injuries. The sectarian explanation gained momentum when seven railway workers were arrested and imprisoned. The accused were all Catholics: labor­ ers William Flanagan, Hugh and William Larkin, Francis McMahon, John Moran, and Rory Murphy, and a stonemason named William Lynch.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-12

The Trillick Railway Outrage  179 The men were part of a work gang positioned near the crash site to ensure the train passed by safely. They were picked up after they had been overheard threatening to wreck the train in a local tavern. Despite determined efforts to prove their guilt over the next nine months, government officials and a grand jury determined that the evidence against the men was circumstantial and that they could not be brought to trial. The men were released from jail in July 1855, an act that generated predictable cries of anger and elation. No one else was charged.2 Trillick largely disappeared from public view after the late 1850s, although memories of the Trillick Railway Outrage were carefully preserved in Cole family memoirs and Orange histories, occasionally resurfacing when late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century unionist leaders used the episode to mobilize opposition to Irish Home Rule.3 Ulster long has been associated with Catholic–Protestant violence; a global watchword for the enduring power of religious conflict. Similar assumptions guided many nineteenth-century commentators, who often used sectarian interpretations to explain a wide range of Irish phenomena. Sectarianism is defined here as attitudes, actions, beliefs, and structures that reflect, maintain, and strengthen a sense of oppositional difference between Catholics and Protestants. It was a potent force in nineteenth-century Irish life, reflecting a very real history of power relations rooted in English conquest and the consequent use of religious markers of identity to define political, economic, and cultural power on the island. Historicizing sectarianism requires close attention to time and place, as well as a heightened sensitivity to the ways that complex motivations and events often are reworked into reductionist narrative explanations.4 This was not simply a matter of myth; group violence in nineteenth-century Ulster often took on a communal hue. This was particularly true after the late 1820s, when Daniel O’Connell’s successful crusade for Catholic political rights challenged some of the remaining vestiges of the British confessional state. In ensuing decades, agrarian, electoral, and labor strife in the North of Ireland often was articulated in Catholic–Protestant terms, narratives strengthened by populist political and religious leaders operating in an increasingly competitive political environment. One of the primary challenges for the historian of sectarian violence in nineteenth-century Ireland, then, is to carefully reconstruct relationships between complex social conflicts and simplistic sectarian explanations. This chapter does this by examining the shifting registers of response to the Trillick Railway Outrage of 1854, highlighting the ways that Orangeism acted as an opponent against which a wide range of commentators defined themselves in a society marked by increasingly powerful sectarian lines of division. By attacking Orange extremists for their role in producing and

180  Sean Farrell politicizing atrocity, a variety of Irish participants positioned themselves as modern and rational civil subjects. This strategy was successful in the short term, helping to keep Orange and ultra-Protestant politics at the margins of British and Irish politics until the late 1860s. At the same time, the use of such sectarian interpretations of Ulster life had a significant cost, as British and Irish observers and policy-makers increasingly struggled to craft explanations that were not dominated by assumptions of Catholic–Protestant opposition, a trend that can be seen in Trillick and large-scale contemporary events such as the Belfast Riots of 1857. Historians typically have argued that communal explanations for Ulster’s political and religious divisions crystallized in the late nineteenth century. Trillick shows just how powerful the sectarian compass had become by the mid-1850s. Religion in Post-Famine Ulster The religious complexity of post-famine Ulster belied a binary portrait of Catholic–Protestant division. Part of this was a simple function of Protestant denominational diversity, where the Church of Ireland (20% of the Ulster population in 1861, the first time that religion was recorded in the Irish census), the Presbyterian Church (26%), and a host of other churches (2%) retained distinctive characteristics, histories, and identities.5 But neither Irish Protestantism nor Catholicism was static; significant institutional and theological developments also strengthened a growing sense of communal difference. Andrew Holmes has characterized the mid-nineteenth century as an era of revival and crisis for Protestantism in Ireland, with an increasingly evangelical population facing a series of challenges to their privileged minority position on the island.6 Their anxieties were reinforced by a newly assertive and confident Roman Catholic Church, led in Ireland by the Ultramontane Paul Cullen, who, after being appointed Archbishop of Armagh by Pope Pius IX in 1850, became Archbishop of Dublin in 1852, and Ireland’s first cardinal in 1866. In line with the rise of Ultramontanism elsewhere, Cullen transformed the Irish Church over the next generation, creating a more centralized and standardized institution with much greater power over its flock. While popular religious practice remained varied, there can no doubt that Cullen’s post-famine Church succeeded in making the majority of the Irish people, Roman Catholics.7 For many ultra-Protestants, Cullen came to personify the Catholic threat in Ireland in the 1850s. Many of nineteenth-century Ulster’s sectarian affrays were initiated by the public activities of the Orange Order, an organization founded in 1795 to defend Protestant interests in Ireland. While a majority of Northern

The Trillick Railway Outrage  181 Protestants only joined the Order after the Home Rule crises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the organization attracted a significant membership by the 1850s, particularly in areas of rural Ulster dominated by conservative Anglican landlords like the Earl of Enniskillen. Orange demonstrations, particularly the Order’s noisy processions on the Twelfth of July (which commemorated late seventeenth-century Protestant victories), regularly produced violent confrontations with Catholic crowds determined to block the insult of such partisan displays. Catholic participation in these clashes tended to be more reactive and less formal, organized by local leaders and shaped by regional power dynamics. These clashes often were tied to broader political and religious developments. On July 12, 1829, for example, Catholic and Protestant crowds battled outside of Enniskillen, a conflict shaped by local evangelical efforts to convert Catholics to Protestantism, the eviction of tenants, and Orangemen’s determination to show their opposition to the recent passage of Catholic Emancipation, legislation that allowed British and Irish Catholics to take their seats in parliament at Westminster. Despite the Earl of Enniskillen’s efforts to keep the peace, at least four Protestant men were killed in the so-called Battle of Macken. 19 Catholics were arrested. One man was executed and many of the rest transported to Botany Bay in Australia. Although sectarian clashes were rarely this dramatic, they fed the notion that Catholic–Protestant division was somehow natural to Irish society. This idea was reinforced by common patterns in the form and shape of sectarian conflict, which often masked the complex and local origins of these ritualized contests.8 The nineteenth-century British State had an ambivalent relationship with the Orange Order, one that shifted between embarrassment at its partisan demonstrations and gratitude for its loyalty to the British connection in times of political crisis. Whig governments regularly outlawed party processions and even forced the Order to dissolve itself in 1836. Like so many British efforts in nineteenth-century Ireland, however, the prohibition did not last. Orangeism made its return to Irish public life in 1846, a move its leaders justified as a necessary response to the threat of agrarian violence and the rising tide of nationalist agitation. While government officials clearly appreciated the Order’s support in 1848, its marches remained controversial outside the organization’s ranks. The problems created by Orange processions were illustrated by the tragedy at Dolly’s Brae on July 12, 1849, when an estimated 1,500 Orangemen clashed with roughly 1,000 Catholics who had gathered to block a march through a disputed area. After defeating their opponents, many of the better-armed Orange marchers continued their rampage, destroying homes, and leaving dozens of people dead. The British government responded by passing the Party Processions Act of 1850, which

182  Sean Farrell outlawed partisan processions designed to “provoke animosity between different classes of Her Majesty’s subjects”.9 No systematic effort was made to purge Orange leaders from government positions, however, and the State’s inconsistent efforts to curb partisan display generated resentments that are evident in the ways that commentators responded to the train derailment at Trillick. The Trillick Railway Outrage was not a particularly significant event. With the important exceptions of the victims, the accused, and their families, this is a story of a tragedy narrowly averted. Of interest is, however, how various Irish civic, political, and religious leaders used narratives of the event to define their rivals and advance their own agendas; what can be termed the politics of atrocity. And this was vital. Post-famine Ulster saw a dramatic increase in the use of sectarian rhetoric and often consequent outbreaks of violence. Ritualized confrontations between Orange demonstrators and Catholic opponents occurred annually in Belfast from the early 1850s, with major riots in 1857, 1864, 1872, and 1886. Scholars have pointed to a number of factors to explain the growth of this “tradition of sectarian violence”: the rise of organized nationalist politics and a more assertive Catholic Church, the growing strength of evangelical Protestantism, the dramatic growth of Belfast, and the rebirth of the Orange Order.10 These factors were shaped by broader changes in British and Irish society, as democratization, the growth of the State, and technological change created a more competitive and contentious political climate. The markers of Northern politics were by no means coterminous with religious affiliation. Support for both the conservative and liberal parties crossed denominational lines, and the political map of the 1850s was complicated further by the creation of an independent Irish Party, a loose grouping of Irish liberals who attempted (unsuccessfully) to organize a political bloc around agrarian reform and religious equality. At the same time, Ulster politics took on an increasingly sectarian tone in these years, as an influential minority of conservative Protestant leaders like the Earl of Enniskillen attempted to use potent narratives of the Catholic threat to counter liberal and nationalist politics across the island. The Trillick Railway Outrage illustrates just how difficult it was for a broad range of Victorian commentators to think outside a Catholic–Protestant box. Writing the Rails: Interpreting Trillick Newspaper editors started writing the rails soon after the engine hit the turf. A local paper immediately published a sensationalist report claiming that John Mitchell, one of the engineers killed in the crash, had foreseen his own death, saying goodbye to his wife and four children as he left for work that

The Trillick Railway Outrage  183 morning. The report then shifted from melodrama to hyperbole, arguing that “the Gunpowder Plot was nothing to this. There, much was at stake, but mere murder – heartless, cold-blooded diabolical murder – could only have been contemplated by the Ribbonmen of 1854”.11 Conservative newspapers replicated this template, which soon traveled through the expanding networks of the British and Irish press. Within a week, newspapers in at least 14 English and Scottish cities had reprinted the story. The Liverpool Mail described the incident as a “Railway St. Bartholomew”, categorizing Trillick as “a villainous attempt at wholesale murder”.12 Other historical comparisons included the killing of unarmed Irish Protestants at Portadown Bridge in 1641 and Scullabogue in 1798. In one particularly ambitious telling, Derry and Enniskillen even filled in for Marathon and Thermopylae. The rhetorical stakes were high.13 The idea that the Trillick Railway Outrage involved a broader Catholic conspiracy governed most Orange and ultra-Protestant coverage of the story. According to this narrative, the crime was the work of the Ribbonmen, shadowy Catholic secret societies blamed for a wide variety of agrarian and sectarian crimes in the 1840s and 1850s. Historians have begun to uncover the complex and hybrid nature of Ribbonism, showing how its lodges worked as both anti-Orange mutual defense societies and as protounions designed to protect the economic self-interest of local Catholic communities across Central and Northern Ireland.14 Many contemporaries held less nuanced views. For the Tyrone Constitution, the Ribbonmen were everywhere – the men “mere instruments in the hands of that dark and bloody organization in whose conclaves human life has often been sacrificed”.15 This was a story that clearly had constituencies outside of Ulster’s often claustrophobic religious politics. Orange extremists were not the only ones anxious about Catholic secret societies. In 1852, the British government created a Select Committee to investigate Ribbon activity in the South Ulster borderlands. Nearly every witness who testified emphasized the power that Ribbon networks held in the Irish countryside, alleging widespread jury intimidation, land agitation, and murder. Many linked the Ribbonmen to the work of the Irish Tenant League, an organization pushing for land reform that attracted significant support from tenant farmers across the island. Two experienced magistrates explicitly tied the spread of Catholic secret societies to the expansion of Irish railroads. As George Fitzmaurice put it, railway construction projects brought “bad people from other places” to work in previously peaceful areas.16 A number of figures in West Ulster made the same argument, underlining the destabilizing impact that the navvies who worked on the Londonderry and Enniskillen Railway had on local power relations. Those interested in advancing sectarian explanations of the derailment certainly had plenty of material. In July 1853, Catholic railway

184  Sean Farrell workers threatened to destroy a Protestant church in a village four miles from Trillick if church leaders failed to take down an Orange flag. A year earlier, a Church of Ireland rector claimed that only the threat of Orange retribution prevented Catholic railway workers from wreaking havoc in the Omagh area.17 While there was no tangible evidence that the men accused of derailing the train were part of a Ribbon conspiracy, investigators started from that premise. Newspapers were not the only vehicles for spreading the word. Orange champions like William Johnston of Ballykilbeg and Reverend Thomas Drew cited Trillick as irrefutable evidence of the Catholic threat, talking to their Orange brethren in lodge meetings and giving inflammatory speeches to large crowds of supporters at Protestant meetings in Belfast, Downpatrick, and Enniskillen. Drew was particularly unrestrained at a meeting in November 1854, arguing he had physical evidence of the Pope’s involvement in the Trillick conspiracy, a story he reinforced with a theatrical wave of parchment.18 But it was not simply “good Dr. Drew”, a notorious anti-Catholic rabble rouser. At a gathering in Enniskillen, Colonel Henry A. Cole, the County High Sheriff, and, incidentally, the Earl of Enniskillen’s brother, declared that the only comparable event to Trillick was the infamous Gunpowder Plot to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. Cole insisted, however, that his listeners should not worry, since “the same God that frustrated wicked designs in those days was present, and ready to do the same now”.19 When Edward Maguire, a local Catholic landowner and magistrate, took exception to the widespread use of heated anti-Catholic rhetoric, he was shouted down.20 For ultra-Protestants and Orange advocates, Trillick was a useful story, allowing them to update historically resonant sectarian narratives they believed redounded to their political benefit. This type of anti-Catholic charge had a wide resonance in conservative circles across Britain and Ireland in the early 1850s, driven by anger at efforts to restore the Catholic hierarchy in England, and the British government’s decision to provide increased funding to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth. As William Wood, the master of an Orange lodge in Montreal, Canada, wrote in a letter sent to the Earl of Enniskillen as he recovered from his injuries, only an omnipotent God could have preserved the lives of the Earl and his “Brother Protestants” from the “bigoted fury of Popish malice”.21 Like many of Enniskillen’s correspondents, Wood believed that the British government had to return to Protestant principles if it was to revive the fortunes of a sinful nation. While such opinions clearly represented a minority view within the broad contours of Victorian public opinion, the ultra-Protestants were a noisy and influential minority, quite capable of stirring up trouble, particularly in the divided North of Ireland.

The Trillick Railway Outrage  185 The Trillick Railway Outrage elicited a more complex response from Irish Catholics, liberals, and even moderate conservatives, who were typically less than thrilled with the Orange Order’s often disruptive behavior. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, such commentators signaled their outrage in similar terms to those of their political opponents. The Belfast reformer James Simms labeled Trillick the most serious attempt to destroy Protestant life in 250 years, adding that, in the modern world, there was nothing more horrific than an attack on a holiday train filled with men, women, and children.22 At the same time, Simms and many of his like-minded colleagues were determined to counter the Orange narrative of general Catholic barbarity, making it clear they believed there was a distinction between Irish Catholics writ large and the railway workers who had been accused of the crime. Within days, however, this hesitant effort to be “fair and balanced” had all but disappeared, as writers increasingly placed Trillick within longer narratives of Orange provocation. This shift was accelerated by the entry of wellknown anti-Catholic demagogues into the fray, whose attempts to politicize the tragedy created openings for Catholic and liberal commentators to change the subject from religious atrocity to the partisan extremism that had provoked it. As Simms put it, Trillick was a “sadly disgraceful” episode for all of Ulster, a spectacle produced by a “crack-brained lord and his fanatical followers” that culminated in what was most likely a tragic railway accident. He compared Trillick to the “great affair at Dolly’s Brae” in 1849, which, Simms noted, had begun as a partisan demonstration on another irresponsible Orange aristocrat’s land.23 The Nation, the most prominent nationalist newspaper in Ireland, focused on the ways that Protestant demagogues in Dublin were using the story to divide the Irish people.24 Less strident voices soon joined the dispute. By the time the men were released in July 1855, a new consensus had developed that focused on the ways that Orange fanatics, “excited by strong drink and stronger words”, had transformed a railway accident into a Popish plot.25 Changing the Conversation: The Politics of Atrocity Atrocity narratives reached larger audiences in the 1850s because of the advent of new technologies that reduced the space of the Irish polity, changes that sharpened sectarian and other types of social conflict. One of the most important of these was the newspaper industry. This was a period of dramatic growth for Irish newspapers, a trajectory shaped by the British government’s abolition of the knowledge taxes: on advertisements in 1853; on newspaper stamps in 1855; and on paper in 1861. The growth of the Dublin press in these years was remarkable. The number of stamps issued for metropolitan weekly newspapers tripled between 1851 and 1854, a trend driven

186  Sean Farrell by the Weekly Telegraph, a comparatively cheap newspaper created to advocate for Catholic interests. Nor was this development confined to Dublin. By Marie-Louise Legg’s calculation, the number of Irish newspapers published outside the capital more than doubled between 1850 and 1861.26 The provincial newspaper market was particularly lively in the North of Ireland, which saw the creation of two Belfast-based papers that actively reported on Trillick and its legal aftermaths: the aforementioned James Simms’ Belfast Daily Mercury (1851), and the ex-Young Ireland revolutionary Dennis Holland’s radical nationalist paper, The Ulsterman (1852). To reiterate the broader point: a dynamic and increasingly competitive Irish newspaper industry was one of the key factors in the quickening tempo of communal division in the 1850s. For although newspapers did not invent sectarian narratives, they did allow for their wider circulation in contentious packaging. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the discussion that followed the Trillick Railway Outrage. The railroad itself also played a critical role in efforts to mobilize sectarian politics. Trains allowed activists to bring otherwise isolated supporters to central locations for more effective displays of partisan strength. This could be used to transform politics in a society that was still overwhelmingly rural. North-western Ireland is a case in point. The Londonderry and Enniskillen Railway was built in the early 1850s to help farmers bring agricultural produce to markets and better connect the region to existing transportation networks. While the company struggled to turn a profit, the railway had a clear political impact. Regional conservative elites used the Londonderry and Enniskillen line and other railways to increase their presence in Derry, turning local celebrations into partisan contests. The Trillick Railway Outrage was produced by one of the first efforts to use trains to mobilize and display conservative support. The Earl of Enniskillen hired the excursion train to bring his supporters to Derry for an explicitly Protestant celebration in a historic town that long had been a liberal stronghold. Moving forward, the Orange Order’s use of the railroad to facilitate expressions of partisan power would become an integral part of Ulster political culture. When William Johnston organized a massive demonstration to initiate his campaign against the Party Processions Act in July 1867, thousands of Orange supporters came to the event by train.27 The partisan mixture of private and public was one of the central problems raised in the reporting on Trillick. Critics immediately pointed out that the Earl of Enniskillen had been allowed to turn the Londonderry and Enniskillen Railway into a vehicle for reactionary politics. Catholic and liberal organizations accused the company of partisan bias, arguing that they had not been allowed to hire an excursion train.28 Newspaper reports of the Derry festivities only reinforced the overlap between the Orange Order and the civic establishment. Many of the stories featured reports of

The Trillick Railway Outrage  187 speeches made by the Earl of Enniskillen and other leaders at a banquet in Corporation Hall, addresses that were replete with familiar anti-Catholic codes. The day’s central public event was a procession complete with testimonials given by the Mayor, the Earl of Enniskillen, the Protestant Dean of Derry, several magistrates, and Church of Ireland ministers in the shadow of Derry’s Walls and Walker’s Pillar, public monuments to a heroic narrative of late seventeenth-century Irish Protestant history venerated by Orange and conservative interests.29 The entire day was a vivid illustration of the ways in which the Orange Order remained interwoven with British governance in the North of Ireland. As one Belfast editor wryly noted, was it any wonder that Irish men and women had so little faith in the impartiality of magistrates?30 From the outset sectarian interpretations crowded out alternative explanations for the Trillick Railway Outrage. Few stories referenced the real danger of railroad travel, an already prevalent theme of Victorian public discourse.31 The Times (London) was the only newspaper to put Trillick in dialogue with an accident at Straffan, Co. Kildare in October 1853, when a freight train crashed into a stalled passenger train, killing 16 people – the deadliest railroad crash in Ireland up to that point.32 This silence seems particularly ironic given the Londonderry and Enniskillen Railway’s later reputation as the “least efficient and most dangerous railway in Ireland.”33 In the Trillick case, however, the majority of commentators were committed to the firmly human origins of this outrage – whether the real perpetrators were Catholic conspirators and/or Orange blowhards. Anxieties about the technology, power, and violence involved in railroad travel appeared in at least two aspects of the reporting on Trillick. UltraProtestant writers used the sheer scale and violence of the derailment to strengthen the event’s links to potent mythic narratives of the Irish past and present. Figures like Reverend Thomas Drew celebrated the manly heroism of the Earl of Enniskillen, the suffering of ‘poor Mitchell’, and the barbarous perfidy of the men who tried to kill so many innocent men and women. As one like-minded eyewitness wrote to the Daily Express: The shrieks of 800 human beings, who knew not the moment they would be hurled toward eternity, the rush from the carriages, the flight from the danger of bursting boilers, the scramble over the rocks and precipes along the line in the dark of night, four miles distant from any town, […] this barbarous locality […] I blush for my country.34 This type of emotional language was certainly nothing new for Irish ultraProtestants and conservatives, who had no shortage of windmills to tilt at in the early 1850s. But Trillick’s dramatic tale of attempted assassination by train upped the rhetorical stakes; the sheer horror of this train wrecking in

188  Sean Farrell West Tyrone made it the perfect episode for Orange conservatives trying to mobilize supporters in Belfast, Derry, and across the province. Other writers highlighted the juxtaposition of new technologies and their association with progress against the reactionary irrationality of party division to critique both the barbarity of the assailants and Orange provocation. Liberal newspapers focused much of their fire on the Earl of Enniskillen and his supporters, critiquing their efforts to use the newly opened railroad for outdated partisan purposes. James Simms was characteristically curt, placing the blame for the outrage firmly on the leaders, who, “indulging in facetious performances, provide, and willfully provoke, the barbarism of the ignorant”.35 Writing from a different vantage point, The Times took a similar tack, writing that “[w]e fully admit that this demonstration of the Enniskilleners and of the Apprentice Boys of Derry was an arrant act of tomfoolery, totally out of character with modern ideas […]” before saying that this hardly justified the train wrecking attempt.36 For their part, ultra-Protestant newspapers consistently used Trillick’s juxtaposition of the old and the new to emphasize the backwardness of the Irish Catholic rural population. The ultra-Protestant trope that Trillick reflected a more general Irish Catholic barbarity was one of the frameworks that shaped both Catholic and liberal responses to the derailment. Writing in The Ulsterman, Dennis Holland mocked those who called the accident a Popish conspiracy, arguing that no good Catholic could do such a thing and calling on local Catholics to aid with the criminal inquiry despite their aversion to “blind and rancorous Orangemen.”37 The more moderate Dublin Evening Post supported Holland’s arguments, critiquing “vile attempts to cast imputation on Roman Catholics and highlighting local efforts to discover exactly what had happened”.38 At a late October meeting of the Dublin Liberal Registry Association, John O’Connell, the late Daniel O’Connell’s son, acknowledged the “abominable Trillic [sic]”, but wondered why anyone would charge all Irish Catholics with such a crime?39 The charge of Catholic savagery generated a vigorous response from middle-class Irish Catholics, determined to be seen as respectable. Many detailed the efforts of Reverend Manasses O’Kane, a parish priest in Omagh, who organized a reward of ₤100 for information leading to the capture of the individuals responsible for the accident. The fund’s subscription list was dominated by the town’s Catholic middle class – lawyers, merchants, priests, and shopkeepers. The text of the Omagh petition illustrates the ways that critics used Orange extremism to change the subject of public conversation. This was particularly important for the Catholic clergy. As Oliver Rafferty has made clear, violence was a difficult subject for the Church in Ireland, which needed to balance the desire to defend its members with both its general support for the state and social order and its own ethical teachings. Orange attacks on the civility of Irish Catholics as a whole made it much easier

The Trillick Railway Outrage  189 for a figure like Father O’Kane to enter the fray.40 The reward’s placard opened by condemning “an intolerant and unprincipled section of the public press” for forcing Catholics to act as a “separate class of religionists” in denouncing an attempt to kill 800 people. The petition further repudiated the “uncharitable and libelous imputation” hurled at Irish Catholics and looked forward to the “impartial, dispassionate trial” of the alleged conspirators by “the constituted tribunes of the land”. O’Kane closed by critiquing recent Orange demonstrations that had featured party banners and gunfire, gatherings that were designed to “insult our coreligionists, excite party feeling, and perpetuate animosity and ill will between Catholics and Protestants”.41 It was a bravura performance, well calculated to appeal to both Catholic Ireland and the British political establishment. It certainly generated a response. The Weekly Telegraph hoped that the Omagh appeal would be read across Europe to contradict the attacks leveled at Irish Catholics as a body for the alleged crimes of a few. The Catholics of Omagh, it made clear, had responded in a way that afforded them the “highest honour, as Irishmen, and as Catholics”.42 In Belfast, Dennis Holland concurred, drawing a stark contrast between O’Kane’s manly and straightforward efforts and Orangeism’s anti-Popish howl. He lamented the fact that Ulster Catholics were denied the chance to express their feelings calmly in public, calling on community leaders in regional centers like Derry and Strabane to follow the Omagh Catholics’ honorable example. The appeal allowed Irish Catholics from across the political spectrum to position themselves as modern subjects against Orange partisans who were determined to keep Ireland in the past.43 If Irish Catholics rushed to defend the honor and integrity of their coreligionists, a wide array of commentators also placed the blame firmly on the partisan behavior of the Orange Order. Newspaper stories were framed with historically resonant narratives about Orangeism’s irresponsible leaders, provocative public violence, and negative impact on the judicial system. Where Irish conservative stories lionized the Earl of Enniskillen as a hero and natural leader in an Orange melodrama, the Belfast Daily Mercury argued that the Earl and his allies were the prime movers of this tragedy, men of rank “in an era of state moderation, moved to make a public work one of faction […]”, an irresponsible act that stimulated “[…] the resentment of barbarous opponents and dabbled Protestant liberty and Protestant principle in the Orange mud of Derry or Enniskillen”.44 In repeated editorials, The Ulsterman highlighted the partisan irresponsibility of Orange leaders, calling the Earl “crack-brained” and “foolish” and critiquing the ways that bigoted newspapers had used Trillick “to stimulate fanaticism and party hatred”.45 The editor of The Nation, the nationalist leader Charles Gavan Duffy, focused on the irresponsibility of Protestant extremists who did no more than stir up sectarian enmities.46

190  Sean Farrell These reports went beyond a thick description of the day’s events, placing Trillick in longer narratives of Orange provocation and anti-Catholic violence. Commentators put the incident in direct dialogue with recent riots in Newtownlimavady, a market town seventeen miles east of Derry. Problems started there in early September, when an Orange crowd attacked Catholics leaving a Redemptorist mission service, leaving several people wounded and reportedly breaking windows in every Catholic house in the town. The Evening Telegraph compared the violence to that of the Know Nothings in America, highlighting a conservative evangelical minister’s recent lecture celebrating the virtues of that anti-Catholic party.47 Over the next few months, The Ulsterman repeatedly contrasted the State’s failure to arrest a single Newtownlimavady rioter with the almost immediate arrest of seven Irish Catholic railway workers on circumstantial evidence. Holland grew increasingly frustrated by the men’s continued imprisonment in Omagh jail as investigators – public and private – failed to find significant evidence of a conspiracy. The Freeman’s Journal took much the same tack, emphasizing the encouragement given to Orange rioters by the State’s failure to prosecute.48 The treatment of the accused men also underscored the ways that the Orange Order perverted the judicial process in Ireland. From the outset, editors focused their attention on partisan infiltration of the legal system. In a September 29 report, the Freeman’s Journal noted that the coroner’s inquest had been held behind closed doors and that Orange sympathizers and conservatives had been allowed to “lend their assistance”. After railing against the privacy of the proceedings for two months, Dennis Holland delighted in the surreptitious publication of the inquest proceedings in mid-November, highlighting the fact that most of the evidence presented would have fallen apart under cross examination.49 Ironically, an increasing number of government officials agreed with Holland’s assessment of the case. By late November 1854, a resident magistrate in Omagh was so frustrated by the failure of the investigating policeman that he ordered him to go back to his station if he could not do any better. After reviewing the case, the Attorney General agreed, arguing that although he believed at least four or five of the men were guilty, there was insufficient evidence to risk a trial.50 Despite efforts to gather more information, this never changed. By March 1855, it was increasingly clear there was insufficient evidence to try the imprisoned men. At the Spring Assizes, state prosecutors successfully argued that the case should be delayed until the next session, a decision that left seven men in jail for an additional four months. When the case finally came up for trial in July, it seemed as if everything was set for a dramatic showdown. The Attorney General for the new Whig government, William Keogh, the first Irish Catholic to hold the position, traveled north from Dublin for

The Trillick Railway Outrage  191 the proceedings. Newspaper accounts highlighted local excitement about the trial, and police were positioned to control the expected crowds in Omagh. The stage was set, but it was not to be. The jury foreman reported that the all-Protestant Grand Jury had found no bill for either murder; there would be no trial. The Attorney General declared that with no bill, he had no choice but to release the prisoners. The acquitted railway workers left the courthouse to the cheers of the local crowd, leaving the region, and the historical record shortly thereafter. The ultra-Protestant press that had done so much to publicize Trillick largely was silent about the decision. Most provided a routine transcript of the proceedings, but few published detailed commentaries. Looking to explain the decision, the Tyrone Constitution argued that while there was plenty of circumstantial evidence, the Grand Jury must have found that the absence of new evidence and/or new witnesses made it impossible to go to trial. A few Orange leaders tried to keep Trillick in public view. Writing in the Downshire Protestant, William Johnston argued that Catholic trickery had allowed the plotters to evade punishment. Speaking at a special sermon to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot in November 1856, Thomas Drew used Trillick as a prime example of global efforts to frustrate the advance of Protestant truth.51 For the most part, however, Orange leaders and their allies dropped the subject, moving on to other proofs of supposed Catholic perfidy. While Trillick remained a story to excite the faithful, its close association with sectarian violence only damaged Orange efforts to portray the organization as loyal and respectable. Other voices were not so silent. The Freeman’s Journal reveled in the decision, sure that every “Protestant gentleman” in this “Christian country” would rejoice in the fact that “super-exalted Protestant” tales of Catholic conspiracy had been proven false. The editorial closed by hoping that Orange leaders remembered the failure of their “efforts to conjure up such Popish atrocities as the great Trillick Massacre”.52 Writing in the Ulsterman, Dennis Holland raged against Orangeism’s continuing influence, arguing that the acquittal highlighted the fundamental injustice of the Trillick case. These were men, he intoned, who had been imprisoned for months on false suspicion – humble men, with families who depended on them. In an attempt to come up with an alternative explanation, Holland argued that this was an accident produced by the company’s “cruelly dangerous experiment”, a huge monster train too large to manage a sharp curve over badly-made earthworks. The Derry Journal took it one step further, claiming the railway company had placed the coping stones on the rails to cover its tracks.53 There is no evidence to support either of these stories, although the railway’s reputation lends credence to the possibility that this might have been a tragic accident.

192  Sean Farrell Conclusion The broadly shared anti-Orangeism highlighted in this chapter masks significant variations in reporting about Trillick. Dennis Holland’s strident anti-landlord rhetoric and humane concern for the poverty of the accused were not replicated in the more socially conservative Dublin weeklies. It is worth noting that both The Nation, a nationalist newspaper committed to non-sectarian politics, and the Northern liberal papers, provided either barebones coverage or dropped the story after an initial flurry of reports attacking Orangeism, its aristocratic leaders, and furious press. Neither the Belfast Mercury nor the Northern Whig paid much attention to the Summer Assizes – the release of the accused men to the cheers of the Omagh Catholic community. This silence reflected the uneasy nature of the alliance at the heart of Ulster liberal politics; the fact that a party traditionally led by Northern merchants, Presbyterian ministers, and strong farmers was now reliant on an increasingly politicized Irish Catholic electorate. This tension only sharpened in ensuing decades.54 But for all their differences, it is the shared language of antipathy that is striking; all of these opinion makers focused their attacks on the evils of Orange extremism. Northern liberals and Irish Catholics of various stripes may have positioned themselves differently against their opponents, but the histrionic ultra-Protestant narrative of Trillick allowed both to draw stark contrasts between the rational and the irrational; the progressive and the reactionary; the faithful and the fanatic. Similar dynamics emerged around other episodes of sectarian conflict in the 1850s: controversies surrounding the confrontational open-air preaching of evangelical Protestant ministers, or the unprecedented scale of communal rioting in Belfast in the summer of 1857. In each case, Irish liberals and nationalists situated themselves against partisan excess. As in Trillick, these efforts were successful in the short term; government officials castigated the irresponsible behavior and partisan attitudes of both Northern evangelical street preachers and the Orange Order. This strategy, however, may have also had unintended consequences. This chapter has illustrated the ways that sectarian assumptions and rhetoric dominated the ways that Victorian commentators interpreted the Trillick Railway Outrage of 1854, marginalizing alternative readings of the incident. It is clear that the politics of atrocity strengthened already potent beliefs about Catholic–Protestant conflict in Ulster, interpretations that would be replicated in debates about the increasingly frequent and deadly riots that rocked Victorian Belfast and the horrifying violence of the Indian Uprising of 1857. We may never know exactly what happened at Trillick, but the stories told about the railway accident and its aftermaths underscore the power and appeal of the oppositional binaries that proved to be such powerful markers in late Victorian Ireland.

The Trillick Railway Outrage  193 The Trillick Railway Outrage also highlights the hybridity of nineteenthcentury sectarian conflict. Religion was an essential part of this mix. On the one hand, this seems patently obvious, since religion was a primary marker for Northern communities that had long “lived together and apart”.55 But it was more than a matter of externalities. When Orange and ultra-Protestant leaders used the press and pulpit to mobilize supporters, they did so in historical and religious terms, featuring resonant narratives of Irish Catholic violence as well as the political and spiritual threat posed by the Catholic Church. Orange entry into the fray allowed Catholic leaders to fight back. They did so effectively, wielding stories of Orange extremism and defending both the honor and legitimacy of Roman Catholicism in the pages of popular Dublin weekly newspapers. When the accused men were released from jail in the summer of 1855, it was this Catholic narrative that dominated. Not surprisingly, this story dovetailed perfectly with two of the most powerful forces in post-famine Irish life: efforts to restore the Catholic Church to its rightful place in Irish society and the desire of an emergent Catholic middle class to be viewed as respectable. Lost in these discussions were the participants themselves; both the supposed perpetrators and victims. The accused men quickly left the area, and some were rumored to have left for America. Mary Mitchell, the young widow of the fireman killed at Trillick, briefly became something of an ultraProtestant celebrity. Funds were raised for her family, but the money soon ran out, and Mary Mitchell was forced to give two of her children to the Protestant Orphan Society in the fall of 1855. While both of the children were successfully placed in apprenticeships, the story underlines Trillick’s ephemeral appeal.56 These were lives that were too complex to fit the reductionist terms of sectarian explanations, and they soon disappeared from a post-famine Irish landscape increasingly disturbed by the clamor of communal strife. Historians would do well to pay closer attention to the ways that dominant narratives of events like Trillick buried the stories of people like the workers accused of derailing the train, or Mary Mitchell and her children. Their absence from the historical record underlines both the power of sectarian explanations and the myriad ways those narratives have left us with an impoverished understanding of Ulster life. Notes 1 Douglas Galton, “Report on the Enniskillen and Londonderry Railway,” Board of Trade, October 10, 1854, 14–16. 2 This narrative is based on the following accounts: Belfast Daily Mercury (September 18 and 20, 1854); Dublin Evening Mail (September 18 and 20, 1854); Northern Whig (September 19, 1854); Galton, “Report,” 14–16. For the one scholarly examination of Trillick, see Desmond Fitzgerald, “The Trillick Derailment 1854,” The Clogher Record 15, no. 1 (1994).

194  Sean Farrell 3 Reverend Abraham Dawson, Annals of Christ Church (unpublished manuscript, 1858); Nancy, Countess of Enniskillen, Florence Court: My Irish Home (Monaghan: Water Gate Press, 1972), 26–27. 4 Joseph Liechty and Cecelia Cregg, Moving Beyond Sectarianism: Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Columba Press, 2001), 102– 103; Matthew Lewis, “Sectarianism and Irish Republican Violence on the South-East Ulster Frontier, 1919–22,” Contemporary European History 26, no. 1 (2017): 1–5; T.K. Wilson, Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918–22 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–20. 5 51% of the Ulster population was Roman Catholic. See Kerby A. Miller, Liam Kennedy, and Brian Gurrin, “The Great Famine and Religious Demography in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ulster,” in Atlas of the Great Famine, eds. John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 449. 6 Andrew R. Holmes, “Protestantism in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume III, 1730–1880, ed. James Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 331. 7 Colin Barr, “The Re-Energising of Catholicism, 1790–1880,” in The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume III, 1730–1880, ed. James Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 304. 8 Sean Farrell, Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Modern Ulster, 1784–1886 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 97–98; Richard McMahon, Homicide in Pre-Famine Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 126–157. 9 Bill to Restrain Party Processions in Ireland, HC 1850 (519), V. For Dolly’s Brae, see Sean Farrell, “Writing an Orange Dolly’s Brae,” in Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence, History, and Art in Ireland, eds. Danine Farquharson and Sean Farrell (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007). 10 Mark Doyle, Fighting like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics, and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Catherine Hirst, Religion, Politics and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belfast: The Pound and Sandy Row (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002). 11 Londonderry Sentinel (September 23, 1854). 12 Liverpool Mail (September 23, 1854). 13 Details Connected with the Trillick Tragedy of 15th September 1854, and Comments of the English and Irish Press Therein (Derry: Sentinel Office, 1854). 14 Kyle Hughes and Donald MacRaild, “Introduction,” in Crime, Violence, and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Kyle Hughes and Donald MacRaild (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017); Breandán Mac Suibhne, The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17–18, 53–77, and 153–237; Niall Whelehan, “Labour and Agrarian Violence in the Irish Midlands, 1850–70,” Saothar 37 (2012). 15 Tyrone Constitution (September 22, 1854). 16 Evidence of George Fitzmaurice, Report of the Select Committee of Outrages (Ireland), HC 1852, (438), iii, 69–70; Evidence of Bartholomew Warburton, ibid., 23. 17 Dublin Evening Mail (September 22, 1854); Morning Chronicle (September 20, 1854); Reverend E. Moore to William Kirkpatrick, July 31, 1852 (Kirkpatrick Papers, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland [hereafter PRONI], D.1604/9).

The Trillick Railway Outrage  195 18 Diaries of William Johnston, November 10, 1854 (Johnston Papers, PRONI, D.880/2/6). Drew read a letter from the Earl of Enniskillen about Trillick at a local lodge meeting in Belfast. See the minutes of the Eldon Orange Lodge, November 13, 1854 (Museum of Orange Heritage, Belfast). 19 Belfast News Letter (October 6, 1854). 20 For similar reactions, see Belfast News Letter (September 18, 1854); Liverpool Mail (September 23, 1854); Details Connected with the Trillick Tragedy. 21 William Wood to the Early of Enniskillen, October 20, 1854 (Enniskillen Papers, PRONI, D/12/24). 22 Belfast Daily Mercury (September 18 and 20, 1854). 23 Ibid. 24 The Nation (September 23, 1854). 25 The Ulsterman (September 20, 1854); Freeman’s Journal (July 21, 1855); The Nation (September 23 and October 11, 1854). 26 Ann Andrews, Newspapers and Newsmakers: The Dublin Nationalist Press in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 166–170; Marie-Louise Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850–1892 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 30. 27 Sean Farrell, “Recapturing the Flag: The Campaign to Repeal the Party Processions Act, 1860–72,” Eire-Ireland XXXII (Summer/Fall 1997), 52–53. 28 Belfast Daily Mercury (September 20, 1854); Catholic Telegraph (September 16, 1854). Company records to show that the Board of Directors was struggling to decide how to handle excursion trains: Londonderry and Enniskillen Company Minute Book, August–Sept. 1854 (PRONI, UTA/13/A/1/721, 728–730). 29 For a crisp discussion of the complex evolution of the historical memory of the Siege of Derry among various communities of Ulster Protestants, see Ian McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997). 30 The Ulsterman (September 16, 1854). For coverage of the Derry Protestant celebration, see Belfast News Letter (September 18, 1854); Northern Whig (September 19, 1854); and Londonderry Sentinel (September 22, 1854). 31 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014 [1979]), 129–133; Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 51–99. 32 Quoted in Dublin Evening Mail (September 22, 1854). 33 P.J. Geraghty, “The Londonderry and Enniskillen Railway (1845–62): The Least Efficient and Most Dangerous Railway in Ireland,” Clogher Record 20, no. 1 (2009), 62–64. 34 Quoted in Belfast News Letter (September 20, 1854). 35 Belfast Daily Mercury (September 20, 1854). 36 Quoted in Dublin Evening Mail (September 22, 1854). 37 The Ulsterman (September 20, 1854). 38 Dublin Evening Post (September 23, 1854). 39 The Ulsterman (October 25, 1854). 40 Oliver P. Rafferty, Violence, Politics, and Catholicism (Dublin: Four Courts Press), 11–40. 41 Reward Placard and Subscription List, Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers [hereafter CSORP], 1854 (National Archives of Ireland [hereafter NAI]). 42 Weekly Telegraph (October 7, 1854).

196  Sean Farrell 43 44 45 46 47 48

The Ulsterman (October 25, 1854). Belfast Daily Mercury (September 20 and 21, 1854). The Ulsterman (September 20 and 23, 1854). The Nation (September 23, 1854). Evening Telegraph (September 9, 1854). The Ulsterman (September 16, 20, 23 and 30, October 7 and 25, 1854, March 14 and July 23, 1855); Freeman’s Journal (September 29, 1854). 49 Freeman’s Journal (September 29, 1854); The Ulsterman (November 18, 1854). 50 R.D. Coulson and Abraham Brewster’s reviews of Carolan’s Report on Trillick Railway Outrage, 30 November, and 2 December 1854 (NAI, CSORP, 1854 – 21197, 21114). 51 Tyrone Constitution (July 20, 1855); Downshire Protestant (August 17, 1855); Belfast News Letter (November 6, 1856). 52 Freeman’s Journal (July 23, 1855). 53 The Ulsterman (July 23, 1855); Derry Journal (July 25, 1855). 54 Gerald Hall, Ulster Liberalism, 1776–1876: The Middle Path (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011); Walker, Ulster Politics. 55 Alan Ford, “Living Together, Living Apart: Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland,” in The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, eds. Alan Ford and John McCafferty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 56 Protestant Orphan Society Papers (NAI, 1045/5/1/4/1176–80).

Bibliography Andrews, Ann. Newspapers and Newsmakers: The Dublin Nationalist Press in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Pres, 2014. Barr, Colin. “The Re-Energising of Catholicism, 1790–1880.” In The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume III, 1730–1880, edited by James Kelly, 280–304. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Budge, Ian, and Cornelius O’Leary. Belfast: Approach to Crisis, 1613–1970. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973. Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Countess of Enniskillen, Nancy. Florence Court: My Irish Home. Monaghan: Water Gate Press, 1972. Dawson, Abraham. Annals of Christ Church. Unpublished manuscript, 1858. (The author was able to consult the original manuscript thanks to the late Reverend S. Niall Baily, the final rector of Christ Church in Belfast. A typescript copy can be found at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast [PRONI, T.2159/1]). Details Connected with the Trillick Tragedy of 15th September 1854, and Comments of the English and Irish Press Thereon. Derry: Sentinel Office, 1854. Doyle, Mark. Fighting like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Farrell, Sean. “Recapturing the Flag: The Campaign to Repeal the Party Processions Act, 1860–72.” Eire-Ireland XXXII (Summer/Fall 1997): 52–78. Farrell, Sean. Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784–1886. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

The Trillick Railway Outrage  197 Farrell, Sean. “Writing an Orange Dolly’s Brae.” In Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence, History, and Art in Ireland, edited by Danine Farquharson and Sean Farrell, 90–106. Cork: Cork University Press, 2007. Fitzgerald, Desmond. “The Trillick Derailment 1854.” The Clogher Record 15, no. 1 (1994): 31–47. Ford, Alan. “Living Together, Living Apart: Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland.” In The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, edited by Alan Ford and John McCafferty, 1–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Galton, Douglas. “Report on the Enniskillen and Londonderry Railway.” Board of Trade 10 October (1854): 14–16. Geraghty, P.J. “The Londonderry and Enniskillen Railway (1845–62): The Least Efficient and Most Dangerous Railway in Ireland.” Clogher Record 20, no. 1 (2009): 62–64. Hall, Gerald. Ulster Liberalism, 1776–1876: The Middle Path. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011. Hirst, Catherine. Religion, Politics and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belfast: The Pound and Sandy Row. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002. Holmes, Andrew R. “Protestantism in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume III, 1730–1880, edited by James Kelly, 331–349. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hughes, Kyle, and Donald MacRaild. “Introduction.” In Crime, Violence, and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Kyle Hughes and Donald MacRaild, 9–13. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Legg, Marie-Louise. Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850– 1892. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999. Lewis, Matthew. “Sectarianism and Irish Republican Violence on the South-East Ulster Frontier, 1919–22.” Contemporary European History 26, no. 1 (2017): 1–21. Liechty, Joseph, and Cecelia Clegg. Moving Beyond Sectarianism: Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Dublin: Columba Press, 2001. Mac Suibhne, Breandán. The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. McBride, Ian. The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. McMahon, Richard. Homicide in Pre-Famine and Famine Ireland. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Miller, Kerby A., Liam Kennedy, and Brian Gurrin. “The Great Famine and Religious Demography in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ulster.” In Atlas of the Great Famine, edited by John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy, 426–434. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Morris, R.J. “Reading the Riot Commission: Belfast, 1857.” Irish Historical Studies 43, no. 164 (2019): 194–219. Rafferty, Oliver P. Violence, Politics, and Catholicism in Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2016. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014 [1979].

198  Sean Farrell Walker, Brian M. Ulster Politics: The Formative Years, 1868–86. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1989. Whelehan, Niall. “Labour and Agrarian Violence in the Irish Midlands, 1850–70.” Saothar 37 (2012): 7–17. Wilson, T.K. Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Wolffe, John. The Protestant Crusade in Britain, 1829–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

9

Catholicism and Violence in Korea Two Case Studies from the Chosŏn Dynasty Franklin Rausch

In 1801, Catholics in Korea faced a severe state-sponsored persecution that took the lives of most of their Church’s leadership. One of the few men to survive the initial attacks responded by writing a letter asking Pope Pius VII to send an armada to frighten the Korean government into tolerating Catholicism. A century later, Catholics enjoyed de facto tolerance, but for a complex host of reasons, violent conflict broke out between Catholic and non-Catholic Koreans on Cheju Island. Catholics lost the battle, after which several hundred were massacred. Focusing on these two case studies, this chapter will explore the violence that Catholics suffered, justified, contemplated, and utilized in both instances. It will illustrate the complexity of violence related to Catholicism, revealing how multiple actors could share the same religious label while behaving in very different ways. In particular, the chapter will argue that key to the differences in violence in these two incidents were changes in the power of the State and the hegemonic position of Confucian orthodoxy that its legitimacy rested upon. Korean historiography has paid some attention to both incidents, though rarely in a comparative way. Catholic scholarship tends to focus on the time of the state-sponsored persecutions, lasting from roughly 1784 to the late 1870s, often celebrating its victims as pious martyrs. While Catholic actors are the focus, some attention is paid to the causes of persecution, whereby the latter is often presented as the result of a cultural clash in terms of Catholics challenging traditional hierarchies with their emphasis on spiritual equality.1 Korean Catholics today celebrate the causes of this persecution as a sign of their religion playing a positive role in the development of their country. More controversial in the historiography is the connection between Korean Catholics and foreign military force, of which the so-called Silk Letter (1801) sent by Alexius Hwang to Pope Pius VII forms an example. Receiving much less attention are the massacres of Korean Catholics by non-Catholic Koreans in 1901 on Cheju Island. This anomaly is in part due to the willingness of Catholics of the time to use violence in return, which

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-13

200  Franklin Rausch does not fit into the template of martyrdom that expects the faithful to passively accept their fate. In contrast, secular scholarly accounts of these conflicts are more likely to focus on how early Catholicism acted as a route by which modern Western knowledge entered Korea; they often emphasize the anti-foreign nature of anti-Catholic violence. While the 1801 persecution that led to Alexius writing his letter is sometimes referred to, the 1901 Cheju Island violence is generally not mentioned. By analyzing the complex nature of both incidents and tying them together, this chapter aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between Catholicism, popular violence, and state force in nineteenth-century Korea.2 Korea in the Nineteenth Century The Korean State, referred to by the dynastic name of Chosŏn, was a centralized, bureaucratic monarchy in which a king was assisted in the task of governance by officials. Centralization however did not mean that the monarch was necessarily strong. Confucian orthodoxy demanded that the king take seriously official critique of his rule; should he ignore such critiques, he would find it almost impossible to govern or might even be removed from the throne, which would then be given to a royal relative from the same dynasty.3 The king was thus not an autocrat, but rather a sort of referee who sought to make sure that the various political factions were balanced against each other, and that the elite maintained their position in society (lest there be a coup) without being allowed to oppress the common people too much (lest there be a rebellion).4 Government officials were drawn from the “yangban” class, which consisted of families with a history of office holding and who controlled enough land and enslaved individuals to give them the resources needed to provide male members of the clan with sufficient Confucian knowledge. This included the ability to read and write Classical Chinese fluently, to be competent scholars, and to have someone pass the exams and enter government service at least once every few generations. This status group dominated the state, society, and the economy and generally acted to protect its privileged position. However, differing interpretations of Confucianism, policy views, and the desire to monopolize access to a limited number of government positions and the wealth and power they conferred led to factionalism. Different groups of officials were therefore frequently in conflict with each other, factional struggles even at times leading to bloodshed. One of the primary duties of the Chosŏn State was to spread and develop true, that is, Confucian morality. Key to fulfilling that obligation was the performance of ritual. For instance, Confucians practiced ancestor rites, in

Catholicism and Violence in Korea  201 which food, wine, and incense would be offered to spirit tablets with the ancestors’ names written upon them and in front of which the participants would bow. Such rituals were not seen as simply the expression of filial piety, the love, honor, and respect owed to one’s parents but were also believed to actually create that virtue within those who participated. Such virtue was thought necessary for a society to be truly civilized and for human flourishing. In addition to the obligation to spread Confucian morality, the State had a vested interest in such rituals, as a respect for family hierarchy easily transferred to accepting the authority of the king and his officials, who frequently presented themselves in familiar terms to the people they governed. Don Baker has coined the term “ritual hegemony” to describe the State’s claim to be able to regulate the ritual life of its subjects – that it determined what rituals could be performed, by whom they could be performed, and what constituted correct rituals.5 Korea had initially borrowed Confucianism from China, a state which it recognized as its overlord, or older brother in Confucian idiom. Thus, while an independent country, Chosŏn Korea regularly sent tribute missions to China, the members of which would frequently buy whatever books they could while there. The arrival of Catholic missionaries in China led to the production of books on that subject in Classical Chinese, which Korean scholars would subsequently gain access to thanks to these tribute missions. While for more than a century Koreans would reject Catholicism, eventually a group of scholars connected to the political faction known as the Southerners would be attracted to the religion. These Southerners believed that God, in part through the sacraments of the Church, could provide them the grace needed to properly live out Confucian morality. The promise of an afterlife, which was largely neglected in Confucianism, also seems to have been attractive. One of these scholars, Yi Sŭ nghun (1756–1801), would accompany one of these tribute missions and be baptized with the name of Peter in Beijing in 1784 by Western missionaries. He would return to Korea and begin baptizing others so that when the Chinese missionary Father James Zhou Wenmo (1752–1801) arrived a decade later, there would already be several thousand Catholics on the peninsula. However, as Catholicism grew, so too did violent state action against individual believers. For instance, two Catholics were executed in 1791 because they had not only refused to conduct ancestor rites, which they saw as idolatrous, but one of them had burned the tablets in his possession (something not required in Catholic teaching). However, the king during this period, Chŏngjo (r. 1776– 1801), wished to prevent an all-out persecution, partially out of a desire to avoid spilling blood, but also because it was from the Southerners that many of his advisers and most loyal officials came.6 Why did the Chosŏn State consider Catholicism threatening? First, as mentioned above, Catholics refused to conduct ancestor rituals. While not

202  Franklin Rausch performing such rituals owing to such reasons as poverty was not punished, Catholics explicitly rejected them as idolatrous. This made Catholics appear anti-social, as these rituals were understood as both expressing and developing the core value of filial piety. Moreover, for an authoritarian and hierarchical state such as Chosŏn, the refusal to honor ancestors in the way mandated by state and society was seen as a fundamentally disloyal and egotistical act – after all Catholics were substituting their own private judgment for the commands of the State and putting their own ‘selfish’ interest in salvation ahead of their duties to the group. While Catholics protested that their religion taught them to be loyal and filial, their relativization of those values and subordination of them to God and the Church undercut state power and Confucian orthodoxy, particularly as it denied the State’s claim to ritual hegemony. Moreover, the connection of such ideas with an organized community raised the specter of religious rebellions, such as those that had occurred in China, which Koreans were familiar with. Since this community was connected to foreign countries, even a small number of Catholics could theoretically serve as spies and guides for an invasion force. Thus, from the perspective of the Chosŏn State, as well as the Confucian elite, Catholics were a serious threat to both the civilizing mission of the State and national security.7 The Persecution of 1801 King Chŏngjo’s desire to protect his advisers and most loyal officials led him to do what he could to prevent a large-scale anti-Catholic persecution. However, his death in 1800 led to his minor-son King Sunjo (1790–1834) ascending to the throne. Sunjo’s regent, Queen Dowager Chŏngsun (a former consort of Chŏngjo’s grandfather, 1745–1805) was connected to factions hostile to many of Chŏngjo’s supporters. Moreover, the growth of Catholicism had led to the arrest of an increasing number of Catholics; local officials were not sure what to do with them. Thus, the queen dowager issued an edict in January 1801 that would set a clear policy by declaring recalcitrant Catholics to be treated as rebels. The actual text of the petition reveals how Catholicism was seen to pose a serious moral threat to the State: As for a person being a person, it is a matter of morality. As for a country being a country, it is a matter of civilization. This so-called evil learning [Catholicism – F.R.] is without father and king, destroys morality, interferes with the spread of civilization, and causes people to degenerate into barbarians, birds, and beasts. And so the foolish people are infected with these errors and led astray […]. If, now that evil learning has been strictly forbidden, there is still a gang of people who do not mend their ways, then it is right to treat them as rebels.8

Catholicism and Violence in Korea  203 The State’s concern that Catholicism violated morality and was spreading led it to declare individual believers rebels, who were then liable to the legal punishment of decapitation. Many victims had clear factional connections and had been Catholic leaders, such as Paul Hong Nangmin (1751–1801), who was duly beheaded. Others, however, were targeted for attack despite having abandoned Catholicism or even having denied being Catholic; thus Yi Kahwan (1742–1801), a former official, was tortured to death. This shows how there was a factional element to a persecution that at first glance seemed religiously motivated. In general, men in leadership positions would be the first to die, though others, including women (who were typically not included as targets within factional disputes), could also be arrested, tortured, and executed. This illustrates that the aforementioned proclamation’s focus on protecting the common people from the taint of Catholicism was taken seriously, as women were not considered politically important, but were key agents in spreading Catholicism. So, while the persecution was shaped by factionalism, it was not completely determined by it. Most Catholic leaders were arrested quickly, with the exception of Alexius Hwang Sayŏng (1775–1801).9 He would feel responsible for trying to end the persecution and save the Catholic Church in Korea. Alexius was born into a yangban family affiliated with the Southerner faction near Seoul, his father having held several low-ranking government positions. His childhood was complex as he was a “yubokja,” a child whose father died after he was conceived but before he was born. Alexius himself appeared to be on the road to government service, passing an important exam at the young age of sixteen in 1790. A tradition exists that King Chŏngjo even held Alexius’ hand as an honor, leading the young scholar to tie a red silk around his wrist that he would wear throughout his life. Alexius would subsequently marry into another Southerner family, one that was connected to central figures in the early Catholic community, and convert just before the ancestor rite incident of 1791. Not only did Alexius decide to remain Catholic after this, but he was so devoted to his new faith that he gave up the thought of government service to dedicate himself completely to the religion, which is rather striking considering this was the period when his faction was on the rise and he would have likely had no difficulty entering into state service. He would thus devote his talents to teaching and spreading Catholicism, as well as acting as a leader within the community. Not having entered into government service, Alexius was relatively unknown and thus able to escape from Seoul into the countryside when the initial arrests of Catholics were made in 1801. While some Catholics chose to give themselves up, seeking martyrdom, he felt that the continued existence of Catholicism in Korea was endangered and therefore opted to go into hiding. He also wrote a letter on a piece of silk, known today as the Silk

204  Franklin Rausch Letter (“paeksŏ”).10 Such a letter, sewn into a messenger’s clothes, could easily be smuggled to the bishop of Beijing. Alexius described in the letter the suffering of Catholics at the hands of the government, how they had to flee or suffer arrest. He explained how those who were taken into custody were cruelly tortured in an effort to make them inform on their fellow Catholics and to give up their faith. For example, he described how Columba Kang underwent six rounds of severe torture before she was executed by decapitation and described how Peter Cho was not only beaten severely, but a government official had his father beaten in front of him in an effort to force him to apostatize.11 Particularly devastating to the Catholic community was the arrest and execution of Father James Zhou Wenmo, the only priest in Korea, who Alexius described as the “pillar we had relied on to support us in both life and death” and whose loss led Catholics to be “heartbroken.”12 Father Zhou’s death, which would serve as the climax of the hagiographies found in the Silk Letter, was clearly patterned after the Passion of Christ. Thus, Alexius not only sought to provide information about the suffering of Catholics in Korea to the bishop of Beijing and show that Catholics needed saving from persecution but also that they were good Christians who deserved to be saved.13 In order to save the Church, Alexius needed to find a way to end the persecution, obtain religious tolerance, and arrange for new clergy to come to the peninsula. He thought this could be done relatively easily. Rather than a deep-rooted conflict between Confucianism and Catholicism and the consequent threat the new religion posed to the ruling yangban, he believed that the causes of the persecution were fundamentally confined to factionalism, individual personality flaws, and the relative isolation of Koreans that made them hostile to new ideas. For instance, Alexius compared Koreans to “a little child who was born in an isolated village and grew up spending almost all his time inside a room without seeing strangers” and would therefore react with fear when meeting an unknown person. He even wrote that “Koreans are fearful and suspicious, and we have no match when it comes to ignorance and weakness.”14 Alexius furthermore emphasized problems in the military, which had become incredibly weak after “two hundred years of peace” and would “crumble like a ball of dry mud or shatter like a thin tile” if it ran into difficulties. Based on this understanding, he suggested having the pope order the countries of Europe to build a force of “several hundred warships loaded with fifty or sixty thousand elite troops, large cannons, and other dangerous weapons.” This armada would carry with it a letter that promised that the invaders were “not here to seize your [Korea’s – F.R.] women or your wealth but have come out of obedience to the command of His Holiness the Pope, who desires the salvation of your people’s souls.” If one Catholic missionary were to be accepted, they would “establish ties of eternal peace and

Catholicism and Violence in Korea  205 friendship” and then leave; “[h]owever, if you do not accept this one servant of God into your country, then we will visit the Lord’s punishment upon you. You will die, and it will be too late for you to undo what you have done.” The letter then explained that Catholicism would encourage Confucian values, noting that it would “make people loyal, filial, and compassionate.” Its acceptance would lead the kingdom to “enjoy boundless fortune” and, like European countries, “the benefits of peace and good governance” that accrue to those who “worship the true Lord.”15 Alexius expressed his faith in this plan, stating that if this message was repeatedly proclaimed and “backed by Western military might […] then all the countries of the East will be so afraid that they will not dare to disobey.” In fact, he argued that fear was the primary motivating force behind the government persecution, and therefore, in the face of the threat of violence, the government, “fearing destruction and desiring peace […] will give in to our demands.” Alexius was sensitive to the charge that Catholics were rebels and that his actions might therefore be considered disobedient, noting that that his coreligionists had been “slandered […] as traitors […] and executed.” Following Confucian orthodoxy, he then claimed that if Catholics had indeed risen “up in rebellion,” they could rightly be accused of being rebels. Yet, in requesting help from the pope, they could not be considered insurgents as Korea “has not only refused to accept Catholicism, it has gone so far as to block its civilizing influence, fiercely persecuting the Church and murdering our priest.” Thus, if “an armed force were raised in Europe to punish those responsible for those crimes, how could anyone possibly object?” The Silk Letter reveals how much Alexius, despite having converted to Catholicism, still accepted the same basic understanding of the relationship between the State and orthodoxy as the Confucian scholars who were behind the anti-Catholic persecutions. Like them, he believed that the correct orthodoxy would promote human flourishing and that force or violence could be used to defend it. Unlike them, however, he thought that Catholicism, not Confucianism, represented orthodoxy. That is not to say that there was nothing distinctly Catholic about Alexius’ thought. For one, he saw spiritual salvation and the consequent attainment of heaven, something that did not exist in Confucianism, as one more reason why Catholicism should not be persecuted. Likewise, while he implicitly rejected rebellion against the State, he accepted the pope as having the authority to legitimate insurrection. This was rather different from the emperor in Beijing, who, while respected, was not recognized by Korea Confucian officials as having such authority. And Alexius would even make a specifically Biblical argument justifying the threat of violence by citing Matthew 10:11–16: Jesus taught that the sin of refusing to allow the good news of the Gospel to be preached was greater than the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.

206  Franklin Rausch If God could destroy those two cities, then how could it harm the image of Catholicism were force brought to bear against Korea? After all, that force would be used only to awe the government into allowing Catholicism to be preached and practiced openly. It would not harm the people or lead to the seizure of their property, and so it would be a benevolent and righteous use of force. Alexius’ position is rather ambiguous here. On one side, he makes an explicit argument that an invasion would be justified and threatened those who opposed the spread of Catholicism with death. At the same time, he seems to have believed that these violent threats would not have to be carried out, that such was the weakness of the Korean State that it would give in to the threat of violence. Although Alexius thus thought that insurgency would be legitimate, he also assumed that the mere threat of it would suffice to obtain the desired end, namely, the toleration of Catholicism. Hence the absence of a plan for the actual punishment of officials or for the occupation of Korea to insure that religious tolerance would continue; once the missionary was allowed into Chosŏn, the armada would simply leave. While the reality of Western colonialism makes this sound unrealistic, it must be remembered that East Asia did not begin to feel the full brunt of imperial pressure until the 1830s.16 More to the point of understanding Alexius’ position seem the tensions within his own thought – a desire to stay loyal to the Korean king and abhorrence at the idea of his compatriots being killed by foreign invaders on the one hand, and a desire to end the persecutions that had taken the lives of so many Catholics, including friends and relatives, on the other hand. In the end, Alexius’ letter would never be delivered, as he was informed upon and arrested while it was still in his possession. Government officials were horrified at its contents and Alexius was interrogated and tortured. After the State learned what it could, he was executed and posthumously dismembered. His wife and young son were enslaved, separated, and sent into distant exile. The discovery of the letter and its incriminating contents led to a new round of arrests and interrogations of actual and suspected Catholics. Finally, convinced that followers of the new religion no longer posed any serious threat to the Chosŏn State, the persecution was formally declared to be over in a proclamation issued in January 1802 that presented the State as successfully defending itself and Confucian orthodoxy from the political, religious, and moral threat posed by Catholicism. The 1901 Cheju Island Persecution Catholicism would continue to be sporadically persecuted in Korea throughout the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, killing thousands of

Catholicism and Violence in Korea  207 local believers and a dozen French missionaries. The persecutions that occurred from the late 1860s to the middle 1870s were particularly severe, as the number of foreign invasions increased. Catholics could play an important role in such incursions, with French priests and Korean laymen sometimes acting as guides. However, following the Kanghwa Treaty (1876) with Japan, the Korean State shifted its priorities to selective integration with, rather than near-complete rejection of the outside world; the last known Catholics dying through state action perished in 1878. Treaties with Western powers followed those with Japan, with France signing one in 1886 that gave its citizens the right to “teach” in Korea, which would come to be interpreted to include missionary work. When combined with extraterritoriality, French priests suddenly became powerful figures rather than hunted fugitives. And while the legal status and rights of Korean Catholics were not as firmly settled, they would eventually be able to practice their religion publicly without fear of government persecution.17 Increasing freedom from state-sponsored repression did not mean that Catholicism in Korea was no longer a source of contention. While nearly a century of anti-Catholic propaganda could not be eliminated overnight, a combination of the changes from integration into a global system and longsimmering tensions within Korean society would lead to serious conflict. One key issue was the contest over resources, particularly land and power, between different segments of society. This was exacerbated by the attempt of the Chosŏn State, at the time pursuing modernization, to collect taxes in greater quantity and with more efficiency. A further complicating matter was the presence of corruption among at least some government officials who abused their power to collect taxes, for instance, by raising more than they were supposed to and then keeping the excess for themselves. During this time period, it was common for Koreans to organize themselves into different groups, particularly along religious lines, to defend and expand their access to power and resources, and to even resist what they saw as a predatory state and corrupt officials.18 At times, even Catholics behaved aggressively, believing that French missionaries would protect them. Such was the belief in the power of these clerics that several Koreans went around pretending to be Catholic in order to pressure people into donating money to them.19 Such conflict could easily lead to violence and even to death, as shown by the hundreds of incidents involving Catholics breaking out in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1901, Cheju Island, located off the southwest coast of the present-day Republic of Korea and now known as a beautiful spot for school trips, was the site for the bloodiest of such incidents, resulting in the massacre of several hundred Catholics.20 Though occurring more recently than the 1801 persecution, analyzing this incident is quite difficult. In 1801, the Chosŏn State was relatively open about why it persecuted Catholics and

208  Franklin Rausch did so publicly and formally through its judicial system, leaving behind copious records. For 1901, the historical record is fragmentary, with very few of those involved leaving behind written statements. Those that do exist seek to justify their authors’ positions and to assign the blame for violence to opponents. For instance, Catholics generally criticized government officials for either being weak or even playing key roles in the massacre while those officials blamed oppressive and violent Catholic behavior as the main cause behind the violence. The present analysis will attempt to embrace this ambiguity and take the approach that there were multiple, interlocking causes that fed upon each other. Key to understanding the massacres is the relationship between Cheju Island and the central government of Chosŏn. Though the State considered the island to be a part of Korea, it was only able to exercise very limited authority over it. The population was also relatively poor. Thus, while the Chosŏn State was fairly effective at collecting taxes on the mainland through centrally-appointed officials who remitted what they had collected to Seoul, taxation on Cheju Island was carried out by local officials who were closely connected to the region and wished to avoid conflict with their neighbors. Such taxes that were collected usually stayed on the island. William Sands, an American employed by the Korean government in the Imperial Household Department sent out to suppress the 1901 uprising, and himself a Catholic, captured the state of Cheju Island thusly: “It was known only that the coast was so difficult and the inhabitants so unfriendly that even the Korean steamship company never landed there.” He added that “[b]ecause of its isolation, the island was used by Seoul as a penal colony for political prisoners. It was nominally administered from Seoul but only nominally.”21 The desire of the modernizing state for taxes nevertheless led to the dispatch of a central government official, who would fundamentally be responsible to it rather than to Cheju Island, and would collect taxes in cash rather than in “horses and cattle.”22 This change, combined with the presence of Japanese traders on the island who wished to expand their influence, exacerbated existing tensions. Further deteriorating the atmosphere was the decision of the Chosŏn State to categorize land, seizing that which had been used in common by the people for its own purposes. Cheju islanders had a long history of banding together into various organizations to pursue their interests, including protesting when they felt the government was intruding too far and had engaged in tax revolts in recent history. They would not sit idle in the face of an expanding State and increasing taxation. Parallel to the expansion of central government reach into Cheju, was the beginning of Catholic work there in 1899. Alexius Hwang’s widow had been exiled to the island and there were a few Catholics there, natives who had left it, converted somewhere else, and then returned. The mission itself would come to include two French missionaries and the Korean priest Father

Catholicism and Violence in Korea  209 Augustine Kim Wŏnyŏng, who, though absent during the massacre, played a key role in its origins. These priests were no more welcomed than the tax collectors. On the boat ride over, they were told by a native of the island that if they built a church then the islanders would tear it down. Once settled, most of the local population indeed wanted to have nothing to do with them, and they found it difficult to buy items they needed. There were even rumors that Catholics stole the eyes of children and ate marrow from the bones of the dead. Strikingly, even the old criticism that Catholics had neither king nor father was leveled, showing how deeply the Confucian critique of Catholicism had sunk down roots. Conversely, the priests, particularly Father Kim, viewed opposition to the Catholic mission as demonic, criticized the hold that “superstition,” especially adherence to shamanism, had on the islanders, and admonished the people of Cheju for their drinking, sexual immorality (specifically adultery), and gambling. The mission met with little initial success, there being only nineteen Catholics in the first part of 1900. However, by the time of the incident in May 1901, it counted 242 baptized Catholics and 600 to 700 catechumens. How can this rapid growth in such a hostile environment be accounted for? First, the relationship between government officials and Catholics was good at first, with one missionary teaching French to a son of a high official. Similarly, Cheju Island was a place where government officials were exiled to, and some of these exiles showed an interest in the religion with a few even converting. These officials were generally from wealthy and powerful families and might return to government service one day and thus were treated with respect. Recognition from the elite, even if they were in exile, made Catholicism seem less dangerous and put to rest ideas that Catholics were cannibals or ocular burglars. This encouraged the general population to at least consider the possibility of becoming Catholic. Powerful connections and rapid growth also caused problems. For one, though reports differ, it would seem that the tax collector sent out by the central government, himself a Catholic, appointed fellow Catholics to assist him in his work. As a result, Catholicism became connected to the increased tax burden levied on the islanders. A further problem was that Father Kim seems to have been particularly zealous in his criticism of shamanism and the traditional religion of the people of Cheju, both from a Catholic perspective and also from a view that such practices did not accord with modern civilization. This encouraged converts to engage in acts such as cutting down sacred trees (including on public land that had been seized by the State and then sold to Catholics); there were even accusations that Catholics disrupted shamanic rituals. Father Kim also appears to have encouraged his flock in the belief that they could act boldly as the Catholic Church, thanks to its connections with French missionaries, could protect them. For example, one Catholic stated that he did not have to pay back debts from before

210  Franklin Rausch his conversion. Some Koreans even seem to have joined the new religion in the hope that it could prevent their arrest (in at least one case a French missionary essentially broke a Catholic out of jail) and at least one exile hoped that Church representatives could appeal to the government to have his time of banishment decreased. Father Kim himself even used his connections with French missionaries to protect Catholics who were, from their perspective, being unfairly taxed by government officials. Thus, both religious and this-worldly tensions led to increasing conflict between Catholics and the general population on Cheju Island. Such conflicts also soured the relationship between Catholics and many state officials as well as exiles. A central point of conflict was the construction of a chapel by Korean Catholics. There seem to have been attempts by non-Catholics to disrupt its construction, with one man even placing signs at the crossroads in front of his house criticizing the religion. The meeting of women there for devotional practices at night led to the accusation that Father Kim was having improper relations with them. Unfortunately, amidst the increasingly heated atmosphere, the priest’s solution to this problem was to have the man brought to the church and beaten. When a government runner, O Sillak, complained about the chapel, Father Kim seems to have acted similarly; O died shortly after this, apparently of suicide. Anger over this chain of events combined with the tradition of local organizations and protest on Cheju Island led a large number of people to assemble ostensibly to petition the local government. Excerpts from three different accounts provide a sense of the differing interpretations of the immediate cause of the massacre. The first statement comes from a translation of a Korean government report, which described how “two French priests appeared on the scene with 300 armed followers and attempted to scatter the crowd.” One member of the crowd was wounded and Catholics carried off half-a-dozen people to confine them in their chapel. Then, while the magistrate sought to disperse the crowd, Catholics went into the town, “seized all the arms and ammunition, barred the gate of the town and terrorized the people by firing upon them and killing one and wounding three others.” The assembled crowd, made “reckless” by the “sight of blood,” attacked Catholics with the help of some hunters, killing several and releasing the captured men. Catholics, seeing they were losing, then “scattered” while the French priests made their escape. Letters were sent out and subsequently “large numbers of Catholic adherents were seized and killed. Forty or fifty a day were massacred and on May 27, 250 Roman Catholics were killed.”23 Thus, while admitting the occurrence of multiple massacres, blame is laid squarely on the Catholics, particularly the missionaries, who are presented as acting too aggressively, in contrast to the magistrate who sought to defuse the situation. People had simply acted as they were expected to act in Chosŏn Korea – emotional and violent when angry – and therefore did not deserve any special criticism.

Catholicism and Violence in Korea  211 A contemporary Catholic defense provided a rather different description of the events. The government official in charge is here presented as “undecided and timid.” Anti-Catholic islanders are no longer treated as a mass, but had leaders who arrogantly “demanded that 100 Christians be handed over to them.” A French cleric seeing “the danger growing imminent every day” then decided to organize a protest, which he did “with the courage of a chief and the coolness of a priest.” He launched an attack and captured the leaders so as to quickly “crush the uprising.” Though successful, a frightened official “almost immediately” released the leaders, which only “encouraged the insurgents.”24 This official then “began to excite the people against the Christians.” The town where Catholics had sought refuge was put under siege. The consequent massacre was described in detail: “Among the Christians, men, women, and children fell beneath the first of muskets and the blows of swords, stones and clubs.” In a different report, the aforementioned William Sands, generally considered a reliable source, witnessed the aftermath of the massacre and described it as follows: Not a shot nor a sign of life came from the walls. The city gates hung wide open and the narrow streets were cumbered with dead bodies. I counted a group of ninety, young and old of both sexes, all horribly mutilated, before the governor’s gate on the market place, where they had been lying for ten days in rain and snow.25 Partisan descriptions thus agree on the occurrence of the massacres but differ over whether it was Catholic aggression or government weakness that were their primary cause, with Catholics also emphasizing their brutality. Far from the option of law suits and government punishment, it is possible to interpret the incident as arising out of a time of conflict that occurred in both this-worldly terms, particularly in relation to taxes and local power, and over religious-ideological differences – following the old religion based on Korean tradition or embracing a new one calling for change. Both sides saw the other as dangerous and took actions that reinforced their own negative view. For instance, acts carried out by Catholics deemed as “aggressive” by the islanders were seen by Catholics themselves as necessary to protect themselves in a hostile environment. Catholics did not trust the State to help them; when it became known that missionaries had sent a telegram to the French Legation seeking help, Sands was dispatched by the Korean government to race French warships that had already departed for the island. Likewise, Catholics were frustrated at the relatively few people who were punished for their role in the 1901 massacre and at responsible government officials suffering no significant sanctions. In the aftermath, the mission would be re-established, the Chosŏn government would pay restitution to the French government for destruction of property, and a written agreement would be

212  Franklin Rausch reached by the Catholic Church and the Korean government. Whereas the former promised to prevent Catholics from acting badly and respect local customs, the latter committed itself to protecting Catholics. Conclusion The two case studies of violence connected to Catholicism examined in this chapter show a shift in who committed bloodshed, in its nature, and how it was justified. In 1801, the state-sponsored persecution of Catholics took the form of formal executions following interrogations that involved torture. The Chosŏn State justified this by presenting Catholics as a threat to the moral order that the Confucian government was dedicated to upholding, though issues of national security were also a part of the equation. Generally, Catholics responded to state persecution by fleeing, and if they were caught, either agreeing to give up the practice of their faith or dying as martyrs. The idea of rebellion does not seem to have been seriously entertained – doing so would have been impractical and it appears that Catholics themselves rejected such a rising as immoral. The sending of an armada was however contemplated by Alexius Hwang Sayŏng, who believed the pope could both organize and legitimize an invasion. Yet, while drawing upon Catholic ideas, Alexius also shared some of the basic assumptions of the Confucian State, particularly the idea that the government should be guided by orthodoxy, which would obtain practical benefits for both the State and the people it governed. The key difference was that Alexius believed that Catholicism was the orthodox teaching, not Confucianism. He thought that the threat of insurgency violence would be sufficient to win official tolerance for Catholicism. It is not clear why he took this approach, considering that he certainly saw killing innocent Catholics as a crime worthy of punishment. Perhaps the reason was that, as much as he was critical of his society, he could not bring himself to call for the killing of his fellow Koreans. And of course, as he was a deeply devout person who had turned away from a promising career in officialdom to pursue religious goals, we should not discount the possibility that his faith would have made him hesitant about actual bloodshed, even if he thought it was morally legitimate. Whatever Alexius might have felt, such a moral scruple does not appear to have played a significant role in the 1901 incident on Cheju Island. In that case, violence was committed by both Catholics and non-Catholics, and though people on either side held state positions or had close relations with Chosŏn’s representatives, the violence was not formalized. Rather, it took the form of clashes between popular armed groups, both Catholic and non-Catholic, and the indiscriminate massacre of the former by the latter. Here there is no strong State persecuting its largely helpless subjects

Catholicism and Violence in Korea  213 as in 1801. Rather, it is a weak State that, in its attempt to grow stronger, exacerbated competition over already insufficient resources. The Chosŏn State’s vulnerability meant that different groups in society looked to their own communities to protect themselves and seize what power they could. The weakening of the State can be seen by the fact that Catholic priests, particularly French missionaries, went from powerless individuals whom the State could torture and kill with relative impunity, to powerful actors who could successfully oppose the State with foreign backing. Catholics in Cheju, a restive minority growing in power linked to an increasingly aggressive, and from the perspective of non-Catholic islanders predatory state, posed a singular threat. Fearing this danger and not trusting the State to protect them, Catholics lashed out, which set into motion an armed conflict that, considering their small numbers and lack of government support, they could not hope to win. Their ultimate defeat resulted in their massacre. Particularly striking in this story is the retreat of issues of state-sponsored Confucian orthodoxy into the background. The threat posed by Catholicism from the perspective of the Chosŏn State in 1801 was primarily one against state orthodoxy, though the persecution was shaped in part by factional issues. In contrast, while the incident of 1901 did involve religion, it was traditional folk beliefs versus Catholicism. Thus, a relatively strong Chosŏn State persecuted Catholics because their beliefs and actions challenged its religious orthodoxy, while a relatively weak Chosŏn State that no longer was able to tell a story that could unify a critical mass of society and lacked the raw power to maintain stability allowed for the growth of divisions within that society that would lead to armed struggle among its subjects. Though we must be careful to avoid reading too much into these two case studies, it is interesting to note that despite the historic continuities within the Catholic Church in Korea and the Chosŏn State, they acted differently in both circumstances. As a result, the behavior of Catholics and nonCatholics, particularly their relationship with state force and popular violence, cannot be explained by any theory that assumes an essentialist understanding of how politics and religion work. Rather, these case studies seem to indicate that while theories can be applied to help us better understand a particular instance of violence, they cannot be applied universally, and therefore careful attention is needed to the historical particulars of any specific incident being studied. Notes 1 Yi Changwu, “Sinyu pakhae wa Hwang Sayŏng Paeksŏ sakkŏn” [The 1801 persecution and the Hwang Sayŏng Silk Letter Incident], in Han’guk Ch’ŏnjugyohoesa [Korean Catholic History] 2, ed. Han’guk Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso (Seoul: Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso, 2010), 23–30.

214  Franklin Rausch 2 For examples of such secular approaches, see Kyung Moon Hwang, A History of Korea (London: Palgrave, 2017), 90–92, 105–107, and 172; Michael J. Seth, A Brief History of Korea (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2019), 81–82, and 118. 3 The male pronoun is used in this paper in such cases as ruling Chosŏn monarchs were always males. 4 For an overview of the Joseon political system, particularly as it pertained to Catholicism, see Don Baker, with Franklin Rausch, Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 3–29. 5 Ibid., 6–8. 6 For more on Chŏngjo and his style of rule, see Christopher Lovins, King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019). 7 For more on the early Confucian critique of Catholicism, see Baker, with Rausch, Catholics and Anti-Catholicism, 30–58. 8 For more on this subject and the translation of this source, see Franklin Rausch, “Like Birds and Beasts: Justifying Violence against Catholics in late Chosŏn Dynasty Korea,” Acta Koreana 15, no. 1 (June 2012), 47–48. 9 For more on Alexius Hwang, see Baker, with Rausch, Catholics and Anti-Catholicism, 98–100; Franklin Rausch, “The Ambiguity of Violence: Ideology, State, and Religion in the Late Chosŏn Dynasty,” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2011). 10 For more on the subject of voluntary martyrdom, see Franklin Rausch, “Choosing to Die: Catholic Voluntary Martyrdom in Late Chosŏn Korea,” in Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea, eds. Charles Kim, et al. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). 11 Baker, with Rausch, Catholics and Anti-Catholicism, 182–183. 12 Ibid., 189. 13 This aspect of the Silk Letter is examined in Franklin Rausch, “Wicked Officials and Virtuous Martyrs: An Analysis of the Martyr Biographies in Alexius Hwang Sayŏng’s Silk Letter,” Kyohoesa yŏn’gu [Research Journal of Korean Church History] 32 (July 2009). 14 The rest of the quotations from this section are from Baker, with Rausch, Catholics and Anti-Catholicism, 198–201. 15 Alexius Hwang, like other Catholics in Korea, did not know about Protestant Christianity and believed that Europe was unified by Catholicism and that the pope was extremely powerful. He also would not have known about the problems the French Revolution and its aftermath had created for the Catholic Church. In general, Koreans did not have much contact with Westerners until the 1860s, at which time it would face increasing pressure, and even several minor invasions. 16 Alexius could not have known this, but when Western naval forces began to show up in Korea in the 1860s and early 1870s, the Chosŏn State would respond vigorously rather than shrinking in fear. 17 For more information on this subject, see Young Choe Choi, The Rule of the Taewŏn’gun, 1864–1873: Restoration in Yi Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Key-Hiuk Kim, The Last Phase of the East Asian World Order, 1860–1882 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980); Yongkoo Kim, The Five Years’ Crisis, 1866–1871 (Inchŏn: Circle, 2001). 18 For a study of such conflicts, see Yumi Moon, Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

Catholicism and Violence in Korea  215 19 Franklin Rausch, “The Bishop’s Dilemma: Gustave Mutel and the Catholic Church in Korea, 1890–1910,” Journal of Korean Religions 4, no. 1 (April 2013): 47. 20 For an English overview of this subject that shows the various perspectives on the incident, see Boudewijn Walraven, “Cheju Island, 1901: Records, Memories and Current Concerns,” Korean Histories 1, no. 1 (2009). For two Korean articles ̆ that played an important role in the writing of this chapter, see Pang Sanggun, “Hanmal Ch’ŏnjugyo wa Cheju kyoan” [Catholicism at the End of the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Cheju Incident], Kyohoesa yŏn’gu [Studies in Church History] 12 (December 2001); Ch’oe Sŏnhye “Kyohoe wa kŭndae sahoe ŭi ch’ungdol” [The Church and Clashes with Modern Society], in Han’guk Ch’ŏnjugyohoesa [Korean Catholic History] 4, ed. Han’guk Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso (Seoul: Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso, 2011). 21 William Franklin Sands, Undiplomatic Memories: The Far East, 1896–1904 (London: John Hamilton Ltd., 1934), 166–167. 22 See “The Disturbance on Quelpart,” in Korea Review (December 1901): 540. This is an English translation of a French article that originally appeared in the Shanghai publication Revue de l’Extrême Orient. 23 “News Calendar,” in Korea Review (June 1901): 279–280. 24 “The Disturbance at Quelpart,” 540. During this time, “Cheju” was usually used to refer to the main city on the island while “Quelpart” referred to the entire island. 25 Sands, Undiplomatic Memories, 173.

Bibliography Baker, Donald, with Franklin Rausch. Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017. Ch’oe, Sŏnhye. “Kyohoe wa kŭndae sahoe ŭi ch’ungdol” [The Church and Clashes with Modern Society].” In Han’guk Ch’ŏnjugyohoesa [Korean Catholic History] 4, edited by Han’guk Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso, 73–105. Seoul: Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso, 2011. Choi, Young Choe. The Rule of the Taewŏn’gun, 1864–1873, Restoration in Yi Korea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, East Asian Research Center, 1972. Hwang, Kyung Moon. A History of Korea. London: Palgrave, 2017. Kim, Key-Hiuk. The Last Phase of the East Asian World Order, 1860–1882. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980. Kim, Yongkoo. The Five Years’ Crisis, 1866–1871. Inchŏn: Circle, 2001. Lovins, Christopher. King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. Moon, Yumi. Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pae, Ŭ nsa, ed., Yŏksa ŭi ttang, paeum ŭi ttang: Paeron [Land of History, Land of Learning: Paeron]. Seoul: Paoro Ttal, 2002. ̆ “Hanmal Ch’ŏnjugyo wa Cheju Kyoan [Catholicism at the End of Pang, Sanggun. the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Cheju Incident].” Kyohoesa yŏn’gu [Studies in Church History] 12 (December 2001): 49–74. Rausch, Franklin. “Wicked Officials and Virtuous Martyrs: An Analysis of the Martyr Biographies in Alexius Hwang Sayŏng’s Silk Letter.” Kyohoesa yŏn’gu [Research Journal of Korean Church History] 32 (July 2009): 5–30.

216  Franklin Rausch Rausch, Franklin. “The Ambiguity of Violence: Ideology, State, and Religion in the Late Chosŏn Dynasty.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2011. Rausch, Franklin. “Like Birds and Beasts: Justifying Violence against Catholics in late Chosŏn Dynasty Korea.” Acta Koreana 15, no. 1 (June 2012): 43–71. Rausch, Franklin. “The Bishop’s Dilemma: Gustave Mutel and the Catholic Church in Korea, 1890–1910.” Journal of Korean Religions 4, no. 1 (April 2013): 43–69. Rausch, Franklin. “Choosing to Die: Catholic Voluntary Martyrdom in Late Chosŏn Korea.” In Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea, edited by Charles Kim, Jungwon Kim, Hwasook Nam, Serk-Bae Suh, and Clark Sorenson, 87–111. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Sands, William Franklin. Undiplomatic Memories: The Far East, 1896–1904. London: John Hamilton, Ltd., 1934. Seth, Michael J. A Brief History of Korea. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2019. Walraven, Boudewijn. “Cheju Island, 1901: Records, Memories and Current Concerns.” Korean Histories 1, no. 1 (2009): 3–24. Yi, Changwu. “Sinyu pakhae wa Hwang Sayŏng Paeksŏ Sakkŏn” [The 1801 persecution and the Hwang Sayŏng Silk Letter Incident]. In Han’guk Ch’ŏnjugyohoesa [Korean Catholic History] 2, edited by Han’guk Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso 15–111. Seoul: Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso, 2010.

Part IV

Imposing a Catholic Order

10 Violence in Circulation? Missionaries, Local Population, and Colonial Politics during the German War on the East African Coast, 1888–1889 Richard Hölzl

In 1873, two years after its foundation, the German Empire faced its first major economic crisis. The idea of colonies – protecting German trade interests overseas and mitigating domestic social problems through emigration to settler colonies – gained popular support. To avoid clashes with Britain, the government under Otto von Bismarck favored an indirect approach to colonization, safeguarding private investment of entrepreneurs and trading companies. Individual agitators such as Carl Peters, however, fiercely demanded colonial engagement, and cited racist, social-Darwinist theories as well as economic and political arguments in support of their ideas.1 In 1884, Peters conducted an expedition into the East African mainland, concluding so-called protection treaties with local chiefs in the name of the German East African Company (est. 1882). Subsequently, the trading company received imperial protection. During the Berlin Africa Conference (1884), Bismarck appeared as the honest broker, negotiating between the major powers and their colonial claims. Over the course of the years 1888 and 1889, however, the German government effected a policy change – away from indirect colonialism toward direct colonial rule. Under contract with the Sultan of Zanzibar, Peters’ Company proceeded to set up customs stations along the coast in a bid to gain control of trade in the area and break the regional traders’ market power.2 This precipitated the armed resistance of the East African coastal population and, consequently, the German government’s U-turn on colonial policy. In the Reichstag, that is, the German parliament, Bismarck portrayed the conflict as a religious war and an uprising by traders in enslaved people against the humanitarian efforts of the Christian European powers. In January 1889, after six months of fighting and with the German navy enforcing an embargo on coastal trade, the station of the Lutheran mission in Dar es Salaam and the German Benedictine mission in Pugu were attacked and destroyed, three Catholic missionaries killed, and others abducted. The imperial government took the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-15

220  Richard Hölzl attack as confirmation of a religious war, echoing the view propagated by the Benedictine missionaries and their leader, Andreas Amrhein, who wrote of the “fanaticism [of the] followers of the flag of Mohammed and the revenge of the slave traders”.3 Neither he nor the government mentioned that the coastal population’s leader Abushiri ibn Salim al-Harthi had assured French Catholic missionaries on the spot that they were under his protection, that the violence in Pugu was directly related to the German, British, and Italian embargo on coastal trade, and that the demolished missions had effectively been regarded as branches of Peters’ Company.4 Three weeks after the attack, the Reichstag debated sending troops to East Africa, officially with the goal of ending the trade in enslaved people. A majority decided to approve financing a military campaign, which launched the first German colonial war in East Africa. In Germany at the time it was known as the “Arab uprising”, in East Africa as the “war of the Germans on the Mrima Coast”.5 The imperial commissioner for East Africa, Hermann Wissmann, portrayed the situation as a “fight for survival” in a race war between Europeans and Arabs.6 Yet, most of those fighting the East African Company were, as Wissmann admitted, not traders but putative or actual local, enslaved Africans. A renowned ‘expert’ on Africa who had participated in three expeditions to Central Africa between 1880 and 1887 and helped Belgian King Leopold II found the Congo colony, Wissmann resolved this contradiction in the political framing of the conflict by characterizing Africans as the weak-willed minions of dominant forces. But he also casted doubt on the religious character of the conflict. Chancellor Bismarck took a different line: “What is hated there is the Christian, the protector of the slaves and disruptor of the illicit trade”.7 Bismarck’s interpretation prevailed. On January 30, 1889, the law “to combat the slave trade and protect German interests in East Africa” was enacted, opening the doors for German colonial conquest. Bismarck’s anti-Catholic culture war of 1871 to 1887 had just abated. But even the Catholic Center Party – once the government’s bitter opponents – agreed to a German colonial army occupying East Africa on the grounds that it was to fight slavery. Thus, in the decisive moment of German colonialism becoming formalized, the idea of the Christian mission to ‘civilize’ – rather than a social-Darwinist ‘struggle for survival’, economic interests, or great power status – proved to be the conceptual common ground on which the imperial government, nationalist liberals, and the Zentrum party came together. The narrative framing of the colonial war as a religiously motivated act of violence, performed by Muslim traders in enslaved people against Christian missionaries, who represented Euro-Christian civilization, played a crucial role in the colonial project. It ensured that the German conquest of parts of East Africa was religiously connoted – as defending a Christian, humanitarian mission. Every act of physical violence is performed by individual actors; only in this way do they become part of social reality.8 That is also true of the events

Violence in Circulation?  221 described below. However, this chapter proposes widening the focus to understand the dynamics of violence between the colonies and the metropole: it took purposeful transregional communication to make acts and perceptions of physical violence circulate between these spaces.9 Events needed to be medially framed in specific ways to ensure their connectivity and to motivate further violent actions. In the following, I inquire into the nature of the communicative and narrative work performed by missions and politics to mark out the acts of physical violence as ‘religious violence’, and into how this resulted in colonial conquest. Missionaries Abroad: Benedictines in East Africa, 1888–1889 Father Joseph Amrhein never traveled to Africa. Nonetheless he founded the Missionary Benedictine Congregation in 1882 envisioning a German, missionary branch of the ancient Benedictine order to convert and ‘civilize’ East Africa. Amrhein inspired an avid following of young monks and nuns.10 Fourteen of them – tens monks and four nuns – sailed for East Africa in fall 1887. Only nine of them were to survive the first year there. Before they left, Amrhein explained how he imagined the mission station and drew a detailed picture to illustrate his vision. Later, this picture became part of the media framing of the violence during the colonial war on the East African coast.11 In the process of translating the colonial experience of violence, the mission founder’s utopian design was transformed into a supposedly realistic image of the mission station that had been destroyed by religious enemies. The drawing, titled “The St. Benedict of Pugu mission station”, depicts a mission station set in a remote wilderness. [See Figure 10.1] The buildings and grounds are laid out in an angular arrangement, suggesting the mission’s cultivating and regulating influence. The scene is framed in the background by a mission house and chapel. A garden and a ‘children’s refuge’, featuring children in the care of nuns, dominate the foreground. In the garden, two monks are planting banana trees. In the background on the left there are smaller buildings, defined in the legend as a washhouse, chicken coop, workshops, and stalls. Thus, Amrhein’s drawing demonstrated the Benedictines’ claim to establish territorial abbeys and cultivate land to pursue self-sufficiency and support a monastic community; a permanent settlement (stabilitas loci) worthy of the Divine Office. This claim went hand in hand with the German colonial mission to ‘civilize’. Indeed, in the drawing, the wooden cross in front of the chapel faces an equally large flagpole flying the flag of the German Empire. The charitable aspect of the mission is demonstrated by the ‘children’s refuge’, reminding beholders of the contemporaneous movement opposing enslavement, to which the Benedictine missionaries had committed themselves. The missionaries intended to raise children at the station, baptize them, arrange marriages between them, and settle them in agriculturally organized villages surrounding the future monastery.12

222  Richard Hölzl

Figure 10.1 “The St. Benedict of Pugu mission station, destroyed on January 13.” Die katholischen Missionen (1889), 80. Photo courtesy of the author.

Violence in Circulation?  223 On arrival in East Africa, the missionaries had rejected the German East African Company’s suggestion to settle in Dar es Salaam and run a hospital and an orphanage there. Instead, their leader Amrhein had instructed them to build a station “at an advisable distance from the coast that has fallen prey to all the Arabness and Mohamedanism [!], amidst a quite pagan tribe of the black natives”.13 Located some 20 kilometers south-west of Dar es Salaam, Pugu was no island of culture in the wilderness, as Amrhein’s drawing suggested. It took less than a day to reach the coast along a road that had recently been improved – but not for the benefit of the Benedictines or the 500 Zaramo of Pugu.14 In spring 1888, the Company’s representative August Leue had set up a settlement in Pugu to harvest copal and experiment with export crops such as tobacco, coffee, and cocoa. It was one of about 30 branches of the Company in the coastal hinterland.15 An Austrian named Roos ran a plantation nearby. Leue likely recommended Pugu to the missionaries. Certainly, he was glad to report in late 1888 that his new branch had become part of “a small community” along with Roos’ plantation and the mission.16 In front of the Pugu hills lay two Zaramo villages, the inhabitants of which seemed cooperative, albeit under the uncompromising circumstances – enforced by superior weaponry – of the Company’s rule. Amrhein’s depiction of the mission buildings and gardens reflects his concern to portray modesty and order – hallmarks of civilization. Actually, the mission station diverged greatly from the European, even Alpine style draft. The house was built on poles over the ground “in the tropical style” and out of clay as was customary in the region.17 A passing traveler noted that all the buildings were “provisionally built”.18 Laborers were easy to find among the Zaramo. On the coast, both money and cloth were accepted as payment. The missionaries could offer the going wage and more. In fact, the mission may have been an attractive workplace since workers encountered technical innovations in metalwork, carpentry, and other crafts. The head of the station, Bonifaz Fleschutz, advised training craftsmen-monks to oversee and instruct helpers in a letter to Germany. Several dozen workers were hired, who were likely skilled in the earth building technique. Contrary to the original plans, the Benedictines carried out little of the work themselves but – partly for health reasons – supervised local workers.19 The missionaries had planned to live by hunting and farming. They had brought hunting rifles, gunpowder, and seeds from Europe and sought to purchase cattle inland.20 But the goal of self-sufficiency proved utopian. One monk wrote bitterly that they had lived on two dishes in the first four months – cucumbers and mashed pumpkin. Inadequate nutrition was accompanied by lack of sleep and working days that were ill-adapted to the climate (taking only negligible midday breaks). The missionaries struggled with tropical diseases, especially malaria. After a few weeks, six monks, a nun, and Father Bonifaz were all running high fevers. After six months, one

224  Richard Hölzl monk and one nun had died; another monk and nun returned to Germany, severely debilitated.21 Conditions were to remain precarious in this mission. In the first decade, a total of 28 missionaries died and about the same number were called back to Germany due to ill health.22 The social composition of the station was more complex than Amrhein’s sketch implied. Staff included local porters and a translator who the missionaries hired to escort them to Pugu. The translator was an Anglican Christian with experience of German culture who was suggested by the East African Company.23 One report mentions two translators who helped clear the grounds, presumably as well as interpreting for the workers and fostering relations with the local population.24 Later described as supervisors, it appears they remained permanently at the station.25 The locals observed the missionaries’ movements with curiosity, ever since gathering on Pugu hill to watch their arrival. Father Bonifaz and the catechist Brother Ildefons seized such opportunities to pursue some evangelization with the help of translators and an illustrated bible – but met with little response.26 Laborers often stayed at the station, which was gradually extended. Three named individuals – Amanie, the 40-year-old gardenand-household help, 20-year-old Rukgaume and his 15-year-old brother, a trainee locksmith named Mkondo/Jansen – are documented as having “voluntarily joined” the mission as more-or-less permanent residents.27 Over the course of the year, the missionaries gained a handful of pupils from the vicinity. But they did not stay long, leaving when they found the monks expected them to work in the garden and buildings for no pay.28 The reason for their response remains unclear: it is likely there was enough work to do on the Zaramo’s own fields, and perhaps gender and class issues played a role. Moreover, Pugu was situated on the caravan route to the Central African lakes and on the periphery of the coastal region.29 There was no lack of opportunities for paid work and the Zaramo were relatively accustomed to Europeans and their offers. Lastly, the Zaramo would surely not have wanted to be confused with another group of Africans who increasingly populated the station – former ‘slaves’. Missionaries bought enslaved children on the coast and took into their care children and women from ships captured by European navy vessels. The number of women and children accommodated in Pugu rose considerably when British and German ships enforced an embargo on the seaborne arms and enslaved people trades in fall 1888.30 It is not known whether the Benedictines were aware of the risk of harboring the children in view of the hostilities along the coast. The French and British mission had refused to receive any more children so as not to provoke Abushiri’s fighters.31 By the end of the year, 40 formerly enslaved children, aged between six and twelve, and several formerly enslaved adults were living at Pugu.32 The missionaries’ goal was to baptize the children and give them a Christian education. Settling as Christians in villages, they were supposed to have a “positive” effect on the surrounding

Violence in Circulation?  225 population.33 But the coastal population regarded them as “slaves of the Wafranza” (the missionaries), who were expected to do unpaid work and show unconditional obedience.34 Though ‘freed’ they still did not have freedom of movement because they risked renewed enslavement, or, if minors, because they were under the guardianship of the mission. The concept of entirely Christian villages, moreover, remained abstract. The formerly enslaved individuals worked in the mission gardens, which were so extensive they resembled plantations. Though not intending to trade, the missionaries needed to produce enough food to provide for the mission. To the Benedictines, their gardens were the realization of the monastic ideal of ora et labora; sizable agriculture, after all, characterized Benedictine abbeys. However, in Europe, the monks performed the work themselves rather than supervising the unpaid work of dependents – a subtle difference that was not addressed. From an East African point of view, though, it meant there was little to distinguish the monks and nuns from the Company representatives and plantation owners.35 The missionaries tried to live up to the monastic ideal, to sing the Divine Office at regular intervals, to take their meals in silence while hearing a reading, to pray the Breviary, and celebrate the Catholic liturgy. The mission was well endowed with ritual objects, holding chalices and ciboriums, chasubles and paraments, an altar and a tabernacle, complete with baldachin for processions with the Blessed Sacrament.36 The men and women of the mission were trying hard to distinguish themselves from other Europeans, driven by their strong identification with the missionary objective and the Benedictine, monastic ideal of solitude and renunciation of worldly life. No doubt they identified strongly with monastic culture during the first months in Pugu. In their letters, they stressed their willingness to make sacrifices and trust in God and asked for prayers. They made frequent references to the history of the Benedictine order, invoking medieval predecessors, and recalling Benedict of Nursia’s founding of the Monte Cassino Abbey in 529 to reflect their own situation. They likened the people of East Africa to the Saxons, Teutons, or Scandinavians, conceptualizing them as one of many ‘pagan’ peoples. Accordingly, the Benedictines did not inquire deeply into the religious and cultural peculiarities of the local population during their first months in Pugu. No evidence of any research into the religion, customs, and traditions of the Zaramo can be found in the mission’s reports and letters. The only information – ex negativo – that the missionaries gave on the Zaramo around Pugu in 1888 was that they were not Muslims. This had been one of Amrhein’s stipulations for establishing the mission. Coastal regions, especially those that were predominantly Muslim, such as the Mrima Coast, were considered decadent and impervious to evangelization.37 The Benedictines adhered to Amrhein’s vague ideas of evangelizing a “quite pagan tribe of the black natives”.38

226  Richard Hölzl The Zaramo, for their part, were quite familiar with religious difference. According to the – indubitably Eurocentric – ethnographic reports published around 1900, they held to their own concepts of ancestral influence, which they sought to control by ritual. They believed the world was created by a god who did not intervene in the human world and practiced elaborate transition rites to integrate society on socio-cultural and religious levels. The Protestant missionary Klamroth in 1910 described a notable rivalry between Islamic healers and Zaramo ritual experts.39 In view of their religious beliefs and their experience of Islam on the Swahili coast, the Zaramo must have been accustomed to living with interlinking religious, social, political, and economic practices. The Benedictines’ efforts to negate the entanglement of these spheres through their monastic ritual and habitual distinctions and to set themselves apart from violent colonial conquest were hardly convincing or even decipherable for the Zaramo. Benedictine Missionaries and Company Rule Amrhein’s sketch was pervaded with the otherworldly, insular self-conception of the monastery. But the attack of 1889 raises questions about the nature of relations between the mission and the Company. The monks and nuns likely appreciated the Company’s assistance. Nonetheless they distanced themselves from it. Father Bonifaz wrote to St. Ottilien: The population […] has grown rather distrustful due to the attitude of the station chiefs, who simply enforce obedience with rifle in hand. They think they have done well, as the population now fears them; but I and probably every missionary must deplore it.40 The Company staff’s tendency to control the local population at best by barking at them like Prussian officers, at worst with arbitrary humiliations and excessive violence was confirmed by observers in Zanzibar, such as Alexander O’Swald, a young man from Hamburg representing his family’s business, or by the German consul, Gustav Michahelles.41 Its authority on the mainland remained ephemeral after securing the protection of the German Empire in 1885. In 1888, under mounting pressure from Britain and Germany, the Sultan of Zanzibar was finally persuaded to sign a contract ceding the legal, customs and tax administration on the coast to the Company. The latter then assumed governance in the sultan’s name, deposing the previous holders of power and establishing new systems of administration and taxation. One especially ruthless representative, Emil von Zelewski, disparaged the local power elite and desecrated a mosque before installing a “regime of terror”.42 According to a Swahili report, Zelewski took dogs into a mosque on a search for the sultan’s representatives in Pangani, causing a

Violence in Circulation?  227 tumult.43 As resistance spread throughout the coast, it changed in character sometimes directing itself against the sultan. Especially in Dar es Salaam, however, the Germans remained at the center of the conflict. When the mercenary troops sent and financed by the German Empire arrived in May 1889, the various disturbances along the coast spiraled into a colonial war. The victory of Wissmann’s troops led seamlessly to the colonial conquest of the mainland completed by the late 1890s.44 The Benedictines felt they had little in common with lay Europeans and especially the Company men. Accordingly, they did not leave the mission station even when the hostilities reached the Dar es Salaam area. No doubt it seemed reassuring that Abushiri’s forces had spared the French mission station in Bagamoyo and even used it as a hideout. But the French missionaries were hardly associated with the German Company. They had established their missions before it arrived on the scene and cultivated friendly relations with the Swahili elites in their neighborhood. They, too, had bought and taken in hundreds of formerly enslaved children but it did not generate any conflict with the Swahili and Arab traders and plantation owners. Father Bonifaz assured the Congregation of the Evangelization of Peoples in Rome that the population distinguished between missionaries and other Germans.45 But from the perspective of the East Africans who had contact with the Benedictines, the monks’ different, religious character was likely less significant. Various Company representatives, such as August Leue on the neighboring hill, were regular visitors to the station.46 The Benedictines not only transacted their financial affairs through the Company post in Dar es Salaam, which also served as the porters’ place of departure and arrival, they cooperated with the trading company on various levels. They hired translators from it, received enslaved children from Arab ships, and had the German flag fly over Pugu. A dispute over hoisting the Company’s flag (a mimicry of the Empire’s colors) in the coastal towns had been one of the triggers of conflict.47 On January 13, 1889, some one hundred fighters attacked the station in Pugu, killing two monks and a nun.48 A further two monks escaped through the forests, guided by Rukgaume and another Zaramo from Pugu, to the Company headquarters in Dar es Salaam. A nun, two monks, and two kitchen maids were captured; the three Europeans were later released on payment of a ransom. The fate of the two African girls was not documented. Any children remaining at the station were killed, according to mission reports. Most of the formerly enslaved people had already fled the station on January 10 and 11, when it became clear that Abushiri’s troops would attack Dar es Salaam. The missionaries’ eyewitness reports mostly describe the physical acts of violence and the looting of material items that took place. Both profane and religious objects were pillaged, although the fighters did not appear to have religious motives.49

228  Richard Hölzl It was a ferocious attack, carried out by a large troop of heavily armed fighters. One of Abushiri’s officers told prisoners: If we had known you are padri [missionaries], we would not have attacked you. We were told you were Germans and connected to Leue […] and have a lot of gunpowder and rifles and would defend yourselves; and that you have a lot of the slaves taken from us; that is why we came with so many men and fired at you!50 Amrhein subsequently used this report to reframe the incident: the attackers were not from the area, had not known the Benedictines, and did not even know they were missionaries.51 However, this state of affairs is unlikely.52 Another of Abushiri’s officers seemed to doubt the missionary nature of the Pugu station: “But if you are padri, why have you installed shooting slits and the like, to be able to defend yourselves with weapons?”53 Selemani bin Seif, commander of Abushiri’s troops around Dar es Salaam, asked why they had not written to him to let him know they were neutral and had come with good intentions, as the French missionaries in Bagayamo had done.54 It was thanks to Abushiri’s friendly relations with the head of the mission there, Father Etienne Baur, that the captured Benedictines were eventually released on payment of 9000 RM and in exchange for ten resistance fighters held by the German navy.55 Seven survivors then made the journey back to St. Ottilien, arriving in mid-1889.56 Media Framing: How a Conflict over Political Rule Became a Religious War The discrepancy between the imaginations in Germany and the reality of life at the mission station was symptomatic of the feedback loops affecting communication between the colony and the metropole. The messages and reports sent from the colony – in letters written in the style of telegrams or field reports – negotiated the violence, the actions of individuals and groups, and personal interpretations of them, and relayed complex and contradictory clusters of information. In Germany, these were transformed into comprehensible, coherent narratives to be medially disseminated. Edited eyewitness reports were, for example, published in the journal Katholische Missionen and abridged versions appeared in the daily press. Father Amrhein issued an appeal for public support for the captured missionaries’ release in which he placed the attack on the mission in a theological context. He portrayed the destruction of Pugu as part of a religious war in which the missionaries were opposed by fanatical Muslims and vengeful traders in enslaved people: Nobody, I think, throughout the entire Christian world, has remained unmoved by the painful knowledge of how the first martyrs and confessors among the Christian messengers of the faith, along with their

Violence in Circulation?  229 blossoming work, fell victim to the fanaticism of fighters under the flag of Mohammed and the vengefulness of ‘slave’ traders.57 Amrhein furthermore emphasized the mission’s civilizing work, writing that just a few months after the missionaries had arrived in East Africa, [T]he enemy [had found] very much to destroy: a beautiful chapel, a spacious, well-built residence for the monks and priests and another for the nuns, a large orphanage for 100 children and asylum-seekers, a school, a building with workshops for various crafts and another for domestic services; twenty acres of cultivated land with young palm and banana trees, vegetables and grain plantings to devastate.58 The appeal, primarily addressing the supporters of the mission and German Catholics, used lurid descriptions to highlight the intensity of the violence. Amrhein condemned the “bloody work” and “bloodbath” committed by the attackers and referred to the victims as “blood witnesses” who had “bled to death” having been “brutally hacked to pieces by the knives of the raging attackers”. The journal Katholische Missionen ran the appeal together with Amrhein’s sketch of the mission station in Pugu. In this context, the drawing was reframed from an a priori draft to a realistic depiction of what had been lost.59 In Amrhein’s portrayal, missionaries had defended African women and children against Muslim attackers. The assignment of roles in this enactment compelled readers to develop a clear emotional bias and take sides with the Christian missionaries – the heroes – against the fanatical Arab Muslims – the villains – while sympathizing with Africans as the passive objects of the conflict.60 Amrhein pushed the religious attributes of Abushiri’s forces to the fore but did not mention their political and economic motives, drawing an ethnic-religious boundary between the African population and the Arab ruling class that did not exist in such unambiguous terms. He portrayed the attackers as strangers to the area who did not know the lie of the land, and the local population as uninformed but friendly. In this way, he styled the dead missionaries as martyrs who had died for the Christian cause – victims of a superordinated dispute between Christian civilization and ‘primitive’ paganism, and/or Islamic ‘decadence’, rather than parties in a concrete, historically locatable conflict.61 This elicited euphoric responses from the monks and nuns back in St. Ottilien. It fueled the romanticization of missionary life and a cult of self-sacrifice in the name of religion.62 They were inspired by the concept of ecclesia militans combined with a form of piety based on suffering, sacrifice, and Christian discipleship that was deeply rooted in the Catholic doctrine of grace: sacrifice would be followed by new life, and bring God’s blessing.63

230  Richard Hölzl Amrhein’s narrativization and framing of the conflict should be viewed in the light of the Catholic mission’s relationship to colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century. In this period, Church policy on colonialism changed at the urging of the French cardinal Charles de Lavigerie, who launched an anti-slavery campaign concurrently with the ‘scramble for Africa’. European powers – Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium – conquered territories in Africa by military means while formalizing rule at various diplomatic conferences. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, the great powers sealed the ‘package deal’ of colonial rule with a civilizing mission, focused on the fight against slavery. Henceforth to be a legitimate colonial power, a nation needed not only to have enough political power to enforce its claim to rule, but also to pledge to promote the “elevation of the moral and material welfare of the native peoples” and to work toward “the suppression of slavery and especially the negro trade”.64 The missions were assured ‘freedom of worship’ in the African territories. The ‘humanitarian’ and ‘Christian’ thrust to imperial policy assigned the missions a key role. From having been largely marginalized in 1884, Catholics pushed to the forefront in 1888, when the Holy See launched a diplomatic offensive and Pope Leo XIII followed Lavigerie’s call in the In Plurimis encyclical.65 Here, he described slavery in Africa as an “perfidy and cruelty” committed by “Mohammedans” who forced Africans “to conform to the religious rites of Mahomet”. Christian missionaries, in contrast, were to “shine indeed as worthy ministers of salvation, authors of consolation, messengers of peace, who, by God’s help, may turn solicitude, desolation, and fierceness into the most joyful fertility of religion and civilization.”66 Lavigerie, meanwhile, gave fervent speeches in Paris, London, and Brussels, calling on European governments to fulfill their responsibility as “Christian states”: It is true that the European states think of Africa, but apparently only insofar as they intend to take possession of it. It is easy to convene at a congress, to award oneself new realms by drawing a line on a map. But the Christian states must not forget that with their entitlements they have assumed duties […] to not let the natives perish helplessly [… ] [and] not again close off the territories that explorers have opened to civilization.67 The 1888 Catholic Convention in Freiburg collectively joined Lavigerie’s call, appealing to Christians’ responsibility before God and mankind through the ages and calling to mind the historic duty of ‘civilized nations’. An “Africa Society of German Catholics” was founded the same year. With its high-profile fundraising activities and publications, it brought the fight against slavery to a broader public. By the end of the year, Ludwig Windthorst, leader of the

Violence in Circulation?  231 Catholic Center Party, had successfully argued for a Reichstag resolution to support the government on measures against the trade in enslaved people.68 In his words, the trade “derided every Christian, yes, every human emotion”, and obstructed the “Christian civilization of Africa”.69 A few years previously, in 1886, Lavigerie had warned via diplomatic channels of the “eradication of all Europeans” by “fanatical” Muslims in the hinterland of the Swahili coast.70 The anti-slavery campaign of spring and summer 1888, which climaxed at the German Catholic Convention in September, took place only months before the violent incident that spelled the end of the Pugu mission. The proximity in time was no coincidence – the attack was a direct consequence of the colonial conquests that were gradually swallowing sub-Saharan Africa. Lavigerie’s own Society of Missionaries of Africa, or ‘White Fathers’, had been involved in a conflict over the control of the kingdom of Buganda, north of Lake Victoria, since 1886. That year, 43 Christians had been murdered there. As the European powers advanced, and fearing collaboration and insubordination, King (Kabaka) Mwanga had resolved to purge his court of Christians, but spared Christians outside the court. The White Fathers in Algiers portrayed the incident as the act of an African despot influenced by Muslim agitators and called on the European powers to intervene. Missionaries in the area, however, regarded Muslims as also under threat.71 Nonetheless, the incident contributed to establishing the rhetorical blend of criticism of Islam, fighting to end slavery, and a Christian civilizing mission. Formulating and harnessing anti-Islamic stereotypes was crucial for the formation of a politico-religious ideology of ‘Christian civilization’ in the late nineteenth century. As the Western concept of civilization gained a stronger religious dimension, Islamic societies were not regarded as underdeveloped potential targets of European civilizing missions but as the absolute opposite of ‘Christian civilization’. Yet, as the missionaries found, Islam had undeniable appeal to populations not only in many regions north of the Sahara but also in West and East Africa – often more than the Christian missions. The hostile conception of Islam served a political purpose and legitimized colonialism, as Rebekka Habermas has pointed out.72 Due to their local, political, economic, and cultural contexts, missions were useful for settling proto-colonial and colonial conflicts and styling them disputes between ‘Christian civilization’ and a ‘deviant’ Muslim culture over influence in Africa. Humanitarianism, Anti-Slavery, and the Christian Mission to Civilize: Fundamentals of Modern German Colonialism The ‘scramble for Africa’ and the negotiations, conferences, and campaigns it entailed introduced a new semantic field to international politics.

232  Richard Hölzl Henceforth it was connotated with humanitarianism and freedom from slavery, often linked with the fight against local ‘pagan’ or ‘Muslim despots’, and the Christian mission to ‘civilize’. This impetus had a legitimizing character and a resounding impact on European debates on colonialism.73 Both Catholic and Protestant missions now became agents of humanitarianism by reconceptualizing the enlightenment concept of civilization as a “Christian mission to civilize”.74 Bismarck adopted the new rhetoric when he called on the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury to end the trade in enslaved people in late October 1888. Stressing the “common duty” of “[a]ll nations participating in the promotion of Christian morality”, he repeated almost verbatim Lavigerie’s appeal of a few months previously.75 The same semantic transformation can be observed in domestic politics: on November 22, 1888, to mark the opening of the Reichstag, Emperor Wilhelm II underlined the task of “winning every part [of Africa] for Christian morality” and ending the trade in enslaved people.76 One month prior, on October 23, 1888, Bismarck had instructed the government-loyal press to discuss the East African issue as a question of the trade to win over “public opinion for our anti-slavery efforts”.77 In late September – when the sultan’s hold on the coast had seemed to be broken by Abushiri’s troops – Bismarck approved the guarding of coastal towns and enforcement of an embargo on coastal trade by the German navy. In early October, he had still opposed a military intervention on the mainland because neither the public nor a majority in parliament supported it.78 The new, moral course of the German Empire’s East African policy was then unveiled by Under-Secretary Herbert von Bismarck on December 14, 1888: “So long as the horror of the slave trade […] exists, it is not possible to open Africa to morality, Christianity, and culture”.79 News of the destruction of Pugu on January 16, 1889, and the death and abduction of the missionaries, was immediately incorporated into the political debate.80 Herbert von Bismarck referred directly to the raid on the mission on January 26 when he introduced the bill that was to establish Germany’s ‘protective rule’ in East Africa. He reported that “some of the apparently self-sacrificing missionaries” had “fallen victim to the rebels” or were “in the hands of the insurgents”.81 Although there were some critical voices in the debate, who derided the anti-slavery campaign as a smokescreen for saving the East African Company, and others feared an escalation of the colonial dynamic, the imperial government prevailed.82 The humanitarian mark on global politics and colonialism convinced a large majority to support the bill. Soon the secular colonial movement embraced the antislavery motif as well.83 Further violence followed as a direct consequence of the media transfer of the incident in Pugu: a troop of mostly Sudanese mercenaries – recruited by Wissmann in Egypt and led by German officers – invaded East Africa. After defeating the Company’s enemies along the coast, they continued

Violence in Circulation?  233 fighting for several years, in a manner that Michael Pesek has described as “terror” to conquer the East African mainland.84 Over the next decades, a culture of colonial military violence emerged in the conquered territories that climaxed in World War I.85 Slavery was not abolished until the end of German colonialism in 1919. Even in 1914, hundreds and perhaps thousands of enslaved individuals were sold and bought with the approval of the local authorities who, indeed, taxed the trade.86 The religious nature of colonialism remained ambiguous and controversial: the immediate executors of colonial violence – the colonial soldiers – were mostly Muslims while the commanding Germans were Christians of varyingly firm denominational convictions. With the German military conquest, both Catholic and Protestant missionary activity spread throughout East Africa, serving as a considerable support for colonial rule. Yet, at the same time, the German colonial administration regarded Islam as a local resource which it sought to harness despite the fierce criticism of the missions.87 This strategy reached a climax in World War I when the German Empire tried to mobilize Muslims all over the world by agitating against their enemies.88 Conclusion This chapter has approached the destruction of the Catholic mission in Pugu as a micro-historical case study of an incident with transregional repercussions. It has detailed how a physically experienced act of violence that took place within the complex reality of emerging German colonialism in East Africa was received as a medially negotiable incident in the colonial metropole. After this transformation of the multiple facets of conflict, almost only religious aspects remained. The transformation was part of a rising discourse on colonial rule in which humanitarian interventions – understood as part of a global Christian mission to ‘civilize’ – legitimized European nations’ rule over societies in Africa and Asia. The cluster of information on the violence in the contact zone arriving in Germany via letters and eyewitness reports was reworked in mission publications into a simple narrative based on stereotypes and appealing to the emotions of mission supporters. This narrative was put to direct use in the Reichstag debates of January 1889 to generate political support for a colonial intervention. The circulation of violence continued, not least through the imperial parliament’s approval of funding the mercenary army that facilitated Germany’s invasion of East Africa. The simultaneous arrival of the mission and the Company men on the East African coast also triggered medial transmissions and religiously charged perceptions of the colonial advances within Swahili society. Historian Lawrence Mbogoni cites the Swahili epic Utenzi wa Vita Wadachi Kutamaliki Mrima (Tale of the War of the Germans on the Mrima Coast)

234  Richard Hölzl by Hemed Al-Buhry as an example for the genre’s politicization in the face of rising colonialism. It portrays the German colonizers as having politico-religious motives, running in one verse: “The infidels studied/The Torah and the Gospel/The books told them/A great event was imminent/ They came and entered”.89 The Swahili political class also used the narrativization of colonial violence for anti-colonial goals, to legitimize the rule of the Sultan of Zanzibar, or to promote local opponents of the Sultanate. For a deeper analysis of the circulation of violence further comparative research is needed. The example of the Pugu incident shows that the transfer of actual physical experiences of violence from the colony to the metropole in the form of narrativized and medially framed interpretations was a key feature of colonial rule. The difference between social experiences of violence and their media transformation point to an overarching problem. To make ‘religious violence’ a category of analysis requires a reflexive level which in modern societies, such as Imperial Germany’s, is often related to (mass-)media: it requires inquiry into when, by whom, and with the help of which rhetorical devices complex acts of violence are disambiguated to such an extent that they can be negotiated as ‘religious violence’ in social discourse. The violence that the people at the mission station in Pugu experienced was deeply entangled with the complex realities of rising colonialism in the region which included religion. But it became unambiguously ‘religious violence’ only through the communicative work of the mission in Germany. The ground had been prepared for the public’s reception of the message by the popularization of the concept of the ‘Christian mission to civilize’, European attitudes of superiority, and the Christian idea of mission, manifesting itself in the fight against slavery. This had advantages for both, the Catholic mission and the German government. The concept of ‘religious violence’ helped the Benedictines to define a clear objective; namely, to intensify their efforts to overcome religious opponents and expand the mission. For the German government it was a concrete occasion to illustrate the new moral course in foreign policy and rally the support for its colonialist goals. Notes 1 See Carl Peters, Kolonial-Politische Korrespondenz 2, February 9 and 16, 1886, accessed March 31, 2021, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document_ id=1871. 2 See Michael Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Ostafrika. Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005), 185–189. 3 Andreas Amrhein, “Bericht und Aufruf zur Befreiung der gefangenen Missionäre und Missions-Schwestern in Ostafrika”, January 16, 1889, Archiv der Missionsbenediktiner in St. Ottilien (hereafter ArchOtt) Z. 1. 06.

Violence in Circulation?  235 4 See Sebastian Napachihi, The Relationship between the German Missionaries of the Congregation of St. Benedict from St. Ottilien and the German Colonial Authorities in Tanzania, 1887–1907 (Ndanda: Mission Press, 1998), 136–151. 5 This is the title of the Swahili epic Utenzi wa Vita vya Wadachi Kutamaliki Mrima by Hemed Al-Buhry; see Lawrence Mbogoni, The Cross versus the Crescent. Religions and Politics in Tanzania from the 1880s to the 1990s (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota 2004), 28–29. 6 Hermann Wissmann, in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages, January 26, 1889, accessed March 31, 2021, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/, 606. 7 Otto von Bismarck, in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages, January 26, 1889, accessed March 31, 2021, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/, 621. 8 See Alf Lüdtke, Gewalt und Alltag im 20. Jahrhundert, accessed March 31, 2021, http://www.db-thueringen.de/receive/dbt_mods_00000828. 9 See Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Media and Cultural Studies. Key Works, eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). 10 See Frumentius Renner, “Vom Missionshaus in Reichenbach zur Benediktinerkongregation von St. Ottilien,” in Der fünfarmige Leuchter. Beiträge zum Werden und Wirken der Benediktinerkongregation von St. Ottilien, ed. Frumentius Renner (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1970). 11 Amrhein’s drawing was published to illustrate reports on the destruction of the mission in Pugu; see Die katholischen Missionen (1889), 80. 12 Andreas Amrhein, “Unsere Mission,” Missionsblätter Old Series 2 (1889). 13 Ibid., 376. 14 The Zaramo were a society that inhabited the hinterland of Dar es Salaam and Bagamoyo. 15 See Gilbert Gwassa, “The German Intervention and African Resistance in Tanzania,” in A History of Tanzania, eds. Isaria Kimambo and Arthur Temu (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), 101. 16 August Leue, Dar-es-Salaam. Bilder aus dem Kolonialleben (Berlin: Süsserott 1903), 14. This made Pugu one of the largest German establishments on the coast; see Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot. Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast 1856–1888 (Portsmouth: Pearson 1995), 196. 17 Amrhein, “Unsere Mission,” 385. On house building in Usaramo, see Fritz Bley, Deutsche Pionierarbeit in Ostafrika (Berlin: Parey, 1891), 97–110. 18 Otto Ehler, cit. in: Die katholischen Missionen (1889), 35. 19 See Siegfried Hertlein, Ndanda Abbey I. Beginning and Development up to 1942 (St. Ottilien: EOS, 2008), 51. 20 Bonifaz Fleschutz, “Eine Tagesreise ins Innere,” Missionsblätter, Old Series 1 (1888/89). 21 See Hertlein, Ndanda I, 44–46. 22 Alfons Adams, Im Dienste des Kreuzes. Erinnerungen aus meinem Missionsleben in Ostafrika (St. Ottilien: Missionsverlag, 1899), 9. 23 Amrhein, “Unsere Mission,” 377. 24 Ibid., 381. 25 Fleschutz, “Tagesreise,” 397–411. 26 Amrhein, “Unsere Mission,” 239. 27 Andreas Amrhein, “Das große Sühne- und Brandopfer in Pugu,” Missionsblätter Old Series 1 (1888/1889), 437. 28 See Bernita Walter, Von Gottes Treue getragen. Die Missions-Benedikterinnen von Tutzing, vol. I (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1984), 134.

236  Richard Hölzl 29 Victor Giraud, Les lacs de l’Afrique Équatoriale. Voyage d’exploration exécuté de 1883 à 1885 (Paris: Hachette, 1890), 52–53. 30 See Abdul Sheriff, “Tanzanian Societies at the Time of the Partition,” in Tanzania Under Colonial Rule, ed. Martin Kaniki (London: Longman, 1980); Edward Alpers, “The Coast and the Development of the Caravan Trade”, in A History of Tanzania, eds. Isaria Kimambo and Arthur Temu (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969). 31 See Heinz Schneppen, Sansibar und die Deutschen. Ein besonderes Verhältnis, 1844–1966 (Berlin: Lit, 2006), 262. 32 Walter, Treue I, 140; Amrhein, “Brandopfer,” 456–458. 33 See John Baur, 2000 Years of Christianity in Africa. An African Church History (Nairobi: Paulines, 2005), 230–232. 34 See the Benedictine mission’s annual report 1906/1907, ArchOtt Z. 1. 08. 35 See Napachihi, Relationship, 143–145. 36 See Amrhein, “Brandopfer,” 456–459. 37 See Richard Hölzl, “Rassismus, Ethnogenese und Kultur. Afrikaner im Blickwinkel der deutschen katholischen Mission im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” WerkstattGeschichte 59 (2011): 13. 38 Amrhein, “Unsere Mission,” 376. 39 Martin Klamroth, “Beiträge zum Verständnis der religiösen Vorstellungen der Saramo im Bezirk Daressalam,” Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen 1 (1910–11). 40 Fleschutz, “Tagesreise,” 405. 41 See Schneppen, Sansibar, 250–251; Glassman, Feasts, 187–188. 42 See Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft, 184. 43 See Ann Biersteker, Kujibizana. Questions of Language and Power in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Poetry in Kiswahili (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), 197. 44 See John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 88–107. 45 Walter, Treue I, 140. 46 Amrhein, “Brandopfer,” 484. 47 See Pesek, Herrschaft, 183–184. 48 See also Glassman, Feasts, 247. 49 Amrhein, “Brandopfer,” 439–450, 555–565. 50 Ibid., 556. 51 Ibid. 52 Napachihi, Relationship, 145–146; Rochus Schmidt, Brief an die bayrische katholische Missionsgesellschaft, 5 June 1889, ArchOtt Z. 1. 06. 53 Amrhein, “Brandopfer,” 567. 54 Ibid., 570. 55 Letter from the East African Company to Amrhein, January 23, 1889, ArchOtt Z. 1. 04. 56 See Hertlein, Ndanda Abbey I, 52–57; Walter, Treue I, 141–147; Napachihi, Relationship, 136–151. 57 Bericht und Aufruf zur Befreiung der gefangenen Missionäre und MissionsSchwestern in Ostafrika. ArchOtt Z. 1. 06, January 16, 1889, 1–3. 58 Ibid. 59 “Vorgänge in Ostafrika,” Die Katholischen Missionen (1889), 80–81. 60 On these narrative mechanisms, see Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009). 61 Amrhein, “Bericht und Aufruf, 16. Januar 1889,” ArchOtt Z. 1. 06.

Violence in Circulation?  237 62 Brother Michael Hofer later recalled the monks’ “boundless enthusiasm for the missionary life”; Michael Hofer, Im Dienst und Schutz des Höchsten. Bruder Michael Hofer erzählt sein Leben (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1978), 86. The nuns showed similar reactions; Walter, Treue I, 146–147. 63 Amrhein, “Brandopfer,” 433. 64 Präambel und Kapitel 6 der Generalakte der Berliner Konferenz, in Protokolle und Generalakte der Berliner Afrika-Konferenz 1884–1885, ed. Frank Gatter (Bremen: Überseemuseum, 1984). 65 See François Renault, Cardinal Lavigerie, Churchman, Prophet, and Missionary (London: Athlone, 1994), 368. 66 Leo XIII, “In Plurimis,” accessed March 30, 2021, https://www.papalencyclicals. net/leo13/l13abl.htm. 67 “Lavigerie in London,” in Der Sclavenhandel in Africa und seine Greuel beleuchtet nach Vorträgen des Cardinal Lavigerie und Berichten von Forschern und Missionaren, ed. Humanus (Münster: Schöningh, 1888), 17. 68 “Document no. 27 (Appellation Windthorst),” in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, vol. 4 (Anlagen), 1888/1889, accessed March 31, 2021, http://www. reichstagsprotokolle.de/, 182. 69 Ludwig Windthorst, in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, January 1889, 26, accessed March 31, 2021, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/, 304. 70 Letter of the German Consul in Tunis to Chancelor Bismarck, June 1886, 14, attached a note by Lavigerie, undated, German Federal Archives, Colonial Office R1001/849. 71 See Renault, Lavigerie, 260–262, 277–279. 72 Rebekka Habermas, “Debates on Islam in Imperial Germany,” in Islam and the European Empires, ed. David Motadel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 73 See Daniel Laqua, “The Tensions of Internationalism: Transnational Anti-Slavery in the 1880s and 1890s,” The International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 711. Italian antislavery organizations legitimized the colonization of Libya; see Amalia Ribi Forclaz, Humanitarian Imperialism. The Politics of Anti-Slavery Activism, 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17–20. 74 For a comparison of Protestant and Catholic involvement in the German debate on colonialism, see, e.g., Richard Hölzl and Karolin Wetjen, “Negotiating the Fundamentals? German Missions and the Experience of the Contact Zone, 1850–1918,” in Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire. Transnational Approaches, ed. Rebekka Habermas (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2019). 75 Bismarck on October 21 and 23, 1888, cit. from Schneppen, Sansibar, 245. Lavigerie had written to Bismarck in 1886 and 1888, calling on him to intervene against the trade in enslaved people; Félix Klein, Cardinal Lavigerie und sein Afrikanisches Werk (Strasbourg: Le Roux, 1893), 228–234. 76 Emperor Wilhelm II, cit. from Schneppen, Sansibar, 249. 77 Otto von Bismarck, cit. from Fritz Müller, Deutschland – Zanzibar – Ostafrika. Geschichte einer deutschen Kolonialeroberung 1884–1890 (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1959), 401. 78 See Schneppen, Sansibar, 230–233. 79 Herbert von Bismarck, in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, December 14, 1888, accessed March 31, 2021, https://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/, 311. 80 East African Company to Amrhein, January 1889, 17, ArchOtt Z. 1. 05. 81 Herbert von Bismarck, in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, January 26, 1889, accessed March 31, 2021, https://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/, 604.

238  Richard Hölzl 82 Ludwig Windthorst, “Brief an Reuß am 17.12.1888,” in: idem, Briefe 1881–1891, ed. Hans-Georg Aschoff (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 705–707. 83 See Jan-Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East-Africa (London: Curry, 2006), 104–105. 84 See Pesek, Herrschaft, 191. 85 Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries. African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014). 86 See Deutsch, Emancipation, 97. 87 Michael Pesek, “Islam und Politik in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” in Alles unter Kontrolle. Disziplinierungsprozesse im kolonialen Tansania, 1850–1960, eds. Albert Wirz, et al. (Cologne: Koppe, 2003). 88 See David Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany’s Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 15–27; Michael Pesek, “Für Kaiser und Allah. Ostafrikas Muslime im Großen Krieg für die Zivilisation 1914–1919,” Bulletin der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft Mittlerer Osten und Islamische Kulturen 19 (2004). 89 Cit. from Lawrence Mbogoni, The Cross Versus the Crescent. Religion and Politics in Tanzania from the 1880s to the 1990s (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2004), 28–29.

Bibliography Adams, Alfons. Im Dienste des Kreuzes. Erinnerungen aus meinem Missionsleben in Ostafrika. St. Ottilien: Missionsverlag, 1899. Alpers, Edward “The Coast and the Development of the Caravan Trade.” In A History of Tanzania, edited by Isaria Kimambo and Arthur Temu, 35–56. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969. Amrhein, Andreas. “Das große Sühne- und Brandopfer in Pugu.” Missionsblätter, Old Series 1 (1888/1889): 433–450, 553–570. Amrhein, Andreas. “Unsere Mission.” Missonsblätter, Old Series 2 (1889): 25–33. Baur, John. 2000 Years of Christianity in Africa. An African Church History. Nairobi: Paulines, 2005. Biersteker, Ann. Kujibizana. Questions of Language and Power in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Poetry in Kiswahili. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996. Bley, Fritz. Deutsche Pionierarbeit in Ostafrika. Berlin: Parey, 1891. Breithaupt, Fritz. Kulturen der Empathie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009. Deutsch, Jan-Georg. Emancipation without Abolition in German East-Africa. London: Curry, 2006. Fleschutz, Bonifaz. “Eine Tagesreise ins Innere.” Missionsblätter Old Series 1 (1888/89): 397–411. Forclaz, Amalia Ribi. Humanitarian Imperialism. The Politics of Anti-Slavery Activism, 1880–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Gatter, Frank, ed. Protokolle und Generalakte der Berliner Afrika-Konferenz 1884– 1885. Bremen: Überseemuseum, 1984. Giraud, Victor. Les lacs de l’Afrique Équatoriale. Voyage d’exploration exécuté de 1883 à 1885. Paris: Hachette, 1890. Glassman, Jonathon. Feasts and Riot. Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888. Portsmouth: Pearson 1995.

Violence in Circulation?  239 Gwassa, Gilbert. “The German Intervention and African Resistance in Tanzania.” In A History of Tanzania, edited by Isaria Kimambo and Arthur Temu, 85–122. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969. Habermas, Rebekka. “Debates on Islam in Imperial Germany.” In Islam and the European Empires, edited by David Motadel, 233–255. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Media and Cultural Studies. Key Works, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, 163–173. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Hertlein, Siegfried. Ndanda Abbey I. Beginning and Development up to 1942. St. Ottilien: EOS, 2008. Hofer, Michael, and Frumentius Renner. Im Dienst und Schutz des Höchsten. Bruder Michael Hofer erzählt sein Leben. St. Ottilien: EOS, 1978. Hölzl, Richard, and Karolin Wetjen. “Negotiating the Fundamentals? German Missions and the Experience of the Contact Zone, 1850–1918”. In Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire. Transnational Approaches, edited by Rebekka Habermas, 196–234. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. Hölzl, Richard. “Rassismus, Ethnogenese und Kultur. Afrikaner im Blickwinkel der deutschen katholischen Mission im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.” WerkstattGeschichte 59 (2011): 7–34. Humanus. Der Sclavenhandel in Africa und seine Greuel beleuchtet nach Vorträgen des Cardinal Lavigerie und Berichten von Forschern und Missionaren. Münster: Schöningh, 1888. Iliffe, John. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Klamroth, Martin. “Beiträge zum Verständnis der religiösen Vorstellungen der Saramo im Bezirk Daressalam (Deutsch-Ostafrika).” Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen 1 (1910–1911): 37–70, 118–153, and 189–223. Klein, Félix. Cardinal Lavigerie und sein Afrikanisches Werk. Strasbourg: Le Roux, 1893. Laqua, Daniel. “The Tensions of Internationalism: Transnational Anti-Slavery in the 1880s and 1890s.” The International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 705–726. Leo XIII, “In Plurimis.” Papal Encyclicals Online. Accessed March 30, 2021, https:// www.papalencyclicals.net/leo13/l13abl.htm. Leue, August. Dar-es-Salaam. Bilder aus dem Kolonialleben. Berlin: Süsserott, 1903. Lüdtke, Alf. “Gewalt und Alltag im 20. Jahrhundert.” Accessed March 31, 2021, http://www.db-thueringen.de/receive/dbt_mods_00000828. Mbogoni, Lawrence. The Cross versus the Crescent. Religion and Politics in Tanzania from the 1880s to the 1990s. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2004. Motadel, David. Islam and Nazi Germany’s Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Moyd, Michelle. Violent Intermediaries. African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014. Müller, Fritz. Deutschland – Zanzibar – Ostafrika. Geschichte einer deutschen Kolonialeroberung 1884–1890. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1959.

240  Richard Hölzl Napachihi, Sebastian. The Relationship between the German Missionaries of the Congregation of St. Benedict from St. Ottilien and the German Colonial Authorities in Tanzania, 1887–1907. Ndanda and Peramiho: Mission Press, 1998. Pesek, Michael. “Für Kaiser und Allah. Ostafrikas Muslime im Großen Krieg für die Zivilisation 1914–1919.” Bulletin der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft Mittlerer Osten und Islamische Kulturen 19 (2004): 9–18. Pesek, Michael. “Islam und Politik in Deutsch-Ostafrika.” In Alles unter Kontrolle. Disziplinierungsprozesse im kolonialen Tansania, 1850–1960, edited by Albert Wirz, Kathrin Bromber, and Andreas Eckert, 99–140. Cologne: Koppe, 2003. Pesek, Michael. Koloniale Herrschaft in Ostafrika. Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880. Frankfurt: Campus, 2005. Peters, Carl. Kolonial-Politische Korrespondenz 2, February 9 and 16, 1886. Accessed March 31, 2021, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document_id=1871. Renault, François. Cardinal Lavigerie, Churchman, Prophet, and Missionary. London: Athlone, 1994. Renner, Frumentius. “Vom Missionshaus in Reichenbach zur Benediktinerkongregation von St. Ottilien.” In Der fünfarmige Leuchter. Beiträge zum Werden und Wirken der Benediktinerkongregation von St. Ottilien, edited by Frumentius Renner, 1–336. St. Ottilien: EOS, 1970. Schneppen, Heinz. Sansibar und die Deutschen. Ein besonderes Verhältnis, 1844–1966. Berlin: Lit, 2006. Sheriff, Abdul. “Tanzanian Societies at the Time of the Partition.” In Tanzania Under Colonial Rule, edited by Martin Kaniki, 11–50. London: Longman, 1980. Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages und seiner Vorgänger, 1867–1942. Accessed March 31, 2021, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/. Walter, Bernita. Von Gottes Treue getragen. Die Missions-Benedikterinnen von Tutzing, vol. I. St. Ottilien: EOS, 1984. Windthorst, Ludwig. Briefe 1881–1891, edited by Hans-Georg Aschoff. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002.

11 Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa Violence and the Creation of Religious Statehood in South-Eastern Congo during the Partition Era, 1867–1914 Reuben A. Loffman

This chapter concentrates on the attempt made by two sets of Catholic missionaries to exert state-like powers in the Congo Free State and its successor, the Belgian Congo. The Free State was the culmination of King Léopold II of Belgium’s diplomatic and military efforts to occupy a region in Africa that was approximately seventy-two times the size of his own country. It was most famous for meting out mass violence against the Congolese people in the hunt for rubber profits. After an international outcry against those atrocities, the king had to turn his fiefdom over to the Belgian parliament and it became known as the ‘Belgian’ Congo by 1908. The political structure of both states remained extremely centralized, at least theoretically, with bureaucratic power vested in Brussels and orders being transmitted through a pyramid comprized of governors-general, provincial governors, and territorial governors. Territories in turn tended to be broken down into chieftainships with the chiefs who ran them being the highest African members of the colonial administration during this period. Many of these chiefs and their subjects practiced various forms of ancestor veneration in which deceased leaders were offered tributes in publicly visible locations, such as hills. Statues would also occasionally be sculpted as a means of communing with ancestors. Rather than concentrating on the cosmological thought that existed before the advent of the mission encounter, this chapter examines the violence that played a formative role in the Catholic Church’s establishment in the South East of the Free State. The imposition of church authority in this region was the result of a series of militant confrontations between armies, institutions, and individuals. Historians have so far identified two distinct yet inter-related reasons why the Church became involved in cycles of violence in Central Africa. First, Allen Roberts, David Northrup, and myself have argued that the Catholic Church had state-like pretensions in south-eastern Congo, and that these sometimes clashed with pre-existing potentates’ claims to land and resources.1 In particular, the founder of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-16

242  Reuben A. Loffman Society of Missionaries of Africa, or ‘White Fathers’, Cardinal Lavigerie, saw in the establishment of a ‘Christian Kingdom’ in south-eastern Congo a means of diffusing what he believed to be Christian civilization across that part of Central Africa, just as he had believed Christian kingdoms had done in Europe centuries before.2 He also saw the foundation of a Christian polity as a way of counter-balancing the supposed liberal materialism of the pioneering arm of the Free State project: the International African Association.3 Abolitionism forced the White Fathers to seek out areas ‘free of slavery’ for which they employed Léopold-Louis Joubert, a former papal zouave, who then used violence to confiscate these areas on their behalf.4 David Gordon, for example, has expertly explained how abolitionism played a very important role in the theocracy that the White Fathers tried to establish.5 Indeed, Catholic missionaries practiced ransoming enslaved people, or buying their liberty from traders, in a way that they eventually realized simply perpetuated the self-same violent cycles they wanted to stop.6 This chapter aims to contribute to the conclusions already drawn by the historical literature about the relationship between Catholicism and violence in south-eastern Congo in three ways. First, it synergizes the historiography in such a way as to systematically show how early mission encounters involved violence in order to establish a state-like Catholic presence in southeastern Congo. Secondly, the chapter argues that while missionaries often operated at a distance to the militaristic violence that took place outside the confines of their out-stations, they partook in violence within their stations, which was designed to uphold strict disciplinary codes for Africans. In particular, missionary-led corporal punishment, while by no means exclusive to south-eastern Congo, was considered a fundamental part of church training. Thirdly, the chapter argues that the violence that was so central to the Catholic mission encounter in south-eastern Congo was intertwined with the politics of statehood in line with Karen Armstrong’s thinking on the relationship between religion and violence.7 While religion was more than simply rhetoric used to justify a political venture, that is, it motivated participants to engage in a political project, faith was ultimately subordinated to the political means by which missionaries felt that they had to resort to so as to establish their Christian Kingdom. Violence was crucial to the Church’s attempt to establish networks of out-stations and, afterwards, to try to gain cultural hegemony over the minds of potential African converts. Both these forms of violence were trivialized or minimized in in-house mission writing – with violence committed by Africans outside mission stations presented as savage and irrational. To investigate the history of Catholicism in Tanganyika, synonymous with south-eastern Congo in this chapter, this text draws on a wide range of

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  243 sources, not least mission diaries and colonial state documents. Many of these documents come from the White Fathers’ headquarters in Rome and the Spiritans’ in Paris. European sources will frequently be read ‘against the grain’, which, in Luise White’s words, is a form of reading “at odds with the master narratives with which documents were conceived and written.”8 These master narratives were imbued, first, with a sense of progress, which scholars such as David Maxwell have noted in the context of missionary writing in the Belgian Congo, even if they could sometimes be pessimistic too.9 Secondly, mission reportage tended to present missionaries as blameless; so little about their involvement in violence is covered in any kind of detail. As a result, violence, and particularly corporal punishment, has to be discerned by reference to outside sources as well as by interrogating the stories missionaries told “in spite of themselves.”10 Militaristic Violence and Society in East-Central Africa The violence involved in the Church’s foundation in south-eastern Congo was closely bound up in countervailing processes of slaving, slavery, and abolition. Although enslaved individuals had been exported to East Africa for centuries, a range of factors in the nineteenth century accelerated this trade.11 First, the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade by the United Kingdom’s parliament in 1807 and the British Navy’s subsequent patrolling of West Africa shifted many Atlantic slavers eastwards where such patrols were sparser. Secondly, as Jan-Georg Deutsch suggested: “In the 1870s and 1880s the commercialisation of plantation agriculture on the coast advanced considerably.”12 A fall in spice prices, corresponding with the generalized depression in the late nineteenth century, meant investors sought more profitable crops inland. The owners of these plantations “attempted to practice a particularly regimented form of slavery.”13 Thirdly, connections between East Africa and the Middle East intensified during the nineteenth century and so many enslaved people were taken to ports such as Muscat.14 The increasing numbers of people involved in slaving and slavery in Eastern Africa, estimated at “well over a million […] during the nineteenth century,” meant that a number of changes took place that were relevant to the societies that Catholic missionaries encountered upon their arrival in East and Central Africa.15 First, there was considerable political tumult as preexisting leaders without access to firearms were replaced by predominantly young men, known colloquially as the Ruga Ruga, who had access to superior weaponry.16 The Ruga Ruga took enslaved people, first, for themselves and, secondly, for their masters, not least Tippu Tip: one of the premier slavers in the eastern savanna in the late nineteenth century.17 Having begun his career on the eastern African coast, Tippu Tip had made enough money

244  Reuben A. Loffman to gain credit for a number of large raiding ventures into the interior. The eastern African trade in enslaved people involved, also, a burgeoning commerce in ivory that necessitated the use of firearms and large caravans. At times, slavers such as Tippu Tip, financed by Zanzibari merchants and often born on that archipelago, created settlements known as bomas or forts.18 Missionaries – Catholic and Protestant – tended to congregate around bomas given that they were populated with enslaved people who were more “religiously biddable” than their peers because they were social outsiders.19 Alongside the changes to the built environment and political culture, other important social transformations included, first, the spread of the Swahili language, which was a mixture of Bantu languages with Arabic.20 Secondly, in Melvin Page’s words, “a new class of Wangwana (lit., freemen) emerged among whom distinctions of enslaved and free became blurred.”21 The ambiguity that surrounded the status of the Wangwana, who were often simultaneously Ruga Ruga, was less important than the fact that they followed the slavers and disassociated themselves from their former societies that were in turn referred to by the Zanzibari slavers as the washenzi or pagans. Although many young men involved in the Indian Ocean Slave Trade became Muslims, many later became Christian converts – either to Protestantism or Catholicism. And, much as David Maxwell suggests: “Sensing that the future belonged to them, many became catechists and evangelists, later introduc[ed] Christian notions of patriarchy into […] rural society as they became elders themselves.”22 Slavery and slaving were therefore fundamental to the mission encounter between Catholic missionaries and Central African societies. Like their Protestant counterparts, Catholic missionaries fervently denounced the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, and particularly so in the case of those churchmen and women who went to what is now the province of Tanganyika.23 The Arrival of the ‘Spiritans’ and the ‘White Fathers’ The two missionary groups involved in this chapter – the Holy Ghost Fathers (‘Spiritans’) and the Society of Missionaries of Africa (‘White Fathers’) – were also influenced by a range of nineteenth-century phenomena. The Spiritans had admittedly been established earlier, in 1703, yet many of their original number had been killed during the French Revolution.24 Given their sparse numbers, in 1848 the Vatican finally acceded to Francis Libermann’s longstanding request that the Holy Ghost Fathers merge with the new Society of the Holy Heart of Mary that he had founded. Libermann’s Society had been largely – though not exclusively – established to convert formerly enslaved people and so in their terms, “preparing [them] for […] emancipation” within the context of the French Empire in particular.25 The Spiritans’ emphasis on emancipation corresponded with the ambitions of the White Fathers with whom they usually maintained friendly relations.

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  245 Given their emphasis on working with enslaved people of African descent, the Spiritans enjoyed a longstanding relationship with Africa. For much of the early nineteenth century, however, the majority of this work had been confined to West Africa and Senegal in particular.26 It was only when what Daniel Headrick describes as the “tools of empire,” such as quinine, steamships, guns – and trains in the Spiritans’ case – became more widely available that the Congregation could make their way further inland.27 The Spiritans had worked in the French Congo (1883) as well as in what is now Angola (1881) before they decided to go to the Congo Free State.28 Rather than coming in large part from the East, via ports such as Dar Es Salaam in what is now Tanzania, they approached south-eastern Congo from the West and their bases in Francophone Central Africa. Once there, they “encountered ready-made Christian communities of ouvriers and licenciés, current and former workers who had been employed in railway construction” in towns such as Kongolo.29 These peoples had originally been trafficked from the Luba, Songye, and Lunda territories of what would become the Belgian Congo before being Christianized in Angola.30 Around the same time that the Spiritans arrived in south-eastern Congo, the White Fathers joined them. The latter had been created by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie in 1868 to stop slaving and slavery in the Maghreb and beyond.31 Although the Spiritans were founded in 1703, their mid-nineteenth century revival means that they too were influenced by popular European debates about abolition and emancipation. Unlike the Spiritans, however, the White Fathers initially wanted to proselytize Muslims – much to the consternation of French colonial administrators such as General de MacMahon who did not want to further antagonize their subjects by allowing Christian mission activity among Muslims.32 Given Lavigerie’s ambition to convert Muslims en masse, and much as Adrian Hastings suggested, the White Fathers’ headquarters was “based quite deliberately not in France but in North Africa – in Algiers and in Carthage, outside Tunis.”33 Yet, because their plans in the Maghreb were ultimately frustrated, they started to work further south. Initially, the White Fathers wanted to traverse the Sahara overland yet they lost many of its members in so doing. As such, they began to explore maritime means of accessing Eastern Africa, often using the port of Dar Es Salaam to enter what is now Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although David Northrup only used the expression to refer to the White Fathers’ relationship with the Colonial State, Belgian officials acted as “secular protectors” for the Spiritans also.34 They may have quibbled with some of the violence of Belgian conquest, but they rarely if ever protested about the actions of the Free State’s army: the Force Publique. The entanglement between the White Fathers and the Free State’s precursor, the International

246  Reuben A. Loffman African Association, is more obvious than the relationship between the Spiritans and the Free State given that the former were never expelled from the territory as the latter were.35 Léopold II, who directed and organized the Free State, was concerned that the territory he was granted at the Berlin Conference could be conquered – in whole or in part – by another European power and not least France. That the Spiritans were headquartered in France and contained many francophone clergy made the Belgian king so nervous that he actually asked them to leave in 1886.36 Conscious of the king’s fears of foreign involvement, Cardinal Lavigerie chose the Belgian national Victor Roelens to lead the White Fathers in the Congo.37 Roelens, from Ardooie in West Flanders, would not be expelled. As a result, the White Fathers had considerable momentum in the Free State and, later, the Belgian Congo. The White Fathers and the Making of a ‘Christian Kingdom’ in SouthEastern Congo The ‘Christian Kingdom’ that Lavigerie had initially envisaged, however, was not necessarily ever going to be included in the Free State nor headed by Roelens. In fact, Lavigerie had initially hoped that King Mwezi IV Gisabo Bikata-Bijoga (1850–1908) of what is now Burundi would be the ‘Christian King’ he desired, with his domains roughly encompassing the site of his ‘Christian Kingdom.’38 As such, the White Fathers arrived at a town called Rumonge in 1879 with high hopes. However, the idea of a White Fathers mission in Burundi proved too difficult after two members of the Society were slain two years later.39 This meant that Lavigerie chose another location for the ‘Christian Kingdom.’40 He also needed new protection for his missionaries. At first, he turned to the Knights of Malta but they refused his request.41 Instead, a former papal zouave called Léopold-Louis Joubert agreed to help him.42 The historian David Gordon writes that “Joubert, a model Catholic soldier […] arrived in Mpala in 1887 and took over the civil administration and recruitment of soldiers.”43 Mpala was a town on the western coast of Lake Tanganyika. It had been chosen by the White Fathers as a base for a variety of reasons. First, having been effectively ousted from Burundi – or Urundi as the German colony was then known – the White Fathers needed somewhere else to go. Secondly, they were keen on following the East African slaving routes that fed the Indian Ocean Slave Trade given that they were, first, abolitionists, and, secondly, initially willing to ransom enslaved people to form the nucleus of their early congregations. Finally, there were historic reasons why Mpala, in the Congo Free State, should have appealed. It is worth briefly detailing these reasons to properly contextualize the White Fathers’ decision to establish a base there.

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  247 Of particular note was that Lavigerie had very good relations with Léopold II irrespective of Roelens’ appointment as Vicar Apostolic of Upper Congo in 1895.44 His relationship with the Belgian king meant that he had secured the base of Mpala from the latter in place of the person who had conquered it on behalf of the International African Association: Émile Storms.45 Storms was livid to be recalled from Mpala in early 1885. Yet, he nonetheless handed over his base there to Isaac Moinet and Auguste Moncet, both French White Fathers, who saw themselves as involved in a process of forming a new theocracy. Throughout the time that Moinet and Moncet focused on spiritual and more secular matters, violence was never far away in those early days at Mpala. As Gordon suggests, “the White Fathers would take advantage of the full range of transactions in rights-in-persons, from the use and recruitment of military slaves to violent capture, ransoming, debt enslavement, pawning, and purchase.”46 Although Émile Storms had been forced to return to Belgium, ‘King’ Joubert remained with the White Fathers to take over the local administration and the recruitment of soldiers.47 According to his own account: “In 1890 […] he defeated a local chief, Katele, who had refused to return the slaves he had raided.”48 Joubert later occupied Katele’s territory, which he renamed Saint Louis, after the French crusader King Louis IX, from its original name of Mrumbi. He then set about organizing the remnants of the Wangwana into an army. Much of it remained in Joubert’s hands, even if there were some rebellions against his authority. As such, according to Allen Roberts, “a de facto state existed at Mpala, well into the 1890s.”49 That Joubert had raised an army and fought to establish and maintain the boundaries of this nascent State meant that missionaries such as Moinet and Moncet did not actually have to undertake violence themselves and therefore could afford to relegate it to the periphery of their thinking most of the time. Even with a state-like presence established, violence continued. From their base at Mpala, Joubert’s forces conducted raids against the most prominent slavers, though they often lost these struggles.50 Mpala itself was burned nearly to the ground in 1885 (despite this, work on the reconstruction had already been finished by 1890).51 At the same time, significant potentates such as Mohamed bin Khalfan (known by the nom de guerre ‘Rumaliza’ or ‘The Finisher’) only “intensified his slaving along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, north of the ‘Christian Kingdom’.”52 As a result, the White Fathers created the base of ‘Baudouinville’ (Kirungu) shortly after they established Saint Louis.53 Likewise, given the precarious political position of chiefs outside the White Fathers’ enclaves, many vulnerable people sought missionaries out in order to make a better, more stable life for themselves. However, many of these internal refugees were enslaved as a result of the extremely strict disciplinary system established in Saint Louis early on.

248  Reuben A. Loffman For example, theft typically necessitated the payment of three times the value of the stolen item.54 Given that those involved in theft frequently did not have much money, enslavement followed in order to pay off the debt. Alongside this process of judicial enslavement in Saint Louis, redemption was by far the most important means by which people found themselves enslaved there. The White Fathers distinguished between those enslaved people they ransomed for personal use (a process called acheter) and those they bought to liberate (racheter).55 Given that the practice of ransoming, particularly in its ‘racheter’ form, looked a lot like slavery, the White Fathers began to phase it out by the turn of the century. Aside from the enslavement taking place in the confines of Saint Louis and Baudouinville, the mere existence of Joubert within the Mpala ‘Christian Kingdom’ began to create problems for Cardinal Lavigerie because the White Fathers were increasingly being linked to his militarism even if it was conducted against slavers such as “Rumaliza and his allies.”56 So, the question that Lavigerie had wrestled with throughout much of the 1880s – the choice between nurturing a militaristic missionary order or distancing the White Fathers from the militarism that had been fundamental to their establishment in the Congo – resurfaced.57 The cardinal had never been averse to establishing an armed mission group but he was also painfully aware that this idea was unpopular in many European quarters, not least the United Kingdom.58 Secondly, the state-like powers Joubert’s army gave the White Fathers were increasingly in conflict with the territorial aspirations of the Free State administration. Even as early as the mid-1880s, Free State agents were encroaching into the area west of Lake Tanganyika.59 Given these factors, by the turn of the century, Joubert’s status was reduced to that of a “simple particular” and he was only “allowed to handle minor [judicial] cases.”60 By the turn of the twentieth century, Mpala and Baudouinville, while operating largely independently of Free State rule, were nonetheless legally intertwined with a Léopoldian administration capable of acting as the Church’s “secular protector.”61 In 1897, the White Fathers were establishing arrangements for the Free State to subsidize their education programs.62 Likewise, the Belgian administration was clarifying the fact that it could impose import duties on commodities in the ‘Christian Kingdom.’ Even if the White Fathers’ nascent polity, which was rebranded the Vicariate Apostolic of Upper Congo, had been absorbed into the jurisdiction of the Free State this did not mean that the Church was secure. There was still a good deal of slaving taking place outside the White Fathers’ strongholds of Mpala and Baudouinville, for example.63 Roelens constantly complained to the Free State authorities about the caravan trades occurring – but his attention was also turning to extending his network of

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  249 out-stations into the Congolese hinterland. The vicar apostolic founded a station in Kasongo in March 1903, and this would be followed by others, notably Sola, afterwards.64 Slaving remained a factor in Congolese life, as an entry in the White Fathers’ mission diary from Sola in 1913 suggested, but the violence of conquest was steadily superseded by the symbolic violence of mission discipline.65 The White Fathers, together with their cohort of rachetés, as well as the Spiritans, used a range of corporal punishments to engineer the kind of pristine communities they hoped would rival the industrial forces increasingly making their presence felt in other parts of the Congo. The White Fathers’ Disciplinary Regime As straightforward militarism began to feature less in the lives of the White Fathers in south-eastern Congo, not least with their absorption into the Free State by the turn of the century, education began to feature more in their thinking. The White Fathers’ commitment to education was more than mirrored by the Spiritans. Both groups of missionaries used some form of closed-chapel system called chapelles-écoles (school-chapels). School-chapels, like their fermes-chapelles (farm-chapels) forebears developed by the Jesuits in Lower Congo, were designed to alienate particularly young potential converts from their ancestral traditions and expose them only to Church discipline and principles.66 The high walls of, say, Mpala, meant that this town in many ways already operated like a closed-chapel system that was largely divorced from the social world around it.67 Correspondingly, a normal school was already established in Mpala in 1894.68 The strict system of discipline that the White Fathers had established in Mpala was replicated throughout the hinterland of what was to become the Tanganyika district. To this end, one of the most important of the White Fathers’ out-stations constructed in the wake of the creation of the Vicariate Apostolic of Upper Congo was Sola, in what would become the territory of Kongolo, in 1909. Rather than patterned by violence, Roelens’ decision to establish a base in Sola was made because there were no signs of sleeping sickness in the town.69 The Sola school chapel was one of the first the White Fathers created in the Tanganyika hinterland and was initially met with incredulity on the part of the local population.70 As such, the rachetés core of catechists, who were drawn largely from a group that would come to be known as the Bango-Bango, were crucial to the sustaining of the Sola mission named after the patron saint of Bruges: Saint Donat.71 While the rachetés were important to the functioning of the White Fathers’ out-station, they were still subject to the same disciplinary code as the converts from Sola

250  Reuben A. Loffman itself, who were mainly the Báhêmbá peoples of the Bena Nkuvu (‘people of the turtle’) grouping.72 The disciplinary regime in Sola as elsewhere in the White Fathers’ outstations revolved around controlling Africans’ mobility and preserving an uncompromising routine in the chapelle-école. Although written primarily about Baudouinville rather than Sola, there is much truth in Valentine Mudimbe’s claim that “village life was subordinated to the missionaries’ schedule” with missionaries being able to “rapidly command time and its categories.”73 Certainly, those who came to live in the Sola out-station could only leave with the express permission of the superior and this could only be granted on certain occasions given the demands of religious life. While there was naturally some variance across out-stations, the following general routine was preponderant: “Morning prayers [followed] the mass, and immediately after [came] ‘Christian instruction’. […] [T]he afternoon [was] devoted to a different labor – agriculture or construction, depending on seasons, till 6 P.M., the moment of a compulsory evening prayer […] A dinner [followed] and then, till 9 P.M. curfew, recreation.”74 In short, “missionaries […] regulated everything.”75 The school-chapel system was the product not only of the Church’s earlier encounters with African societies but also of Roelens’ and his colleagues’ distaste for many aspects of the African societies they encountered in southeastern Congo. Although he always insisted on his missionaries being able to speak local languages fluently, a belief shared by many White Fathers such as Amaat Vyncke (1850–1888), who worked in the Congo at the time, Roelens was generally hostile to African systems of thought.76 He wrote at length about the “moral depravation” of the African societies in Upper Congo.77 He believed, moreover, that the latter were deficient – often morally – in a number of ways that the White Fathers were not. Even the Bena Nkuvu, who the superior of the Sola out-station at the time, Auguste van Acker, believed were intelligent and enterprising, were at the same time described as “superstitious,” “polygamous,” “angry,” and “vengeful.”78 Another important element of life for the missionaries was the fact that they were in competition with the local political economy.79 It was very hard, for example, to attract neophytes to the Sola out-station during the harvest season, with one of the main local agricultural occupations being peanut farming.80 In one instance Auguste van Acker suggested that farmwork was a “ruse by Satan to diminish our influence.”81 Unsurprisingly, he complained vociferously in the mission diary during the year 1912–1913 that the local people simply did “too much cultivation.”82 Such close attention to farming was hardly rare among rural African societies, yet many missionaries still struggled to compete with its obvious commercial and subsistence benefits.

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  251 Given their awareness of the profitability of agricultural work, as well as their pessimistic opinion of local expressive cultures, the White Fathers believed that discipline was fundamental. However, references to the punishments inflicted on those who transgressed mission rules are rare in the White Fathers documentation. Rather than describe physical punishments, mission diaries and reports concentrate far more on their successes in terms of baptisms, confirmations, and examination passes. Even so, some references to punishment are made in the archives. On January 5, 1912, a catechist called Zebedeo Twaliwose exited the Sola out-station, according to Van Acker because he had been caught in an act of “open theft” and so had left to avoid punishment.83 The missionary never explained what punishment Twaliwose faced but it must have been severe if he felt forced to flee the out-station. Emilio Callewaert, the Spiritans, and Corporal Punishment At times, mission discipline was imposed outside of the mission station much as it was being administered in it. To illustrate this point, it is useful to look at the Spiritans. They had generally followed the Great Lakes Rail Company down to the Tanganyika region in the early twentieth century and had established a range of schools there by the time World War I broke out.84 Among the first of the Spiritan missions in Tanganyika was the StCoeur de Marie de Kongolo yet there were a number of others, not least Braine L’Alleud in Lubunda. The Spiritans were known to use harsh punishments in the schools that they established. Although we do not have many records of violence, one of the most important sources to support the fact corporal punishment happened in Spiritan schools comes from Father Henry Koren, one of the Spiritans’ most notable historians. In his comprehensive history of the congregation, he wrote that some missionaries during this early phase had used the rod but that it was eventually phased out after its use had been discouraged by superiors.85 However, there is little evidence that the use of harsh punishments by the Spiritans had in fact died out after World War I. Emilio Callewaert, who became the Prefect of the Northern Katanga Prefecture Apostolic in 1912, believed that corporal punishment was necessary in the Tanganyika region and beyond.86 Colonial reports written in the 1920s suggest that he had instigated a ‘fierce disciplinary regime’ from 1912 onwards.87 Not only was corporal punishment used internally in the Spiritans’ facilities he oversaw; but he would even administer it outside their concessions. Those punishments could include being whipped with a hippopotamus-hide whip known as a chicotte. Given the infrastructure that the Church had erected before World War I, the Belgian colonial administration did not

252  Reuben A. Loffman challenge Callewaert on this matter even if the Prefect enforced canon and not secular, colonial law. A lawsuit by a European doctor that was instigated after Callewaert’s death brought his ‘disciplinary regime’ into sharp focus again yet the State did nothing – presumably because the cleric had already died. What distinguished Callewaert’s actions in the 1923 case was that he had whipped a woman he had suspected of adultery right outside the territorial bureau of Kongolo. Callewaert’s case therefore suggests that mission discipline was not a feature peculiar to out-stations but was even enforced outside them on occasion. We only really see Callewaert’s disciplinary regime in archives from the colonial State as Church records do not mention whipping. It is a shame that similar documentation does not exist for the White Fathers’ strongholds of Mpala and Kirungu as it might have been possible to see similar extensions of mission discipline in and around these bases too. In many respects, therefore, the fact that the Spiritans worked more closely to colonial administrative buildings allows us as historians to see their disciplinary regime more clearly than their coreligionists in the Society of Missionaries of Africa on occasion. While information about the violence that took place in mission stations is difficult to ascertain from the remaining sources, mission documents are replete with details about the violence that they observed in the African societies that surrounded them. Rather than remedial, justified, or progressive, which is how mission violence is usually presented in in-house reports, the violence that missionaries associated with African societies was presented as savage, immoral, and retrograde. There are too many examples of mission representations of African violence to be in any way comprehensive but space allows for two to be presented here. The most obvious example relates to the closed association, or an organization whose membership is restricted but whose activities were visible to the wider public, known as ‘Bamangimba.’ Auguste van Acker suggested in his report that those young people who gave up membership of Bamangimba, which he described as an “infantile sect” that recruited people by will or by force on occasion, to enroll in the Church were “molested and even beaten.”88 A second example of mission presentation of African violence before World War I comes in the form of the complex inter-village political relationships that existed before the White Fathers settled in Sola. For a long time, the Sola chief had expected tribute from the Bena Kasanga in the form of proceeds from leopard hunts. However, in 1910, this tribute did not occur despite a hunt having taken place.89 As such, many of the Bena Nkuvu from Sola armed themselves in preparation for an attack on the Bena Kasanga. For their part, the latter did not want to pay tribute to the chief anymore because they saw him as having eschewed the political tradition they followed by embracing Catholic mission presence.90 Van

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  253 Acker wanted to intervene but, given the Bena Kasanga’s concerns about missionary activity, he felt unable to do so.91 Conclusion What is one to make of the links between Catholicism and the violence of the mission encounter in south-eastern Congo at the turn of the century? This chapter has emphasized that the state-like pretensions of Cardinal Lavigerie were a vitally important component of the violence that occurred on the eastern savanna in the nineteenth century. As such, much of the violence detailed here has little to do with Catholicism per se and much to do, first, with the creation of a Catholic state-like presence and, secondly, with maintaining it. What accentuated the violence was the fact that Lavigerie’s ‘Christian Kingdom’ had to be constructed in a region beset with practices of slaving and slavery. Whereas Lavigerie believed that any polity he established could transcend the conditions of the region in which he established it, the reverse proved to be the case. The ‘Christian Kingdom’ was suffused with practices of servitude and forced labor with both of these conditions reliant on violence. While the White Fathers were far more committed to building a theocracy than the Spiritans, Callewaert’s enforcement of mission discipline beyond the boundaries of his religious concessions demonstrated something of his political ambitions. The second part of this chapter turned to what kind of state or quasi-state was being erected by Catholic missionaries and, secondly, what light this can shed on the relationship between the Roman Church and violence. The existence of intimidating punishments, such as whipping, in out-stations is not unique to Catholicism nor to polities or facilities that were built and maintained by its missionaries. The crucial point here is that the polities and networks Lavigerie, Roelens, and Calleweart envisaged were those that contained perfect Christian families and communities. As such, the practice of corporal punishment was designed as part of a panoply of tools to ensure cultural hegemony over the minds of neophytes. So, what was especially ‘Catholic’ about the violence of the mission encounter in south-eastern Congo? Although the disciplinary regimes missionaries imposed were purportedly to help conversions, the most spectacular and militant examples of violence occurred as Catholics became intertwined with stately ambitions. As such, this chapter has argued broadly along the lines of Karen Armstrong in seeing religiously motivated violence in this specific historical context as the product of politics by other means or justifications.92 Lavigerie, Roelens, and Callewaert looked back to a devout Europe whose supposed loss they lamented and that they wanted to recreate in Central Africa. They were working against currents of what they believed to be liberal materialism that they saw as threatening their vision for the Congo

254  Reuben A. Loffman Free State and, later, the Belgian Congo. The violence that occurred was admittedly motivated by a desire to erect Christian States but was greatly accelerated by the trappings of forging a State in the midst of a land greatly scarred by the Indian Ocean Slave Trade. Notes 1 David Northup, “A Church in Search of a State: Catholic Missionaries in Eastern Zaïre, 1879–1930,” Journal of Church and State 30, no. 2 (1988): 310; Allen F. Roberts, “History, Ethnicity, and Change in the “Christian Kingdom” of Southeastern Zaïre,” in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); Reuben A. Loffman, Church, State, and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890–1962 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 63–118. 2 David Maxwell, Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, The Creation of Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), 94. 3 Reuben Loffman, “On the Fringes of a Christian Kingdom: The White Fathers, Colonial Rule, and the Báhêmbá in Sola, Northern Katanga, 1909–1960,” Journal of Religion in Africa 45 (2015): 305. 4 The White Fathers’ founder, Cardinal Lavigerie, used the slogan: ‘Hoisting the flag of the abolition of African slavery by the cross, in the name of the Church’ when launching his work against the East African Slave Trade. Cited in Viera Pawliková-Vilhanová, “White Fathers, Islam, and Kiswahili in NineteenthCentury Uganda,” Asian and African Studies 13, no. 2 (2004): 202. 5 David M. Gordon, “Slavery and Redemption in the Catholic Missions of Upper Congo, 1878–1909,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Societies 38, no. 3 (2017), 577–600. 6 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “The Redemption of Child Slaves by Christian Missionaries in Central Africa, 1878–1914,” in Child Slaves in the Modern World, eds. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011). 7 Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (London: Bodley Head, 2014). 8 Luise White, “Hodgepodge Historiography: Documents, Itineraries, and the Absence of Archives,” History in Africa 42 (2015): 310. The idea of reading against and along the archival grain is explored in Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 9 David Maxwell, “Freed Slaves, Missionaries, and Respectability: The Expansion of the Christian Frontier from Angola to Belgian Congo,” The Journal of African History 54, no. 1 (2013): 81. 10 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 51. 11 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “The Economics of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea Trades in the Nineteenth Century: An Overview,” in The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Gervase Clarence-Smith (London: Routledge, 2013), 1. 12 Jan-Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa, c.1884–1914 (Oxford: James Currey, 2006) 38.

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  255 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 36. 15 Clarence-Smith, “The Economics of the Indian Ocean,” 1. 16 Richard Reid, “Warfare and the Military,” in The Oxford Handbook of African History, eds. Richard Reid and John Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 121. 17 Stuart Laing, Tippu Tip: Ivory, Slavery, and Discovery in the Scramble for Africa (Surbiton: Medina Publishing, 2017). 18 Leda Farrant, Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade (London: Hamilton, 1975), 49. 19 David Maxwell, “Christianity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, eds. John Parker and Richard Reid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 272. 20 John M. Mugane, The Story of Swahili (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2015). 21 Melvin E. Page, “The Manyema Hordes of Tippu Tip: A Case Study of Social Stratification and the Slave Trade in Eastern Africa,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 71. 22 Maxwell, “Christianity,” 272. 23 David Livingstone was among the most important Protestant opponents of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, see: Derek R. Peterson, “Introduction: Abolitionism and Political Thought in Britain and East Africa,” in Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, ed. Derek R. Peterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3. 24 Henry J. Koren, The Spiritans: A History of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University, 1958). 25 Arsène Aubert C.S.Sp., “Libermann in Conflict with the Authorities,” Spiritan Horizons 5 (2010): 5. 26 Bengt Sundkler and Christopher Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134. 27 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 28 Phyllis M. Martin, Catholic Women of Congo Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters in Troubled Times (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 7; Jelmer Vos, “Child Slaves and Freemen at the Spiritan Mission in Soyo, 1880–1885,” Journal of Family History 35, no. 1 (2010): 75. 29 David Maxwell, “Continuity and Change in the Luba Christian Movement, Katanga, Belgian Congo, c. 1915–1950,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 69, no. 2 (2018): 332. 30 Maxwell, “Freed Slaves”, 80. 31 Carol W. Dickerman, “On Using the White Fathers’ Archives,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 319. 32 Sundkler and Steed, The Church in Africa, 132. 33 Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 255. 34 Northrup, “Church in Search of a State,” 309–319. 35 Allen F. Roberts, A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 36 Loffman, Church, State, and Colonialism, 79. 37 Vicars apostolic tended to be chosen by civic authorities rather than Rome but given the close relationship between Lavigerie and Léopold II we can probably assume that the choice was mutual. 38 Loffman, Church, State, and Colonialism, 66.

256  Reuben A. Loffman 39 Dickerman, “On Using the White Fathers’ Archives,” 321. 40 The first permanent post in Burundi was only established in 1898 and it would later be incorporated in the Vicariate of Kivu rather than its own Apostolic Vicariate. 41 Loffman, Church, State, and Colonialism, 66. 42 Gordon, “Slavery and Redemption,” 587. 43 Ibid. 44 François Renault, Cardinal Lavigerie: Churchman, Prophet, and Missionary (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 271. 45 Roberts, A Dance of Assassins. 46 Gordon, “Slavery and Redemption,” 587. 47 Roberts, “History, Ethnicity, and Change,” 198. 48 Gordon, “Slavery and Redemption,” 587. 49 Roberts, “History, Ethnicity, and Change,” 198. 50 Gordon, “Slavery and Redemption,” 588. 51 Zana Etambala Mathieu, “Patrimoines Missionaire et Colonial: Des Images Médiévales à l’Époque du Congo Belge, 1890–1940,”’ Annales Aequatoria 30 (2009): 1035. 52 Allen F. Roberts, “‘Like a Roaring Lion’: Tabwa Terrorism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Banditry, Social Rebellion, and Protest in Africa, ed. Donald Drummey (Oxford: James Currey, 1986), 72–73. 53 Ibid., 73. 54 Gordon, “Slavery and Redemption,” 588. 55 Ibid., 589. 56 Aylward Shorter, The Cross and Flag in Africa: The “White Fathers” During the Colonial Scramble (1892–1914) (London: Orbis Books, 2006), 65. 57 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 49. 58 Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 49; Suzanne Miers, “Review: The White Fathers in East Africa,” The Journal of African History 14, no. 1 (1973): 148. 59 Allen F. Roberts, “‘Insidious Conquests’: Wartime Politics along the SouthWestern Shore of Lake Tanganyika,” in Africa and the First World War, ed. Melvin E. Page (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), 188. 60 Shorter, Cross and Flag, 90; Roberts, “Insidious Conquests,” 201. 61 Northrup, “Church in Search of a State,” 315. 62 A.M. Delathuy, Missie en Staat in Oud-Kongo, 1880–1914: Witte Paters, Scheutisten, en Jezuïeten (Berchem: EPO, 1992), 13. 63 Ibid., 15. 64 Ibid., 16 65 Archives Générales des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome (hereafter AGM), Rapport Annuel (hereafter RA), (Maison-Carrée / Alger): Imprimerie des Missionnaires d’Afrique, 1913), 1911–1912, 6, Bruges-Saint-Donat, 551–552. 66 Anne-Sophie Gijs, “Entre Ombres et Lumières, Profits et Conflits. Les Rélations entre les Jésuits et l’État Indépendant du Congo (1879–1908),” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 88, no. 2 (2010): 262–263. 67 Delathuy suggested that 600 Africans escaped Mpala in 1906 and that the facility largely became a place in which those with Sleeping Sickness were treated thereafter, see: Delathuy, Missie en Staat, 47. This point is supported by Victor Roelens’ own writings, see: Victor Roelens, Notre Vieux Congo, 1891–1917: Souvenirs du Premier Évêque du Congo Belge (Namur: Grands Lacs, 1948), 173. 68 Roberts, “Insidious Conquests,” 189. 69 Loffman, Church, State, and Colonialism, 71.

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  257 70 Reuben Loffman, “In the Shadow of the Tree Sultans: African Elites and the Shaping of Early Colonial Politics on the Katangan Frontier, 1906–1917,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 5, no. 3 (2011), 542–546. 71 In the annual report for the White Fathers’ out-station in Sola for the year 1910– 1911, the superior wrote that the Bango-Bango came from Mirambo’s lands so this might imply they came from outside of the Free State, see: AGM, RA, 6, 1910–1911, Bruges-Saint-Donat, 160. The Bango-Bango are sometimes spelled ‘Bangu-Bangu’. Note that they left Sola in 1915 in a planned return to Kasongo once the Sola mission was established though some did stay around the territory of Kongolo. 72 Loffman, Church, State, and Colonialism, 71. 73 Valentine Yves Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 111. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Johannes Fabian, Language and the Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 76. See also Roelens’ book: Victor Roelens, Instructions aux Missionnaires Pères Blancs du Haut Congo par son Excellence Monseigneur Roelens, Vicaire Apostolique du Haut Congo Belge (Baudouinville: Vicariat Apostolique du Haut Congo, 1938). 77 Roelens, Notre Vieux Congo, 162. 78 AGM, RA, 6, 1910–1911, Bruges-Saint-Donat, 160–161. Van Acker would remain the superior until October 1921. 79 AGM, RA, 6, 1912–1913, Bruges-Saint-Donat, 575. This was also a point made in: Loffman, “In the Shadow of the Tree Sultans,” 535–552. 80 AGM, RA, 6, 1912–1913, Bruges-Saint-Donat, 574–575. 81 AGM, Bruges-Saint-Donat, Journaux de Mission, 1912, January 8, 1912, 29. 82 AGM, RA, 6, 1912–1913, Bruges-Saint-Donat, 575. 83 AGM, Bruges-Saint-Donat, Journaux de Mission, January 5, 1912, 28–29. 84 Maxwell, “Continuity and Change,” 333. 85 Koren, The Spiritans, 481. 86 Catholic Hierarchy, “Emilio Callewaert,” accessed May 4, 2021, http://www. catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bcall.html. 87 Loffman, Church, State, and Colonialism, 141. 88 AGM, RA, 6, 1912–1913, Bruges-Saint-Donat, 574. 89 AGM, Bruges-Saint-Donat, Journaux de Mission, November 6, 1910, 8. 90 For more detail about the pre-colonial Equatorial African political tradition, see: Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 91 AGM, Bruges-Saint-Donat, Journaux de Mission, November 6, 1910, 8. 92 Armstrong, Fields of Blood.

Bibliography Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. London: Bodley Head, 2014. Aubert, C.S.Sp. Arsène. “Libermann in Conflict with the Authorities.” Spiritan Horizons 5 (2010): 3–18.

258  Reuben A. Loffman Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft, translated by Peter Putnam. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Catholic Hierarchy. “Emilio Callewaert.” Accessed May 4, 2021, http://www.catholichierarchy.org/bishop/bcall.html. Clarence-Smith, William Gervase. “The Redemption of Child Slaves by Christian Missionaries in Central Africa, 1878–1914.” In Child Slaves in the Modern World, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, 173–190. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. Clarence-Smith, William Gervase. “The Economics of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea Trades in the Nineteenth Century: An Overview.” In The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, edited by William Gervase Clarence-Smith, 1–20. London: Routledge, 2013. Deutsch, Jan-Georg. Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa, c.1884– 1914. Oxford: James Currey, 2006. Delathuy, A.M. Missie en Staat in Oud-Kongo, 1880–1914: Witte Paters, Scheutisten, en Jezuïeten. Berchem: EPO, 1992. Dickerman, Carol W. “On Using the White Fathers’ Archives.” History in Africa 8 (1981): 319–322. Fabian, Johannes. Language and the Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Farrant, Leda. Tippu Tip and the East African Slave Trade. London: Hamilton, 1975. Gijs, Anne-Sophie. “Entre Ombres et Lumières, Profits et Conflits. Les Relations Entre Les Jésuits et L’État Indépendant du Congo (1879–1908).” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 88, no. 2 (2010): 255–298. Gordon, David M. “Slavery and Redemption in the Catholic Missions of Upper Congo, 1878–1909.” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Societies 38, no. 3 (2017): 577–600. Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Koren, Henry J. The Spiritans: A History of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1958. Laing, Stuart. Tippu Tip: Ivory, Slavery, and Discovery in the Scramble for Africa. Surbiton: Medina Publishing, 2017. Loffman, Reuben. “In the Shadow of the Tree Sultans: African Elites and the Shaping of Early Colonial Politics on the Katangan Frontier, 1906–1917.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 5, no. 3 (2011): 535–552. Loffman, Reuben. “On the Fringes of a Christian Kingdom: The White Fathers, Colonial Rule, and the Báhêmbá in Sola, Northern Katanga, 1909–1960.” Journal of Religion in Africa 45 (2015): 279–306. Loffman, Reuben A. Church, State, and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890– 1962. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Martin, Phyllis M. Catholic Women of Congo Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters in Troubled Times. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. Mathieu, Zana Etambala. “Patrimoines Missionnaire et Colonial: Des Images Médiévales à l’Époque du Congo Belge, 1890–1940.” Annales Aequatoria 30 (2009): 989–1047.

Catholic Missionaries in Central Africa  259 Maxwell, David. “The Soul of the Luba: W.F.P. Burton, Missionary Ethnography, and Belgian Colonial Science.” History and Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2008): 325–351. Maxwell, David. “Christianity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, edited by John Parker and Richard Reid, 263–280. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013a. Maxwell, David. “Freed Slaves, Missionaries, and Respectability: The Expansion of the Christian Frontier from Angola to Belgian Congo.” The Journal of African History 54, no. 1 (2013b): 79–102. Maxwell, David. “Continuity and Change in the Luba Christian Movement, Katanga, Belgian Congo, c.1915–1950.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 69, no. 2 (2018): 326–344. Maxwell, David. Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, The Creation of Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. Miers, Suzanne. “Review: The White Fathers in East Africa.” The Journal of African History 14, no. 1 (1973): 147–149. Mudimbe, Valentine Yves. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Mugane, John M. The Story of Swahili. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015. Northup, David. “A Church in Search of a State: Catholic Missionaries in Eastern Zaïre, 1879–1930.” Journal of Church and State 30, no. 2 (1988): 309–319. Page, Melvin E. “The Manyema Hordes of Tippu Tip: A Case Study of Social Stratification and the Slave Trade in Eastern Africa.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 69–84. Pawliková-Vilhanová, Viera. “White Fathers, Islam, and Kiswahili in NineteenthCentury Uganda.” Asian and African Studies 13, no. 2 (2004): 198–213. Peterson, Derek R. “Introduction: Abolitionism and Political Thought in Britain and East Africa.” In Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson, 1–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Reid, Richard. “Warfare and the Military.” In The Oxford Handbook of African History, edited by Richard Reid and John Parker, 114–131. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Renault, François. Cardinal Lavigerie: Churchman, Prophet, and Missionary. London: Athlone Press, 1994. Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Roberts, Allen F. “‘Like a Roaring Lion’: Tabwa Terrorism in the Late Nineteenth Century.” In Banditry, Social Rebellion, and Protest in Africa, edited by Donald Drummey, 65–88. Oxford: James Currey, 1986. Roberts, Allen F. “‘Insidious Conquests’: Wartime Politics along the South-Western Shore of Lake Tanganyika.” In Africa and the First World War, edited by Melvin E. Page, 215–231. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987. Roberts, Allen F. “History, Ethnicity, and Change in the “Christian Kingdom” of Southeastern Zaïre.” In The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, edited by Leroy Vail, 193–214. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.

260  Reuben A. Loffman Roberts, Allen F. A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Roelens, Victor. Instructions aux Missionnaires Pères Blancs du Haut Congo par son Excellence Monseigneur Roelens, Vicaire Apostolique du Haut Congo Belge. Baudouinville: Vicariat Apostolique du Haut Congo, 1938. Roelens, Victor. Notre Vieux Congo, 1891–1917: Souvenirs du Premier Évêque du Congo Belge. Namur: Grands Lacs, 1948. Shorter, Aylward. The Cross and Flag in Africa: The “White Fathers” During the Colonial Scramble (1892–1914). London: Orbis Books, 2006. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Sundkler, Bengt, and Christopher Steed. A History of the Church in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Vos, Jelmer. “Child Slaves and Freemen at the Spiritan Mission in Soyo, 1880–1885.” Journal of Family History 35, no. 1 (2010): 71–90. White, Luise. “Hodgepodge Historiography: Documents, Itineraries, and the Absence of Archives.” History in Africa 42 (2015): 309–318.

12 “The Children Grow Up Without Discipline” Religion, Childhood, and Violence in Colonial New Guinea around 1900 Katharina Stornig

On December 11, 1902, Valeria Dietzen, a Catholic missionary sister of the Servants of the Holy Spirit on the island of Tumleo, then part of the colony of German New Guinea, wrote a letter to the Superior General of her congregation in Europe. In it, she told of the humiliation she had recently suffered due to the reproaches of some of her fellow nuns.1 Other surviving sources from the period show that the conflict to which she referred centered around the use of violence: Sister Valeria’s colleagues had evidently found her educational methods excessively heavy-handed, and voiced misgivings that reverberated all the way back to Europe.2 Around 1900, the staff of the Catholic mission on Tumleo had begun to discuss whether and to what extent physical rebukes should be used for disciplinary purposes on indigenous children. Valeria Dietzen was highly regarded by the mission’s board as a teacher with purpose and determination. As such, she did not let the criticisms by her fellow nuns deter her from defending her conduct or prompt her to have any regrets.3 In the above-mentioned letter to the Superior General in Europe, she stressed that she always acted according to the guidelines from her religious superior in Tumleo, Apostolic Prefect Eberhard Limbrock.4 As proof, she enclosed a leaf of paper on which Limbrock had noted three Bible passages that not only legitimized the corporal punishment of male children but demanded it as a necessary expression of paternalistic ‘love’.5 Limbrock had, moreover, explicitly asserted the relevance of the said Bible verses to Sister Valeria’s work in Tumleo – teaching and raising indigenous girls –, writing: “The same is of course true, and perhaps even more so, for daughters, who are rarely mentioned in the Holy Scripture”.6 Though to Valeria Dietzen the case was as good as closed thanks to this authorization from ‘above’, and the criticisms of her disciplinary and educational methods abated – at least in the surviving correspondence –, the issue of violent teaching methods in a missionary school on a small island in German New Guinea, and indeed the criticism of it, raises fundamental questions DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-17

262  Katharina Stornig concerning the connections between religion, childhood, and violence: What role did religion play in Catholic missionaries’ motivation for, legitimization of, and use of violence against indigenous children in colonial New Guinea? What role did violence and coercion play in missionary thought and conduct in general? What was specifically ‘religious’ or ‘Catholic’ about the violent acts and debates surrounding them on Tumleo? This chapter explores these questions in the light of the interaction between German Catholic missionaries and indigenous children, men, and women on a small island in colonial New Guinea around the turn of the century. By analyzing various sources (letters, ethnographic studies, and articles) it seeks to shed light on Catholic actors’ attitudes to violence and to what extent they appreciated, used, legitimized, or rejected it as part of their religion-based mission and as an educational and disciplinary tool. In the sense that indigenous conceptions of violence and interpretations of the events in question will be considered only in the margins, with the focus placed on German missionaries’ attitudes to violence, it is a case study that cannot give a complete picture. Yet, its portrayal and analysis of diverging positions shows that the debates on Tumleo arose in the context of a close historical connection between violence, Catholic missionizing, and childhood.7 Furthermore, it elucidates the complexity of the missionaries’ attitudes to violence, and their diverging responses to it, from criticism to justification (both inward and outward). The chapter starts with a brief description of the religious and social circumstances of the Tumleo mission. This is essential for analyzing both the violent acts and the debates surrounding them in the light of their specific historical context. Second, it discusses incidents of violent encounters between the missionaries and indigenous children in the mission schools. A third section analyzes missionaries’ speech about violence against children by the example of the debates on Tumleo in the years 1899 to 1902. It argues that the missionaries’ use of violence can be regarded primarily as the consequence of their firmly hierarchical interpretation of religious and cultural difference, as well as their intolerance of indigenous concepts of faith and morality. Sister Valeria Dietzen and other members of the mission placed absolute importance on their Catholic doctrine and conceptions of faith and morality and sought to realize their ideal of ‘proper discipline’ in New Guinea. By their own logic, the religious responsibility they bore for the indigenous children implied keeping the latter from – the Christian concept of – sinful conduct by any means necessary. In a sense, they were also sanctioned by the government to use violence. Although the colonial administration had not actually legalized corporal punishment, it accepted beatings as a

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  263 means for European employers (including the missions) to discipline indigenous workers; the practice was effectively codified when the German Empire assumed governance of the colony in 1899.8 The fourth section offers a concluding reflection on the relationship between religion and violence in the context of the case study and discusses likely further implications. It should, however, be stressed that the present inquiry is limited to the events on Tumleo and cannot therefore make general assertions about the connection between missions and violence or indigenous child-raising practices, since New Guinea in the period of inquiry was the site not only of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity but also of numerous different missionary initiatives. The Catholic Mission on Tumleo The first German missionaries arrived in the Apostolic Prefecture of KaiserWilhelms-Land, established by Pope Leo XIII, in August 1896. They were priests and brothers of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD), founded in the Dutch border town of Steyl in 1875. In 1889, the society gained an affiliated women’s congregation, the above-mentioned Servants of the Holy Spirit (SSpS), the first members of which soon followed their male counterparts to New Guinea. Whatever these missionaries may have expected of their life in New Guinea, the surviving sources show that their early days in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land were not easy.9 The mission was forced to abandon its original plan to set up a station near the colonial settlement of FriedrichWilhelmshafen (now Madang), partly because of the rival Protestant Rhenish Missionary Society already active there and partly because of difficulties adapting to the climate. Seeking an alternative, they came upon Tumleo, a small island off the north-eastern coast. Although it had no colonial infrastructure, was only 90 hectares-large, and had a tiny population of between 280 and 290, the missionaries considered Tumleo sufficiently important due to its function as a trading post for food items, traditional weapons, and earthenware, to be a suitable location for a mission.10 But building the station was just the first step. While the work on Tumleo progressed satisfactorily at first – the mission station was completed and furnished, a church and schools built, plantations laid out, and the first baptisms performed – the missionaries also struggled with numerous difficulties and disappointments. Hunger, overwork, disease, isolation and loneliness, tensions, intolerance, and setbacks were not only to become mainstays of their everyday life but also impacted enduringly on relations between the missionaries and the island’s inhabitants. Overall, the sources paint an ambivalent picture of the early missionary work on Tumleo. On the one hand, they show that the mission soon

264  Katharina Stornig established regular contact with the population of Tumleo as well as that of the neighboring islands and some parts of the main island. Soon after the first missionary nuns arrived in 1899, they attested to the friendly reception the inhabitants gave them, writing that they always invited them into their “huts” when they visited the villages.11 They also affirmed how attached the children were to them and that men and women came to the mission station, sent their children to the school, and agreed to have their new-borns baptized.12 According to one missionary nun, writing in January 1900, “the progress of our mission is really quite encouraging”.13 One aspect of this ‘progress’ was their success in convincing a number of local boys and girls to stay and work at the station for a time. Indeed, the most important and promising field of activity in the eyes of the missionaries was childcare and education.14 The missionaries wasted no time in opening schools and a nursery to realize their goal of converting the young generation on Tumleo to Christianity and raise them according to European, Christian ideas of religion and morality. This approach reflected the general tendency within the SVD missions in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land. The missionaries pinned almost all their hopes on the youth, who, as Prefect Limbrock wrote to the order’s superiors in Europe in 1904, had “barely any less talent and capacity for education than European children”.15 Yet, the sources also show that this strong focus on children and adolescents was essentially due to the missionaries’ failure to convert the adult population. Sister Fridolina Vökt, for instance, wrote in February 1900 that things were “going quite well” with the children, whereas there were “difficulties and obstacles” with most adults and old people “because they would not let go of old pagan habits and customs”.16 Limbrock, too, mentioned not only talented children in his correspondence but also old people whose thinking was “fossilized” and who were “bogged down in paganism”.17 In this way, he echoed the widespread Euro-Christian notion of “pagan culture” as resisting the religious and cultural change for which the missionaries strove and so preventing the ‘progress of civilization’ that they (along with other colonists) propagated. On Tumleo, missionaries encountered indigenous institutions and social and cultural practices that were intolerable to them on religious and cultural grounds, such as polygamy, contraception, and infanticide. The missionaries interpreted the local inhabitants’ adherence to these customs as a sign of their enduring ‘paganism’ and subjugation by diabolical forces. Local clothing habits, or rather the tendency not to cover certain – according to European constructs, sexualized – parts of the body, and the missionaries’ interpretation of this as indecent, strained relations from the start. Above all, the missionaries objected to indigenous attitudes to

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  265 sexuality, regarding their sexual practices and modes of partnership, marriage, divorce, and remarriage as disorderly, immoral, and deeply sinful. Instead, they propagated the monogamous, sacramental, and indissoluble marriage of a man and a woman as the only respectable form of partnership and only legitimate context for sexuality, oriented toward reproduction. But it proved difficult to convince the inhabitants of Tumleo, even those who had been baptized, to accept this normative Euro-Catholic idea and practice of marriage and sexuality. The missionaries therefore drew the conclusion that the adult populace of the island was deeply immoral, and they should henceforth concentrate all their efforts on raising the new generations, focusing on their educational and childcare work. Correspondingly, General Superior Arnold Janssen wished the missionaries in New Guinea much success “in bringing up a whole new generation of people that does not kill children and ruin the people’s fertility by contraceptive poisons”.18 The new generation of indigenous Catholics was to be raised within the mission’s sphere of influence, where the children could – at least temporarily – be removed from the ‘pagan’ influence and ‘pernicious’ habits of their parents and relatives. According to the missionaries’ concepts and religious topography, the mission station was to function as a kind of Catholic enclave within an environment that they conceived of (and experienced) as dark, sinful, and morally dangerous. The SVD mission therefore sought to run boarding schools and accommodate as many children as possible in the station, to detach them from the influence of the indigenous social and cultural environment. As will be shown below, consideration of the missionaries’ tremendous hope in this respect, and equally profound rejection of the social, cultural, and religious practices of the indigenous population, is crucial for understanding the missionaries’ violent acts and the debates they sparked. Violence in the Mission School While the missionary vision of raising a new Catholic generation of children and young people in the mission school on Tumleo might have seemed perfectly feasible in theory, in practice it proved extremely problematic. The sources tell of major difficulties with language and communication, various cultural differences, and frequent truancy.19 Around 1900, the school on Tumleo, the first and for several years most important of the SVD mission’s schools, was essentially in the hands of Valeria Dietzen, the missionary nun mentioned above, who soon gained a reputation in missionary circles as a diligent educator. It emerges from Sister Valeria’s own accounts of her early experiences teaching in the school that she used beatings from the outset to

266  Katharina Stornig establish the order and discipline to which she strove. In a letter written in summer 1900, for instance, she claimed that her strict teaching methods (the details of which she did not, however, specify) had resulted in an improvement in her schoolchildren’s behavior: The children give me great pleasure with their conduct. They obey my every word. At first, they still hesitated when I gave an order. But I refused to accept that; now the evil has been eradicated. Wherever they can bring me joy, they do.20 As well as conveying a certain amount of pride in her charges’ (enforced) docility, these lines highlight Sister Valeria’s belief in an authoritarian approach to education and the need for obedience it entailed. This was a common view among Catholics across the German Empire. Indeed, obedience was widely considered to be a specifically Catholic virtue, to which considerable social and religious importance was attached, since it was seen to assure order and regulate communities. Members of religious orders, who had taken vows of obedience, were attuned to authoritarianism. It is no surprise, then, that obedience was also demanded in KaiserWilhelms-Land. One missionary even described obedience as the “mother and teacher of all virtues”.21 Sister Valeria’s account should therefore be considered against the background of a long tradition of corporal punishment as an integral part of the Christian method of child-raising. ‘The rod’ was regarded in many contemporaneous mission schools as an important educational device, the use of which went largely unchallenged. Certainly, in 1901, breaking the children’s will was as explicit a goal of education in the mission school on Tumleo as teaching them simple prayers and rudimentary German.22 Beatings were not uncommon in Christian education around 1900, which rested on a long tradition of using and legitimizing corporal punishment. Indeed, certain acts of violence on children and adolescents were inscribed into the educational ideals and practices of many Catholics. Even in most secular schools, beatings were at least tolerated. As historian Heather Ellis has stressed, in the nineteenth century, only three countries of Europe – France, Belgium, and the Netherlands – made any efforts toward stopping corporal punishment in schools.23 In the German Empire, both corporal punishment and the firm belief in its educational value in confessional and state education continued to be widespread. The same was true in many Catholic mission schools in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, including on Tumleo. As historian Livia Loosen has shown, the missionary sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus of Hiltrup, active in New Pomerania and the Marshall Islands, used corporal punishment even on the

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  267 smallest children. For instance, Loosen cites a nun’s report of an eighteenmonth-old child who “often counted the cost” of having a “stubborn little head”, sometimes “getting three tastes of the switch by midday”. Overall, Loosen has found much evidence of the conviction among the missionary nuns that “it is impossible to educate the children without using the cane”.24 The religious leader of the SVD mission, Prefect Eberhard Limbrock, not only defended the corporal punishment of boys and girls but explicitly advised it by referring missionaries to Bible passages in which it was mentioned. In an essay published in 1902, missionary priest and author of an ethnographic study of Tumleo Mathias Erdweg wrote of the need to physically punish children as if it were entirely self-evident.25 Similarly, a letter by Sister Fridolina Vökt, the first head of the missionary order on Tumleo, conveys a fundamental acceptance of violence as a disciplinary device. She writes that Sister Valeria “now and then gives the one or other [of the children] a sound beating”.26 Yet, from the same letter, it also emerges that news of “Sister Valeria’s heavy-handedness” had reached even the Superior General in Europe, indicating that Sister Valeria had transgressed certain norms or at least elicited some criticism. While declaring the news of heavyhanded tactics in the school to be a mere “joke”, and Sister Valeria’s actions to be legitimate, and stressing that the beatings were “good and necessary” and, moreover, “not too often and not too intense”, Sister Fridolina Vökt’s letter nonetheless carries an apologetic tone. This is partly conveyed by her insistence that, overall, they were “very satisfied” with the children: “If one must occasionally give one of them a box on the ear, then they are all much better again”.27 In general terms, the letter suggests that corporal punishment was fundamentally accepted as a means of disciplining and educating children, but that excessive use could elicit criticism, as in the case of Sister Valeria. Many of the letters examined for the inquiry mention the violent punishment of resident pupils who had left the mission station without permission and been brought back by the missionaries. One missionary nun, for instance, wrote of a girl, about six years old, who had a habit of running away, and would be given “a taste of the rod” when she was caught.28 The truant children would, as Sister Ursula Sensen confirmed in summer 1900, be “fetched and thrashed”, which helped in some cases to discipline them but strained relations with the adults, “as the parents do not like to see their children beaten”.29 The latter observation tallies with the findings of the missionary Mathias Erdweg, who noted the Tumleo parents’ reluctance to beat their children in his 1902 study, considered in greater detail below.30 Unlike Erdweg, who criticized this reluctance, Sister Ursula took it as grounds to propose an alternative approach: “I believe we would effect more if we

268  Katharina Stornig approached the people in a friendlier manner and sought to win their hearts with love”, she wrote, implicitly criticizing the actions of her colleagues.31 To underline the urgency of her proposal, Sister Ursula mentioned the situation in the mission station in neighboring Leming, where the local people refused to have any more to do with the mission and even the baptized boys no longer went to school or church. Although the letter conveys no explicit information on the origins of the problem in Leming, the narrative suggests that it was acts of violence here (too) that disrupted relations between the mission and the local population. Overall, the surviving sources from the SVD mission on Tumleo and in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land show that coercion and violence were pillars on which the early Catholic boarding school system rested. The Catholic mission on Tumleo not only punished children for playing truant but also tried to force them to stay until their education was considered complete. In this respect, it is important to note that school attendance was not compulsory either in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land or in the rest of German New Guinea, and Germany’s influence on schooling in the colony was negligible.32 Consequently, the mission developed its own, aggressive approach to recruit schoolchildren on the one hand and, on the other, to prevent those they managed to hold (on whom they pinned such great hopes and who they regarded as the key to the religious and cultural transformation for which they strove) from leaving the mission boarding schools before their education was completed. A similar situation could be observed in other Catholic missions and other parts of the colony. The missions’ generally aggressive approach was even viewed with concern by the colonial government. To neutralize any hint of slavery, they required the missions to conclude contracts with the parents or close relatives of the pupils, regulating the length of their education.33 The missions welcomed the idea of contracts, as a letter to the colonial government jointly written by the Catholic missions in Kaiser-WilhelmsLand shows, regarding them as a way of committing pupils to stay to completion of their educations.34 And some parents evidently entered into the contracts, the details of which – and how the signatories interpreted them – however remain unknown. The quantitative success of Catholic boarding school education in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land – from the mission’s point of view – has been explained by Paul Steffen, a specialist in the history of the Catholic missions, by the indigenous population’s familiarity with the practice of (temporary) adoption.35 His argument is supported by various ethnological studies that have noted the commonplace practice in the region of children being raised in households other than those of their biological families. However, it should be noted that these indigenous adoptions did not follow any formalized procedure, nor involve any coercion or violence. Rather, the children were free to return to their biological families of their own accord.36 It was

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  269 different in the mission’s domain, where coercion, control, and violence prevailed. The surviving sources tell not only of thrashings for children who played truant but also of repeated attempts to keep children at the mission against the will of their biological parents.37 Unlike the controversial practice of thrashing pupils as a punishment for truancy, the missionaries’ categorical reliance on coercion to make children stay at the mission apparently seems not to have sparked any internal debate. Rather, the view apparently prevailed – and was justified by religious doctrine – that it was in the children’s interests to remove them as far as possible from their families’ “pagan influence”.38 Religious Patterns of Legitimizing Violence on Children Sister Valeria Dietzen shared this religious conviction. For her, too, there was no question that it was in the children’s best interests to make them stay at the mission – if necessary, against their will and by force – and constrain them to a Catholic way of life. But how did Sister Valeria and her colleagues legitimize the practice of coercion and violence? An analysis of their remarks on the issue reveals that they pursued two main lines of reasoning, which, though distinct, were interconnected. One was based on a fundamental belief in the educational value of corporal punishment, not only as a means of ensuring discipline but also as an expression of parental or adult ‘care’. Second, Sister Valeria’s comments reflect the impact of the specific social and cultural context on Tumleo and the racialized patterns of interpretation she developed there. These two strands of argumentation will be discussed in succession below. “The children grow up without discipline”, claimed the missionary Mathias Erdweg in his essay on the inhabitants of Tumleo, published in the Vienna Anthropological Society’s 1902 report.39 Like his colleagues in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, Erdweg held that the indigenous population, which he (like many Europeans at the time) located at “the lowest level of culture”, did not “provide their children with any true education”.40 Despite expecting obedience from their children, Erdweg found, Tumleo parents were mostly disappointed in this respect due to their lack of effective punishment for disobedience. He observed a certain reluctance on the part of the parents to beat their children, which he criticized as a sign of weakness and lack of educational purpose. Significantly, he did not even evaluate as positive the fact that fathers did not assault their children (even when they were “enraged”).41 Indeed, ethnological studies on Tumleo and neighboring East Sepik Province found that indigenous modes of child-raising – at least in some places – tended to be non-violent.42 The ethnologist Kathleen Barlow has argued in a study on the Murik (populating the North coast of New Guinea) that authority was primarily

270  Katharina Stornig asserted through the caring and generous bearing of the elders, and specifically mothers. Rather than arising from physical rebukes, coercion or demands for immediate obedience, then, adult power lay in the superiority they gained through their role as providers and nurturers.43 Erdweg, however, did not analyze indigenous concepts of parental (or adult) authority and child-raising. He merely remarked that the occasional punishments they meted, in the form of reprimands or physical rebukes (“a good spanking”), had little effect as they did not occur in the “right” educational context.44 To summarize, in Erdweg’s eyes the parents on Tumleo beat their children too infrequently and in the wrong way (that is, with the wrong objectives). Consequently, he believed it was the task of the Catholic missionaries to introduce the correct – as in, achieving the desired educational effect – form of corporal punishment on Tumleo, and in Kaiser-WilhelmsLand in general. Erdweg’s essay reflects the importance that many German Catholics around 1900 attached to the practice of corporal punishment, and which they based on religious concepts. In fact, corporal punishment was less a specifically Catholic than a generally Christian tradition. Studies have pointed to the significance of corporal punishment throughout the history of Christianity, arising from the doctrine of original sin and pessimistic view of children, which remained influential despite various efforts toward reform and the spread of decidedly positive concepts of children and childhood over the long nineteenth century (and beyond).45 According to the Christian concept, children were hereditarily burdened with original sin, or capable of sinful behavior, but had not yet acquired the necessary means to combat it. Corporal punishment was consequently propagated by many as an indispensable method of disciplining children. It was declared to be the task (or even duty) of the paternalistic authority figure to thus lead weak, sin-prone children on to what Christians regarded as the only “right” path.46 The missionaries’ legitimization of violence against children and adolescents on Tumleo should be considered in the context of this tradition. Many Christians’ fundamental belief in the necessity of physical punishment in religious education also explains the Bible passages that Prefect Limbrock pointed out to Sister Valeria. They included verse 22:13 of the Book of Proverbs, which makes a direct connection between strikes of the rod and the Christian promise of redemption.47 Erdweg’s sketch of indigenous child-raising practices on Tumleo conveys a certain sense of superiority and self-satisfied ignorance among European Christians. Evidently, he could or would not consider indigenous modes of child-raising, education, and socialization in detail, simply because they lacked the element of obedience that was so crucial to the Catholic missionaries:

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  271 Little is known on the small island of Tumleo of child obedience. The child learns early on to follow his whims, to be stubborn, to do as he pleases. The weakness of the parents is very conducive to all that; they do not have the heart to give their offspring a good spanking.48 In this passage, Erdweg’s reference to the (non-) use of corporal punishment serves to mark a distinction between the supposedly ‘weak’ indigenous parents and the ‘strong’ European, Catholic educators. The fundamental arrogance displayed by the author by refusing to consider the value of indigenous practices can be observed in the writings of other missionaries who gave absolute importance to Christian ideals and practices and rejected all other approaches to education and socialization. What Erdweg and others interpreted as weakness, Kathleen Barlow has found to be the educational ideal of Murik mothers. She observed that the Murik frequently gave instructions to and made demands of their children, complained if they were non-compliant, and even threatened them with all kinds of penalties, but rarely acted on their threats. According to Barlow, Murik mothers do not expect “quick obedience” from their children.49 Expectations were different, however, in the Catholic mission on Tumleo, where Sister Valeria Dietzen responded to her colleagues’ accusations by underlining the principle of obedience. She assured the Superior General in her letter, “I am little concerned what the others say, I adhere to what my superiors say”, and enclosed the prefect’s list of Bible references as proof.50 That brings us to the second line of reasoning discernible in Catholic patterns of legitimizing violence, which emerged not only from the abstract conception of children as generally sinful but also from the missionary’s specific racialized and sexualized construct of children on Tumleo. While the missionaries viewed children on the one hand as a resource that could be shaped and educated and used to build the Catholic society of the future, on the other hand, they were forced to admit that religious and cultural change could not be enforced. Sister Valeria Dietzen, especially, reported on the difficulties she had upholding Christian sexual morals and the ideal of the Catholic mission station as a de-sexualized space. Her letters suggest that she most often used violence to punish (what she considered to be) sexual acts. For instance, she wrote of a child who had the “nasty habit” of “breaking the 6th commandment” (Thou shalt not commit adultery). By her own account, she had tried to show the “child” the error of its ways in a “one-to-one meeting”.51 This had in turn elicited the criticism of her fellow nuns. While the letter gives no details of how or why the unnamed child committed adultery (presumably following the general tendency among missionary nuns to avoid naming or describing what they perceived or inferred to be sexual acts), it shifted the focus of criticism on to the subsequent “meeting” and the criticism it had precipitated.

272  Katharina Stornig In the light of remarks contained in other letters and the reactions of Sister Valeria’s colleagues, it seems likely that “one-to-one meeting” was a euphemism for physical punishment. In any case, Sister Valeria appears to have become increasingly exasperated with her work as a Christian educator and insurer of the schoolchildren’s salvation, continuing in her letter: “I have entrusted the children to Our Lady, Mother of God, that she may save them all from damnation”.52 The missionary nuns’ fear of damnation, rooted in their religious beliefs and practices, was very concrete. Sister Valeria and many of her colleagues were increasingly convinced that it was almost impossible for their pupils to lead Christian lives in what they saw as the “pagan surroundings” of Tumleo. Moreover, they not only feared the children’s “damnation” but felt personally responsible, as Catholic educators, for preventing it. Consequently, they supported the strict, round-the-clock supervision of the children, even if it was at variance with the strict routine of convent life and prevented the missionary nuns on Tumleo from praying together, as the alternative was unthinkable: “What responsibility will we bear if we are to blame for the children doing evil due to a lack of supervision”.53 Strict supervision notwithstanding, sexual acts were allegedly committed at the mission station. Sister Valeria regarded them as evidence of the “low morality” of the indigenous population, which she gradually wove into an increasingly negative picture of the indigenous children, and which to her legitimized physical punishments. In August 1902, she reported that some boys and girls at the mission station had practiced the most shameful vices, involving no less than “5 deadly sins”.54 Unwilling to give any details in her letter to the Superior General in Europe, she obviously found it difficult to explain the offensive acts, which the missionaries had not been able to prevent despite their constant presence and which – according to her interpretation of Catholic morals – placed the salvation of all those involved at risk. All she would offer in conclusion was a simultaneous justification and explanation of the situation in Tumleo: “I do what I can, but not everything can be prevented. The corruption of morals has become ingrained in these pagans. It is self-evident that one must be severe sometimes”.55 These lines seem to indicate that the missionaries used punishments to clamp down on what they interpreted as the children’s sinful tendencies and which they increasingly viewed as innate. According to their interpretation, the boys and girls involved in the incidents not only offended Catholic doctrine and moral norms (which Sister Valeria regarded as infallible and unquestionable) but in a sense surrendered to their sexualized bodies, which were increasingly conceived of as the ‘other’ in relation to the self-controlled ‘white’ bodies of European Catholics. It was apparently important to Sister Valeria to inform her superiors in Europe of the ‘kind’ of children she was dealing with in Tumleo. These children seemed to her to display none of the

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  273 innocence that European constructs of childhood had advanced since the early nineteenth century. In November 1901, over one-and-a-half years after her arrival on Tumleo, she wrote to the Superior General in Europe: You no doubt think these little ones are still such innocent angels, but that is unfortunately not true[.] Children of 2 years of age are already depraved. The vice of unchastity seems to be innate in them. Hon[orable] Mother, believe my words, I am speaking from experience, you would certainly throw your hands up in horror if I told you the things I have seen in this respect. Children of 5–6 years of age know what in Europe adults know and, to make matters worse[,] they do it as well. The vice of unchastity is the most formidable obstacle to the mission.56 These lines suggest that Sister Valeria Dietzen had developed a picture of the indigenous population in her first years on Tumleo as deeply sinful and trapped in the sexualized bodies of their specific ethnicity. This picture included the children and adolescents, whom the newly arrived missionaries found to be not as easily shapable and controllable as they and others had perhaps expected. Within the religious value system of the Catholic mission, the allegation of “unchastity” not only legitimized physical force but demanded it in the eyes of some missionaries. Sister Valeria’s personal dilemma arose primarily from the fact that she (like her colleagues) saw herself as responsible for the souls of her charges. But she did not link this responsibility with contemporary pedagogics or the frequently observed indigenous parents’ reluctance to use violence on children. Instead, she relied on Catholic ideals and practices of corporal punishment, which were presumably familiar to her from her own upbringing and which her religious superiors expected her to exercise. Nonetheless, the debates on the quantity and quality of beatings in the mission school on Tumleo abated shortly after the turn of the century and Sister Valeria Dietzen emerged strengthened. While the issue of violence was largely dropped from correspondence, her career ascended.57 Superior General Janssen not only appointed her prioress of the convent on Tumleo but also Provincial Superior, and thus religious superior of all the Servants of the Holy Spirit in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, which she remained until her death in 1917. Meanwhile, corporal punishment continued to be practiced in the mission on Tumleo. This is shown by an indigenous worker’s account, documented by the ethnologist Richard Scaglion for an inquiry into indigenous perceptions of their first contact with Europeans. The worker, a certain Nambil from Neligum, tells of how he spent about a month on Tumleo as a freshly hired laborer, where he witnessed the brutal punishment of two men for stealing food from the Catholic mission by “ten lashes with a kanda, which was heated, so that the skin came off with each lash”.58

274  Katharina Stornig Conclusion Analysis of the events, actions, and debates on Tumleo around 1900 point to two phenomena being the primary motivation and legitimization for violent acts by German Catholic missionaries against indigenous children. One was a long-established tradition in Europe and the German Empire based on the Christian doctrine of original sin, which propagated a view of children as essentially sinful and consequently stressed the educational value of physical correction. Representatives of this pedagogic tradition, such as, in this case, Prefect Eberhard Limbrock, referred to specific Bible passages that not only legitimized corporal punishment but even demanded it as an expression and act of paternalistic love. Hence, the violence considered here did not necessarily mark a crisis situation in social relations. Rather, the opposite was true: to those who practiced it, violence, in the form of corporal punishment, was a legitimate means of achieving certain religion-based educational goals. In the context of the religious, cultural, and social ‘others’ on Tumleo specifically, and Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land in general, it appeared especially expedient to some of the missionaries, who were concerned to save themselves and the local indigenous population from what they saw as sinful conduct. They were sanctioned by the colonial government, who permitted physical punishments in New Guinea for disciplining employees and workers, an approach which Hermann Hiery has interpreted as aiming to enforce a German concept of labor.59 At the same time, the inquiry shows that the quality and quantity of the violence used could nonetheless spark controversy. In the case considered here, the discussion reverberated all the way back to Europe. Evidently, the missionary actions on Tumleo transgressed the ‘norms’ for corporal punishment in schools. It emerges that this occurred primarily because of the missionaries’ self-imposed obligation to save souls. In the firm belief that they knew the only true way to redemption, Sister Valeria Dietzen and others resorted to violence to enforce their concept of ‘proper discipline’. On Tumleo around 1900, then, it was precisely the universal Catholic promise of salvation combined with Catholic doctrine’s claim to infallibility that led to the use of violence. The road to redemption did not seem compatible with local cultural and social practices. And the missionaries were not able (at least during the early years on Tumleo investigated here) to adapt their own concepts and ideals to the realities of local life, nor able to view indigenous practices without contempt, or even to merely tolerate them. Instead, they condemned what they saw as deeply sinful and resorted to violence to deter the children of Tumleo from acts that offended the Catholic morals of the day. The struggle intensified to the point that Sister Valeria Dietzen, for one, took to sweepingly declaring the entire indigenous population of New Guinea to have ‘unchastity’ deeply rooted in their innately sexualized bodies.

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  275 Lastly, it should be added that several other, not primarily religion-related aspects played a role in triggering the acts of violence examined here: the sources refer explicitly and repeatedly to the missionaries’ physical and mental overload, adjustment problems, language difficulties, and fears, and how these fundamentally shaped their early years on Tumleo. Finally, with respect to the question of whether the violence on Tumleo around 1900 and the surrounding debates were of a specifically Catholic nature, the inquiry has revealed the key significance of a religiously charged concept of obedience and the considerable repercussions for life in the mission this had. While it emerges from the sources that some missionary nuns criticized the use of (what they regarded as excessive) beatings to punish children and called for an alternative, non-violent approach to ‘correction,’ a general adherence to the demand for obedience ultimately thwarted these efforts. Obedience stands out not only as a key term in the present case study (for instance, as a goal of education, and as a form of conduct demanded of children and believers) but also impacted as a principle on the hierarchically and authoritarian structured domain of the order and the mission. In the end, the call for obedience (which was also a characteristic tenet of Catholics and members of Catholic orders across the German Empire) was seen to legitimize Sister Valeria’s actions within the mission and the order, which were both organized along strictly hierarchical and authoritarian lines. It was ultimately the emphasis on obedience that silenced the criticisms which had begun to be voiced and prevented any reform of educational practices. Sister Valeria’s assertion that she was obeying the requirements of a superior was enough to end the debates on violence both on Tumleo and in the correspondence between the missionary nuns and their superiors in Europe. Notes 1 Sister Valeria Dietzen (December 11, 1902), in: Servants of the Holy Spirit’s General Archive (hereafter AG SSpS) PNG 6201 Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 2 See Katharina Stornig, Sisters Crossing Boundaries: German Missionary Nuns in Colonial Togo and New Guinea (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2013), 326–327. 3 The complaints mounted when a second group of missionary sisters arrived in Tumleo and criticized Sister Valeria’s conduct, prompting her to write to the General Superior in Europe: “I must tell you quite frankly that it is very hurtful to hear such things from the new arrivals.” Sister Valeria Dietzen (August 1, 1902), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201 Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 4 Sister Valeria Dietzen (December 11, 1902), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201 Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 5 Among the passages listed was the well-known verse from the Book of Proverbs (13:24) that criticizes a lack of violence in child-raising as a lack of love: “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to

276  Katharina Stornig discipline them”. Sister Valeria Dietzen (December 11, 1902), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201 Korrespondenz 1899–1910. For a theological analysis of the verse, see Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1–15 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman, 2004). 6 Sister Valeria Dietzen (December 11, 1902), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 7 The nexus between Christian missions and violence has been addressed by Ulrich van der Heyden and Jürgen Becher, eds., Mission und Gewalt. Der Umgang christlicher Missionen mit Gewalt und die Ausbreitung des Christentums in der Zeit von 1792 bis 1918 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000). 8 See Hermann Joseph Hiery, Das Deutsche Reich in der Südsee (1900–1921): Eine Annäherung an die Erfahrungen verschiedener Kulturen (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1995), 132–137; Peter Sack, “Das deutsche Rechtswesen in Melanesien,” in Die deutsche Südsee 1884–1914. Ein Handbuch, ed. Hermann Joseph Hiery (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001). 9 See Josef Alt, “Historical Introduction,” in Arnold Janssen – Letters to New Guinea and Australia, ed. Josef Alt (Nettetal: Steyler, 1996). 10 For information on the island, its geographical location and inhabitants, see Mathias Erdweg, “Die Bewohner der Insel Tumleo, Berlinhafen, DeutschNeu-Guinea,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 32 (1902). 11 Sister Ursula Sensen (June 4, 1899), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 12 On the children’s attachment see, e.g. Sister Fridolina Vökt (April 1899), in: AG SSpS 601 PNG, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. On interactions more generally see Sister Ursula Sensen (January 7, 1900), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 13 Sister Ursula Sensen (January 5, 1900), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 14 See, e.g., Paul Benedikt Steffen, Die Anfänge der Rheinischen, Neuendettelsauer und Steyler Missionsarbeit in Neuguinea (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta della Pontifica Università Gregoriana, 1993), 39–40, and 49–50. 15 Eberhard Limbrock, in: Steffen, Die Anfänge, 49. 16 Sister Fridolina Vökt (February 25, 1900), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 17 Eberhard Limbrock, in: Steffen, Die Anfänge, 49. 18 Arnold Janssen (March 10, 1903), in: Arnold Janssen, ed. Alt, 138–141, 140. 19 See Steffen, Die Anfänge, 40–41; Stornig, Sisters Crossing Boundaries, 294–297. 20 Sister Valeria Dietzen (June 21, 1900), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 21 Franz Vormann, “Die Mission in Monumbo,” Steyler Missionsbote 8 (1905): 119. 22 Sister Fridolina Vökt (March 6, 1901), in: AG SSpS 601 PNG, Korrespondenz 1899–1917. 23 Heather Ellis, “Corporal Punishment in the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century,” in Childhood and Violence in the Western Tradition, eds. Laurence Brockliss and Heather Montgomery (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 146–147. 24 Livia Loosen, Deutsche Frauen in den Südsee-Kolonien des Kaiserreiches: Alltag und Beziehungen zur indigenen Bevölkerung, 1884–1919 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 502. 25 Erdweg, “Die Bewohner der Insel Tumleo,” 283.

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  277 26 Sister Fridolina Vökt (January 15, 1901), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 27 Ibid. 28 Sister Evangelista Ihler (August 31, 1902), in: AG SSpS PNG 601, Korrespondenz 1899–1917. 29 Sister Ursula Sensen (June 22, 1900), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. Loosen has found similar occurrences on the Marshall Islands, where a missionary nun wrote that they “should not scold and punish” the children at all as “then they would never come anymore, one must try to convince them with love”. Loosen, Deutsche Frauen, 503. 30 Erdweg, “Die Bewohner der Insel Tumleo,” 281. 31 Sister Ursula Sensen (June 22, 1900), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 32 Hiery, Das Deutsche Reich in der Südsee, 155–160; Hermann Joseph Hiery, “Schule und Ausbildung,” in Die deutsche Südsee 1884–1914. Ein Handbuch, ed. Hermann Joseph Hiery (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001), 202. 33 See Stornig, Sisters Crossing Boundaries, 325–326. 34 Stellungnahme der Missionare zur rechtlichen Stellung der Erziehungsverträge, in: Propaganda Fide Historical Archives [hereafter APF] N.S. vol. 552, 115–118; here, 118. 35 Paul Steffen, “Die katholischen Missionen in Deutsch-Neuguinea,” in Die deutsche Südsee 1884–1914. Ein Handbuch, ed. Hermann Joseph Hiery (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001), 363. 36 This at least was asserted by Camilla Wedgwood in her ethnological study on the Manam and by Melissa Demian writing on the Massim: Camilla Wedgwood, “The Life of Children in Manam,” Oceania 9 (1938): 22–25; Melissa Demian, “Transaction in Rights and in Children: A View of Adoption from Papua New Guinea,” in CrossCultural Approaches to Adoption, ed. Fiona Bowie (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 103. The indigenous practice of adoption in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land is also addressed by Franz Vormann, “Zur Psychologie, Religion, Soziologie und Geschichte der Monumbo-Papua, Deutsch-Neuguinea,” Anthropos 5, no. 2 (1910): 413. 37 Stornig, Sisters Crossing Boundaries, 324–325. 38 Steffen, Die Anfänge, 42. 39 Erdweg, “Die Bewohner der Insel Tumleo,” 382. 40 Ibid. For Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land see, e.g., Andreas Puff, “Das papuanische Kind,” Steyler Missionsbote 36, no. 10 (1908–1909): 154. 41 Ibid.: 281. 42 In view of the ethnic and cultural diversity in New Guinea, it is imperative not to generalize. Other studies have pointed to “exceedingly brutal methods” of discipline. Hiery, Das Deutsche Reich in der Südsee, 137. 43 Kathleen Barlow, “The Dynamics of Siblingship: Nurturance and Authority in Murik Society,” in Sepik Heritage Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea, ed. Nancy Lutkehaus (Brathurst: Carolina Academic Press, 1990), 325–326. 44 Erdweg, “Die Bewohner der Insel Tumleo,” 382. 45 See Edmund Hermsen, Faktor Religion. Geschichte der Kindheit vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 124–134; Eugen Paul, Geschichte der christlichen Erziehung, vol. 2 (Freiburg: Herder, 1995), 204–205. Patricia Brennan argues that abandoning the concept of the sinful child would be an effective measure toward combating abuse within the Church. Patricia Brennan, “Religion, Children and Violence. Fallen Angels or Risen Apes?,” Church Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 8–9.

278  Katharina Stornig 46 Christina de Bellaigue, “Faith and Religion,” in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Age of Empire, ed. Colin Heywood (London: Bloomsbury, 2 2014), 154–155. 47 The note reads: “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod you will save his soul from hell. Proverbs 23:13”. Sister Valeria Dietzen (December 11, 1902), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 48 Erdweg, “Die Bewohner der Insel Tumleo,” 281. 49 Barlow, “The Dynamics of Siblingship,” 329. 50 Sister Valeria Dietzen (December 11, 1902), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 51 Sister Valeria Dietzen (January 4, 1900), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 52 Ibid. 53 Sister Valeria Dietzen (July 1900), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 54 Sister Valeria Dietzen (August 1, 1902), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 55 Ibid. 56 Sister Valeria Dietzen (November 10, 1901), in: AG SSpS PNG 6201, Korrespondenz 1899–1910. 57 Katharina Stornig, “Sacrifice, Heroism, Professionalization, and Empowerment: Colonial New Guinea in the Lives of German Religious Women, 1899–1919,” in Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I, ed. Hartmut Berghoff, et al. (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2018). 58 While the original report refers to an island named Tamalio, Scaglion says that it was “almost certainly” Tumleo. It should also be noted that from the worker’s account of the scene, which Scaglion dates to the early 1920s, it is not immediately obvious who executed the thrashing. Richard Scaglion, “Reconstructing First Contact: Some Local Effects of Labor Recruitment in the Sepik,” in Sepik Heritage, ed. Lutkehaus, 53 and 55. 59 Hiery, Das Deutsche Reich in der Südsee, 136.

Bibliography Alt, Josef. “Historical Introduction.” In Arnold Janssen. Letters to New Guinea and Australia, edited by Josef Alt, XXX–LIX. Nettetal: Steyler, 1996. Barlow, Kathleen. “The Dynamics of Siblingship: Nurturance and Authority in Murik Society.” In Sepik Heritage Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, 325–336. Brathurst: Carolina Academic Press, 1990. Bellaigue, Christina de. “Faith and Religion.” In A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Age of Empire, edited by Colin Heywood, 149–166. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Brennan, Patricia. “Religion, Children and Violence. Fallen Angels or Risen Apes?” Church Studies 14, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. Demian, Melissa. “Transaction in Rights and in Children. A View of Adoption from Papua New Guinea.” In Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption, edited by Fiona Bowie, 97–110. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

“The Children Grow Up Without Discipline”  279 Ellis, Heather. “Corporal Punishment in the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century.” In Childhood and Violence in the Western Tradition, edited by Laurence Brockliss and Heather Montgomery, 141–151. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010. Erdweg, Mathias. “Die Bewohner der Insel Tumleo, Berlinhafen, Deutsch-NeuGuinea.” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 32 (1902): 274–399. Hermsen, Edmund. Faktor Religion. Geschichte der Kindheit vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Cologne: Böhlau, 2009. Heyden, Ulrich van der, and Jürgen Becher, eds. Mission und Gewalt. Der Umgang christlicher Missionen mit Gewalt und die Ausbreitung des Christentums in der Zeit von 1792 bis 1918. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000. Hiery, Hermann Joseph. Das Deutsche Reich in der Südsee (1900–1921). Eine Annäherung an die Erfahrungen verschiedener Kulturen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995. Hiery, Hermann Joseph. “Schule und Ausbildung.” In Die deutsche Südsee 1884– 1914. Ein Handbuch, edited by Hermann Joseph Hiery, 198–238. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001. Janssen, Arnold. Letters to New Guinea and Australia, edited by Josef Alt. Nettetal: Steyler, 1996. Loosen, Livia. Deutsche Frauen in den Südsee-Kolonien des Kaiserreiches: Alltag und Beziehungen zur indigenen Bevölkerung, 1884–1919. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Paul, Eugen. Geschichte der christlichen Erziehung, vol. 2. Freiburg: Herder, 1995. Puff, Andreas. “Das papuanische Kind.” Steyler Missionsbote 36, no. 10 (1908– 1909): 154. Sack, Peter. “Das deutsche Rechtswesen in Melanesien.” In Die deutsche Südsee 1884–1914. Ein Handbuch, edited by Hermann Joseph Hiery, 322–342. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001. Scaglion, Richard. “Reconstructing First Contact. Some Local Effects of Labor Recruitment in the Sepik.” In Sepik Heritage. Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, 50–57. Brathurst: Carolina Academic Press, 1990. Steffen, Paul Benedikt. Die Anfänge der Rheinischen, Neuendettelsauer und Steyler Missionsarbeit in Neuguinea. Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta della Pontifica Università Gregoriana, 1993. Steffen, Paul. “Die katholischen Missionen in Deutsch-Neuguinea.” In Die deutsche Südsee 1884–1914. Ein Handbuch, edited by Hermann Joseph Hiery. 343–383. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001. Stornig, Katharina. Sisters Crossing Boundaries. German Missionary Nuns in Colonial Togo and New Guinea. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013. Stornig, Katharina. “Sacrifice, Heroism, Professionalization, and Empowerment: Colonial New Guinea in the Lives of German Religious Women, 1899–1919.” In Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I, edited by Hartmut Berghoff, et al., 237–254. Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2018. Vormann, Franz. “Die Mission in Monumbo.” Steyler Missionsbote 8 (1905): 117–119.

280  Katharina Stornig Vormann, Franz. “Zur Psychologie, Religion, Soziologie und Geschichte der Monumbo-Papua, Deutsch-Neuguinea.” Anthropos 5, no. 2 (1910): 407–418. Waltke, Bruce K. The Book of Proverbs. Chapters 1–15. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman, 2004. Wedgwood, Camilla. “The Life of Children in Manam.” Oceania 9 (1938): 1–29.

Part V

Opposing Catholic Invasion

13 Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence Celebrating Fête-Dieu in MidNineteenth-Century Montreal Dan Horner

On a Sunday morning each spring Montrealers lined the footpaths of their city to observe the annual commemoration of Fête-Dieu. Often referred to in other jurisdictions as Corpus Christi, this was a public celebration of a ritual otherwise carried out behind heavy church doors: the Catholic Mass. More specifically, Fête-Dieu commemorated the miracle of transubstantiation, whereby the communion bread comes to embody Christ.1 Weeks of preparation were required to transform the raucous urban streets of Montreal into a site of religious contemplation. Residents living along the procession’s route decorated their homes with banners and flags. Civic employees watered down the streets to prevent blowing dust from marring the occasion. Lay people spared no effort in decorating the streets of the city with cedar saplings, garlands, and floral archways. The procession was an opportunity grasped by the Catholic clergy to move through the streets of a cosmopolitan and heterogeneous city in all of their finery to the accompaniment of brass bands from the city’s temperance societies. As Montreal was home to a substantial British garrison, the clergy were often accompanied by military escort. Marching behind them were other Catholic professionals, including notaries and members of the bar. What always attracted the warmest acknowledgment, however, were the columns of young children marching at the rear of the procession. They represented the students of some newly established Catholic schools (Écoles de la Doctrine Chrétienne), an initiative that aimed to pull children off the streets and into the classroom. All of this was designed to showcase the vitality of Montreal’s Catholic community. Les Mélanges Religieux, a newspaper operated by the clergy, described each year’s procession with poetic flourish, speaking of how the sun bounced off the medals pinned to the chests of temperance band members, and of the countless visual and auditory expressions of zealous religious observance that their correspondents witnessed in walking the length of the procession.2 The latter’s focal point was at the rear, where a “gorgeous canopy” hung over the bishop and a handpicked group of local

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-19

284  Dan Horner priests accompanied a box carrying the communal wafer that symbolized Christ’s body.3 The Montreal that readers encountered in these descriptions of Fête-Dieu was pious, Catholic, and orderly. Those who lived in or visited the city during this period, however, knew a very different Montreal. They were more accustomed to hearing of a Montreal that was a rowdy port city with a rough popular culture; a hub for economic migrants in search of opportunity whose cultural experiences were marked by drinking and interpersonal violence. This violence ranged from brawls that regularly spilled out of taverns and brothels to large-scale riots that implicated hundreds of people, thereby shaping the political process. On multiple occasions, this led to fatal confrontations between soldiers and crowds, such as during the elections of 1832 and 1844 and during the visit of the renegade priest Alessandro Gavazzi in 1853.4 This violence was fundamentally sectarian, even when it was purported to be fought in the name of political principles like democratic reform. Physical confrontations were not addenda to political life in mid-nineteenth-century British North America, but were situated at their very core. Political leaders counted on the support of rowdy young men, often plying them with alcohol. In exchange, these men would engage in a variety of acts to intimidate their political rivals, jostling with them in an effort to prevent them from casting ballots or carrying out other gestures of support.5 In a city defined by migration, these political toughs were drawn from groups like the predominately Catholic canal workers and the Protestant members of a fraternal society known as the Orange Order, which nudged individuals to position themselves along Montreal’s sectarian divide. As a growing public chorus, especially those of urban elites, began to identify this violent political culture as a problem, politicians and their supporters became increasingly insistent that it was their rivals who were egging on the violence. Questions of public order permeated every aspect of public life in British North America during this period, and nowhere more than in Montreal. Collective violence became the forum through which people from all walks of life reflected on the sectarian rift between Protestants and Catholics that shaped colonial public life. While elite figures like religious leaders did not explicitly condone violence, they were deeply invested in the rhetoric of sectarian conflict, and defended their calls for greater access to the levers of power by denigrating the character of their cultural rivals. Even if outbreaks of sectarian violence only occurred on an annual basis, anyone engaged in the city’s public sphere during this period would have been aware of the ongoing conflicts between Protestants and Catholics and the outsized role that cultural difference played in shaping the city’s politics. Violence and the threat of violence was a cornerstone of Montreal society. This chapter comes at the topic of Catholic violence from an unconventional angle. Rather than studying an outbreak of collective violence

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  285 directly, it examines how the threat of tumult loomed over public discussions of an annual celebration that itself never erupted into social unrest. The chapter will delve into this question by examining how these processions were debated in the deeply partisan Montreal press of this period. A shift in Catholic public culture toward fostering more assertive and public expressions of religiosity, a trend associated with the Ultramontane Catholic revival, forced both Protestants and Catholics to reflect on what they considered to be the appropriate use of public space. Leaders from across the sectarian and political divide frequently accused their rivals of making reckless use of the city’s public spaces, thereby threatening the precarious peace that allowed daily life to continue amidst profound social conflict. While some Protestants took issue with the annual Fête-Dieu processions, Catholics had similar qualms when it came to Protestant preaching on street corners. Discussions of the annual Fête-Dieu procession allow us a valuable glimpse into how these assertions were made. For Catholics, these processions came to represent their right to practice their religion as fully equal citizens in a British colony with a powerful Protestant establishment. For Protestants, Fête-Dieu was taken as a symbol of the threat posed by an increasingly assertive Catholic Church that they worried would gradually begin to trample their rights as religious and ethnic minorities in British North America. Cosmopolitan and Turbulent: Montreal’s Public Culture Montreal had originally been settled by Europeans when the northern reaches of North America formed part of the French Empire. It had been inhabited and stewarded by a succession of Indigenous nations long before that. The British conquered this territory during the Seven Years War. While restrictions were put in place on the practice of the Catholic faith at first, these efforts were tossed aside within a decade when British colonial officials grasped the necessity of bringing Canadien elites into the fold as loyal servants to the British Crown. In the decades that followed, Montreal’s growth was relatively stagnant in comparison to the bustling American cities that ran down the Atlantic Seaboard. Its population climbed slowly to 50,000 by the middle of the nineteenth century. Still, a cosmopolitan community took hold in the closing decades of the eighteenth and the opening decades of the nineteenth centuries.6 The city had a Canadien – or French Catholic – majority. Following the Conquest of New France by the British in 1763, a sizable British Protestant minority had taken root, many of whom profited from close connections to the colonial establishment even before Montreal became the capital of the Province of Canada in 1844. There were smaller communities of migrants from other European countries, including a small Jewish population. The circuits of trading in enslaved people active in both

286  Dan Horner the French and British empires resulted in a Black presence.7 While it is unclear how many Indigenous people lived fulltime in Montreal during these years, the presence of a large Kanien’kehá:ka (or Mohawk) community just across the St. Lawrence River at Kahnawá:ke meant that Indigenous peoples were a familiar presence on the city’s streets.8 Since the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Montreal had also attracted a growing influx of migrants from Ireland. Before the 1840s, the majority of these migrants were Irish Protestants, who tended to quickly assimilate into the larger British Protestant community. The same could be said of a small but economically dynamic community of American merchants who called Montreal home. Thereafter, the demographic balance of Irish emigrants had swung toward Irish Catholics. The latter soon came to occupy a complicated place in Montreal’s social composition. They shared a language with the British Protestant minority, but their religion cast them as outsiders during a period marked by sectarian conflict, when an increasingly bellicose British identity was understood to be fundamentally Protestant.9 Meanwhile, Irish Catholics shared a religious connection with the city’s Canadien majority.10 This heterogeneous community produced a distinct and turbulent culture in Montreal. By the 1840s, the city was in the grips of a political conflict that knit together questions of democratic reform and sectarian rivalries. The vast majority of the city’s Catholics of both the French and Irish variety were supportive of a movement for political reform that would expand the power of the Province of Canada’s democratically elected legislature. These advocates of reform often took inspiration from Catholic counterparts in Ireland, like Daniel O’Connell.11 The city’s British Protestant minority, meanwhile, vigorously opposed this agenda. They insisted that what reformers were proposing would amount to a form of popular tyranny; with Catholics making up the majority of the Province of Canada’s population, they would be able to govern without any checks on their power if there were not institutional powers ceded to minorities. At the core of this critique of democratic reform was the widespread sentiment in the British Protestant community and the Tory faction in parliament that they were entitled to hold the reins of power in the colony because of their decades of loyal service to the Crown, an institution that they understood to be distinctly Protestant in character. These sentiments were deepened by the circulation of anti-Catholic ideas around the Atlantic world during this period. The assertion that Catholics, with their loyalty to a foreign pope in Rome, were not equipped to contribute constructively to democratic institutions was one being made by Protestant political activists in a number of different national contexts at this time.12 These political and sectarian conflicts erupted into violence repeatedly during the 1840s in Montreal. The turbulent attributes of political life in British North America – expressed in bloody sectarian riots in Montreal and

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  287 across the colony throughout this period – left an indelible mark on public life in the city. Political rallies customarily concluded with raucous processions past the homes of prominent political rivals, where bawdy songs were sung and public figures burned in effigy. Such events frequently erupted into brawls. In the era before the adoption of voting by secret ballot, Montreal voters made their way to a small number of polling stations, where candidates and their supporters would jostle each other in an effort to prevent votes from being cast.13 Many people implicated in this violence were from the city’s nascent migrant working-class. On the Protestant side, it tended to be artisans and clerks of modest means who entered into these frays to defend the Tory cause, which advocated for significant checks on the power of the elected legislature in order to preserve the dominance of the British minority. Although evidence to support this claim is tenuous, it appears as though they often engaged in these tumults through their affiliation with the Orange Order, a fraternal society with a strong anti-Catholic bent.14 Opposing them were Irish Catholic migrant laborers employed on large public works projects like the expansion of the Lachine Canal and the quarries that surrounded the city. In the aftermath of these confrontations, political rivals would accuse each other of paying their supporters to engage in acts of violence, while asserting that they themselves would never sink so low as to encourage their own supporters to do the same. These sectarian and political conflicts marred elections on a regular basis, most notably during parliamentary by-elections in 1832 and 1844, where troops called in to restore the public peace fired into rioting crowds. The two most dramatic outbreaks of violence in the city during this period were the burning of parliament by outraged Tories after Queen Victoria’s representative in the colony, Lord Elgin, signaled his intention of supporting the expansion of the elected legislature’s power – a move widely understood to signal the Crown siding with the Catholic community, and the Gavazzi Riot of 1853, when Protestants and Catholics clashed during an appearance by a controversial ex-communicated Italian priest.15 These outbreaks followed a pattern. Protestants and Catholics would congregate in a public space, like a square adjacent to a polling station or, in the case of the Gavazzi Riot, a church where a controversial figure was making an appearance. Jostling and fisticuffs would ensue. Troops from the garrison would be summoned. It was in their attempts to subdue the melee that the skirmish would turn fatal, as they fired their guns into the crowd. Soldiers and military officials over the course of this period became increasingly vocal in insisting that intervening in urban sectarian conflicts of this kind was not their place. Furthermore, there were widespread concerns in the Catholic community that British troops stationed in Montreal had too many connections to the Orange Order to serve as neutral arbiters of such disputes. The frequency with which these bloody skirmishes occurred on the streets of Montreal during this period,

288  Dan Horner against the backdrop of a public sphere defined by sectarian difference, demonstrates why there was such widespread concern that the Catholic Church’s ostentatious Fête-Dieu procession could instigate a similar conflict. Historians have tended to address these riots as sporadic outbursts of exceptional violence. In doing so, they masked the degree to which these larger disturbances were rooted in a quotidian experience where Montrealers were no strangers to interpersonal violence. This reality helped fuel the ambitions of a dynamic assemblage of reform-oriented elites who prescribed everything from temperance initiatives to limit the number of taverns operating in the city to the ramping up of policing as a means to create a more genteel urban culture in the city. Montreal’s Catholic community – particularly Irish and Canadien migrants newly arrived in the city – were disproportionately the targets of these actions, as arrest records show. For example, in her work on the policing of sex work during this period, Mary Anne Poutanen demonstrates that it was primarily Irish Catholic and Canadien women who were being arrested and convicted for these offenses.16 Police records demonstrate a similar increase in arrests for vagrancy-related charges that were essentially used to criminalize poverty in an environment marked by substantial disparities in wealth. Likewise, judicial records show hundreds of men and women being brought before local magistrates on an annual basis on charges of being drunk in public, lying across public footpaths, or disturbing the public peace. In many instances, people came before the lower criminal courts on a fairly regular basis. While policing was not an entirely novel dynamic on the streets of Montreal, the 1840s were marked by a spike in arrests for minor public order related offenses. It was members of the city’s most marginalized communities who found themselves pulled into the web of the criminal justice system. That such substantial portion of this criminalized cohort were Catholic became grist for the city’s sectarian conflicts, leading Catholics to double down on assertions that they were respectable and causing some Protestants to insist that Catholics were not equipped to handle the responsibilities of full citizenship. The Contested Notion of Montreal’s Catholic Revival Catholic newspapers like Les Mélanges Religieux would often remark in their coverage of Fête-Dieu that the procession was steeped in tradition, rooted in a deep Catholic past. This construction of the Fête-Dieu procession as a practice existing outside of time masked the degree to which it was, in fact, a vital component of the Church’s engagement with modernity. Historians of nineteenth-century Catholicism, like Christopher Clark and Roberto Perin, have argued that the architects of this period’s religious revivals leaned heavily on public and emotive customs to engage with men, women, and children living in rapidly growing urban centers.17 The Mass

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  289 commemorating Fête-Dieu had long been celebrated, but the Church was devoting considerably more energy to coordinating a public event on the urban street beginning in the 1840s. This shows an effort to increase the Church’s power in an age of democratic expansion by making an assertion of growing public support for the Church’s temporal power. That people experiencing modernity in the guise of the physical dislocations prompted by the transition to capitalism embraced a procession that aspired to a sense of timelessness and tradition is a powerful example of the tensions between modernity and anti-modernity.18 Even so, the question of why the annual Fête-Dieu procession resonated with the city’s ethnically heterogenous Catholic community is a complex one. Some were surely drawn by their religious convictions, while others might have seen it more broadly as a community celebration and break from quotidian routine. Given the contentious coverage Fête-Dieu received in the press, it is likely that the majority participating in and observing the procession would have understood the larger political implications of occupying public space in such a forceful way. The contours of a Catholic revival in Montreal and, indeed, throughout the large St. Lawrence River Valley during this period have been debated by social historians and religious scholars of Quebec for decades.19 What is clear is that in the first decades of the nineteenth century many Canadien Catholics were only religiously observant in perfunctory ways, turning to the Church to mark major life events like births, marriages, and deaths. Clerical leaders in what would become Quebec were attuned to the Ultramontane turn in the Catholic nations of Europe. This was a movement that combined a deeper popular engagement with the Church as an institution through a focus on religious rituals and an increasing deference to the centralized power of the papacy and the institutions that sprung from it. At the very moment that secular Canadien leaders found their political movement in disarray following the failure of armed rebellions against the Crown in 1837 and 1838, Catholic leaders began borrowing strategies from their European counterparts to carve out a stronger social and cultural presence in the colony. One of the pivotal moments of this campaign occurred in 1840, when Bishop Lartigue invited one of the more energetic spokesmen for the Ultramontane cause, the Bishop of Nancy, to Montreal to oversee a religious revival among the city’s Catholics, both Irish and Canadien. This entailed weeks of daily masses meant to pull Catholics into church pews with a frequency that they had not previously been accustomed to. Coverage at the time, particularly in the newly established Les Mélanges Religieux, highlighted the degree to which the sublime and mysterious characteristics of the Catholic Mass played a pivotal role in this. The use of church bells in particular signaled the way that the clergy were seeking to stake a claim to a larger social and cultural presence across the city in a way that foreshadowed

290  Dan Horner their celebrations of Fête-Dieu in the years ahead. Anecdotal evidence at the time suggests that women were particularly drawn to Lartigue’s revival.20 In a city of migrants, where people aimed to forge community for both emotional and material reasons, the Catholic Church thus began to achieve success in carving out a larger role for itself in Montreal’s daily life. In doing so, they were able to position themselves to make a larger claim on institutional power in regards to projects like education and social reform. While more commercially-oriented Protestants viewed this as appropriate in a liberal society, it provoked anger among some of the city’s Evangelical Protestants, who tended to be more tapped into the anti-Catholic discourse circulating around the Atlantic world. The Catholic culture forged on the streets of Montreal during the Ultramontane revival was inherently contentious in this heterogeneous environment. The Politics of Public Space in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal The Fête-Dieu procession resonated with Montreal’s Catholic communities at least in part because assertions of public space were a cornerstone of the city’s politics during this period. The city’s public sphere directed the attention of Montrealers to the notion that the raucous popular culture found on the streets was a problem in need of correction. Political conflicts and sectarian tensions were not merely exercises in rhetoric. Montrealers actively experienced politics on the streets; a critical mass of them had witnessed or participated in the rough pageantry of electoral politics. They had marched in or stood along footpaths to watch the more secular commemorations of Saint Patrick’s Day and Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, the national celebrations of the Irish and Canadien communities, respectively. Furthermore, they lived in a city where the vast majority of people worked and socialized on the streets. For migrants to the city, the streets were a place where community was forged. This was a process that was materially vital to people in an environment that offered little in the way of a social safety net. While nineteenth-century Catholic Montrealers might not have articulated it precisely in these terms, their engagement with events like Fête-Dieu suggests that they understood intrinsically the importance of staking a claim to the streets.21 Public officials and colonial authorities began taking a harder stance on political assemblies during this period. The Special Council, an unelected body that was handed the levers of power in the colony for two years following the insurrections of the 1830s, had passed ordinances that placed limitations on people’s right to engage in political demonstrations of any kind.22 More recently, an upsurge in popular violence propagated by the Orange Order had led the Reform faction in parliament to successfully usher into effect the Party Processions Act in 1843.23 The latter was aimed at raucous

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  291 commemorations of the anniversary of the Protestant victories at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when forces allied with King William III successfully fought off a challenge by those allied with the deposed King James II, thereby ensuring that the British Crown remained in Protestant hands.24 This piece of legislation was greeted with hostility by the colony’s Protestant establishment. They pointed to the Catholic Church’s increasing use of public acts of popular piety, which the Party Processions Act did not address, to suggest that it revealed the hypocrisies that lay at the core of the Reform faction’s political agenda, which they claimed employed vague allusions to popular democracy to cloak a darker agenda of Catholic dominance. In the years following the passage of the bill, political and sectarian rivals would debate ad nauseum the differences between the Orange Order’s celebrations of Protestant military victories and the Catholic Church’s use of religious processions. Catholics argued that their crowd events were sacred in character and rested decidedly above the fray of political contestation, while Protestants insisted that this was a fantastical assertion that defied what they witnessed occurring during the Catholic celebrations. How people carried themselves on the urban street – how they marked difference and built community – thus became a deeply politicized topic. It was how people made sense of larger debates about political reform, which frequently linked democratic citizenship to assertions of public composure and restraint. Elites during this period viewed the streets as a troubling space, a place where the violence and unruly behavior of the city’s poorest residents could erupt at any moment. These anxieties became one of the primary ways through which they contemplated the social transformations of the midnineteenth century, namely the migration of people out of rural agricultural regions and into cities, and the interconnected processes of industrialization. For many of these same reasons, however, they also viewed the streets as a space where they could make assertions of their authority. Events like parades, public celebrations, and religious processions expanded substantially in frequency and scope in the 1840s. The contested nature of the urban street, and its relationship to the threat of violence in a raucous and cosmopolitan city were intricately connected. In a city where a variety of leaders and groups were making assertions about the legitimacy of their authority, being able to demonstrate an ability to bring the daily tumult of life on the streets of Montreal to a pristine halt became a powerful political tool. It gave community leaders and those with such aspirations an opportunity to present themselves as being above the fray of popular politics. Discussions about the Fête-Dieu procession ought to be read as a running commentary on the politics of public space in the rapidly growing nineteenth-century city. The presence of children marching in tight formation, for example, resonated with spectators because they were accustomed to rougher encounters with children on the streets. Many youngsters

292  Dan Horner contributed to their family’s economic survival by hawking newspapers or carrying out chores that left their clothes stained with mud and other debris.25 The children joining these processions represented the positive impact that a more socially engaged and institutionally cohesive Catholic Church aspired to have on a turbulent urban environment. It was an assertion that the schools operated by the Catholic Church were doing effective work. Like other parades during this period, the Fête-Dieu procession was meant to communicate the legitimacy of a particular segment of the elite’s power – in this case, a dynamic and assertive Catholic Church in the midst of orchestrating a religious revival. Following the 1830s, a decade when public life was marked by the secular demands of an emerging Canadien elite’s calls for democratic reform, the Catholic clergy used an invigorated celebration of Fête-Dieu as an opportunity to popularize and legitimize a greater position for itself in the social, cultural, and political life of the city. As Montreal’s leading English-language Catholic newspaper noted, Fête-Dieu was “a public occasion for the Catholic to testify before heretics and unbelievers, his belief in the great mystery of our faith, and in an annual triumph for our holy religion.”26 This insistence that the procession ought to be interpreted by Montrealers of every background as an event that existed wholly outside the realm of political turmoil masked the degree to which it was a novel use of public space that signaled the Catholic Church’s deep engagement with a changing urban landscape. In a city marked by a sharp sectarian divide, however, such assertions did not go uncontested by the Protestant community, especially the city’s small but energetic and well-connected Evangelical community. John Dougall played a crucial role in this. Dougall was a Scottish migrant who arrived in British North America in 1826, settling first at Quebec before moving up the St. Lawrence River to Montreal several years later. He established the Montreal Witness, a newspaper that played a substantial role in knitting together the city’s community of Evangelical Protestants, in 1845.27 Dougall and his correspondents made clear that they saw Fête-Dieu as an attack on Protestants and their own right to the city. They argued that their coreligionists were prevented from making their way to their own religious services on the Sabbath, and noted that the streets surrounding the Anglican Christ’s Church were almost entirely blocked on the day of the 1848 procession, which “materially affects the liberties of the residents of Montreal.”28 Dougall and others described this obstruction in physical terms that painted Catholics participating in the procession as aggressive, noting that “all the ladies and most of the gentlemen were obliged to wait a considerable length of time before they could ‘worm’ their way through the number of persons that were crammed into such a narrow street.”29 These complaints were registered on an annual basis; they showed how this organ of the Evangelical community saw the procession as an opening volley in a

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  293 larger struggle over public space in a city whose public life was oriented around sectarian conflict. Admitting that the procession might simply be viewed as “a grievous annoyance,” the Montreal Witness asserted a forceful opposition had to be mounted against it because “we have no guarantee that every Sunday in the year, and every street in the city, will not be used for holding procession.”30 The assertion here was that this brand of emotive and popular Catholicism posed an existential threat to the Protestant community because it was fundamentally expansionary in nature. Such sentiments were not unique to Montreal. A New York paper argued in 1851 that events like Fête-Dieu revealed a larger push for Catholic supremacy in North America. “What,” they asked, “is to be the end of this? Can we look upon the steady and rapid growth of popery in this land, and not tremble for our Sabbaths?”31 Fête-Dieu on the Pages of Montreal’s Sectarian Press These annual contestations over the legitimacy of the Fête-Dieu procession frequently pitted the Montreal Witness against Les Mélanges Religieux. The editors of the former took issue at their Catholic counterparts for seemingly suggesting that any potential physical confrontation could be defused by Protestants electing to stay at home on that particular Sunday. While this might bear the appearance of a practical solution that would allow Protestants and Catholics to navigate cultural difference in the city, it was interpreted by Dougall as a grave threat to the religious liberties of Protestant Montrealers.32 Dougall and his correspondents warned readers to avoid any act that might be taken as a sign of capitulation. It shows how in their coverage of the annual procession they understood Fête-Dieu through the framework of violent conflict. While Catholic coverage of the procession portrayed it as a sublime expression of piety, the Montreal Witness painted a picture of Catholics recklessly thumbing their noses at the sensibilities of the city’s Protestants, thereby risking an outbreak of collective violence. The Montreal Witness expressed this in sensory terms, describing how the thoroughfares were completely crammed with the procession and its hangers-on, and the cross streets were crowded with the latter, running from one point to another to obtain a more favourable view, whilst all the time the bells jangled and pealed with more than ordinary energy.33 By making the claim that people were being jostled on footpaths and that the ringing of church bells was a purposefully intense intervention in the city’s soundscape, the Montreal Witness was building the case that the FêteDieu procession was not a reprieve from the city’s turbulent sectarian confrontations, but rather an extension of it. Again, the questions raised by the

294  Dan Horner Party Processions Act loom large over this discussion. If the Orange Order was being barred from celebrating Britain’s Protestant lineage and symbols because such practices had been deemed a risk to Montreal’s combustible popular culture, why were Catholics able to rally around the commemoration of one of their core religious customs? One of the cornerstones of the Protestant attack on Fête-Dieu was the assertion that it demonstrated the contrast between the two faiths. While Protestants, the Montreal Witness argued, engaged in their faith with reason and reserve, they deemed popular Catholic practices like the procession to be feminine and irrational. An 1848 letter to the editor labeled the event a “carnival of superstition.”34 The public showcasing of the communion host was particularly galling. The Montreal Witness lamented it as a celebration of “a paste God carried round in a box.”35 It was an insult to Protestants, they argued, to have “the grievous idolatry and blasphemy of this whole affair thrust into their very faces by a procession in the open streets.”36 Evangelical commentators in the Montreal Witness were also troubled by a reality that they rarely mentioned in print: that many Protestants in the city, perhaps drawn in by the joy and splendor of a public festival in the aftermath of a dark and grueling Montreal winter, actually participated in the procession by decorating their homes along the procession’s route and lining the footpaths to watch Catholic friends and neighbors march. Readers were urged not to “swell the crowds of idle gazers and Sabbath breakers which attend it.”37 Rather than suggesting that Protestant participation in FêteDieu might have been indicative of some Protestants having a more nuanced perspective on the event than that which was held on the pages of the Montreal Witness, Dougall and his correspondents suggested instead that it ought to be taken as evidence of Catholic intimidation toward the Protestant minority, arguing that Protestants who decorated their homes were “countenancing publicly what they privately condemn as idolatrous.”38 They articulated a similar logic in an 1846 editorial celebrating the military’s decision to cease playing a ceremonial role by accompanying the procession, arguing that this had been an encumbrance on the soldier who was a “conscientious Protestant.”39 Two months prior to the 1849 procession, Montreal had been the scene of bitter sectarian violence over political reforms that empowered Canada’s Catholics and their allies in the legislature. These events, known as the Rebellion Losses Crisis, reached a crescendo with the burning of the colonial parliament in Montreal, but skirmishes would continue for much of the spring and summer of that year. The Protestant press argued that this was not an appropriate time for Catholic revelers to take to the streets for the celebration of Fête-Dieu. The Catholic press responded indignantly that the mere suggestion that this reverent occasion could pose a threat to public order was indicative of the Protestant community’s deep hostility to their

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  295 Catholic neighbors. The accusatory exchanges that were lobbed back and forth demonstrate how a single event could be depicted in starkly different terms in the public sphere. Protestants continued to argue that the event was more raucous than its Catholic organizers made it out to be, pointing out that celebrants frequently fired rifles into the air at the procession’s conclusion, an act that would be distressing to Montrealers who had lived through weeks of sectarian violence. In the Catholic press, meanwhile, the firing of rifles at the end of the procession was depicted as part of Fête-Dieu solemn pageantry. The Protestant press also reacted to rumors circulating in town and repeated in the Catholic press that thugs were hashing out a plan to attack the procession. Religious Protestants, they argued, would never engage in violence unless they were under attack and defending themselves.40 When the procession took place without incident, Les Mélanges Religieux praised Montrealers for celebrating Fête-Dieu in sublime silence, holding it up in contrast to the violence that had tarnished the city’s standing just a few weeks earlier. It is not clear whether celebrants abstained from the customary rifle shots. That the event did not instigate violence was proof, they argued, of how Catholic institutions were uniquely equipped to restore order to the streets of Montreal.41 Catholic and Protestant newspaper editors depicted what occurred on the streets of Montreal in ways that aimed to buttress their larger claims on power during these years, a fact that serves to frustrate those trying to get a clear picture of how people actually experienced these events. What is clear, however, is that in a turbulent social and cultural environment like Montreal, public events such as parades, processions, and even riots, could teeter on the edge of solemnity and disorder, and much depended on the perspective of whoever was telling the story. Protestant attacks on the celebration of Fête-Dieu became an important front in a larger conflict with a resurgent Catholic Church. Both sides placed these debates around Fête-Dieu into the larger context of sectarian tension. They accused each other of recklessly endangering public order. Protestants saw the procession as an act of intimidation against their community, while Catholics maintained that it was Protestants and their unrelenting attacks on the procession that threatened to create social upheaval. The issue would continue to resonate with the city’s Evangelical Protestant community, who were tapped into global social movement through the early 1850s. In 1852, Evangelical activists printed and distributed the preamble of a piece of British legislation that banned both Orange Order processions and those of the Catholic Church. A fiery editorial in Les Mélanges Religieux argued that such actions demonstrated how hollow Protestants’ commitment to religious tolerance was, with Catholics furthermore maintaining that their reaction to Fête-Dieu betrayed a strain of fanatical intolerance.42 The key to religious tolerance, one 1844 editorial argued, was for Christians to allow

296  Dan Horner each denomination to practice their religiosity in whatever manner they saw fit.43 They noted elsewhere that most of the complaints about the procession dwelled on its sensory manifestations, particularly the sounds of the bells ringing and of the brass bands playing. Les Mélanges Religieux noted that there was nothing preventing Anglicans from organizing a similar celebration of their own faith, and that it was no fault of the Catholic Church that their fellow Christians elected not to take their religion out onto to the streets.44 Conclusion: A City Steps Back From the Brink of Violence The annual Fête-Dieu procession never erupted into major violence in nineteenth-century Montreal. In a city that was so mired in sectarian tension that colonial officials elected to strip it of its status as a capital following the burning of parliament in 1849, this is surprising. Toronto, the city which was deemed placid enough to replace Montreal as the capital of the Province of Canada, saw a major riot break out between Protestants and Irish Catholics during their Fête-Dieu procession in 1864.45 How did Montreal escape this same fate? The answer does not rest, it would seem, with effective policing. The city’s newly established police force was, like many of its counterparts across the North Atlantic World during this period, notoriously ineffective when it came to handling large-scale public disturbances given their modest size and resources. While the prospect of thousands of Catholics taking to the streets of the city might have prompted exchanges of heated rhetoric that marched Montrealers to the brink of conflict, these words never translated into actual violence. Although Toronto might have had a more peaceable reputation than Montreal, the Orange Order wielded considerable clout there during this period, both on the streets and in the halls of power, thereby making an outbreak of violence at an explicitly Catholic procession more likely. As aggressive as the words might have been on the editorial pages of the city’s newspapers, the Fête-Dieu procession became a moment when Montrealers reflected upon and negotiated difference in their city. These were discussions that pushed competing views of what constituted the appropriate use of public space to the forefront of public consciousness. They are also filtered into the historical records of newspapers that were likely more militantly partisan than the general population, who had a stronger motivation to pursue compromise, and whose daily lives involved routinely engaging across the sectarian divide. In a city where outbreaks of sectarian violence had marked public life for decades, the possibility of violence lingered over the entire conversation, but both Protestant and Catholic Montrealers managed to avoid being drawn into conflict over Fête-Dieu. So much of urban politics during

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  297 this period in Montreal was built around rituals that brought residents of the city to the brink of physical confrontation, like marching in public processions and jostling in front of voting stations. It seems likely, however, that the tacit tolerance for Catholic religiosity among the majority of the city’s Protestants played a significant role in preventing violent confrontations during the Fête-Dieu procession. That tolerance flowed in both directions. The Fête-Dieu procession might have been a show of community strength, but it stopped short of carrying out an explicit attack on Protestant symbols and institutions. What is particularly compelling is that this tolerance flowed from the bottom up.46 Powerful community leaders, with partisan press organs at their disposal, often engaged in tempestuous attacks on their sectarian foes, while it was ordinary citizens who appear to have consistently walked the city back from the brink of violence. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for an urban culture where a powerful Catholic Church co-existed with a dynamic Protestant minority deep into the twentieth century, when demographic change and the secularizing tides of the 1960s dampened the importance of the Protestant / Catholic divide. Notes 1 For an overview of Fête-Dieu in mid-nineteenth-century Montreal, see Christine Sheito, “Une fête contestée: la procession de la Fête-Dieu à Montréal au XIXe siècle” (MA thesis, Université de Montréal, 1983). 2 See, e.g., Les Mélanges Religieux (June 20, 1843). 3 Montreal Witness (June 4, 1849). 4 For an overview of the military’s role in subduing sectarian violence in Montreal during this period, see Elinor Kyte Senior, British Regulars in Montreal: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), chapter 5. 5 For micro-histories that provide descriptions of specific sectarian riots in Montreal, see James Jackson, The Riot That Never Was: The Military Shooting of Three Montrealers in 1832 and the Official Cover-Up (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2009), and Bettina Bradbury, “Women at the Hustings: Gender, Citizenship and the Montreal By-Elections of 1832,” in Re-Thinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, eds. Mona Gleason and Adele Perry (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2006). 6 For a more detailed overview of the city’s changing demographic profile during this period, see the work of historical geographers Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton, particularly Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), chapters 1 and 2. 7 For an overview of the history of Blacks in Montreal, see Frank Mackey, Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s–1880s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), and Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2006). 8 Daniel Rück’s The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Vancouver: University of British

298  Dan Horner Columbia Press, 2021) carefully examines the relationship between colonizers and Indigenous peoples in the Montreal region during this period. 9 For the contours of this identity, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1992), chapter 1. 10 For a discussion of the Irish Catholic community as a “third” group in midnineteenth-century Montreal, see Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton, “The Challenge of the Irish Catholic Community in Nineteenth Century Montreal,” Histoire Sociale / Social History 35, no. 70 (November 2002): 334. 11 For a clear overview of democratic thought in French Canada during this period, see Michel Ducharme’s Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions Atlantiques, 1776–1838 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), chapter 4. 12 See the other contributions to this volume, which map out the global character of anti-Catholic sentiment. 13 Colin Grittner’s discussions of the secret ballot are illuminating in this regard. See “Privilege at the Polls: Culture, Citizenship, and the Electoral Franchise in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British North America” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2015), chapters 1 and 4. 14 For the Orange Order’s presence in Canada, see Cecil Houston and William Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 15 For the burning of parliament in Montreal, in 1849, see Gaston Deschênes, Une capitale éphémère: Montréal et les événements tragiques de 1849 (Québec: Septentrion, 1999). On the Gavazzi Riot, see Dan Horner, “Shame upon you as men!: Competing Visions of Masculine Authority in the Aftermath of Montreal’s Gavazzi Riot,” Social History / Histoire Sociale 44, no. 87 (May 2011). 16 For more on Mary, see Anne Poutanen, Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 181. 17 See, for example, Christopher Clark, “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14, and Roberto Perin, Ignace de Montréal: Artisan d’une identité nationale (Montreal: Boréal, 2008), 130. 18 Clark, “The New Catholicism,” 33. 19 For an overview of the scholarly debates regarding the degree to which an Ultramontane Catholic revival occurred in French Canada during this period, see Nadia Eid, Le clergé et le pouvoir politique au Québec: Une analyse de l’idéologie ultramontaine au milieu du XIXe siècle (Montreal: Hurtubise, 1978); Louis Rosseau, “À l’origine d’une société maintenant perdue: le réveil religieux montréalais de 1840,” in Religion et culture au Québec: figures contemporaines du sacré, ed. Yves Desrosiers (Montreal: Fides, 1986). 20 See Christine Hudon, “Le renouveau religieux québécois au XIXe siècle: éléments pour une réinterprétation,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 24, no. 4 (1995), 481. 21 The historical literature on parades and processions helps explain why such events appealed to residents of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city. See, e.g., Mary Ryan, “The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth Century Social Order,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989) and Roberto Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1985).

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  299 22 For more on the Special Council, see Steven Watt, “Authoritarianism, Constitutionalism, and the Special Council of Lower Canada, 1838–1841,” (MA thesis, McGill University, 1997). 23 Annie Tock has examined the political conflicts surrounding the Party Processions Act in British North America. See “Orange Riots, Party Processions Acts and the Control of Public Space in Ireland and British North America, 1796– 1851” (PhD diss., University of Maine, 2020). 24 Dominic Bryan provides an overview of the historical development of Orange parading in Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control (London: Pluto Press, 2000), chapter 3. 25 For more on the efforts of reformers to remove children from the raucous urban street in the nineteenth century, see Peter Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), chapter 4. 26 The True Witness (June 27, 1851). 27 For more on John Dougall and the Montreal Witness, see J.I. Cooper, “The Early Editorial Policy of the Montreal Witness,” Report of the Annual Meeting of the Royal Society of Canada 26, no. 1 (1947). 28 Montreal Witness (June 5, 1848). 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 The Catholic (December 8, 1841). 32 Montreal Witness (June 26, 1848). 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Montreal Witness (June 19, 1848). 37 Ibid. 38 Montreal Witness (June 22, 1846). 39 Ibid. 40 Montreal Witness (June 18, 1849). 41 Les Mélanges Religieux (June 12, 1849). 42 Les Mélanges Religieux (July 6, 1852 and June 9, 1843). 43 Ibid. (June 18, 1844). 44 Les Mélanges Religieux (June 11, 1844). 45 Ian Radforth, “Collective Rights, Liberal Discourse, and Public Order: The Clash Over Catholic Processions in Victorian Toronto,” Canadian Historical Review 95, no. 4 (December 2014), 511–544. 46 While this phenomenon has not been studied in the context of Quebec and Canada, Keith Luria’s work on the co-existence of Catholics and Calvinists in the French city of Poitrou provides a helpful framework for reflecting on how ordinary people managed to successfully navigate cultural and confessional difference through non-violent means. See Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2005).

Bibliography Baldwin, Peter. Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999.

300  Dan Horner Bernier-Cormier, Marie-Eve. “La Fête-Dieu dans trois quotidiennes québécois (1910–1970).” Études Histoire Religieuse 78, no. 2 (2012): 41–58. Bradbury, Bettina. “Women at the Hustings: Gender, Citizenship and the Montreal By-Elections of 1832.” In Re-Thinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, edited by Mona Gleason and Adele Perry, 73–94. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bryan, Dominic. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Clark, Christopher. “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars.” In Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 11–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1992. Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2006. Cooper, J.I. “The Early Editorial Policy of the Montreal Witness.” Report of the Annual Meeting of the Royal Society of Canada 26, no. 1 (1947): 53–62. Deschênes, Gaston. Une capitale éphémère: Montréal et les événements tragiques de 1849. Quebec: Septentrion, 1999. Ducharme, Michel. Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions Atlantiques, 1776–1838. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Eid, Nadia. Le clergé et le pouvoir politique au Québec: Une analyse de l’idéologie ultramontaine au milieu du XIXe siècle. Montreal: Hurtubise, 1978. Grittner, Colin. “Privilege at the Polls: Culture, Citizenship, and the Electoral Franchise in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British North America.” PhD diss., McGill University, 2015. Hardy, René. “L’activité sociale du curé de Notre-Dame de Québec: aperçu de l’influence du clergé au milieu du XIXe siècle.” Histoire sociale / Social History 3, no. 6 (November 1970): 5–32. Horner, Dan. “Shame upon you as men!: Competing Visions of Masculine Authority in the Aftermath of Montreal’s Gavazzi Riot.” Social History / Histoire Sociale 44, no. 87 (May 2011): 29–52. Houston, Cecil, and William Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Hudon, Christine. “Le renouveau religieux québécois au XIXe siècle: éléments pour une réinterprétation.” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 24, no. 4 (1995): 467–489. Jackson, James. The Riot That Never Was: The Military Shooting of Three Montrealers in 1832 and the Official Cover-Up. Montreal: Baraka Books, 2009. Kyte Senior, Elinor. British Regulars in Montreal: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981. Luria, Keith. Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2005. Mackey, Frank. Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s–1880s. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2004.

Pageantry in the Shadow of Violence  301 Olson, Sherry, and Patricia Thornton. “The Challenge of the Irish Catholic Community in Nineteenth Century Montreal.” Histoire Sociale / Social History 35, no. 70 (November 2002): 331–362. Olson, Sherry, and Patricia Thornton. Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Orsi, Roberto. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1985. Perin, Roberto. Ignace de Montréal: Artisan d’une identité nationale. Montreal: Boréal, 2008. Poutanen, Anne. Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Radforth, Ian. “Collective Rights, Liberal Discourse, and Public Order: The Clash Over Catholic Processions in Victorian Toronto.” Canadian Historical Review 95, no. 4 (December 2014): 511–544. Rousseau, Louis. “À l’origine d’une société maintenant perdue: le réveil religieux montréalais de 1840.” In Religion et culture au Québec: figures contemporaines du sacré, edited by Yves Desrosiers, 71–92. Montreal: Fides, 1986. Rück, Daniel. The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-Century Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2021. Ryan, Mary. “The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth Century Social Order.” In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, 131–153. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989. Sheito, Christine. “Une fête contestée: la procession de la Fête-Dieu à Montréal au XIXe siècle.” MA thesis, Université de Montréal, 1983. Tock, Annie. “Orange Riots, Party Processions Acts and the Control of Public Space in Ireland and British North America, 1796–1851.” PhD diss., University of Maine, 2020. Watt, Steven. “Authoritarianism, Constitutionalism, and the Special Council of Lower Canada, 1838–1841.” MA thesis, McGill University, 1997.

14 The Popery Panic Nativism, Anti-Catholicism, and Violence in Antebellum America Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

If a bold and unvarnished lie be told to this generation, they will believe it. […] They found their beliefs not on the known customs and opinions of the Roman Catholics of the present day, but upon the tales they read of popery. Damon Norwood, 18371

Nativism and Anti-Catholicism in the United States, 1830–1860 In 1835, The American Protestant Vindicator, a New York newspaper, revealed to readers that Catholics were “prowling about parts of the United States in every possible disguise to disseminate Popery.” After reporting on an Irish mob attacking speakers at an event sponsored by the New York Protestant Association, the paper asked, “Is Popery Compatible with Civil Liberty?” They held debates on whether Catholicism was “That Babylon the Great of the Apocalypse.”2 At the time of this printing, unprecedented numbers of immigrants were fanning out into the United States, many of them Irish Catholics. Their foreign background and their religion made them stick out in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation still trying to define its own identity, prompting fear and opposition that sometimes turned violent. As this chapter will illustrate, that violence took the form of physical attacks in the streets, the burning of convents and churches, and the denying of basic civil rights and liberties to Catholics and immigrants. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States witnessed a surge of nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment. Broadly defined, nativism is a notion that certain people – those native-born to a particular place – are the privileged heirs of that land. They are owed appreciation for its political and cultural makeup and are entitled to safeguard it. It is a movement based on the concept of insiders and outsiders, the outsiders being non-native-born people, with foreign connections.3 Nativism in the United States was curious since the movement ignored real native

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-20

The Popery Panic  303 Americans or indigenous tribes, looking rather to Anglo national founders. Although various nativist movements have sprung up in American history, the first, and the focus of this chapter, occurred roughly from 1820 to 1860. Leaders of the movement prided themselves on being the protectors of a white, Protestant, and republican nation in the face of a perceived foreign foe. In this case the “other” was considered a threat because of their ethnicity, non-Protestant faith, diverse cultural practices, and associations with non-republican governments. The nativist movement was thus at once racial, religious, social, and political. The nativist movement was significantly animated by unfounded conspiracy theories and panic, as this chapter will detail, but it was also a response to real social changes. Industrialization, urbanization, and Western expansion transformed the young American nation. New factories and industries introduced a host of jobs and opportunities. Yet, the emerging capitalist economy could spell sudden misfortune as quickly as it allowed one to rise from “rags to riches,” as crises, such as the 1837 economic panic, revealed. While Americans hailed new urban centers as bastions of progress, they also feared attendant vices of the city: saloons, prostitution, gambling, gang violence, political graft, and theft. The expanding American West promised new beginnings, but it also provided contested, unregulated ground for influence. Unprecedented population growth, predominantly through immigration, amplified these developments as newcomers competed for jobs, contributed to the congestion and corruption of cities, and vied for influence on the frontier.4 A surge of immigration like the country had never seen before remade the United States, challenging the Protestant, Anglo-American majority. Most of the millions of immigrants to come to the country between 1820 and 1865 were either Irish or German, many of them Catholic. In other words, they not only spoke different languages, or with a conspicuous brogue, but also practiced a different religion. The places where many of them settled, especially the Irish, in cities, like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, saw some of the fiercest outbursts of nativist violence. A mere dot of the population in 1815, with 150,000 adherents (in a population of about 8.3 million), the number of Catholics rose to three quarters of a million by 1830 and 3.1 million by 1860, mostly through immigration, making Roman Catholics the single largest religious group in the country. This surge revived longstanding animosity toward Catholics, a Northern European tradition dating back to the Reformation. Protestant Americans drew on a distinctly English strain of anti-Catholicism. Many assumed the tenants of a republican government inconsistent with Catholicism and the various “Old World” European monarchies from which the newcomers hailed, and too important to be potentially altered by the foreign vote and

304  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi foreign way of life. For this reason, nativism was almost always coupled with anti-Catholicism.5 The nativist movement grew through publications, organizations, speeches, sermons, and politics. In the decades before the Civil War, Americans were inundated with a proliferation of anti-Catholic publications, with over two hundred books, forty-one histories, twenty-five newspapers, thirteen magazines, forty fictional works, and a steady stream of pamphlets, almanacs, and giftbooks. Prominent Protestants formed organizations, such as the American Tract Society and American Protestant Association, intent on spreading the faith and combating “foreign influence.” Nativism became more formalized and politicized by the 1840s, as evidenced by the formation of the American Republican Party, which grew out of a militant group calling themselves Native Americans. The Party quickly spread from New Orleans to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Saint Louis, Charleston, and Newark. Their platform rested on restricting office-holding to native-born citizens, extending the waiting period for citizenship from five to twenty-one years, insisting on the use of the Protestant Bible in public schools, and “usage of every means in our power to diminish foreign influence.” Some nativists, such as the Order of United Americans, plotted underground, with secret meetings, handshakes, and passwords. The “creeping influence of Rome” required covert resistance. When outsiders asked members about their plans, they replied “I know nothing.” The response soon became the nickname of the second-largest third political party in American history, at the height of its influence in the 1850s: the Know Nothing Party.6 Historians have offered various interpretations of the nativist movement in America. Ray Allen Billington, in one of the most seminal works on the topic, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860 (1938), argued that nativist conflict was mostly rooted in religious bigotry.7 Later Richard Hofstadter placed the nativist movement within “the paranoid style of American politics” in a famed essay of the same name.8 Moving away from more ideological explanations, John Higham’s Strangers in the Land (1955) considered the influence of economic and social stressors, real and perceived, in understanding why Americans, and not just “crackpots,” might be more likely to embrace nativism.9 More recently, Katie Oxx, upon whose chronology of events this work builds, emphasized the religious character of nativism in the middle third of the nineteenth century.10 Catholic scholar Mark Massa described nativist anti-Catholicism as being rooted in both “irrational bias” and “sociological, economic, and historical fears about ‘outsiders’.”11 In Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis (2021), historian Luke Ritter reinforced the socio-economic motives behind nativism and argued that the wide net of nativist discourse eventually replaced overt anti-Catholicism with a more inclusive civil religion based on the separation of Church and State.12

The Popery Panic  305 The socio-economic causes of the nativist movement cannot be ignored. Yet, religion and even paranoia were also significant impulses of nineteenth-century nativism in the United States. The nativist movement emerged during the later stages of the Second Great Awakening, a series of religious revivals that sparked conversion and reinforced the view of America as a Protestant nation. In their missionary zeal, many leading Protestants, such as the Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher and newspaper editor William Brownlee, invoked apocalyptic language to describe the need to “defeat Popery.” Using the pulpit, the press, and politics, revivalists enjoyed a vast sphere of influence. The nativist movement also coincided with a printing revolution. New technologies like the revolving cylinder press allowed for mass publishing. While this contributed to a more literate citizenry, it also enticed many writers and publishers to print what would sell the most – cheap newspapers, pamphlets, and paperbacks offering sensational headlines, stories, and conspiracies that promised to thrill.13 These stories often provoked fear and intrigue of the “foreign menace.” Religious zeal, sensational print culture, and nativist politics combined to stir up a culture of moral panic, or what I call the “Popery panic.” Although much of their thinking was based on irrational fears, nativists had a point about Irish immigrants forming gangs or fueling political machines (led by politicians who promised jobs for votes), even if they wrongly associated their violence and corruption with the newcomers’ faith and ethnicity rather than their poverty born of a larger system. Yet, much of the most inflammatory nativist rhetoric avoided nuance, painting a cast of heroes and villains, invoking moral panic. As sociologist Mary de Young claimed, “every moral panic has a folk devil. It has to have a person – or more likely a group of people, whether real individuals or fantasized – who are the devils.”14 In anti-Catholic nativism, the Pope and priests (especially the Jesuits) played the devil, secretly plotting (often through “subterranean passages”) the demise of true Christianity and the United States. Some of the most popular conspiracy theories alleged that the “popish priests” engaged in ritual abuse or murder against the most vulnerable of society – women and children. The belief that they acted in secret made the lack of hard evidence understandable. Yet, their supposed evil acts justified extreme actions. Three distinct events, incidentally, breaking out exactly three decades apart, illustrated the Popery panic: the burning of Mount Benedict convent in 1834, the Philadelphia Riots of 1844, and the Know Nothing uprising against Italian Archbishop Bedini in 1854. Each of these reflected the way in which the conspiratorial mind took hold, prompting panic, shaping reality, and leading to violence.

306  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi Instances of Nativist Anti-Catholicism Raid on Mount Benedict

One of the first united actions against Catholics in the United States was the burning of a convent. With war paint smeared on their faces, a group of mostly working-class men carried torches as they marched toward the convent at dusk on August 11, 1834. Some held bricks, others guns. They had heard the rumors of nuns being held against their will and tortured; some might even have died. These protestors detested the growing Catholic presence in their own town. “Down with the Pope! Down with the Convent!” they shouted drunkenly, gaining energy as they neared the tall brick doublestory building, perched mockingly on top of a hill, Mount Benedict. After months of growing tensions, of side conversations, of reading warnings in the news and hearing them in sermons, of catching glimpses of the enemy moving about freely, they took action into their own hands.15 The ringleader of the group, John R. Buzzell, a bricklayer, like many of the men who marched beside him, held special contempt for the convent’s Mother Superior, Mary Anne Moffatt or Sister St. George, calling her “the sauciest woman I ever heard talk.” Approaching the convent, he led a chant, shouting her name, demanding that she show herself and her “innocent victims.” When she came to the door, he took aim and shot his gun. He narrowly missed. She only incensed them further when she shouted, “I can call on twenty thousand Irishmen who will whip all of you to the sea!” before slamming the door.16 As the nuns roused and rushed the children in their ward out of their school and home through a backdoor, the men entered the building, their torches lighting their presence as they ran past windows. They fanned out into the rooms and the upper floor, burning furniture, instruments, and altar decorations in heaps before shoving a piano out of the second story window. As the building burned, they turned to the cemetery where they desecrated the dead, breaking into coffins, and merrily dancing with corpses, pocketing teeth for souvenirs. They ransacked the garden and burned the bishop’s cottage. As the sun began to rise, the mob dispersed, exhausted from their seven-hour pillage. No one had intervened to stop them. [See Figure 14.1] The $50,000 worth of damages they caused ($1.5 million today) would never be repaid.17 Mount Benedict Academy was a girls’ boarding school run by Ursuline nuns in Charlestown, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. The school catered especially to the city’s elite who wished to secure a European education for their daughters and was a conspicuous symbol of the growing influence of Catholics in New England. That many of the patrons were Protestant, mostly Harvard-educated Unitarians, angered some Evangelicals, like Lyman Beecher, who saw these families as prioritizing status over their faith. In

The Popery Panic  307

Figure 14.1 “Destruction of the Charleston Nunnery, August 24th, 1834.” Published in Harry Hazel, The Nun of St. Ursula, or, The Burning of the Convent: A Romance of Mount Benedict. Boston: F. Gleason, 1845. Photo courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

a sermon he delivered just days before the attack that would become the basis for his publication, Plea for the West, Beecher railed against the vanity of “reckless parents” who sent their daughters to receive a refined education while cunning Catholics converted them to the Church of Rome. “Wake up!” he yelled before a rapt audience. Some in the large crowd who had gathered to hear the famed revivalist did just that, taking the minister’s warning of encroaching dangers of the foreign faith seriously.18 Meanwhile, days before the burning of the convent, rumors had spread around town about the “mysterious” disappearance of Elizabeth Harrison, or Sister Mary John. Harrison, a music teacher at Mount Benedict, was over-worked already before she found her duties doubled in preparation for the Academy’s annual summer fête. In an anxious state one night, she stormed out of the convent, vowing never to return, taking refuge in a neighbor’s house. Although the Mother Superior and attendant bishop, Benedict Fenwick (the Academy’s namesake) convinced Harrison to return, the city’s residents began to whisper about her forced reentry into the convent.

308  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi Handbills appeared throughout Charlestown describing Harrison chained in the basement if not already murdered. “Now it is your duty, gentlemen, to have this affair investigated immediately, if not, the truckmen of Boston will demolish the nunnery!” warned the handbill.19 Another alleged “escaped nun,” (actually a novice who had never taken vows and left freely), confirmed some of the worst fears of Protestants. She reported that the Bishop planned to build another convent on none other than Bunker Hill (the site of one of the first battles of the American Revolution, a politically sacred place, was considered off limits to Catholics), and that the nuns of Mount Benedict were imprisoned, starved, and caged. Her accusations, articulated with the eager help of an Episcopal minister who likely anticipated the book’s high demand, became the basis for the first antiCatholic best-seller in the United States, Six Months in a Convent (1835). After the burning, Mary Anne Moffatt blamed the book for the mob attack and dismissed Six Months as a “tissue of lies.”20 Following the burning, in a very public and sensational trial, John R. Buzzell stood accused of arson. The town quickly mobilized to his support. Of the thirteen accomplices arrested, only two identified Buzzell as the leader of the raid. The fact that he and other members of the mob did not run away before being summoned, showed the confidence with which they faced the trial. Their defense attorney calmly dismissed the accusations as “foreign and imported testimony” before arguing that if the rumors were not true, “twenty thousand citizens would not have suffered a few individuals to destroy [the convent].” When the protestors were acquitted, they were therefore not surprised. Buzzell represented a hero, willing to fight bravely on behalf of Americans and allegedly vulnerable women. It was no matter that he put American women and children in danger on the basis of gossip, bias, and conspiracy theories.21 A few years after the burning of Mount Benedict, author Damon Norwood wrote a satire of the events, The Chronicles of Mount Benedict. At the end of the farce, complete with the Pope coming to America in a boat with the Devil, he concluded, “This generation believed an old and unvarnished lie.” They “found their belief not on the known customs and opinions of the Roman Catholics of the present day, but upon the tales they read of popery.” Little did he know this was only the beginning of a vast moral panic. As is often the case with conspiracy theories, the Popery panic prompted otherwise regular citizens into violent action against what they perceived as not just someone unlike them, but a truly evil threat.22 Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery

Norwood’s satire proved true just two years later. As nativist anti-Catholicism continued to rise, Americans remained deeply suspicious of convents.

The Popery Panic  309 Satiating public interest, the publishers Bates and Howe (a dummy press for Harper Brothers) released a shocking tale of an escaped nun in one of the most overt instances of rhetorical violence against Catholics in American history The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery appeared in print in January of 1836 by the poetically named Maria Monk. Monk unveiled the supposed secrets of nuns and priests in a convent in Montreal, Canada. She described scenes of torture – a nun electrocuted by “the cap,” another branded with hot irons – the murder of a nun trampled to death beneath a mattress, and routine infanticide. Among the nuns’ “chief duties” was to “live in criminal intercourse” with the priests. The ritual murder of infants was an evil consequence of these regular sexual liaisons. Monk claimed to have narrowly escaped to save her own unborn baby. “How shocking is the sight!” wrote the editor of the recently released anti-Catholic newspaper, Downfall of Babylon, in response to the book, “born but to breathe a few short pangs, then to be strangled by fiends in human shape called priests and nuns!”23 Awful Disclosures prompted investigations by the skeptical as quickly as it flew off shelves into the hands of the believing. John Jones of Montreal put together an investigative team who provided evidence that Monk never lived in the Hotel Dieu but rather in the neighboring Magdalen Asylum for the restoration of prostitutes. William L. Stone, a United States Protestant minister, editor of the prominent New York Commercial Advertiser, and “no friend of Catholics,” launched his own investigation. He found no similarities to the description of the convent in the book and the one he visited. On his trip he learned that Monk suffered from memory issues after having a slate pencil jammed into her head as a child. He also noted that the alleged number of births in the convent did not add up given that most of the nuns were “over age.” Perhaps most damning was the discovery that Monk herself did not write the book that bore her name. Rather her “Protestant Protectors,” including popular anti-Catholic writer, George Bourne, did.24 Yet, this evidence meant nothing to those who found Awful Disclosures compelling. What today we might call media misinformation, captivated Americans. The book inspired a host of convent narrative spin-offs that also became best-sellers, with names like The Escaped Nun and The Convent’s Doom. The worlds imagined in the books also motivated many readers into action to defend and save what they perceived as vulnerable women, children, and their nation from foreign foes.25 Catholic immigrants pouring onto American shores prompted conspiracy theories from respected citizens and fringe elements alike, from politicians and ministers, from the believing to the opportunists. In 1835, two publications marked the rise of the Popery panic: Reverend Lyman Beecher’s Plea for the West and famed inventor Samuel F.B. Morse’s Foreign

310  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States. Beecher, revered revivalist minister and patriarch of the famed Beecher clan, which included Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, warned against the growing “Romish influence” in America. The “pauper immigrants” were too ignorant, he claimed, to know they were pawns in a larger scheme led by the Pope and European potentates to topple America’s free institutions through the ballot box and sap “the property and moral virtue of the nation.” Catholic schools, he warned, especially preyed on the malleable minds of the country’s children. As “America’s pastor,” people listened to him and heeded his warning.26 Morse, who pledged his belief in Maria Monk and even proposed marriage to her, feared a vast Catholic conspiracy. In particular, he alleged European Catholic countries were working with the Leopold Association (an Austrian and Hungarian organization dedicated to sending missionaries to America) to infiltrate the United States in order to rule it. Morse’s warnings against Catholicism reflected the paranoid belief in an imminent, vast, and hidden threat. “The serpent has already commenced his coil about our limbs, and the lethargy of his poison is creeping over us. […] We must awake, or we are lost!” he wrote. The decades preceding the American Civil War saw a litany of similar invectives. The air was charged with suspicion of Catholics and foreigners. Real evidence was not needed to confirm many Americans’ views of the Pope as the leader of an international cabal, priests and nuns as his co-conspirators, and lay Catholic immigrants as the unwitting soldiers in a larger scheme that threatened the American way of life.27 The Philadelphia Riots

Ten years after the burning of Mount Benedict, on Friday May 3, 1844 the American Republican Party held a rally in Kensington, an Irish workingclass neighborhood in Philadelphia. They met “for the purpose of expressing their political opinions,” which included Protestant control over public schools and the restriction of immigrants’ political rights. In part, years of job competition among immigrants and native-born workers prompted the Party’s ascent. Protestant native-born craftsmen increasingly found themselves out of jobs as factories required less skills. As the Irish happily accepted work in the growing factory system, they seemed to symbolize the deterioration of a way of life. Members of the American Republican Party cast themselves as entirely non-sectarian, wishing only to preserve the purity of the ballot box, but they feared that through the foreign/Catholic vote, the Pope and certain European heads of state could overthrow America’s political institutions.28

The Popery Panic  311 As members began their speeches, Irish onlookers heckled the crowd before trying to chase them off from the neighborhood. As things escalated, members of the American Republican Party retreated but planned to reassemble the following Monday. They publicized their meeting, inviting Philadelphians to “visit with their indignation and reproach this outbreak of a vindictive anti-Republican spirit, manifest by a portion of the alien population.” Monday May 6, the Party gathered as planned. Vocal anti-Catholic, Lewis Levin, an evangelical convert from Judaism, began the rally with a speech but was interrupted by a rainstorm. Those assembled scrambled for cover in the nearby Nannygoat Market. The Irish blocked them, and as it rained the groups started fighting in the streets, throwing rocks and bricks. Some members of the Party and their nativist counterparts retreated; others held their ground. They stormed Catholic houses as those inside shot guns from the windows. From there, the Irish and their buildings were fair game. Some of the nativists attacked the convent of the Sisters of Charity. They also torched St. Michael’s parish church, the most prominent symbol of the Irish Catholics’ place in the city.29 Property damage from the riots ran up a quarter of a million – a devastating amount for the time. At least twenty-five people died in the streets that day on both sides of the fight – shot, bludgeoned, or burned. The first to die was an eighteen-year-old Protestant, George Schiffler. Within days of his death, Schiffler was pictured everywhere, draped in the American flag. [See Figure 14.2] He immediately became a martyr and symbol of American patriotism, used by nativists to deepen the dividing line, not just between political factions, but between “true” Americans and outsiders. In describing the riots that took place in the Philadelphia streets that May, the Farmer’s Cabinet, a Philadelphia newspaper noted that one man claimed he acted on behalf “of the stars and the stripes.” For him there was no distinction between religion and patriotism; he fought for both.30 The Philadelphia Riots of 1844 broke out as the result of job competition and anti-Irish prejudice, but also over anti-Catholic fears, including a dispute over use of the Bible in public schools. In the 1840s, reformer Horace Mann spearheaded a movement to establish common schools. This would become the basis for America’s vast public education system. Mann saw the potential not only for reaching a broader public with a rudimentary education, but also for offering moral training. Like Mann, many Americans at the time saw moral training as a way to ensure a virtuous citizenry, which they believed was necessary for the preservation of their still young republic. To this end, they turned to assigning the Bible in public schools and insisted on using the King James Version, a Protestant Bible. As common schools cropped up, some Catholics objected. Common schools assigned McGuffy readers, a series of primers for school children,

312  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

Figure 14.2 John L. Magee, “Death of George Shifler [Schiffler – C.L.Y.] in Kensington. Born Jan 24, 1825. Murdered May 6, 1844.” Philadelphia: Wm. Smith, 1844. Photo courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

which included frequent anti-Catholic slurs, such as “papist,” “popery,” and “priestcraft” along with references to “deceitful Catholics.” New York’s Archbishop, John Hughes, opposed taxing Catholics to fund the schools and requested a refund for establishing alternative Catholic education. His debates with the city’s school boards attracted a lot of attention and appeared to Protestants simply as further evidence that Catholics opposed the Bible altogether and sought control over American children’s minds. Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick of Philadelphia also fought for Catholic students’ rights. Instead of requesting funding for Catholic schools, however, Kenrick demanded legislation denying the use of any religious texts as a bulwark against “the stratagems of fanatics” and to protect religious liberty. When this got him nowhere, Kenrick simply requested that Catholic students be excused from reading the King James Version and from other Protestant exercises.31

The Popery Panic  313 The bishop’s campaign only heightened anti-Catholic conspiracies. In the Whig North American and Daily Advertiser one writer pointed to Kenrick’s opposition as evidence that the Pope with “all of his minions [were] against the free institutions of our country.” The writer dismissed Catholics as foreigners who had the gall to “tell us that no Bible shall be tolerated.” In conclusion he stated, “[i]t is now time that the question should be asked […] whether a priest or bishop, who has taken allegiance to the Pope […] can become a citizen of the United States.” Such press echoed the rallying cry from Philadelphia’s American Protestant Association (APA). The APA included over a hundred prominent ministers, including Joseph F. Berg, who trotted tales of nuns kept as concubines for priests, the murder of infants in convents, and the existence of subterranean passes connecting Catholic buildings. In one meeting, members pledged to “stand ready on any suitable occasion” to protect American schools. Thus, when the riots broke out, many nativists already feared that the foreign conspiracy was underway through the Catholic efforts to interfere with American children’s minds in public schools.32 While it was not the ministers of the APA who participated in the Philadelphia Riots, their legitimization of Catholic conspiracy theories encouraged such attacks. Joseph Berg published his anti-Catholic tracts and frequently gave outdoor sermons on the streets, inviting any passerby to listen. Some of the same members of the APA were affiliates of the American Republican Party. The leadership of the American Republican Party included more elite Party leaders and a rank and file that was mostly working class. Prominent members of the Party retreated when the riots broke out, but the working class were invigorated by the Party’s positions and the energy of the rallies. The American Republican Party attracted a wide following by also adopting an anti-Bank platform, a stance that appealed especially to farmers and artisans who not only viewed a national bank as unconstitutional, but also feared that it would favor elites while offering no benefits to the majority. Their fears of preserving the ballot box were not completely unfounded, as political machines, especially in the Democratic Party, offered incentives in exchange for the immigrant vote. The Irish in Philadelphia resisted assimilation and instead embraced a sense of separateness and unity, confirming some of the native-born Americans’ fears. The newcomers brought with them to the United States a burning hatred for the English because of the way they were treated back home. They had already faced discrimination for their religious beliefs and their ethnicity, and so their devotion to Catholicism was in part an anti-English statement and a badge of solidarity. The Irish tended to align with the Democratic Party, which was more pro-immigrant and anti-British. They also had a tendency toward violence, going on violent strikes, like the Weaver’s Strike in Kensington, and attacking Black temperance marchers. To nativists, and especially ministers and reformers,

314  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi the Irish stood out as rabble-rousing non-conformists. All of this did not render them evil, though. The rumors of sexual abuse, torture, and conspiracies against American institutions went a long way to justify the kind of violence unleashed in the streets.33 Two months after the Philadelphia Riots, a nativist-dominated grand jury blamed the violence on poor law enforcement and Irish attempts to keep the Bible out of schools. In celebration, the American Republican Party staged the most lavish parade in the city’s history. On July 4, marchers carried banners to the tunes of a triumphant band behind a float that commemorated Schiffler’s death. One banner featured the goddess of liberty, Columbia, with an open Bible in her hand, symbolizing the school debates. Above her head a ribbon read “Beware of Foreign Influence.” Another featured an open Bible in the mouth of an eagle. George Washington’s mother appeared on another banner, with the note, “To Mary, Mother of Washington,” a reference likely in opposition to Catholic’s elevation of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Although the American Republican Party shortly fell out of favor after earning the nickname, “Church Burners’ Party,” membership in anti-Catholic societies and political parties increased nationally, and Bishop Kenrick offered no further objections to the use of the King James Version of the Bible in schools.34 Death for the Bishop

Nearly ten years later to the date, another violent episode broke out as a result of the Popery panic. In the 1850s, several American cities sanctioned street preaching as a way of bringing religion to the people. In keeping with the democratic ethos of the Jacksonian age that prompted politicians to deliver speeches outdoors before anyone with ears, zealous ministers took to street corners. They attracted crowds as they delivered dramatic, engaging sermons in the style of the earlier revivalists. Yet, what captivated audiences more than warnings against the fires of hell and the hopes of personal salvation were warnings against Popery, the Catholics next door, machinations in Europe to overthrow America, and how all of this was part of a larger cosmic battle. One of the most popular street preachers of this time was an Italian revolutionary and ex-Catholic priest, Father Alessandro Gavazzi. Standing at six feet tall with long black hair that whipped around his face as he delivered a “ferocious discourse,” Gavazzi was a captivating speaker. He had compelling eyes and wore a monk’s robe of his own designed with a cross emblazoned on the chest. [See Figure 14.3] As an ex-priest, crowds believed what Gavazzi said, and he reinforced their biases. His accusations were so inflammatory that he had been kicked out of Montreal when mob violence broke out after one of his talks, leaving some fifty people injured and several killed. From London to Canada and finally to the United States, Gavazzi informed audiences of his life’s mission to “strip the Romish harlot of her garb.” On March

The Popery Panic  315

Figure 14.3 “Father Gavazzi Delivering His Italian Discourses at the Princess’ Concert Room.” Published in Illustrated London News, March 8, 1851. Photo courtesy of HathiTrust.

23, 1853, he gave a talk in New York before a large meeting arranged by the American and Foreign Christian Union. With “almost savage physical energy,” as one newspaper reported, he called himself not a Protestant but a Destroyer, demanding the “Destruction of Popery!” and “Nothing but annihilation!”35 From there, Father Gavazzi delivered a series of lectures throughout New York and other cities, becoming a preacher celebrity in the manner of Lyman Beecher or George Whitefield, albeit more sensational. He saved his worst invectives for the Italian bishop, Monsignor Gaetano Bedini, who was scheduled to tour the United States later that year. Gavazzi blasted Bedini for opposing the Italian revolutionaries of 1848 and 1849 and accused him of personally ordering the death of one of them, Ugo Bassi, and torturing him before overseeing the deaths of hundreds of other patriots. He warned that Bedini’s planned tour of America was merely a cover-up for his mission to destroy American institutions.36

316  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi Archbishop Bedini’s ship sailed into the New York Harbor on June 30, 1853. After being welcomed by Archbishop John Hughes, Bedini visited President Franklin Pierce in Washington, where he delivered a letter from Pope Pius IX. The letter asked that the president “extend his protection to the Catholics living in his country.” Bedini’s mission from the pope was to investigate discord between German and Irish Catholics living in America and report on a recent controversy between lay Catholic trustees and the clergy over ownership of church property. The “trustee trouble” broke out when some lay church members who were elected as trustees in a more democratic church governance system recently adopted by some churches in Buffalo and Philadelphia, pushed for ownership of ecclesiastical land and buildings. The clergy pushed backed, defending their own ownership. Nativists took advantage of the divide, siding with trustees and citing the controversy as evidence of the Pope’s undemocratic efforts to control the people.37 Bedini was a shy man who knew only a few words of English. What he anticipated as a rather quiet trip reporting on local disputes and touring the United States, however, blew up beyond what he could have imagined. In the months leading up to his tour, Americans came to fear him as the “Butcher of Bologna,” a name spat at him nearly everywhere he went. Upon his arrival, the New York Observer warned “he is here to find the best way of riveting Italian chains upon us which will bind us as slaves to the throne of the most fierce tyranny the earth knows.” Gavazzi and other street preachers shouted at crowds that Bedini was an agent of the Roman Inquisition charged with secretly poisoning Americans. Reality was much more boring. Bedini had been governor of Bologna during the Italian uprisings, but by the time he assumed his post in 1849, the territory had already been seized by Austria. Although he did oppose the revolutions of 1848, he had little say in the execution of dozens of revolutionaries, and there was no evidence associating him with Ugo Bassi. After this, Bedini served as nuncio or papal ambassador in Brazil before his arrival in the States.38 Just one year before Bedini’s visit to the United States, Pope Pius IX sent a gift to the country, a stone for use in the new project building the Washington Monument. Inscribed on the stone from the Pope was the phrase, “Rome to America.” The gift sparked outrage among nativists, including one pamphleteer who described it as a symbol of foreign influence, a “trophy of Roman Papal victory,” and a “stratagem” of the subversion of America by Catholics. What was meant as a gift in the hopes of fostering good relations with the young republic only heightened the animosity toward Catholics and immigrants and came to be known simply as “the pope’s stone.” By the time of Bedini’s arrival, he too appeared as a “pope’s stone” in human form and a strong Know Nothing Party stood ready to defeat him.39 The Know Nothing Party, a coalition of various nativist, reformist, and anti-Catholic organizations, formed in the early 1850s. Their platform to

The Popery Panic  317 relocate impoverished Irish to Liverpool, England, deny Catholics the ability to hold public office, and mandate the reading of the King James Bible in public schools was accepted in several states, from Massachusetts to New York, where the party achieved major electoral victories by 1853 and 1854. Members also pledged never to hire a Catholic or foreigner. Although their name was coined by a critic of the Party’s secret meetings, members soon embraced it as a badge of honor.40 Forewarned and ready for a fight, large crowds burned Bedini in effigy from Boston to Baltimore. When the bishop visited Wheeling, West Virginia, a mob, mostly members of the Know Nothing Party, gathered outside his home. Members of the crowd shot bullets through his windows as they chanted “Down with Bedini!” Their assassination attempt was barely averted by a group of armed Irishmen. Before his arrival in New Orleans, nativists plastered the city with placards warning of the arrival of “Bedini the Tiger, Who is Guilty of the Murder of Hundreds of Patriots, their Wives and Children in Italia.” Some of the worst attacks broke out in Cincinnati, Ohio, where there was a large German population who especially took exception to Bedini’s opposition to the recent revolutions. Over two hundred people marched in the street on the night of his arrival, carrying gallows, his effigy, and banners that read “No Priests, No Kings, No Popery!” As the crowd grew in number and energy, police finally stepped in, clashing with the mob. Some twenty casualties resulted in the clash. Afterwards rumors circulated that the police were working with Bedini.41 Having little to say for himself, Bedini sought an early return trip home. When he arrived at the New York Harbor, however, he learned of a mob waiting for him at the docks. To make a safe escape, he had to board a small boat and be smuggled onto his ship after it was well away from the harbor. Although serious violence was averted, Bedini’s disastrous visit revealed the rising tensions that could easily erupt into violence, a scenario prevalent in the 1850s. There had been relatively few riots after those that broke out in Philadelphia in 1844. By 1854, they started breaking out again, revived by the violent rhetoric of nativists and anti-Catholics. Although Bedini’s visit may seem inconsequential, it highlighted the penchant for Americans to rally in the face of an alleged evil foe seemingly threatening freedom, women or children, and the idea of what constitutes real Americanism. Fear of conspiracy, tendency to see the enemy as evil, and the penchant for violence were already mainstays before the outbreak of the Civil War, raised particularly by religion and nativism.42 These Violent Delights The burning of Mount Benedict in 1834, the publication of Awful Disclosures two years later, the Philadelphia Riots of 1844, and the Know Nothing uprising against Archbishop Bedini in 1854 grew out of and reinforced the

318  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi nativist movement and the attendant Popery panic in early nineteenthcentury America. What is distinct about these examples is the way in which rumor, conspiracy theory, religious bias, and perception of the conflict as one of good versus evil, prompted not just violent rhetoric but violent actions. Whispers of tortured nuns and secret Catholic plans of global expansion prompted a mob to burn Mount Benedict. Awful Disclosures solidified stereotypes of priests as villains perpetuating hidden crimes. Real evidence counted for little for those who believed in an elaborate Catholic and foreign conspiracy. The targeting of churches and convents during the Philadelphia Riots showed that the conflict was about more than job competition, while the presentation of George Schiffler as a Protestant martyr reinforced the perception of the battle’s cosmic importance. Archbishop Bedini’s visit prompted mob uprisings because of the wild invectives of street preachers that reinforced nativist warnings. Nativists attackers targeted overt symbols of Catholicism, such as churches and convents. In particular, many of them focused on Ultramontane Catholic symbols. Ultramontane Catholicism, a type of Catholicism that places emphasis on papal and clerical authority, was a debated concept at the time that was popular among some American bishops. In chanting “Down with the Pope!” during the burning of Mount Benedict, protestors focused their ire on the head of the Church as a symbol of what they detested the most. Many of the sensational convent narratives casted priests as devils in cahoots with an arch-evil Pope. The fierce backlash unleashed against the visit of Archbishop Bedini and the exploitation of the trustee controversy, likewise spoke to the ways in which nativists particularly chafed against the hierarchy of Catholicism. Indeed, one of the root themes of American anti-Catholicism was a rejection of the Pope and the Church hierarchy as being at odds with democratic and republican traditions in the United States. While economic and social changes in America surely prompted nativist fears of the “other,” and drove a desire to define and enforce a unifying American way of life, religious ideology played a role too. There was also an element of the irrational, to harken back to Hofstadter’s assessment of nativism that cannot be ignored. Religious fervor stirred by the Second Great Awakening prompted outspoken Protestant Americans to recall the deadly divides of the Reformation, painting the Protestant-Catholic contest in apocalyptic terms. Sensationalism, both in print and in public addresses, exploited religious and political differences, catching the attention of reader and by-passer, often satiating prurient interests, and stirring emotions into a panic. Such panic rendered convents prisons, the Irish a fiendish mob, and the bishop a butcher. Nativist politics, although prompted in part by real changes in the land, grew through a religious characterization of the foreign threat and through overt caricatures of the other as a monstrous danger to Church, State, women and children, and the very way of American life.

The Popery Panic  319 The burning of Mount Benedict, the popularity of escaped nun tales, the Philadelphia Riots, and the uprising against Archbishop Bedini provide a glimpse into the violent ends of the nativist movement in early nineteenthcentury United States. Notes 1 Damon Norwood, The Chronicles of Mount Benedict: A Tale of the Ursuline Convent (Boston: Printed for the Publisher, 1837), xi, and xiii. 2 David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement, Revised and Updated (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 36–37. 3 Luke Ritter, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 1. 4 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5 Edwin Scott Gaustad, Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 101–110. 6 Ray Allen Billington, “Tentative Bibliography of Anti-Catholic Propaganda in the United States (1800–1860),” Catholic Historical Review 18, no. 4 (January 1933): 493; Bennett, The Party of Fear, 54; Native American (May 17 and July 19, 1844); Thomas R. Whitney, An Address Delivered by Thomas R. Whitney, Esq., December 22 1851, On the Seventh Anniversary of the Alpha Chapter, Order of the United Americans (New York: John A. Gray, 1852); Cassandra L. Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 91. 7 Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1938). 8 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics; And Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1952). 9 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955). 10 Katie Oxx, The Nativist Movement in America: Religious Conflict in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2013). 11 Mark S. Massa, Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Crossroad, 2003), 3. 12 Ritter, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis. 13 David M. Henkin, “City Streets and the Urban World of Print,” in The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, eds. Scott E. Casper, et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 14 Noah Caldwell and Ari Shapiro, “America’s Satanic Panic Returns – This Time Through QAnon,” interview with Mary de Young, All Things Considered, NPR, May 18, 2021, audio, 11:20, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997559036/americassatanic-panic-returns-this-time-through-qanon accessed 8 July 2021. See also Mary de Young, The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Inc., 2004). 15 Louisa Goddard Whitney, The Burning of the Convent. A Narrative of the Destruction by a Mob, of the Ursuline School on Mount Benedict, Charlestown, as Remembered by One of the Pupils (Cambridge, MA: Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 1877), 75–81.

320  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi 16 Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns, 27. 17 N.A., “Report,” in Documents Relating to the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown (Boston: Reprinted by Samuel N. Dickinson, 1842). 18 Lyman Beecher, Plea for the West (New York: Leavitt, Lord, & Co., 1835), 127. 19 “Mysterious,” Mercantile Journal (August 1834); John England, “Documents Relating to the Burning of the Charlestown Convent, The Imposture of Rebecca Reed, The Boston Riots, Etc.,” in Works of the Right Rev. John England, First Bishop of Charleston, ed. Sabastian G. Messmer (Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1849), vol. 5, 243 and 245. 20 Rebecca Reed, Six Months in a Convent (Boston: Russell, Odiorne & Metcalf, 1835); Mary Anne Moffatt, An Answer to “Six Months in a Convent” (Boston: J. H. Eastburn, 1835), iii and vii. 21 Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns, 40–41. 22 Damon Norwood, The Chronicles of Mount Benedict: A Tale of the Ursuline Convent (Boston: Printed for the Publisher, 1837), xi and xiii. 23 Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (New York: Howe & Bates, 1836); Samuel Smith, ed., Front page image, Downfall of Babylon; or, The Truth Over Popery 2, no. 16 (April 16, 1836), 89. 24 Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns, 20–25. 25 Ibid., 8. 26 Beecher, Plea for the West; Samuel F.B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (New York: E. B. Clayton, 1835). 27 Morse, Foreign Conspiracy, 21. 28 Oxx, The Nativist Movement in America, 65–67; Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975). 29 Oxx, The Nativist Movement, 65. 30 Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns, 77; Great Riot in Philadelphia, Farmer’s Cabinet 42, no. 39 (May 16, 1844). 31 Oxx, The Nativism Movement in America, 60. 32 Ibid., 58–62. 33 Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots, 51, and 19–30. 34 Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns, 78; Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots, 66. 35 Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 304; American and Foreign Christian Union III (May 1853); Observer (March 31, 1853). 36 Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 302–304. 37 M. Felicity O’Driscoll, “Political Nativism in Buffalo, 1830–1860,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 48, no. 3 (September 1937), 301; David J. Endres, “Know-Nothings, Nationhood, and the Nuncio: Reassessing the Visit of Archbishop Bedini,” U.S. Catholic Historian 21, no. 4 (Fall 2003), 6; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 300. 38 Observer (July 24, 1851); Endres, “Know-Nothings, Nationhood, and the Nuncio,” 6–7. 39 Endres, “Know Nothings, Nationhood, and the Nuncio,” 1–2; John F. Weishampel, The Pope’s Stratagem: Rome to America! An Address to the Protestants of the United States against placing the Pope’s block of marble in the Washington Monument (Philadelphia: Unknown Publisher, 1852). 40 Bennett, The Part of Fear, 105–112. 41 Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 302–303. 42 Ibid., 303.

The Popery Panic  321 Bibliography Beecher, Lyman. Plea for the West. New York: Leavitt, Lord, & Co., 1835. Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement. Revised and Updated. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1938. Billington, Ray Allen. “Tentative Bibliography of Anti-Catholic Propaganda in the United States (1800–1860).” Catholic Historical Review 18, no. 4 (January 1933): 492–513. De Young, Mary. The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Inc., 2004. Endres, David T. “Know-Nothings, Nationhood, and the Nuncio: Reassessing the Visit of Archbishop Bedini.” U.S. Catholic Historian 21, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 1–16. Feldberg, Michael. The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975. Gaustad, Edwin Scott. Historical Atlas of Religion in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Henkin, David M. “City Streets and the Urban World of Print.” In The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, edited by Scott E. Casper, et al., 331–345. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics; And Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1965. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Massa, Mark S. Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. New York: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Moffatt, Mary Anne. An Answer to Six Months in a Convent. Boston: J. H. Eastburn, 1835. Monk, Maria. Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal. New York: Howe & Bates, 1836. Morse, Samuel F.B. Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. New York: E.B. Clayton, 1835. Norwood, Damon. The Chronicles of Mount Benedict: A Tale of the Ursuline Convent. Boston: Printed for the Publisher, 1837. O’Driscoll, M. Felicity. “Political Nativism in Buffalo, 1830–1860.” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 48, no. 3 (September 1937): 279–319. Oxx, Katie. The Nativist Movement in America: Religious Conflict in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2013. Reed, Rebecca. Six Months in a Convent. Boston: Russell, Odiorne & Metcalf, 1835. Ritter, Luke. Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Weishampel, John F. The Pope’s Strategem: Rome to America! An Address to the Protestants of the United States against placing the Pope’s block of marble in the Washington Monument. Philadelphia: Unknown Publisher, 1852.

322  Cassandra L. Yacovazzi Whitney, Louisa Goddard. The Burning of the Convent. A Narrative of the Destruction by a Mob, of the Ursuline School on Mount Benedict, Charlestown, as Remembered by One of the Pupils. Cambridge, MA: Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 1877. Whitney, Thomas R. An Address Delivered by Thomas R. Whitney, Esq., December 22, 1851, On the Seventh Anniversary of the Alpha Chapter, Order of the United Americans. New York: John A. Gray, 1852. Yacovazzi, Cassandra L. Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

15 Occasional Martyrs Catholic Life in Nineteenth-Century China between Coexistence and Subjugation Lars Peter Laamann

The development of Christianity in China can only with great artificiality be equated with that of other historical regions in the world. This is on the one hand due to the absence of religious institutions that could rival the authority of the State and thus become the target of political violence (such as during the French or Russian Revolutions); as a result, the Imperial State showed a remarkable political continuity and enjoyed greater authority than most of its European counterparts. On the other hand, and again in contradistinction to Europe, the religious policy of Imperial China was overwhelmingly marked by dynastic laissez-faire, mirroring the peaceful coexistence of different religious traditions in Chinese society. Even if scholars generally agree on this difference between European and Chinese trajectories, they are divided over how to interpret the history of Christianity in China. One group cites historical sources produced by members of the scholar-official elite, which included Christian converts alongside staunch opponents of the “alien teaching” (yangjiao 洋教), to suggest that Christianity was rejected because of its cultural incompatibility with Chinese culture.1 Another group points instead to the adaptability of Christian practice, in particular at a popular level.2 Because empirical evidence for this argument rarely exists in published form, these scholars have resorted to analyzing tangentially related sources and to comparing the experiences of Chinese Christians to those of other religious groups in China as well as to those of Catholics in other parts of Eastern Asia. Building on this second body of scholarship, the present chapter argues that although Catholic communities faced both official repression and popular violence, their experience was mitigated by the fact that groups belonging to the White Lotus and other forms of popular Buddhism were generally treated more harshly. Likewise, the suppression of Christianity in Tokugawa Japan as well as periodically in Korea and Vietnam serves as a reminder that Catholics in late Imperial China, although occasionally the victim of violent opposition by both state officials and local populations, generally lived in a regime of comparable religious peace.3 Indeed, the chapter argues that the DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-21

324  Lars Peter Laamann history of Catholic Christianity in China was for the greater part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries less characterized by violence than was the case in other parts of Asia – a conclusion that applies to hostile acts both by the non-Christian population and by government agencies. Having said that, there is no denying that from the very onset of the Catholic mission in China – for instance during the persecution of 1616/1617 in Nanjing, and in particular following the anti-missionary edict of 1724 – disturbing investigations and harsh punishments occurred, although such actions usually coincided with punitive campaigns by the State against all sorts of dissenting (xie 邪, “heretical”) religious movements.4 Yet, as indicated by the martyrological literature on the event, most acts of deadly violence occurred during the so-called Boxer Rebellion 義和圑起義 that not just heralded the end of the nineteenth century, but in due course also that of the ruling Qing dynasty (1644–1911).5 But the excessive violence around 1900 stood in stark contrast to the comparably peaceful development of Christianity during the period under review in this volume, as confirmed by the mostly harmonious relationships between Catholic believers and state officials as well as by the indifference shown by non-Christian neighbors. It was a form of religious tolerance that impressed nineteenth-century European missionaries – albeit not always in favorable terms, as shown by the remark of Father Louvet that ‘no people carries skepticism and indifference as far as the Chinese people’.6 Christianity in China The first Christians to arrive in China were adherents to Bishop Nestor’s Syriac church, declared heretical at the Council of Ephesos in 431. Since Nestor’s dogmatic line remained popular in Mesopotamia and Persia, the name ‘Church of the East’ was adopted. Sogdian merchants and mercenaries took “Nestorian” Christianity into the Tang 唐 Empire (618–907), where Christianity became established as the Luminous Teaching (jingjiao 景教).7 The Catholic mission founded by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552– 1610) meant that from the early 1600s onwards, Roman Catholicism took root in China.8 It was being promoted by the Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican orders. In keeping with China’s tradition of religious tolerance, the Catholic orders received a positive reception, aided by the fact that many ordinary faithful interpreted the missionaries’ message as a variation on Buddhism. The emphasis on Mary as Mother of God certainly helped, since Chinese women in the late Imperial period habitually flocked to temples dedicated to the Bodhisattva Guanyin 觀音菩薩 and to the (Daoist) Wusheng Laomu 無 生老母 (“Original Venerable Mother” 無生老母), alias Xiwangmu 西王母 (“Queen Mother of the West”) in order to pray for (male) offspring. It is

Occasional Martyrs  325 thus unsurprising that Catholic churches during this period were commonly referred to as “Halls of the Sacred Mother” (shengmutang 聖母堂). The Manchu conquest and transition to Qing rule had a positive effect on missionary activity, as the Imperial edict of 1692 explicitly protected the Church. This edict of toleration would be invoked by Catholic missionaries well into the nineteenth century whenever signs of discrimination or persecution arose.9 Imperial protection persuaded numerous members of China’s Confucian-educated scholar-official elite to convert, chiefly those residing in the Lower Yangtse Valley. As a result, by 1720, Catholic communities were often well-educated and affluent. At the same time, the efforts of the mendicant orders on the countryside had created Catholic village communities in agrarian regions throughout China, in particular in Guangdong, Fujian, Sichuan, Shaanxi, and in the North China Plain.10 Whereas the Jesuits enjoyed the protection of the Kangxi 康熙 emperor (Manchu: Elhe Taifin ᡝᠯᡥᡝ ᡨᠠᡳᡶᡳᠨ, reigned 1661–1722), at least up to the socalled Rites Controversy, scholar-officials that deemed Christianity a “foreign teaching” (yangjiao 洋教) incited opposition to the religion in the urban centers where they were based.11 The Rites Controversy hinged upon Catholic missionaries’ attempts to reconcile the traditional practice of paying reverence to one’s deceased parents by burning incense in front of a funerary memorial (the so-called lingpai 靈牌, “spirit tablet”) with Christian belief. Suspicion that the ritual amounted to an act of “spirit worship” rather than filial piety (xiao 孝) caused missionaries less inclined to cultural adaptation to lobby papal authorities to prohibit the practice among Chinese converts. This led to an acrimonious conflict with those missionaries – especially the ones belonging to the Society of Jesus – who rejected the idea that ancestral worship contained a superstitious element.12 The conflict officially ended in 1714 with a bull by Pope Benedict XIV, which prohibited Chinese Catholics from practicing ancestral rites.13 Against the backdrop of the Rites Controversy, anti-Christian sentiments during the late sixteenth century spelled episodes of short-lived but intense communal violence.14 The Kangxi emperor’s successor, the Yongzheng 雍正 emperor (Manchu: Hûwaliyasun Tob ᡥᡡᠸᠠᠯᡳᠶᠠᠰᡠᠨ ᡨᠣᠪ, 1723–1736), nurtured further hostility against Catholics, less because of anti-Christian enmity than due to a desire to tighten state control over religious activity at large. Because the short-lived Yongzheng administration wished to extend state influence over the uneducated population (yumin 愚民), the emperor issued an edict in 1724 prohibiting all missionary activity, including proselytization by Chinese clerics. However “anti-missionary” this edict was, it did not prohibit Christianity as such. The emperor moreover imposed similar restrictions on other religious groups, in particular on folk Buddhist movements. Overzealous officials sometimes went beyond the intentions of the edict by placing armed guards outside church buildings and by forcing clerics to

326  Lars Peter Laamann provide certificates of legitimization (piao 票). Moreover, village heads and retired officials were called upon to keep a watchful eye on the religious situation in their localities. This was particularly true for Manchu converts, who the Yongzheng administration specifically forbade “to disrespect the Manchu Way”. These actions, alongside the emperor’s punitive actions against the Sunu clan, that is, Christians related to the ruling dynasty, contributed to a dramatized discourse of Christian martyrdom in Catholic Europe.15 In reality, however, the Yongzheng edict was interpreted differently on the ground. Whereas provincial authorities and local magistrates in Sichuan closed their eyes on the presence of both indigenous and Western (French) missionaries, officials in Fujian often resorted to violent suppression.16 In contrast to Chinese Christians, Manchu soldiers and officials who had converted to Catholicism were sanctioned by hard labor, official ostracism, rarely execution, but as much dreaded: Exile and enslavement to the tribal warlords to the north of the Great Wall.17 This leeway that officials possessed in dealing with Christians locally raises the question how experiences of anti-Catholic violence related to individuals maintaining their Christian faith. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographies of Catholic individuals, often Western missionaries, tended to emphasize their determination to endure whatever earthly predicaments God – or rather satanic worldly governments – produced in order to test their steadfastness. By emphasizing their willingness to accept the crown of martyrdom, these missionaries were put into the same category as the saintly martyrs of antiquity, pillars of the Church.18 More recent scholarship has tended to shift the emphasis away from European missionaries to indigenous believers, as a result of which the relative importance of missionary sacrifices decreases. This greater appreciation for popular sacrifice is also due to the fact that during the period of missionary prohibition (1724–1858), when Chinese Christians predominantly lived in hidden communities without priestly support, their number increased. But if the Qing State was not willing – or able – to eradicate these expanding centers of Chinese Christianity, it did succeed in driving the greater part of the Church ‘underground’. The link between increased repression and lesser visibility applies for the Qing empire but also, interestingly, for the early years of the People’s Republic.19 Even the methods of anti-Christian suppression – exile, psychological torture, and indoctrination rather than brutal annihilation – appear to be similar.20 The persecutions of the early nineteenth century follow the same logic. When Hongli 弘曆 took over power as the Qianlong 乾隆 emperor (Manchu: Abkai Wehiyehe ᠠᠪᡴᠠᡳ ᠸᡝᡥᡳᠶᡝᡥᡝ, 1736–1796), he continued the restrictive policies of his predecessor. Whereas the repression of so-called “heretical teachings” (xiejiao 邪教) could affect any religious tradition, the focus was on the so-called White Lotus Teaching (bailianjiao 白蓮教), an umbrella term for folk Buddhist sects with eschatological leanings.21 The local

Occasional Martyrs  327 character of the mid-Qing persecutions can only be understood when the perceived threat posed by millenarian movements in such localities is taken into account – in particular in Fujian.22 Whereas established religious traditions, such as Sunni Islam, were protected by the State, the perceived threat posed by ‘newcomers’ ensured that, like the White Lotus, Catholic communities during the latter eighteenth century were subjected to sporadic acts of official persecution.23 The introduction of the “Canton System” in 1757 furthermore strengthened state authorities’ control over any remaining Westerners in the empire. The new import arrangement obliged European traders to use Guangzhou as their sole harbor for all commercial transactions, which brought greater protection from pirate attacks against the silver-laden Western vessels. For the Catholic orders, this new system initially changed very little, since they could continue to use Macau (Aomen 澳門) as their port of entrance in Southern China. The Yongzheng edict of 1724 also guaranteed freedom of residence in Macau and in Beijing for Western clerics as well as right of passage between the two cities. One of the stipulations of the Canton System was that no commercial vessel was to have missionaries on board – a demand which was heeded until 1807. Catholic missionaries nevertheless made good use of the centuryold network connecting village congregations in the Chinese interior.24 The Missions Étrangères de Paris (Paris Foreign Missions) used the forested highlands between Burma and Laos as a corridor to reach the southwestern provinces of the Qing empire, notably Sichuan.25 Others, such as the Franciscan Bernardo de los Santos, formed one-man missions in order to rejoin the communities founded by their Catholic predecessors. The greatest factor for clandestine Christian missions were, however, itinerant preachers originating from long-established congregations. Making use of catechetical texts printed in Beijing or transported from Macau, these indigenous missionaries used vernacular imagery in local dialects to emphasize the messages of the religious texts that they distributed. Prosecuting officials automatically recorded these texts as “heretical scriptures” (xieshu 邪書) – unaware of the fact that the missionaries in Beijing were representatives of a legitimate religious teaching. The proliferation of Christian scriptures became the cause of violent suppression movements, such as the coordinated campaign of 1765 south of Beijing and in the Hubei-Hunan corridor.26 On the whole, anti-Christian persecutions remained relatively rare during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This does not mean that they were entirely absent. Rather, violence initiated by state officials usually went hand in hand with the suppression of other religious movements – in particular if these were regarded as ‘heretical’. Such suppressions were thus more political than religious. Convinced that China was under threat by a bewildering array of heretical sects, Christian proselytization was regarded

328  Lars Peter Laamann by many officials as part of a wider heresy problem. The religious quality of the suppressed groups was of secondary importance, for these could be Muslim as during the insurgency in Gansu, folk Buddhist as in Linqing 臨 清 (Shandong), or indeed Christian, as was the case in Xi’an, where in 1784 two European priests were discovered, triggering persecutions against the local Christian community.27 The subsequent investigations of the late Qianlong administration yielded evidence of thriving Catholic communities in all provinces, further emphasizing the autonomy which China’s Christian communities had attained. These were often located along the provincial boundaries, areas that magistrates usually avoided to visit for security reasons.28 The Early Nineteenth Century: State Authority between Moral Management and Social Control Although there was no dramatic change in the official position of Christianity at the turn of the nineteenth century, the steady growth of Catholic communities would eventually expose them to greater official scrutiny. But it was mostly due to the intensifying anti-heresy campaigns of the first two decades, against the perceived threat emanating from the White Lotus movement that Christians began to suffer serious reprisals.29 Millenarianism in the late Qing era (nineteenth century) arose in response to over-population, coupled with natural calamities and ensuing famine. The belief in a better future (Maitreyan Buddhism) was interpreted by some heterodox movements as an appeal to destroy the existing world order – Qing China included.30 Most of the White Lotus sects were pacifist, but since state officials interpreted their eschatological vision as an attack against state institutions, they began to suppress them harshly. Catholic communities could also be counted as ‘heretical’ because Christian eschatology envisaged a cataclysmic end to the existing world order. It did not help that the paraphernalia used were similar (rosaries, incense, religious scriptures) and that some millenarian sects adopted Christian names in order to confuse the prosecutors – including the term Tianzhujiao 天主教 for the Catholic Church.31 Zealous officials looked out for any books, pamphlets, or paraphernalia that could be interpreted as subversive. Most important were, however, weapons. When none could be found, as was the case in most Christian households, homes could still be ransacked or burned and entire families arrested. Religious leaders – the huizhang 會長 – could be exiled to the remote northern part of the empire.32 But these were isolated examples. The dynasty was aware of the destabilizing effects that the oppression of a peaceful part of China’s population would have, already struggling with regional rebellions. In return, Christians often made use of pretended apostasies in order to cooperate with state authorities, thus directly contributing to a

Occasional Martyrs  329 reduction of violent retributions by same.33 As long as villagers and the urban population peacefully continued the traditions of their forefathers, state officials tended to leave them even in the case of non-conventional teachings. But because itinerant preachers upset this balance, encouraging social change and at times political discontent, they faced serious penalties and were forced to tread onto the crucifix as a sign of public apostasy. Western missionaries also lived in perpetual danger, as testified by the execution of Louis Gabriel Taurin Dufresse (Xu Dexin 徐德新), a member of the Society of Foreign Missions, in Chengdu in 1815, and the strangulation of Vincentian Francis-Régis Clet in Wuchang in 1820.34 The same fate had already befallen Giovanni Lantrua, a Franciscan missionary in the Lower Yangtse Valley; by order of the imperial authorities, he had been strangled in Changsha in January 1816.35 Fears of Western infiltration were confirmed when, in 1805, a detailed map outlining zones of missionary influence in Shandong was discovered. The Propaganda Fide missionary Adeodato di San Agostino (1760–1821) had produced the map intended to resolve a border dispute between two Catholic orders and was already en route to Macau from where the map should have been dispatched to Europe.36 The missionary’s subsequent execution was meant to act as warning, also for the Catholic house communities on which both European and Chinese missionaries relied for support. This set-up implied a high degree of danger, since prying neighbors could easily spot and report strangers visiting their villages. The Naples-trained missionary Paul Wang had sought shelter during his efforts to establish a seminary, but was caught in 1815 and executed shortly afterwards. The turn of the 1820s saw similar instances of punitive action, coinciding with the ever greater presence of Western merchants in southern China – not least British traders smuggling opium.37 Despite the increased tension between the 1780s and the 1810s, Chinese Christian communities continued to live mostly harmoniously with their non-Christian neighbors.38 During the Daoguang 道光 era (1821–1851), on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion, China witnessed a relaxation of the anti-heterodoxy campaigns. In a carefully-worded gesture to the Christian communities, the Daoguang court stressed that as long as they posed no harm to State or society, Christians were free to practice their religious traditions.39 This tolerance did not extend to foreign missionaries, who were still barred from proselytizing. By 1827, the only legally residing foreign priest was Gaetano Pires Pereira (Bi Xueyuan 畢學源). Thirteen years later, prosecution resulted in the Vincentian P. Perboyre (Dong Wenxue 董文學), who had entered through Macau in 1835 and relied on the charity of local Christian families, being tied to a cross and then strangled in Wuchang.40 The demise of the permanent mission in Beijing translated into more harassment in certain districts. While execution by local Qing officials acted as a deterrent against overt proselytization,

330  Lars Peter Laamann non-lethal punishments such as caning, incising, or branding ‘anti-heretical’ messages onto the face could have the same warning effect.41 It is important to remember that although the number of Western missionaries prior to the mid-nineteenth century was negligible, Christian communities in China continued to grow. During the peak of the anti-heretical campaigns, between 1805 and 1821, many believers had sought refuge in exile communities beyond the Great Wall where Chinese clerics would provide spiritual and practical guidance for hundreds of Catholic households, who celebrated their faith with “cymbals and drums, exorcisms, and written or painted charms”.42 The banishment destination of Yili was transformed into a large and open Christian community, featuring churches and seminaries. Local Christians who during the Muslim uprisings of the 1820s had assisted the Qing magistrates in suppressing the rebels, were offered amnesty by the Daoguang emperor.43 To sum up, violence by or against Catholics was for a long time not the norm in China, despite the missionary prohibition of 1724 and the increased persecutions during the anti-heresy campaigns of the early nineteenth century. Christianity instead proliferated throughout this period and, with few exceptions, village communities coexisted harmoniously with their nonChristian neighbors. Only occasionally would the state persecutions against presumed ‘heretics’ create a hostile environment for established Catholic communities.44 Thus, until the return of Western missionaries after 1858, China was a laboratory for religious innovation and syncretic cross-fertilization. Whenever acts of communal violence did occur, they were generally not caused by religious disagreements but by inter-family rivalry based on more mundane grievances such as property disputes.45 From the 1830s onwards, there was a significant increase in the number of foreign missionaries. By 1838, the Vatican had established twelve bishoprics, not least to counter the active Protestant mission. The total number of Catholics present in China was a modest two or three hundred thousand, to which were added forty to eighty Western and some ninety Chinese missionaries.46 The 1844 treaty between France and China officially ended state repression of the Catholic mission – labeled “the teaching venerated in foreign countries of the West” 西洋外國所崇奉之教 – and allowed French clerics to build churches in specified locations, including in treaty ports. An official communiqué from 1845 by Qiying 耆英 emphasized that Catholics were to be regarded as morally upright people and called for the repeal of all remaining restrictions against Christianity.47 Intra-Communal Tensions as a Reason for Christian Conversion Following the relaxation of anti-Christian policy in 1844, and increasingly after 1860, Christian communities continued to consolidate as clan-based

Occasional Martyrs  331 units. In so doing, they reaffirmed a familiar pattern in the sociopolitical setup of Chinese small-town life, namely of communal divisions cemented with the aid of external factors. Catholic clans now enjoyed the public support of French missionaries and hence of the French State, while Methodist families looked for British protection and other Protestants for assistance from the United States. Even within districts that had been missionary territories of Roman Catholic orders, deep-rooted differences between the Roman (“Propaganda”), Iberian (“padroado”), and French missions were becoming accentuated from the 1790s onwards, when Chinese clerics such as Maurus Cheng (1752–1801) or François-Marie Tseng (1740–1815) aggravated divisions created by their European predecessors.48 In locations with fewer Western power brokers, more complex interactions between local officialdom and religious communities emerged.49 Even in places far away from the coastal bases of European influence, such as in Ba county near Chongqing in Sichuan, the relaxation in state control meant that Christian clans could purchase land with the backing of French missionaries, who would support them in case of subsequent conflict. Most clashes involving Christians in the latter part of the nineteenth century were indeed defined by disputes over title deeds and estate boundaries – hardly ‘anti-Christian’ in the doctrinal sense, but directly involving the churches and (foreign) missionaries. Having swiftly learned how to utilize the foreign missions to their own advantage, clans employed a realpolitik aimed at maximizing their influence in the communities where they lived. This strategy became particularly pronounced with the increase of Western missionary stations during the latter nineteenth century. The political maneuvers of the Zheng clan in Shantou (Guangdong) during the 1880s, which aimed to mobilize support from foreign clerics for the construction of a family hall within the city limits, illustrates the ease with which contemporaries approached the American Baptist and French Catholic congregations.50 When conflicts could not be resolved peacefully, violence against the mission stations occasionally followed. In such cases, Qing officials usually intervened on the side of the foreign clerics – though not always.51 Property conflicts between neighbors thus constitute the most important source of violence perpetrated against Christians during the late nineteenth century, also in the treaty ports and the colony of Hong Kong.52 There existed, however, another category of violence: instances when cultural norms were challenged to the perceived detriment of the community as a whole. Such cases occurred in growing numbers once the reintroduction of foreign missionaries led to a ‘Westernization’ of Christianity in China, which in turn could prompt anti-foreign reactions among the non-Christian majority. One such example was the Dazu 大足 revolt of 1886–1887, near Chongqing. Despite French protection, the Wan-gu-chang 萬古塲 Church and the attached surgery were burned down by crowds. The Boxers would

332  Lars Peter Laamann later cause substantial damage to Chengdu’s eighteenth-century Sujiawan 蘇家灣 Church.53 A specific aspect of violence in relation to Christianity in China was the role that (foreign) missionary stations played as protective devices for Christian and non-Christian villagers alike. After the Convention of Beijing (1860), foreign clerics were again allowed to establish a missionary presence in the Chinese interior. The need for safety, but also the property issues referred to above, was conducive to the establishment of new stations, which often resembled the military forts of border regions. The more general role of the fortified missionary stations was thus one resembling the feudal donjon, offering protection to the local peasantry. In this regard, they fulfilled the same role as the rural self-defense leagues provided by the leading clans against marauding bandits, and often coordinated by the semi-official gentry (shenshi 紳士) of village elders and retired scholar-officials.54 And just like the latter, the missionaries possessed rifles and other weaponry that allowed them to play a vital role in upholding security in those parts of the countryside where official police forces could not be relied upon. The reputation of missionary stations as centers of medical care and education consolidated their reputation as safe houses in times of unrest. On certain occasions, the stations specifically protected Christians from attacks by hostile crowds. Isolated incidents aside, the great test arose during the Boxer Rebellion (Yihetuan qiyi 義和團起義), which erupted in the late 1890s and came to a dramatic end in 1901. It broke out after peasants throughout Northern China had come to believe that the spirits had locked all clouds due to the disrupting influence of “Western Teachings” (yangjiao 洋教) and because of the harmful effect that the steepled roofs adorning new missionary churches had on geomantic harmony (fengshui 風水). Peasants attempted to avert these natural disasters by staging spiritual processions to release celestial water onto their parched fields, while also protesting against the presumed negative effect of angular Western architecture and modern infrastructure (railways and telegraph wires) on the local fengshui. Similar arguments were well-known to Chinese Christians. Already in 1886, building work on a church in the center of Chongqing city aroused popular fears of damaged geomantic power fields (士民恐傷地脈), sparking widespread violence and causing Li Hongzhang 李鴻章, a senior Qing official and decorated victor over the Nian and Taiping rebels, to intervene at the highest level. In 1901, he was recalled as Governor of Guangdong and Guangxi when the Boxer Rebellion was beginning to threaten Qing authority.55 The Boxers branded Catholics followers of the “Celestial Pig” (Tianzhu 天 豬) – an insult homophonous to the Catholic term for God (Tianzhu 天主). The resulting violence went beyond anything China’s Christian congregations had ever experienced before. Foreign missionaries and Chinese clerics

Occasional Martyrs  333 were held responsible for the droughts that affected Northern China during the late 1890s; pamphlets and popular songs promised blood-curdling vengeance; rebels prepared suicide attacks on Western mission stations, thinking themselves as spiritually protected from rifle fire. For missionaries and Catholic laypeople alike, the siege-like atmosphere and violence of the “Fists for Righteousness and Harmony” (Yihequan 議和拳, hence ‘Boxers’) were deeply troubling. The witness report of missionary Archibald Glover recalls the fear they experienced: The following night, […] we were roused from sleep by the noise of a rain-procession nearing our premises on the main north street. A sufficiently dreadful sound at any time, but awful in the dead of night. In the semi-consciousness of the awakening it came upon the senses as a hideous nightmare, until one was alive to the truth of it. […] The terror of clamorous cursings; and next, the battering of the gate and a volley of stones and brick-bats flung over the roof of the outer buildings into the courtyard, where our own quarters were. There was no time to be lost. Our hearts went up to God as we hurriedly dressed, expecting each moment would see the gate broken in. Just as we were preparing to take the children from their beds, suddenly the volleying and battering ceased, the procession resumed its march, and the terrifying noise of curses, gongs and drums drew away, […] shouting threats of revenge should the drought continue.56 Glover’s recollections, filled with a sense of feeling terrified, were written from the vantage point of a Western cleric – a tiny minority within the already small Christian community in China. Given the self-assumed role of the Chinese State as the ultimate adjudicator over questions of orthodoxy and heresy, how did scholar-officials, as the intellectual pillars of the Imperial State, view the Boxers’ anti-Christian violence in the local societies that they were supposed to govern equitably? And how can the extreme violence of the Boxer Rebellion be explained? One explanation would be that tensions between local communities were accentuated by ‘Confucian’ notions of loyalty to earlier generations, their beliefs, and their vengeances.57 Their destructive power may also explain why much martyrological evidence of Christian suffering is condensed into the explosive events of the Boxer movement. Conclusion: Between Integration and Confrontation The years between the Yongzheng edict of 1724 against the proselytization of heterodox religious beliefs not sanctioned by the Qing State, including the preaching of Christianity as represented by the missionaries from Catholic

334  Lars Peter Laamann Europe, and the re-admission of Western missionaries after the Convention of Beijing (1860), were a period of insecurity for Chinese Catholics. During this time, Christian activity shifted from the established urban centers to the provincial hinterland, usually to border regions difficult to access for Qing magistrates or military troops. This relative obscurity protected most Christians from the attention of the State, leading to their gradual multiplication and the creation of a house church culture. At times, state officials would get involved in the prosecution of Christian villagers, but mostly in the wider context of anti-heterodox persecutions, specifically of the White Lotus movement. Although well-documented, anti-Catholic violence was rare, the norm being peaceful coexistence with the non-Christian majority and tacit toleration by officials. Following the opening of the Chinese interior to Western missionaries in 1860, this equilibrium was disturbed by the mass conversions achieved by a new generation of Catholic and Protestant missionaries. On the one hand, their missionary stations contributed to the pacification of the countryside by providing shelter for people regardless of their faith. They also supplied basic education and health care. On the other hand, the missionary centers could become foci of public anger, often generated by conflicts between Christian and non-Christian families concerning land property purchases. More rarely, albeit well-documented in the (auto-)biographical literature of the nineteenth century, missionaries found themselves at the receiving end of popular beliefs concerning the outbreak of natural disasters and the supposed disruption of cosmic harmony or geomantics. The violent events of the Boxer Rebellion should be seen against this background. Indeed, the often-cited explanation for its outbreak, which links the uprising to the imperialist ambitions of Western missionaries, is problematic since the latter frequently acted as local powerbrokers with the active support of county officials and indigenous gentry. Their actions hence contradicted the power diplomacy of the governments who were supposed to protect them. In other words, both the nationalist, anti-imperialist interpretation – first propagated by the May Fourth intellectuals during the 1920s – and the original Western view of an unprovoked attack by uncivilized heathens are in serious need of revision. A more balanced view would also need to take into account the desperation that the long and severe drought of the late 1890s had engendered in the Northern Chinese peasantry. Spearheaded by sectarian leaders who promised the immiserated peasantry paradise on earth if they forced the alien clerics and their local converts to leave, it gained ever-more widespread appeal.58 In other words, the Boxer Rebellion has parallels both with the classical peasant uprisings of the late Imperial era and with the political mass movements of the twentieth century.

Occasional Martyrs  335 Notes 1 Perhaps most eloquently argued by Jacques Gernet, Chine et christianisme: action et réaction (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). Note that the title of the English translation China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures, published by Cambridge University Press in 1985, accentuates the author’s thesis. 2 Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 374; Lars Peter Laamann, Christian Heretics in Late Imperial China: Christian Inculturation and State Control, 1720–1850. (London: Routledge, 2006); Rolf G. Tiedemann, “Christianity and Chinese ‘Heterodox Sects’: Mass Conversions and Syncretism in Shandong Province in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Monumenta Serica 44 (1996). 3 For Japan see Stephen Turnbull, The Kakure Kirishitan of Japan: A Study of Their Development, Beliefs and Rituals to the Present Day (Richmond: Japan Library/Curzon, 1998), 28. The situation in Korea is addressed in the chapter by Franklin Rausch. 4 Judicial trials against Christians are documented in the systematically kept archival records of the latter Qing period, reprinted in Qingmo jiaoan 清末教案, edited by Zhu Jinfu 朱金甫, Lü Jian 呂堅, China Number One Historical Archives 中國第一歷史檔案館 and History Department of Fujian Normal University 福 建師範大學歷史系; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju 中華書局 and Xinhua shudian 新 華書店, 1996–2000. 5 This includes, significantly, the martyrologium of the 120 Catholics, both Chinese and Western, who were killed during the Boxer Rebellion. The overall death toll amongst Chinese Christians is estimated at circa 30,000. Some 200 Westerners were reported to have died. Roger R. Thompsen, “Reporting the Taiyuan Massacre: Culture and Politics in the China War of 1900,” in The Boxers, China and the World, eds. Rolf Gerhard Tiedemann and Robert Bickers (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 107. See also Jean Charbonnier, Les 120 martyrs de Chine, canonisés le 1er octobre 2000 (Paris: Églises d’Asie, 2000). 6 Cited in Paul Boell, Le protectorat des Missions Catholiques en Chine et la Politique de la France en Extrême-Orient (Paris: Centre Scientifique de la Libre-Pensée, 1899), 42. 7 Daniel Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 15–26. 8 The state of the art in terms of Christianity’s early implantation in China is Nicolas Standaert, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China. Vol. 1, 635–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 9 For a thought-provoking study of this era, see Wonmook Kang, “The Xiyangs in the Early Qing Empire, 1644–1724” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2022). 10 For a focus on the Spanish Franciscan missionary enterprise, see Antolín Abad Pérez, ed., Misioneros Franciscanos Españoles en China: Siglos XVIII–XIX (1722–1813) (Grottaferrata: Editiones Colegii S. Bonaventurae, 2006). 11 Donald Sure and Ray Noll, 100 Roman Documents concerning the Chinese Rites Controversy (1645–1941) (San Francisco: Ricci Institute / University of San Francisco, 1992). 12 George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy: From its Beginnings to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985). 13 This prohibition was rescinded in 1939, just one decade before the Communist victory on the Chinese mainland.

336  Lars Peter Laamann 14 Gernet, Chine et christianisme. 15 Eugenio Menegon, “Surniama Tragoedia: Religion and Political Martyrdom in the Yongzheng Period,” Symposium on the History of Christianity in China, Hong Kong, October 2–4, 1996. 16 Ma Zhao 馬釗, “Shilun Qianlong shiqi (1736–1796) chajin tianzhujiao shijian 試 論乾隆時期(1736–1795)查禁天主教事件” (MA diss., Zhongguo renmin daxue / Qingshi yanjiusuo 中國人民大學清史研究所, Research Centre for Qing History, People’s University of China [Beijing], 1999), 19; Joseph de Moidrey, La Hiérarchie Catholique, en Chine, en Corée et au Japon (Shanghai: Imprimérie de l’orphelinat de T’ou-sè-wè, 1914), 28–30, and 242–243; Bernward Willeke, Imperial Government and Catholic Missions in China during the Years 1784–1789 (St Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 1948), 85–86. 17 J.J.M. de Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution (Leiden: Brill, 1901), 395–396; Zhang Ze 張澤, Qingdai jinjiaoqi de tianzhujiao 清代禁教期的天主教 (“Christianity during the Qing Prohibition”) (Taibei: Guangqi chubanshe 光啟 出版社, 1992), 154–155. 18 On the execution of Jean-Gabriel Perboyre in 1840, see Joseph Boucard, Vie et martyre du bienheureux Jean-Gabriel Perboyre, prêtre de la Congrégation de la Mission de Saint-Lazare – Mort pour la foi en Chine (Tours: Mame, 1897). 19 David Emil Mungello, This Suffering is My Joy: The Underground Church in Eighteenth-Century China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). 20 See Paul Mariani, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Catholic China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 6–7. 21 Benoît Vermander, “Jesuits and China,” in Oxford Handbooks Online (April 2015), accessed October 15, 2021, DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.53; David Ownby, Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Qin Baoqi 秦寶琦, Hongmen zhenshi 洪門真史 (Fuzhou: Fujian People’s Press 福建人民出版社, 1995). 22 Laamann, Christian Heretics, 61. 23 Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “Jesus in Chinese Art during the Time of the Jesuit Missions (16th–18th Centuries),” in The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ, Volume 2, ed. Roman Malek (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 2003), 408; Léonide Guiot, La Mission du Su-tchuen au XVIIIme siècle: Vie et apostolat de Mgr Pottier (Paris: Téqui, 1892), 149. 24 See Joseph Krahl, China Missions in Crisis: Bishop Laimbeckhoven and his Time 1738–1787 (Rome: Gregorian University, 1964) for a vivid account of clandestine missionary activities during this era. 25 Zhang Ze, Qingdai jinjiaoqi de tianzhujiao, 156–159. 26 See Laamann, Christian Heretics, 87–90. 27 On Muslims see Willeke, Imperial Government, 75–95. On Buddhists see Susan Naquin, Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (New Haven NJ: Yale University Press, 1981), iii ff. The parallel campaign against Gansu ‘Wahhabees’ and against Christians is covered in de Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution, 311–335. 28 John Emanuel, “Matteo Ripa and the Founding of the Chinese College at Naples,” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 37 (1981), 134. 29 Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven NJ: Yale University Press, 1976); de Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution, 409 ff. 30 On millenarian cults, see de Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution, 443. Richard Hon-chun Shek, “Sectarianism and Popular Thought in Sixteenth and

Occasional Martyrs  337 Seventeenth Century China” (PhD diss., University of California, 1980), 276– 287, 305; Naquin, Shantung Rebellion, 56. 31 Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü, “Pilgrimages in China,” in Pilgrims and sacred sites in China, eds. Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1992). 32 Laamann, Christian Heretics, 96–98. 33 The main conclusion of Lars Peter Laamann, “Apostasy and Martyrdom in Eighteenth-Century China,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 15, no. 4 (December 2015). See also Margiotti, Il cattolicismo nello Shansi, 478. 34 Evarist-Régis Huc, Souvenirs of a Journey through Tartary, Tibet and China during the Years 1844, 1845 and 1846, Vol. 1 (Beijing: Imprimerie des Lazaristes, 1931), 37. 35 Laamann, Christian Heretics, 107. 36 Ibid., 68–70. 37 De Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution, 484–485. 38 Henrietta Harrison, “Village Politics and National Politics: The Boxer Movement in Central Shanxi,” in The Boxers, China, and the World, eds. Rolf Gerhard Tiedemann and Robert Bickers (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 12. 39 Zhang, Qingdai jinjiao de tianzhujiao, 209. 40 Perboyre’s execution was portrayed as an act of “martyrdom” in Alfred Milon, Mémoires de la Congrégation de la Mission (Paris: C.M., 1912) 572–580. The book was published by Perboyre’s own missionary society. 41 In 1822, Liu Wenyuan 劉文元 of Zhouxian 周縣, Guizhou, for instance, had “Christian Heretic” (天主邪教) incised into his face. Cited in Zhang, Qingdai jinjiao de tianzhujiao, 210–211, with reference to Daqing xuanzong cheng huangdi shilu 大清宣宗成皇帝實錄 (“Veritable Records of the Daoguang Emperor”), 1834. Huc, Souvenirs of a Journey, vol. 1, 38. 42 Cited from de Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution, 495. 43 Demetrius C. Boulger, The Life of Yakoob Beg (London: W. H. Allen, 1878), 236–257. 44 Johannes Beckmann, “China im Blickfeld der jesuitischen Bettelorden des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 19 (1963), and 20 (1964). 45 See Joseph Lee, The Bible and the Gun: Christianity in South China, 1860–1900 (London: Routledge, 2003). 46 Zhang counts 220,000 Christians for 1836, whereas Zhao Qingyuan 趙慶源 estimates 210,000 believers for the year 1815. Zhang Ze, Qingdai jinjiaoqi de tianzhujiao, 218; Zhao Qingyuan 趙慶源, Zhongguo tianzhujiao jiaoqu huafenjiqi shouzhang jieti nianbao 中國天主教教區劃分及其首長接替年表 (Annual Compendium of China’s Catholic Dioceses and their Leaders) (Tainan: Wen-dao Publishers, 1980), 30. 47 See Wang Zhichun, Qingchao rouyuan ji, 251; Zhang Ze, Qingdai jinjiaoqi de tianzhujiao, 222. 48 David Eric Mungello, The Catholic Invasion of China: Remaking Chinese Christianity (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 19–23. For intra-Catholic differences see the letter by Cardinal Dufresse to Rome (June 20, 1813), which lists Christian preachers active in Zhaojiazhuang, in Laamann, Christian Heretics, 115–116. 49 Systematically analyzed for the Fujian county of 福安 by Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). On the sororities after 1840, see page 343 ff. 50 Lee, The Bible and the Gun, 125. 51 The author has found ample evidence in the Ba County records of the Sichuan Provincial Archives (Chengdu).

338  Lars Peter Laamann 52 See the study by Iris Leung 梁翠華, “Zhanzhang yu xuanjiao: diyici shijiedazhan yu xianggangde deguo chaihui 戰爭與宣教——第一次世界大戰與香港的德國 差會” (Warfare and Missions: The First World War and the German Missions in Hong Kong), Daofeng 道風 Logos & Pneuma 52 (January 2020). 53 Zhang Li and Liu Jiantang, Zhongguo jiaoanshi, 425–426. 54 Rolf Gerhard Tiedemann, Huabeide baoli he konghuang – yihetuan yundong qianxi jidujia chuanbo he shehui chongtu 華北的暴力和恐慌——義和團運動前夕 基督教傳播和社會衝突 (“Violence and Panic in Northern China: Missionary Activity and Social Conflicts on the Eve of the Boxer Uprising”) (Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Press 江蘇人民出版社, 2011), 126–131. 55 Roger R. Thompson, “Reporting the Taiyuan Massacre: Culture and Politics in the China War of 1900,” in The Boxers, China, and the World, eds. Rolf Gerhard Tiedemann and Robert Bickers (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 120–126. 56 Archibald E. Glover, A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China: A Personal Record of God’s Delivering Power from the Hands of the Imperial Boxers of Shan-si (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1904), 18–20. 57 The latter point is emphatically made in the recollections of an old Chinese priest in the oral history account by Tian Weiyun 田維耘 ,“Yiwei laoshenfu de zishu” “一位 老神父的自述” (Account by an Old Priest), in Koushu lishi《口述歷史》 (Oral History), (Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe 中國社會科學出版社 (China Social Sciences Press), 2006), 261–263. 58 On this phenomenon immediately prior to the Boxer Rebellion, see Rolf Gerhard Tiedemann, “Not Every Martyr is a Saint! The Juye Missionary Case of 1897 Reconsidered,” in A Lifelong Dedication to the China Mission: Essays Presented in honor of Father Jeroom Heyndrickx, CICM, on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday and the 25th Anniversary of the F. Verbiest Institute, K.U. Leuven, eds. Noel Golvers and Sara Lievens (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 2007).

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Part VI

Conclusions

16 Parameters of Religion-Related Violence in Modern History Eveline G. Bouwers

After Catholics across the world had encountered persecution in the early nineteenth century, the tables turned in subsequent decades. A partial recovery of clerical influence in Europe, concordats between the Holy See and the new Latin American republics, a growing presence in Northern America, official toleration in parts of Asia, and increased missionary activity in ­Africa testified to changing Catholic fortunes. The chapters in this book highlight different aspects of this trajectory, focusing on situations in which Catholics came into conflict with those who thought or believed differently. Some communities operated from a hegemonic position while others formed a powerless minority; some developed a rhetoric that was inflammatory and exclusionary while others spoke of tolerance; some opted for violent action while others favored peaceful coexistence. The same plurality of responses could be found among the secular and religious others with whom Catholics sometimes found themselves at loggerheads. Drawing on these insights, the conclusions here aim to highlight the commonalities between the casestudies and argue against an essentialist understanding of the link between religion and violence. The following pages first revisit the forms of violence discussed in this book, focusing specifically on the religious element in them. They then discuss the ways in which Catholicism, as a category of difference, existed alongside other markers of otherness. They end with a critique of theorizations that promote a monocausal understanding of the nature of religion-related violence. The Many Faces of Violence Involving Catholics The essays in this book deal with various forms of violence involving Catholics. They analyze reports or depictions of and debates surrounding physical actions undertaken against property (window-breaking, arson, vandalism, iconoclasm et cetera) and against people (beating, caning, ­killing, drowning). And they examine violence in the form of speech acts or gestures designed to intimidate, denigrate, or marginalize people who

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127857-23

346  Eveline G. Bouwers believe or think differently – and who would occasionally internalize or describe the impact of these symbolic acts as an experience of violence. The use of derogatory and exclusionary vocabulary (“enemy”, “evil”, “impious”) to describe the religious or secular other is one example; mocking or banning specific religious rituals, such as processions, baptism rites, or acts of ancestor worship, is another. Secondly, on the level of agency, the chapters consider situations in which Catholics perpetrated acts of violence, including assaults on Jewish citizens and disciplinary measures against indigenous children. But they also examine occasions when Catholics themselves became the victims of violence, facing intimidation, exclusion, or even murder. These episodes are analyzed via reports on and by those acting in an official capacity, such as the government functionaries of Chosŏn Korea and Revolutionary France, or enjoying broad popular support, such as the peasantry in Galicia and nativist crowds in the United States; in all these cases, violence tended to unfold on a larger scale, which often made it appear expressive of the general will. At the same time, the chapters explore the behavior of minority or marginalized groups, such as the anticlerical crowds in Buenos Aires and the Sister Servants of the Holy Spirit on the New Guinea island of Tumleo; here violence would be confined to very specific contexts of time and place. Thirdly, the chapters enquire into the aims of violent action as well as the language and gestures it involved. They examine situations in which violence erupted from a desire to preserve the status quo or restore lost influence, as with Mexico’s Religioneros and Spanish integrist Catholics. But they also analyze examples of violent behavior intended to eradicate otherness or attain emancipation from a state of comparable powerlessness; examples include the treatment suffered by Catholics at the hands of the Chinese Boxers and Buenos Aires’ anticlerical protestors. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which religion was entangled in cultures of violence. For one, religious symbols, property, and people were targeted by physical attacks. The demolition of the portraits of Saints Francis Xavier and Francis Borgia in Buenos Aires’ Jesuit college, the fire laid at Mount Benedict convent near Boston, and the killing of Korean Catholics are examples. Secondly, the vocabulary accompanying acts of violence could be rooted in religious culture and history. As Philip Dwyer writes, Catholics opposing French revolutionary politics saw their actions as part of a “Holy Crusade” against the “soldiers of Satan” and their attempt at establishing the “Kingdom of the Antichrist”. Such demonizing language helped Catholics to semantically purge their opponents from the community of faithful by drawing a line between the sacred and the profane. Thirdly, the symbols accompanying violence could be religious. Nineteenth-century Catholics would invoke the Sacred Heart or brandish crucifixes when attacking opponents, just as Ulster’s Ultra-Protestants would use the sash of the Loyal

Parameters of Religion-Related Violence in Modern History  347 Orange Order to visually enshrine their confessional belonging in the Irish public space. A fourth level on which religious culture shaped violence was that of gestures and performances. Examples include the drowning of priests in Revolutionary France, the crucifixion of anticlericals by Italian Sanfedisti, and the singing of hymns by Belgian Catholics opposing the 1879 school law. These symbolic interventions ensured that violence was, as Philip Dwyer writes, not only seen as “spiritually necessary [but also as] pious, and devotional”. On a more abstract level, religion or religious interests could be the motivation for violence. Peasants in Northern China justified the killing of individual Catholics by claiming that “Western Teaching” and the steepled roofs of Christian churches had disturbed the geomantic harmony, causing repeated droughts; in Mexico, the Religioneros used arms to preserve what Brian A. Stauffer calls the “syncretic religiosity of Spanish colonial vintage”; the actions of French Catholics were motivated by allegations of Jewish ritual murder and, later in the century, by fears of dechristianization aroused by anticlerical policies. Sixthly, the arguments cited to legitimize violent action could be religious. Galician peasants, for instance, claimed they had the pope’s blessing to beat and rob Jewish citizens, while a missionary sister in German New Guinea cited verse 22:13 of the Book of Proverbs to defend her use of corporal punishment on indigenous children. Religious identity furthermore informed the perception of violence, that is, the way in which violent action was viewed and interpreted by those exposed to it. This of course applied to violence erupting due to differences pertaining to religion, such as anticlerical violence in Spain and nativist violence in the United States; in both cases, Catholics viewed the violent action as arising not only from opposition to their worldview, but also to what Cassandra L. Yacovazzi calls the “religious characterization of the foreign threat”. But it also applied to situations in which victims ascribed religious meaning to violence which, in the perpetrators’ eyes, was unconnected to questions of faith. Richard Hölzl explains how the murder and kidnapping of Benedictine missionaries near Dar Es Salam was portrayed in Germany “as part of a religious war in which the missionaries were opposed by fanatical Muslims”, although in fact the attack was part of Arab and Swahili traders’ and plantation owners’ struggle against the German East African Company. Similarly, the derailment of a train near Trillick in North-Western Ireland, though probably an accident, was framed as an act of Catholic barbarity – by means of the “politics of atrocity”, as Sean Farrell terms the construction of sectarian narratives, “strengthen[ing] already potent beliefs about CatholicProtestant conflict in Ulster”. The way violence was perceived and interpreted was informed not only by contemporary conflicts but also, as I write in my own chapter, by “historical experience[s]” of violence that helped “construct […] violent protest acts in later periods”. Finally, there was the issue of

348  Eveline G. Bouwers theology, of which Mary Vincent writes that “[h]istorians routinely ignore” it, although “it is fundamental to religion”. Spanish integrist Catholicism, for instance, placed key importance on sacrificial and redemptive violence, encouraging suffering among the faithful. But theology’s relevance also lay in its potential to legitimize domination over those from outside the religious community, as illustrated by the missionaries in south-eastern Congo attempting to impose “cultural hegemony over the minds of neophytes”, as Reuben A. Loffman explains. Alongside these diverse ways in which religion and theology interacted with violence, two further aspects are given close consideration. For one, the contributing authors examine the way the culture of violence would often echo the religious worldview of its perpetrator; thus, we find Protestants in the United States burning a Catholic convent and missionaries in New Guinea defending corporal punishment by citing the Bible and established practices of discipline in imperial Germany. On occasion, however, those involved in violence would symbolically appropriate the religious symbolics of their opponents. Few examples illustrate this better than the anticlerical agitators who deliberately imitated Catholic culture. The protestors of Buenos Aires drafted a “counterpastoral”; the drowning of priests during the French Terror eerily echoed baptism rites; the dismemberment of excavated corpses during the Tragic Week in Spain mimicked Inquisition practices said to bring eternal damnation on the deceased. Anticlericals who had been socialized in Catholic culture were better able to reference it than those unfamiliar with Roman ritual, such as most Africans and Asians, whose violent actions did not echo Catholic culture. Secondly, authors highlight the influence of Ultramontanism on much of the violence covered in this book, whether physical or symbolic. It was the hero saints of the Ultramontane bishop of Buenos Aires that were torn from the walls of the Jesuit college; it was the “popery plot” that fired nativist imaginations in the United States; it was Romanization that drove Mexican Catholics into rebellion; and it was the cult of the Sacred Heart that angered anticlericals in Belgium, France, Spain, and elsewhere. Ultramontanism was a lightning rod for discontent because its universalist ambitions opposed demands for secularism, religious syncretism, and pluralism – illustrating what Brian A. Stauffer calls “the importance of Catholic modernization [of which Ultramontanism was an exponent – E.G.B.] in shaping nineteenth-century ‘religious violence’”. The same rejection of freedom of religion and conscience made Ultramontanism in turn a powerful factor in violent action. Katharina Stornig encapsulates this when she writes how “it was precisely the universal Catholic promise of salvation combined with Catholic doctrine’s claim to infallibility that led to the use of violence” against the indigenous children of New Guinea – and against any other community that did not embrace the Ultramontane narrative of universal hegemony.

Parameters of Religion-Related Violence in Modern History  349 But if Ultramontanism is relevant to our story because of its rejection of compromise, engendering extreme positions that made violence more likely, it is also important because it helps explain the chronology of nineteenthcentury violence involving Catholics. This book contains numerous examples of religion-related violence that occurred around 1800, many of them involving state actors; the crackdown on Catholic communities in Revolutionary France, Qing China, and Chosŏn Korea – however different their motivations – are cases in point. Yet, in a broad perspective, such violence appears to have undergone a transformation over the course of the nineteenth century. For one, religion-related violence became more plebeian; the state persecution of Catholics in Asia, for instance, gave way to popular violence, as illustrated by the Boxer Rebellion and the conflict on Korea’s Cheju Island. Secondly, such violence occurred more frequently as Catholics increasingly came into contact with those who thought or believed differently. Every new encounter harbored a risk of potentially violent conflict; the clashes between anticlericals and Catholics in Belgium and Argentina during the 1870s are one example, the confrontations between missionaries and indigenous communities in Africa around 1900 are another. Thirdly, as the century progressed, what Julie Kalman calls “violent hatred” increasingly turned into “violent action”. In France, the Damascus Affair of 1840 laid the semantic groundwork for the antisemitic riots of the 1890s, just as in Ulster, the “Trillick railway outrage” provided the rhetorical base for a future sectarianism with murderous contours. The reasons for this intensification of religion-related violence during the latter decades of the century are manifold. They include liberal demands for a strengthening of State power over the Church, religion becoming a marker of national or ethnic identity (often to the detriment of minority groups), and the growing frequency of encounters between Catholics and other religious communities due to migration and colonialism. All this happened against the backdrop of a militant Ultramontanism that, from the second quarter of the century onwards, provided the theological framework for international Catholicism. Catholicism as a Category of Difference This book enquires into the interaction between Catholics and violence in the nineteenth-century world. In doing so, it sheds light on the secular differences that were required to move from religious conflict to religion-related violence. French Catholic perceptions of Father Thomas’ disappearance were rooted in long familiar anti-Judaist tropes that, in the context of republican attacks on clerical influence during the late nineteenth century, turned physical. Likewise, it took an additional grievance to make anti-Catholic sentiment in China erupt into violence; the series of droughts around 1900 are an example. In the United States, nativist violence arose from a

350  Eveline G. Bouwers combined fear of Catholic popery and migration. In each case, then, two or more differences came together before grievances relating to religion would turn violent. Yet, if intersectionality helped exacerbate conflicts to the point of escalation, secular differences far more often stifled the outbreak of religion-related violence. This is illustrated well by the chapters that examine situations in which conflict remained latent. Protestant Montrealers’ “tacit tolerance for Catholic religiosity”, Dan Horner writes, rested on a desire for electoral reform and economic betterment that they shared with many Catholic citizens but was rejected by community leaders promoting sectarian narratives in a bid to divert popular attention from socioeconomic issues. Similarly, Irish Liberals “situated themselves against partisan excess” by rejecting a jingoist sectarian language for fear of not being seen as “respectable”, stressing their middle-class backgrounds in order to downplay confessional difference. In these cases, a secular interest was placed ahead of religion, reducing the latter’s potential for violence. As well as highlighting the importance of secular differences for shaping religion-related conflict, the chapters in this book point out the pluralism of Catholic voices. Contrary to anticlerical accusations that the laity blindly followed clerical orders, lay Catholics could display remarkable selfdetermination. The people of Montreal decided against sectarian mobilization during Fête-Dieu, despite being encouraged by community leaders to use negative stereotyping and crowd action. Likewise, not all Galician peasants were in awe of their priests, as the killing spree of 1846 shows. Tensions between the clergy and the laity were also raised by the former’s inability to speak with one voice. Neither did the Church in Spain unanimously support integrist phantasies about sacrificial violence, nor did the Belgian priesthood agree on how to treat those endorsing educational reform – revealing a disunity within the Catholic community that challenges the idea of a binary “culture war”. Clashes among the clergy even occurred in such small communities as the mission station of the Servants of the Holy Spirit on the island of Tumleo. A further challenge to Catholic unity came from religious syncretism, which drove a wedge between local communities and national episcopacies, or international Catholicism. Mexico’s Religioneros battled the ecclesiastical hierarchy with almost as much zeal as they attacked state officials, while the domestication of Catholic thought and ritual in China would make it hard for European missionaries to connect with their belief and experience of violence. But if differences among coreligionists sometimes triggered violence, Catholic pluralism would more frequently curb the escalation of conflict by giving rise to alliances across the religious divide. Alongside differences within the Catholic community, other factors that helped nip conflict in the bud included official recognition of religion-related grievances; in France, the government’s backing of the French consul in Damascus gave Catholics the feeling that their concerns were heeded, in stark

Parameters of Religion-Related Violence in Modern History  351 contrast to the situation at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. A third hindrance to violence was the existence of a legal framework to regulate difference. Thus, China’s antimissionary edict and heresy laws for many years barred a key incentive for popular violence; it was only when the Qing State was forced to readmit Catholic missionaries into the country that popular animosity began to grow again, ending a period of “indifference” (Lars Peter Laamann) toward Catholics that had kept violence at bay. But arguably the most important factor in avoiding violence and by analogy in precipitating it was individual agency. However strongly people felt the need to defend their religion, they always made a conscious choice to either use violence or not. Their actions were never random; as Roberto Di Stefano writes, “rioters chose their targets carefully and in a rational manner”. The peasants of Southern Italy battled revolutionary anticlericalism to maintain a religious life long structured by processions, sacred imagery, and miracles; nativist crowds in Philadelphia assaulted Catholics to protect the Anglo-Protestant hegemony in a country witnessing large-scale immigration; the Religioneros assaulted priests to defend syncretic practices rooted in colonial times; the rural population of Northern China massacred Catholics because they allegedly disturbed the geomantic harmony, with devastating consequences for agriculture. Much of this violence was rooted in a desire to preserve a world that was seen to be unraveling, though it could have surprisingly modernizing consequences. Tim Buchen defines the Galician peasantry’s orgy of antisemitic violence as a stage in its politicization, marked by the transformation of “a community of faith into a community of opinion”. Occasionally, religion-related violence was proactive. The anticlerical crowds rioting on the streets of Buenos Aires and Barcelona did so not to defend the status quo, much less to restore the status quo ante, but to achieve a new order, making their actions revolutionary in nature. Just as violent action was a choice, then, so the decision to refrain from it and negotiate difference without resorting to verbal insults, property destruction, or physical assault was a choice, too. In some cases, the decision to keep the peace was informed by a fear of violence; in others, by a conviction that however bad the ills, violence could never be the remedy – echoing the sentiments which had, centuries earlier, convinced Catholic and Protestant Europeans to seek religious peace. What emerges from the pages of this book is the story of nineteenth-century Catholicism as a source of discontent that, once blended with secular grievances, could erupt into violence – though only when the protagonists felt it necessary. Theorizing the Link between Religion and Violence: Lessons from the Nineteenth Century Having explored the forms of violence involving Catholics across the nineteenth-century world and the way Catholicism was treated as a category of

352  Eveline G. Bouwers difference worth fighting for or not, this last section addresses the link between religion and violence more broadly. While the historical settings in which Catholics were involved with violence varied greatly, here five – by no means mutually exclusive – main motives have been defined that conceptually tied Catholics to violence. A first motive was opposition to secularizing measures and anticlericalism. In Revolutionary France, the laity assaulted republican officials who closed chapels, banned processions, removed statues of saints, and imprisoned priests; in Belgium, crowd action protested the introduction of a school law intended to reduce clerical influence on primary education. Sometimes violence combating secularization was more metaphysical; Spain’s counterrevolutionaries did not so much physically attack anticlericals – that would later happen during the Civil War – as promote a culture of sacrifice intended to maintain the religious foundations of society. Secondly, crowds used violence to challenge clericalism. Galician peasants not only murdered aristocrats and Jews but also attacked parish priests who supported the temperance movement. Elsewhere, attacks on the clergy possessed an anti-Ultramontane tenor, which manifested itself either in opposition to Church-State cooperation (Argentina) or the Romanization of piety (Mexico). Violence could also be a corollary of religious pluralization. Fears that Catholics would destabilize the Confucian-based moral order led Koreans to persecute them. In other cases, acts of violence were perceived in a light that disparaged a religious other, fueling future clashes, such as that of sectarianism in Ulster or antisemitism in France. A fourth connection between Catholics and violence emerges in the context of colonialism. German missionaries in East Africa who tried to evangelize locals were kidnapped and killed, prompting the region’s formal colonization by the German Empire; in south-eastern Congo, missionaries’ pursuit of state-like power made them complicit in the violent dispossession of regional rulers; in German New Guinea, nuns used corporal punishment to correct supposedly sinful behavior in indigenous children. In each case, violence accompanied the imposition of a Christian and Catholic order. Finally, the assertion of Catholic rights in regions where Catholicism did not have a historic presence or maintain a majority position could elicit violent responses. The Protestant majorities in the United States and Canada reacted to the expanding Catholic community by rioting, while in China, protection by the French made Catholics vulnerable to anticolonial anger. In each case, Catholics were framed as an invading force on the streets and in the communities. Together, the chapters in this book offer a kaleidoscopic overview of situations in which violence, either as physical action or in a metaphorical sense, attended conflicts involving Catholics. This brings us to a final question: what can these case-studies, taken from nineteenth-century world history, teach us more broadly about religion-related violence? How do the authors’ conclusions relate to contemporary scholarship on ‘religious violence’? The

Parameters of Religion-Related Violence in Modern History  353 first lesson is that history is far messier than the theories often suggest. In fact, we find in this book historical examples to illustrate all the theories cited in the introductory chapter. For instance, nativist violence in the United States, antisemitic violence in France and Galicia, and anticlerical violence in Spain can all be read in the light of René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat; in each case, the perpetrators of violence constructed a religious other to relieve tensions within their own community. Shifting to the island of Tumleo we find that violence was precipitated by the need to discipline errant behavior, as happened in Chosŏn Korea and Qing China, where the victims were Catholics. Both examples echo Regina M. Schwartz’s hypothesis that violence originated in a desire to discipline actions seen to violate religious norms, such as the worship of different deities. Similarly, we find examples in this book of situations in which the discursive distinction between “true” and “false” religion, as theorized by Jan Assmann, sparked conflict; in Ulster and Montreal, Catholics and Protestants fought for their version of Christianity, with faith providing both the legitimation for violent action and a vehicle to interpret it. Examples supporting other theories can also be found. William T. Cavanaugh sees religion-related violence as an invention of the modern secular State, aiming to crack down on religious communities deemed backward. Looking at the French revolutionaries and Belgian Liberals, we find both groups occasionally exaggerated the Catholics’ willingness to use violence in order to legitimate a civilizing mission that aimed to expand State power. The link between religion and politics returns in the work of Karen Armstrong, for whom all ‘religious violence’ is inherently political. German parliamentarians framed the destruction of the Benedictines’ mission station as part of a broader struggle between Christians and Muslims, though in reality the attack was primarily motivated by economic-political concerns over trade; similarly, the Catholic missionaries in south-eastern Congo dispossessed local rulers in a bid to establish a Christian kingdom. Finally, several authors contributing to this book emphasize the symbolic meaning of actions, echoing Mark Juergensmeyer, who sees violence as a performance intended to draw victims into the lifeworld of the perpetrators. Likewise, the Religioneros in Mexico and Buenos Aires’ anticlerical crowds developed symbolic repertoires expressive of a particular understanding of Catholicism that rejected Ultramontane ideas in favor of syncretism and secularism, respectively. Despite their focus on Catholic agency and the nineteenth century, the chapters in this book thus illuminate the variety of ways in which religion and violence have interacted historically – a plurality that contradicts essentialist understandings of the nature of religion-related violence. Franklin Rausch puts it well when he writes that “while theories can be applied to help us better understand a particular instance of violence, they cannot be

354  Eveline G. Bouwers applied universally, and therefore careful attention is needed to the historical particularities of any specific incident being studied”. When people resorted to violent action, how they justified their behavior, and the words they used to develop a language of religious antagonism (what Kalman calls “the link between rhetoric and the mob”) depended on many factors. Individual agency and the interaction of religious ideas with secular categories of difference were crucial aspects, firmly rooting the culture of religion-related violence in the historical context from which it emerged and with which it communicated. That is not to say that religion was only ever a subsidiary factor in cultures of violence, as scholars including Armstrong and Cava­ naugh suggest: people drew on their religious convictions to initiate, legitimate, and interpret violence, just as they might perceive the experience of violence in the light of their religious identity. But the nuances revealed here should serve as a warning against too rashly classifying any action relating to religion an act of ‘religious violence’, as if no other factors mattered. If the stories of the people portrayed in this book tell us something, it is that however important religion was, and however passionately it was defended or attacked, it alone did not cause the shift from violent rhetoric to violent action.

Index

abolitionism 230–233, 242, 245–246 Aeterni Patris (encyclical, 1879) 70 Alacoque, Margaret Mary 6, 62–66 ancestor worship 200–203, 241, 346 Anglicanism 181, 224, 292 anti-Catholicism 77, 149, 303–304, 318 anticlericalism 9; in politics 120–121, 127–129, 173; and violence 17, 19, 35–38, 45, 66–68, 90, 151, 154 anti-Jesuitism: arguments for 146, 149, 152; and violence 59, 150–153, 346, 348; see also Society of Jesus anti-Judaism see antisemitism antisemitism 100; blood libel accusations 19, 161–163, 165, 170–172; and the press 106–107, 163, 165–172; and violence 107–111, 172–173; see also Jews Armstrong, Karen 14, 253, 353–354 Assmann, Jan 14, 353 Benedict XIV, Pope (born Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini) 325 Benedictines see Missionary Benedictine Congregation Berlin Conference 230, 246 Bible 13, 21, 83, 261, 267, 270–271, 274, 304, 311–314, 317, 348 Boerenkrijg see Peasants’ War Boxer Rebellion 22, 324, 331–334, 346, 349 Buddhism see Buddhists Buddhists 21, 325–326, 328 burial culture 7, 42, 58, 77–78, 122, 144 Catholic Revival 5–7, 285, 288–289, 292; see also Ultramontanism

Capuchins see Order of Friars Minor Capuchin Cavanaugh, William T. 14, 43, 90, 353–354 cemeteries 77–78; desecration of graves 78, 306, 348; see also burial culture children 81, 83, 128, 209, 305, 308; and discipline 261–275, 347; and the experience of violence 87, 110, 211, 306, 333; and priestly influence 152, 310, 312; and religious rituals 283, 291–292; as targets for missionary work 221, 224, 227, 229, 261–275; see also education church property: conflicts over 316; the destruction of 19, 36–38, 59–60, 142, 228, 233, 306–308; the nationalization of 4, 37, 121–122 Clark, Christopher 56, 173, 288 colonialism 2, 20–21, 206, 219–220, 230–234, 243–244; and Catholic missionaries 221–233, 244–253, 261–273, 352 Company of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul 122 concordat 9, 38, 46, 104–105, 123, 345 Confucianism 10, 20, 199–202, 204–206, 209, 212, 325, 333, 352 Congregation of the Holy Spirit 20, 244–253 congregations 5–6, 173, 327; see also the individual congregations conspiracy theory 21, 66, 103, 105, 107, 124, 167, 183–184, 188, 190–191, 303, 305, 308–310, 313, 317–318 Convention of Beijing 11, 21, 332, 334

356 Index convents 1, 4, 9, 56, 59–60, 64, 66–67, 272–273, 302, 306–311, 318, 346, 348; see also congregations conversion 11, 210, 331 counterrevolution: the concept 17, 33, 57–61, 70; and the Church 35, 40–41, 45, 56 culture war: as paradigm 7, 77, 350; and modernity 1, 105, 220

In Plurimis (encyclical, 1888) 230 Inquisition 5, 79, 316, 348 integrist Catholicism 17–18, 57–63, 66–70, 346, 350 intransigent Catholicism 59, 62, 67–68, 79, 119, 121 Irish Sisters of Charity see Religious Sisters of Charity Islam see Muslims

Daughters of Charity see Company of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul Dominicans see Order of Preachers

Jesuits see Society of Jesus Jews: legal emancipation of the 19, 106, 110, 168, 174; see also antisemitism Judaism see Jews Juergensmeyer, Mark 14, 133, 353

education: as a Catholic-Liberal battleground 75, 77, 79–80, 86, 90, 105, 128; the clergy’s role in 68, 80, 89, 127, 224, 248, 261–262, 306–307, 332, 334; and corporal punishment 261–262, 265–275; laws on 75, 79–81, 127, 144, 173, 311, 352 enslaved people: missionaries and 221, 224–225, 227, 230, 242, 244–248, 268; the trade in 12, 219–220, 231–233, 243–244, 246 eschatology 17, 60, 69, 106, 326, 328 evangelization see proselytization expiation, cult of 6, 67, 70, 127 feast days 45, 62, 99, 111, 127 Franciscans see Order of Friars Minor freedom of religion 4, 11, 46–47, 79, 348; see also tolerance freemasonry 84, 146–147, 151–152, 173 gender: and protest 89, 152, 155; and religious culture 6, 63, 67, 148; see also feminization Girard, René 12–13, 57, 90 Gregory XVI, Pope (born Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari) 9, 11 heresy 15, 21, 125, 328, 330, 333, 351 Hieronomytes see Order of Saint Jerome Holy See 5, 80, 230, 345; see also concordats iconoclasm: and anticlericalism 1, 57, 67, 143, 150–154; in a revolutionary context 36–38, 60, 66–68

laicism see separation of Church and State Langlois, Claude 16, 38, 56, 173 Lavigerie, Charles, Cardinal 12, 20, 230–231, 242, 245–248, 253; see also Missionaries of Africa Leo XIII, Pope (born Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci) 7, 59, 230, 263 liberalism 7, 8, 46, 62, 125; conflicts with Catholicism 58, 78, 90; support for it among Catholics 7, 9; as a political movement 10, 18–19, 58–59, 75–76, 79, 105–106, 104–105, 112, 121–127, 133, 144; see also culture war Lourdes 61, 69, 126; see also Virgin Mary Marian devotion see Virgin Mary martyrdom 84–85, 90, 129, 200, 203, 326 media see press migration 21, 284–286, 288, 291, 302–303, 305, 309–310, 349–350 miracle 40, 61, 283, 351 Missionaries of Africa 12, 231, 242, 244, 252 Missionary Benedictine Congregation 221, 223, 225, 225–227 Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit 20, 261–275 Muslims 11, 162–163, 328, 330; and colonialism 220, 225, 231–232; and violence 20, 229, 231

Index  357 nation-building 57–59, 76, 102, 144, 161, 169, 172, 302–305, 310 nunnery tales 67–68, 307–309; see also conspiracy theories Orange Order: in Canada 284, 287, 290–291, 294–296; in Ulster 178–193 Order of Friars Minor 127, 132, 150, 324, 327, 329 Order of Friars Minor Capuchin 19, 41, 161, 164 Order of Preachers 150, 324 Order of Saint Jerome 66 Order of Saint Ursula 306 papacy: accusations of foreign meddling 21, 205, 286, 305, 308, 310, 313, 316, 318; dogma of papal infallibility 6, 149–150; its temporal power 5, 7–8, 10, 38, 125; see also Holy See; Ultramontanism Paris Foreign Missions see Society of Foreign Missions of Paris Party Procession Act: in Canada 290–291, 294; in Ireland 181, 186 Peasants’ War 39, 90 pilgrimage 6–7, 44, 56, 64–65, 85, 103–104, 107, 122 Pius VI, Pope (born Giovanni Angelo Braschi) 35–36 Pius VII, Pope (born Luigi Barnaba Chiaramonti) 5, 38, 199 Pius IX, Pope (born Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti) 7, 59, 64, 105, 121, 125–129, 153–155, 180, 316 Pius X, Pope (born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto) 8 pogrom 108, 172; see also antisemitism popery, accusations of 293, 305, 308, 312, 314, 318, 348; see also conspiracy theories priesthood see secular clergy processions 36, 40, 87, 108, 126, 130–131, 187, 283–285, 288–297, 333 Propaganda Fide 4, 5, 10, 12, 329 Protestantism see Protestants Protestants 1, 4, 15; and missionary work 12, 331; relations with Catholics 8, 34, 179–184, 189, 284–297, 304–305, 312

race 1, 220, 271, 303 Religious Sisters of Charity 151 religious violence: as a concept 2, 13, 33–35, 59–60, 120, 173, 234; theories of 13–15, 90, 352–354 Romanization see Ultramontanism Sacred Heart, cult of the 6, 34, 62–67, 70, 126, 153–155, 346, 348 sacrifice 6, 17, 60–61, 63, 65–66, 69–70, 86, 162, 229, 326, 352; see also martyrdom schools see education sectarianism 16, 20–21, 120, 334; in Canada 284–297; in Ulster 178–193; in the United States 302–319 secularism 8, 45–46, 68, 121, 133 secularization: as Church-State separation 58, 105, 122, 148, 304; and the decline in church attendance 80; the nationalization of church property 4, 37, 121–122 separation of Church and State 58, 105, 122, 148, 304 Servants of the Holy Spirit see Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit Spiritans see Congregation of the Holy Spirit Society of Foreign Missions of Paris 327, 329, 331 Society of Jesus 15, 63–65, 68, 146, 149, 171, 324 statehood 144, 241–242, 248 syncretism 121, 330, 348, 350 Syllabus Errorum (catalogue, 1864) 7, 105, 149 tolerance 16, 20–21, 45, 145, 148, 199, 204, 206, 212, 295, 297, 324, 329, 345 trusteeism 8, 316, 318 Ultramontanism: as a political conception 6–7, 121, 180; opposition to 16, 19, 79, 121, 132–134, 142, 149, 153–154, 348; see also dogma of papal infallibility; papacy Ursulines see Order of Saint Ursula

358 Index Virgin Mary 6, 34, 36, 39–40, 69, 149, 314; see also Lourdes Vix Dum a Nobis (encyclical, 1874) 105 White Fathers see Missionaries of Africa

White Lotus movement 323, 326–328, 334 Zemon Davis, Natalie 13, 15, 34, 141, 155